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.