Nigeria, As Presently Operated, Is Not Sustainable

By Gani Adams  

I would like to salute the organisers of this event for counting me worthy to deliver this lecture on an issue that threatens the very basis of our unity as we speak. There are many sides to the farmers/herdsmen’s crisis but let us just consider two, namely the political and the economic.

*Gani Adams

The political side

Now, Nigeria, for many of its over 250 ethnic groups, is obviously not a nation in the sense that we regard France, United Kingdom or South Africa as a nation. That is why, as recently pointed out by Mr. Dan Nwayanwu, former chairman of the Labour Party, during a programme organised by the Ondo State Government in Akure: given an option, many of the ethnic groups in Nigeria would prefer to opt out of Nigeria.

Already, groups such as the Indigenous People of Biafra and the Niger Delta Avengers, among others, have more or less shattered whatever illusions we may retain regarding the Nigeria that we are living in. While Nigeria would obviously be better off remaining a nation, it is also true that a surgical operation is required to take out the cancer of disintegration currently ravaging the country on every side. And this is quite simply because Nigeria, as it is presently operated, is not sustainable.

Nigeria is supposed to be a federal republic but it operates a unitary constitution where the states, like children, simply go to Abuja at the end of every month to collect food. They cannot even feed themselves. Is it not an utter shame that the descendants of the Oyo empire, Kanem-Bornu empire, Benin empire, and so on, have to go cap in hand to Abuja, collecting allocation that cannot even pay workers’ salaries when the traditional system which guaranteed full employment and a decent standard of living can be recreated through proper federalism like we had in the First Republic?

In the USA, it was the states that came together to form the central/federal government currently headed by Barack Obama.

In Nigeria, it was the Centre or Federal Government that created the states for political reasons and to achieve what the eminent Igbo scholar, Chinweizu, referred to as Caliphate Colonialism; a system whereby some people are born to rule. This is quite simply an aberration, and our consideration of farmers/herdsmen’s clashes must thus begin from this context.

If we have a federal republic that is nothing but a sham, a big fraud, why then are we surprised that a group of Boko Haram members masquerading as herdsmen have been terrorising innocent farmers across the country? If, for instance, there is state police, would the herdsmen have found it easy to attack farmers, rape women and slaughter them afterwards, burn down entire villages, and even carry out major robberies on major highways while the security agencies look the other way?