Struggles Of An African Giant

 By Oyeleke Elizabeth

A British author and philanthropist, Joanne Rowling writes, “We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.” Also, American poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, notes that, “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” 

There is a great unseen bond that binds the people of Nigeria together that is beyond human awareness and understanding. We are different superficially by our languages, cultures and religions but we are same fundamentally.’’

Nigeria And The Threat Of A One-Party State

 By Dan Amor

Aside from the usual historical rendition that Nigeria became a political reality following the fusion of the Northern and Southern protectorates of the River Niger area in the interior coast of West Africa in 1914 by Lord Fredrick Lugard, a British military administrator, Nigeria actually adopted a Federal form of government in 1954. Even though still under colonial rule, party politics thrived in the country. 

*Buhari

The leading parties were: the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) which stood for political democracy in its classical, individualistic form; the Action Group of Nigeria (AG) which stood for federalist democracy; the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), which exemplified the modernization of traditional political authority; and its radical opponent, the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), which espoused egalitarian democracy. As a strictly regional party, the NPC did not threaten the Southern parties in their home regions. Since the Northern Region was said to have contained an absolute majority of the national population, (though a myth of the 1959 population census), the NPC could control the Federal government by monopolizing electoral power in the North. 

Nigeria: The Beginning Of The End

By Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo

Clarence Day was a renowned American poet, essayist and philosopher who lived in the 19th century. Clarence Day could have been a prophet because he captured with astonishing accuracy the trajectory of the collapse of human society. Asked how future generations will know that their society is decaying or collapsing, he counseled his students to always look back into mankind’s documented history. According to him, of all the inventions of man, none is as enduring as the documented histories of human existence. Empires rise and fall, he said; civilizations grow old and die. But in the world of books are volumes and volumes that have seen this happen again and again; still as fresh as the day they were written; still telling men’s heart of hearts of men centuries dead. 

*Dr. Arthur Nwankwo 

However, he regretted that many societies have become lax and complacent; so much so that history means nothing to them. His words, no doubt, accurately depict the Nigerian situation and our leaders’ penchant for collective amnesia. A country that could remove history as a subject from her school curricula is doomed to repeat the tragedies of the past. 

Sir John Glubb, a British author and lecturer, has equally argued that most empires, glued together by artificial tendons generally do not last the distance. Citing examples with the Greek, Roman, Ottoman and Romanov Russian Empires, he remarked that such societies do not realize their internal rot even when events indicate that they have entered the Age of Decadence, i.e. the final stage at which such society is marked by delusion, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, and the total collapse of institutions of governance.

I am constrained to remark here that a few years from now, historians would be writing about the total disintegration of Nigeria. Then Chinua Achebe’s prophetic bequeathal of literary ingenuity and foresight, There was a Country would become more meaningful to us. But even now, Nigeria’s history of dissolution is writing itself furiously; accelerated by agents of doom masquerading as religious and pious puritans. In all my life I have never seen a country consumed by the spirit of despondency and forgetfulness as Nigeria; a country on the highway to perdition without knowing it. 

By the time the day is done, there would be no more compatriots to stand in the gap for Nigeria, there will be nobody to obey the clarion call of national defense; the love, strength and faith would have dissipated in Nigerians that they call to service would fall on deaf ears and the labours of our heroes past would factually be in vain. This sounds like a doomsday prophecy but it is not. It does appear that all the prophecies about Nigeria’s demise are being fulfilled in our time today. The signs are indeed ominous and the day is far gone for redemption. 

The crumbling period of Nigeria started in 1966 when the Nigerian State conspired to annihilate the Igbo population for no just cause than Igbos capacity and ingenuity to survive where others have failed. Though, after that genocidal pogrom, the Nigerian state seemed to get along as a united country with patchy mechanisms, the final descent to perdition began on May 29th 2015 when a combination of political forces anchored on treachery, chicanery and other negative thematic ushered in Muhammadu Buhari into office as the President. Since then, a chain of events, so dire, has occurred that it would seem the Nigerian empire has snapped the fuse of self-destruction, going by the series of catastrophes we have had since 2015. 

