MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

Category:Uncategorized

In one of his comments on one of my Facebook posts in which I basically hailed the news of the arrest of the warmonger Nnamdi Kanu as good riddance to bad rubbish, a contributor said:

“I am not praising or criticising him...I won't haul derogatory names at him either...but I don't feel strongly as a Nigerian....will I have a chance to decide....maybe a vote among others who feel like me to decide if Nigeria is what we want?”

Nigeria was indeed a British contraption, made to, among other things, spite the French who were the other big player in the West African colonial space. The Germans were never really big, and their WWII defeat put paid altogether to their colonial ventures. Our consent to the amalgamation of the Lagos Colony and the Northern and Southern Protectorates was neither required nor sought, nor was our approval obtained before the king’s mistress called us Nigerians (not the King of England, mind, but the man who by leave of the English Crown, was essentially the king in these parts). What mattered to the British overlords was the administrative and strategic military sense it made for the British Empire to have a single, giant colony in the heart of West Africa in addition to the far smaller ones that existed farther west along the west African coast.

At independence, and especially after Nigeria became a republic, our “founding fathers” (if indeed Nigeria can be accurately said to have a founding father other than Lord Lugard) missed important opportunities to put the question to the Nigerian people: “Do you want Nigeria?” It was taken for granted that we did, and that the Nigerian concept was not negotiable. In fact, it was understood that any kind of independence from the white man was a more desperate need and therefore a most thoroughly desirable outcome than was a clear understanding of where we were headed once that much sought-after independence was achieved. Several times since 1963, since the Biafran surrender in 1970 and the promised reconstruction of Eastern Nigeria that never happened, and through all the coups d’état that perforated our half-hearted democratic experiments, we have missed important opportunities to do all of the following:

• convene a truly representative and truly sovereign national conference to which every ethnic group (not local governments) will send representatives chosen by a deliberately organized series of elections.
• systematically address at that conference the following among other questions:
• whether we choose to remain a united Nigeria or otherwise.
• why we want to remain a united Nigeria if we so chose, and why we would not like to remain a united Nigeria, if we chose otherwise.
• how the united Nigeria was to operate if we chose to stay united, and how the so far united Nigeria was to disintegrate if we chose to go our separate ways.
• the number of years that would intervene between one conference and the next conference, at which subsequent session the same questions with respect to our continued nationhood would be posed and answered.
• what role religion and ethnicity were to play in national life, should we have elected to remain together.
• how resources and proceeds from resources were to be exploited in the case of the former, and shared in the case of the latter.
• what form of government the nation would run, were we to have chosen to stay together, and what form our Constitution would take.
• the resolutions reached at that conference would then be subjected to a plebiscite, the result of which would be instantaneously binding and maximally effective.

A lot of Nigerians, like the one whose comment in part inspired this post, do not feel Nigerian. It is unfair not to let them have their say regarding their misgivings. But a lot of other Nigerians do not feel anything other than Nigerian. They know their country is very imperfect on many fronts, but they feel a connection to that green-white-and-green flag, and to those two unfortunate horses forever condemned to their arduous task of unsteadily holding up the banner on which the eagle on our coat of arms rests its conceivably impressive weight. It is unfair to try to force these ones out of their Nigerianness, just because one ragtag riffraff called Nnamdi Kanu can get on the internet and, like his islamist terrorist mentors, dish out hate speeches and refer to the political boundaries of the labours of our heroes past as a zoo.

So it is desirable that there be an opportunity for Nigerians to decide and to determine whether they want to be together, and if they decide that they do, on what terms such a union should be built. This is what the Americans had the opportunity to do when their Founding Fathers met on behalf of the Colonies and decided to become the United States of America. This is the opportunity that Lord Lugard denied Nigerians by his amalgamation to create the behemoth, and that General Yakubu Gowon denied Nigerians by his balkanization of that behemoth into states that had neither ethnic nor religious justification for their allotted boundary lines. This is the opportunity that should be afforded Nigerians, by the simple instrumentality of the ballot box.

A lot of my friends desire Biafra for its own sake really, and not for any clear ideological differences that separate such a Biafra from the already existent Nigeria. The current southeastern states are not noticeably ideologically separate from the rest of the country. So, for many Nnamdi Kanu-enthusiasts at least, and for many others whose lungs have been generously suffused with the incense of his rabble-rousing, Biafra represents an opportunity for personal economic gain, rather than the touted opportunity for the emancipation of a hitherto shortchanged people. 

But not all that is desirable is always immediately achievable. Sometimes, Wisdom is knowing what you really want, how best to get it, and, having got it, knowing how to manage it, how to ensure that it stays useful to you, and how to properly rank it on the scale of preference. This is the definition that assures me that although Nnamdi Kanu is someone that we all are better off without, he is also a cancerous mass than cannot be ignored without dire consequences, and so must carefully be excised in good time, and with clinical precision. He is like a fly perched on the testicles. You do not want to injure your balls while taking a swipe at the insect, but then, as you most definitely do not want the arthropod anywhere near those prized nuggets, you are sure that inaction is not an option.