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We congratulate Nigeria on the occasion of its 59th Independence Anniversary. So many citizens feel a little disappointed that the nation which drew so much optimism at its inception later became an object of butts and jokes because the world expected Nigeria to be ‘Africa’s showpiece state,’ the title TIME used on its first cover story on Nigeria at its Independence. The expectations were not misplaced as any look into the statistical figures of levels of development of the world in 1960 would admit. Nigeria was at par with the current heavy hitters like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China and many others.
Our Independence was won on a platter of gold. We did not go through the rough rides of Kenya. The British Empire, after the loss of the India sub-continent had Nigeria as its exemplary colony of very loyal citizens who love the Queen and gloried in the empire.
In spite of the bad manners that are exhibited now and then by our compatriots in their relation with each other, Nigeria was ushered to Independence by a group of gentlemen and women, honest, patriotic and determined to make the new nation a home to a contented populace. It is sometimes academic to think of what would have been had the British colonial masters followed common sense and split the Northern Region in order to fulfill the first principle of a federation; no one part should be bigger than the rest put together. But the British calculation of pandering to the whims of the Northern leaders, a malady which eventually led to truly grievous political upheavals and, which the honest British administrators who were honest in their memoirs confessed, it is still a conjecture what the objective was because it led to an unbalanced federation which fed narrow nationalist agitations, which, in the end, overwhelmed the country and resulted in Nigeria’s version of the ‘Catastrophe’ which came in the form of the January 15 military attempt to overthrow the constitutional government of Nigeria by force.
But before the Catastrophe, a few little disasters had occurred including the 1962/63 Census. The ghosts of the Census controversy still hover over our country, a phenomenon which has postponed our census almost indefinitely, such that no Nigerian government, even a democratically elected one, thinks of taking the risk of conducting a census so as not to get mired in another census controversy.
Yet all civilized nations conduct a national census at least once every 10 years, if only for national planning. The census imbroglio was followed by the 1964 calamitous Federal Elections, a badly administered election conducted by ill-tempered politicians who saw power as the be all and end all. Then the 1965 Western Election which eventually lit the match on the explosives.
We think our problems got out of hand on January 15, 1966 and after July 1966, which is Nigeria’s equivalent of the Night of the Broken Glass, it became near impossible to put the country back. The Aburi Accords would have helped to patch it up but the civil service chiefs, always thinking ahead for their own interests, prevented the implementation of the accords on the specious reason that Lt. Col Yakubu Gowon was not as prepared for the conference as Lt. Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, so the ‘omniscient’ civil servants interpreted the agreements reached by the young officers to suit their personal and group interests. And the Civil War thus became inevitable.
The war was not about Ojukwu’s ambitions. It was about the pogrom against the Igbo, who were gratuitously accused of masterminding the January 15 coup. When it ended, it exemplified the maxim that those who win wars often don’t know how to win the peace. In spite of protestations of ‘no victor, no vanquished,’ the Igbo were not in doubt about their defeat. They did not expect to be treated like victors, but they were not treated like compatriots. The similarity between the reconstruction after the American Civil War and the Nigerian Civil War is so striking.
Lincoln’s assassination ensured that the philosophical objective of the civil war was lost and power was inherited by Johnson who today holds the record as the worst American president and who turned the victories of the civil war into another version of slavery in the form of mindless segregation, John Crow inhuman regulations and the absolute mistreatment of black people.
The Igbos were not treated much better and it is not a surprise that nearly 50 years after the end of the civil war, echoes of Biafra are still reverberating simply because the illusion of victory masked the reality that the surrender of Biafra did not mean the evisceration of the issues that led to the civil war.
Nigeria can gets its acts together again by returning to first principles. Honesty, hard work, thrift, selflessness and patriotism. The philosophy of ‘winner-takes-all’would widen the wedges. The country is blessed with an infinite endowment of resources and huge productive human resources which can be turned into an advantage. The pessimism over Nigeria is over-stated. A good leader could turn the whole country around in a record time and re-enact the hope and optimism which ushered in Nigeria’s Independence 59 years ago.
