Faced with the challenges of increasing poverty, insecurity and corruption, Nigerians from various ethno-geographic and religious backgrounds appear to be united on the need for the restructuring of the Nigerian federation. With the inability of successive administrations since the beginning of the Fourth Republic in 1999 to provide welfare and security for the Nigerian people, restructuring has now become the Holy Grail of good governance, the final solution and silver bullet that will kill corruption-induced economic crisis as well as insecurity.
But the problem with the clamour for restructuring is the lack of unity among its proponents about the proper definition. Depending on which side of the divide you belong to, “restructuring” could mean resource control, regional autonomy, devolution of powers or imposition of Sharia rule, a clear reflection of Nigeria’s deep-rooted internal contradictions. These contradictions are believed to have come about as a result of the British colonial experiment of creating a modern nation out of a multiplicity of ethnic nationalities through the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914. It is generally believed that that process in which the people concerned had no input, as they were not consulted on the nature and form of the emergent modern state of Nigeria within whose boundaries they were bound to live, has continued to create socio-political tension that is straining the very foundation of national unity.
It is also believed by many that there is an urgent need to renegotiate the terms and conditions for oneness of the Nigerian nation by the Nigerian people. However, the clamour for restructuring along ethnic lines is retrogressive, a recipe for the smothering of Nigeria out of existence.
No nation on earth has a perfect structure of state, as every case is a work in progress. Nigeria’s structure is not an exception. Its problem is not so much that of structure but the operation of the structure by various operators of state affairs at all tiers and arms of government. Nigerians yearn for “true federalism” in the mould of the First Republic’s semi-autonomous federating units. But the romanticisation of the First Republic obscures the fact that the 1963 Constitution did not quite work out because it created a conflict between national citizenship and regional indigenship, a bulwark against national unity and cohesion.
The failure of First Republic leaders to resolve the question of national identity and lay a solid foundation for a united and cohesive nation has remained the bane of Nigeria’s national socio-economic underdevelopment.
No nation was divinely decreed into existence. In the process of evolving into nation-states, colonialism plays and continues to play a critical role through trade, diplomacy and, in some cases, conquest by warfare. These interactions have their pains and gains. The emphasis on the pains of colonialism by pan-African historians has obscured its enormous gains. Great Britain, Nigeria’s colonial master was first conquered by the Normans and was subsequently colonised by the Romans. The name ‘Britain’ is believed to be the anglicised form of the Roman ‘Britannia.’ The lessons not learnt from our colonial experience is the strength in unity of the British people, which made a small island nation of about 18 million people to colonise a country of 50 million people at the time.
The systematic conquest of the various kingdoms and city states that make up Nigeria by the British was possible because the native peoples did not present a united front against external aggression. The British engaged on individual basis each native kingdom and city state in diplomacy, trade and warfare to ease the process of colonisation for its own benefit, otherwise, no nation on earth could have conquered a united Nigeria in its current form.
Interestingly, one unintended benefit of colonialism was a coalescence of the various native peoples into larger ethnic groupings by way of backward integration of sub-ethnic groups into larger tribes that led to a new identity for the natives, which roughly corresponded to the administrative federating units that were the regions of the First Republic.
British sociologists and anthropologists, who carried out extensive exploration of the British sphere of influence around the Niger area successfully isolated and identified similarity in norms, cultures, traditions and languages of otherwise distinct peoples, leading to the current ethnic groupings by which Nigerians are identified. Before this backward integration, there were no ethnic groups known as Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa. In the western region, it was Oyo, Ijebu, Egba, Owu, Ijesha, Ife, etcetera, with Yoruba as the language of communication. In the eastern region, it was the Igbo-speaking Aro, Bende, Ngwa, Ikwere, Onitsha Ado, Wawa, Oru, etcetera. Similarly, in northern Nigeria, Hausa functioned less as an ethnic group but more as a linguistic group of a cultural commonwealth of ethnic groups that shared commonalities in geography, culture and tradition. Hausa language was thus enriched greatly by the original vocabularies of the various adoptive ethnic groups that congregated under the cultural commonwealth of northern Nigeria.
This backward integration was so successful that the various ethnic groups that now identify as Yoruba of the southwest region of Nigeria fostered a common socio-political identity with which they negotiated a fair share of national resources. Interestingly, the man often credited by historians with working hard on the political unity of the Yoruba in the modern era, Obafemi Awolowo, was an Ijebu, an ethnic group that does not share with the rest of the Yoruba the Oduduwa ancestry. He was greatly aided by no less a person than Sir Adeyemo Alakija, a Saro (descendant of returnee ex-slaves from Brazil). The Yoruba identity was further enhanced by the traditional sanction of the Ooni of Ife, who some historians agree is not a bloodline descendant of Oduduwa, the patriarch of the seven original ruling dynasties of Yorubaland, as the supreme leader of the Yoruba tribe.
Similarly, the Igbo tribe was united under the political leadership of Nnamdi Azikiwe, whose origin is traced to Onitsha Ado, a distinct group among the larger Igbo ethnic groupings that traces its roots to the ancient Kingdom of Benin. The political leader of the North was Ahmadu Bello, a descendant of migrant Fulani from Futa Djalon. His administrative genius was deployed to build a very cohesive northern region by assimilating and integrating the various diverse ethnic groups in the North in an Arewa identity. The high point of this effort was when Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, son of the servant of the Madaki of Bauchi, whose origin was traced to the Jarawa, a minority ethnic group in Bauchi Province, became Prime Minister of Nigeria on the strength of the majority seats won by the NPC in the First Republic federal parliament. The success of the backward integration of the Nigerian peoples and cultures is a clear indicator that we were not really different as a people. We simply didn’t realize how intricately linked we were. If the Oyo, Ife, Ijesha and Ijebu resolved to unite under the Yoruba identity, the Aro, Wawa and Bende came together under the leadership of a descendant of the Benin Kingdom through Onitsha Ado, and the confederation of various ethnic groups in the north assumed a new, unified Arewa identity, then they all can come together and adopt a Nigerian identity by way of forward integration. All it will take is a collective resolve to be Nigerians and not so much physical restructuring, because a people are who they decide to be.
Therefore, the rigidity with which Nigerians now hold on to their ethnic identities, which are largely colonial creations further deepened by political expediency by our founding fathers and have led to the clamour for restructuring along ethnic lines, is a sad narrative that should have no place in a modern nation. The diversity of Nigeria is simply the beautiful plumage of one big bird and should not be allowed to degenerate into fault lines that are largely based on a superficial ethnic grouping. We need to let go of the rigidity with which we hold this superficial ethnic identity.
Unfortunately, the desired forward integration of the ethnic groups into a Nigerian identity has been hampered by the failure of African social scientists and anthropologists to further the study in isolating and identifying the similarities among Nigerian peoples and cultures. The unfortunate practice of some leading intellectuals in Nigeria to reduce public discourse to promoting ethnic supremacy of one group over another has drastically rolled back the backward integration that was achieved over six decades ago making restructuring along ethnic lines a recipe for infinite disintegration.