Deconstructing Nigeria

By

Emma Alozie

lozzyfather@gmail.com

Nigeria by all indices of measurement is a great country. It is not every day you see over 160 million people with over 250 ethnic groups lumped in one place, with over 500 languages spoken. Being the sixth most populous country in the world is no mean feat. Like Bishop Kukah would say, no other country in the world has a 50-50 Christian Muslim population in the world and still live in relative harmony, but we do. Scarcely do you see countries rise from the ashes of a bloody civil war and still march on as if nothing happened. We are one of the few countries in the world that stand afar and extend our pity to others on account of natural disasters because we are insulated from the fury of nature despite our recklessness with nature.

We are probably the only people on earth that despite the massive corruption in the land, the resources have refused to finish. There is no known mineral resource that cannot be found beneath the soil in Nigeria.

However, there is one thing agitating my mind. Why is it that in Nigeria we do the wrong routes and expect to arrive at the right destinations? Many have argued that given our diversity, we are not meant to be together. This argument at best is belated. We conveniently aspire to be great, but keep on doing those things that make us very little.

For instance, the recent conviction of Major Hamza Al-Mustapha has further lent credence that we are a people who revel in the absurd. A Hausa/Fulani man was convicted alongside a Yoruba man for murdering a Yoruba woman. Even before the trial judge could leave her chambers, prominent Hausa/Fulani leaders had converged to find a way of saving one of their own, without giving a thought that some other person’s mother, wife, auntie, sister, breadwinner, etc was murdered and this is the way the law has taken its course or without even allowing the law to exhausts its options.  

I heard a story recently that Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria’s first Prime Minister who was fondly called the golden voice of Africa once called one of his Yoruba aides and told him how he caught an Igbo thief and in trying to prosecute him, he was told that he could not prosecute the Igbo thief until he could catch a Yoruba and Hausa thief.

It is only in Nigeria where you have citizens and indigenes. You have a citizen of Nigeria and an indigene of Abia.  It is only in Nigeria where no matter how long your forbears had stayed in a particular place, you the fourth generation are regarded as a settler. How come we have not asked ourselves why it is possible for Chuka Umunna, aged just 33 and whose father emigrated to the United Kingdom some 35 years ago from Awka, Anambra state is now a member of parliament in the UK. He was last October promoted to Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Business Secretary and the Sunday Independent described him recently as somebody who "may end up as the UK's Barack Obama.”

It is only in Nigeria that we deliberately make laws and enact rules that compel the able bodied person to wait for the cripple. For instance, it may take the man in Bayelsa two years to construct a block of flat, whilst it may take another man in Enugu just six months to construct the same block of flack. The man in Bayelsa would certainly need to go beneath the sea to first get sand to reclaim the area he wants the construction to take place. He leaves it for about a year to dry before he starts construction. But in Nigeria, we make laws preventing the Enugu man who needn’t do all these to wait for the Bayelsa man so that they can build at the same pace and finish at the same time and we call it balancing. In the end we may find out that the man in Enugu may have either lost interest in continuing the construction or it could be rainy season in his domain, which may prevent him from building or he may have used the money to take a chieftaincy title. We find out that either the man in Enugu or the one in Bayelsa or both would not build again.  

Tell me why will say Akwa Ibom state generate power and send it to me in Abuja to use instead of using it to take care of the need of the immediate vicinity.

It is only in Nigeria that you hear educationally less developed states.  Two students pursuing the same course of study in the same university could have been admitted into that university with different qualification standard simply because of the geography of their origin. Even after graduation, the standard for one to get job in a federal government office is lower than his course mate in the university, all to balance the geographical divide.

Take for instance, the new Inspector General of police who is from Gusau in Zamfara state. His classmate in Police College who enlisted into the police force the same day who happens to be my townsman from Imo is still an Assistant Commissioner of Police, ACP. Please remember that this is not as a result of a better academic qualification from the new IGP, after all, the new police boss is a diploma holder, whereas my townsman is a university degree holder. It is the handiwork of quota system and federal character.

We promote mediocrity and turn around to yearn for excellence. In the struggle to fill the political vacancies after the last general election, an issue unknown to our constitution reared up its head and the south east was zoned out of the speakership of the House of Reps. They argued that the president is a Christian, the senate president and his deputy are Christians, the then Chief Justice of Nigeria a Christian, how would the speaker be a Christian?

In Nigeria, we are nationalists, when it suits us, but the moment we are disadvantaged from our positions at the national level, we travel back to our ethnic cocoon and begin to champion an ethnic course. Like Sam Omatseye, the chairman of the editorial board of The Nation newspaper recently wrote, Nigeria is a county without Nigerians and this is the singular most tragic point of our nation’s history.

As events are gradually unfolding, it is becoming clearer while we have this murderous Boko Haram on our hands. Today, the shouts of dialogue and amnesty to Boko Haram are renting the air. Very soon they will assemble around a table to pick up their amnesty package. Why? Because the federal government has so far spent multiple billions of Naira to grant amnesty to over twenty six thousand militants in the south, why will the north be left out? Very soon we will hear that about forty thousand ex-Boko Haram bombers have picked their amnesty package. There will even be more than forty thousand of them because the logic will be that as there are more people in the north, there should naturally be more agitators from that part of the country. That is federal character for you, after all it is enshrined in our constitution.

The degree of hypocrisy embedded in our body polity is shocking. We criticise the president for appointing too many ministers and aides that consume our every annual budget, but we were the people who enshrined it in our constitution that the president must appoint at least a minister from each state of the federation and one from each geopolitical zone. We have 36 states and six geo-political zones which amount to 42 and there are 42 ministers. If the president ever tried to appoint say 20 ministers, we would rush straight to the courts and be singing impeachment because he has violated a part of our sacred constitution.

People steal and go free because even corruption, which we have unanimously identified as the bane of our national development, is ethnicised and tribalised. When the former speaker, Dimeji Bankole was being hounded by the EFCC, some elders from his ethnic group quickly mobilised support for him. In Nigeria when you are in trouble for mismanaging public funds, the only effort you need to put is to mobilise your bishop or your imam and convince your first class traditional ruler to accompany you to visit those in authority. That is all. Have you ever wondered why no public office holder, apart from Boy George has ever been sent to jail. It is because like the Catholics would say that the Blessed Virgin Mary mediates for them in heaven, every corrupt public office holder has mediators at the throne of Nigeria’s government.

The force holding us down is greater than the force that may propel us up. Everybody sees things from the myopic prism of ethnicity and religion. We shout of true federalism when it is convenient for us and deride it when it inconveniences it. Curiously, we continue doing the wrong things and continue expecting the right results and psychiatrists call it madness. In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, there is a line that aptly captures our situation in Nigeria; “we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and have done those things which we ought not to have done and there is no truth in us....”

Curiously, while we have fixed a date on our own when we are going to join the world’s largest twenty economies, we are not in a hurry to dismantle those barriers that certainly will not make it possible for us to achieve such lofty ambition. This is Nigeria. This is who we are.