The 1914 Amalgamation Remains Nigeria’s Bane!

By Charles Ogbu 

Every problem Nigeria has ever faced and will ever face can be traced to that demonic event of 1914 when the British merged the Southern and Northern protectorates into one country that is today known as Nigeria.
   

Britain had only one thing in mind while carrying out the amalgamation: Their administrative and economic convenience. Nothing more. The action of the British can be compared to a man who bought both herbivorous and carnivorous animals from the market and chose to put them in one cage to make it convenient for him to transport them home. This man knew that herbivores feed on herbs and are very harmless and easygoing while carnivores feed on flesh and are most times very aggressive and violent. In other words , the herbivorous animals in that cage might end up as meat for the carnivorous ones even before the man would reach his destination. He knew all these but still chose to put both animals together.
  
Do we need the brain of Albert Einstein to figure out the fact that the welfare of these animals was the last thing on this man’s mind? Rather, all he cared about was getting them all home whether dead or alive without spending extra money for another cage and extra  fare for that new cage. 

    

Even my three-month-old niece knows that the North and South have absolutely little in common. Not the same language, not the same culture, not the same religion, not the same ancestry, not even the same worldviews and as such, can’t possibly live together as one country.

Nigeria, A Country Built On Lies

By Kparobo M. Ehvwubare
Four years after the amalgamation of Nigeria, an ex-Judge Stocker, described the Contraption called Nigeria as a form of system he called: The Nigerian System. He described the Nigerian system as "A setback to a condition of things resembling the barbarous ages”. As at the time, “The Nigerian system” was and is still the most infernal system that was ever designed for the express purpose of humiliating and depressing the units of any loyal and progressive community.

(pix:homestrings)

The three basic principles for the successful working of the Nigerian System were and are still: 
*IGNORANCE, FEAR and MILITARY TERRORISM: Infernal – extremely evil or cruel; expressive of cruelty or befitting hell.

The Nigerian System– Designed To Fail
To restrain and subvert the greed and selfishness of the Emirs because of his consistent dread of a Jihad or holy war against him or his government in the Northern Protectorate, Lord Fredrick Lugard charmed them into submission with the princely salary and a 50% allocation of the native’s treasury funds. These funds were derived from direct taxation thereby creating a distinction, without a difference between their private and public funds.

While Sir Lugard humored at the greed of these Emirs and the ignorance of the peasant natives, he had a successful rule as a mini-god, as long as he did not tamper with their religion. Hence, the cementation of the system where only “a few were beneficiary of state funds while the peasants were at the mercy of a ruling class”. In that system, he termed as the “indirect rule” in the Northern Protectorate. He had subtly guided these Emirs {ruling class} to the center of the garden to taste the fruit of knowledge, and to be able to decipher between good and bad while the natives were left in perpetual ignorance.

Things did not work out so well when Lugard arrived the Southern Protectorate and the Lagos Colony. There, he met missionary schools in several nooks and corners, educated natives with a system of government that was designed to progress. During his presentation on taxation policy to the parliament in 1913, he was bombarded with several questions on these policies and considerations were put forward on the affordability in defense of the natives. These didn’t quite go well with the god-emperor Sir Frederick Lugard. Ignorance was not going to be a basic tool for success in the Southern Protectorate/Colony as it were in the Northern Protectorate.


Most of the Princes and some commoners of the Southern Protectorate were already scholars of western education. Hence, history reports that Sir Fredrick’s policy met with such a lamentable and disastrous failure in the Lagos Colony and Southern Provinces. The darkness of ignorance from the Northern provinces was dispelled by the people of the Southern provinces championing Rights, Liberty and Justice.

Faced with the challenges of imposing the "divide and rule by ignorance” policy of the Northern provinces on the Southern Provinces and Colony that was strongly opposed by the natives of the Southern provinces, Sir Fredrick Lugard thereby devised the sudden thoughts of creating the CONTRAPTION called UNITED NIGERIA.