Very few outside government circles will be clinking glasses today in celebration of Nigeria’s 54th independence anniversary. There is rather, among Nigerians, a pervasive sense of gloom: anxiety over the present and uncertainty about what the future portends. Responsible voices, once muted, are questioning the viability of a forced union that has somehow endured a troubled 100 years history. But the recent referendum in Scotland should instruct stakeholders in the Nigerian project on how civilised polities resolve their crises of modernisation.
Failure is not celebrated, but success is feted. That Nigeria is wracked by crises is all too evident. Unprecedented levels of insecurity, ethnic and sectarian conflicts, under-development and political rascality have rendered 15 years of civilian rule a nightmarish experience, rather than the expected blossoming of a vibrant people’s productive and creative abilities.
The dysfunctional nature of the state, the pervasive corruption and the primordial politics, fed and sustained by mutual hostility and the supremacy of ethnic and religious loyalties over national consciousness, have driven principled, cerebral and patriotic citizens from leadership, and left the driving seats to what an activist described as the “worst of us leading the best of us.”
The results are stark. Poverty remains above 60 per cent despite a rebasing of the economy that put Gross Domestic Product at $510bn, Africa’s largest. Infrastructure is deplorable and unemployment is believed to be far above the official figure of 23.9 per cent. The country continues to rank low in human development indices, harbouring, for instance, the highest number of out-of-school children, sharing with Afghanistan and Pakistan, the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s only three remaining polio-endemic nations, and belonging to the club of the 10 countries with the highest number of illiterates.
But these are just symptoms of a deeper malaise: corruption atrophies every effort to navigate out of under-development and keeps every region of the country perpetually poor and crisis-prone.
Our country is a society in gridlock, brought about by an ever deepening crisis of identity that a century of forced amalgamation, including 54 years of puerile nationalistic sentiments and sloganeering, have failed to resolve. To the extent that ethnic identity often trumps an elusive national identity, Nigeria has failed the crucial test of nationhood. The tragic reality is that there may be a state or a country, but in the real sense of the word, there is no nation on earth called Nigeria. This explains why government after government has lurched from shambles to debacle.
We need not continue this way. The centrifugal forces operating in the country, defined by loyalty to ethnic nationality and failure to forge a nation from the 400 odd nationalities and sub-nationalities the British colonial government yoked together in 1914, have caught up with us. For instance, it is only in an artificial entity like Nigeria that individuals and groups will choose to lend their sympathy to a genocidal sect like Boko Haram.
But the independence referendum in Scotland of September 18 demonstrates some inescapable realities. One is that the fire of nationalism cannot be quenched by centuries of union with other nationalities. If 307 years of mostly harmonious and mutually beneficial union with England, Northern Ireland and Wales have not doused the spirit of national self-consciousness in the Scots, then the pronouncement of President Goodluck Jonathan that a marriage of 100 years (referring to Nigeria) cannot be broken is unfortunate indeed.
Jonathan, his predecessors and those of the venal elite who benefit from the rentier state, that see Nigeria as a sacrosanct union are insincere. The 147 years of union with the Canadian state have not diminished the separatist sentiments of the province of Quebec that voted 49.4 per cent to leave in a 1995 referendum, missing independence by a squeak.
Another poignant lesson from the Scottish referendum is that civilised conduct demands that people be allowed to freely express their wishes as enshrined in international charters on human rights. Article 20 of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights states in part: “They (all peoples) shall have the unquestionable and inalienable right to self-determination. They shall freely determine their political status and shall pursue their economic and social development according to the policy they have freely chosen.” The Scottish vote required only Scottish residents to decide; the other region did not have veto power over their decision.
What Nigerians should especially learn from responsible societies is that not all forms of nationalistic agitation end in separation. The essential prerequisite for progress is that a diverse polity must have political and administrative arrangements that will allow for decentralisation and freedom of choice by the component federating units. Scotland’s 5.3 million people have their own parliament as do Wales and Northern Ireland and control their local affairs as distinct nationalities in what is supposedly a unitary state. But in our own queer federation, the atomistic states do not even have autonomous police forces and have no control over minerals and waterways in their domains, unlike Quebec that controls its own resources.
Since the military in 1966 dismantled the federal arrangement where a four-region structure was delivering rapid development, we have centralised to the point of folly, while running what a don, Itse Sagay, calls a “feeding bottle” federation, where the 36 states and 774 local governments go, cap in hand, every month, to collect federal allocations.
Nigeria has been a litany of failures. This is, to put it mildly, a dire situation. Nigeria must change or suffer the terrible consequences of other artificial states like former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Iraq and, lately, Ukraine. We need to restructure the country to deliver autonomy to the old regions along the lines of ethnic nationalities. A country like Nigeria can never make appreciable progress without fiscal federalism to foster the exploitation and maximising of resources and promote healthy competition among the component states as we saw during the First Republic.
Those short-sighted, selfish hegemonists and rent-seekers who oppose change should know that Nigeria is indeed negotiable and all its diverse peoples should be made to have a sense of belonging and freely express themselves as Scots and Quebecois have and as Catalans in Spain are bent on doing. Scots, Czechs and Slovaks – who peacefully split after 74 years of forced union arranged by victorious Allied Powers in 1918 after World War I – have proved that clamour for autonomy need not be violent.
Many believe that most Nigerians do not want a break-up, but fervently desire autonomy and justice and the freedom to maximise their potential. A federation where mineral-rich states get only 13 per cent royalties is patently unjust; a federation where the centre solely controls the police, solid minerals and railways is a travesty.
We need to act on the recommendations of the recent national conference and institute constitutional mechanisms for crisis resolution as the United Kingdom has shown us and Spain, whose Constitutional Court has just struck down the November 17 date chosen by Catalonia for referendum.
Modern Belgium became independent in 1830, yet, its two major ethnic nationalities, the Flemish and Walloons, still nurture separatist sentiments and continually tweak their constitution to accommodate regional demands. The same applies in the Swiss Confederation where elaborate legal arrangements enable the nationalities and cantons to compete, develop and prosper while making the country stronger. Belgium has a highly globalised economy and was, by 2007, the world’s 15th largest trading nation. Malaysia has forged a federal system that allows the states to grow and contribute more meaningfully to national development. But the defunct Soviet Union pretended for more than 70 years to be a harmonious nation until December 25, 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and last undisputed leader, resigned and declared his office and the country he presided over extinct. We need not wait for such a tragic end.
The take-off point should be mutual respect. No one labelled Scotland’s 5.3 million people or Quebec’s 7.9 million “tribalists” for nursing national pride. In the end, respect for their rights convinced 55.3 per cent of Scots and 50.6 per cent of Quebecois to vote to remain in the UK and Canada respectively in their last referenda.
Once again, to break our national gridlock where an overwhelming centre smothers local and regional autonomy, Nigerians must resolve to make a better future than the ruin of the past 54 years by restructuring the wobbly national contraption into a true federation that can deliver progress. Until then, there is nothing to celebrate.
