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There was a time when Nigeria existed more as an argument than as a country. It called itself a nation, sang an anthem, saluted a flag, pledged allegiance to unity and faith, peace and progress. Yet beneath the poetry of its founding promises, it behaved like a reluctant union stitched together by colonial urgency and sustained by postcolonial improvisation.
If one were to write of Nigeria in the past tense, it would read like the obituary of an expired union, a grand experiment that carried the weight of continents and the fragility of suspicion in equal measure.
Nigeria was born in 1914 through the amalgamation engineered by Frederick Lugard, a forced marriage of Northern and Southern protectorates that never courted each other and were never asked if they wished to share a destiny. It was a geopolitical convenience, not a negotiated covenant. When independence arrived in 1960, carried on the shoulders of figures, such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, and Obafemi Awolowo, hope surged across its regions like harmattan fire across dry grass. But the embers of mistrust were never fully extinguished.
Nigeria stumbled early. The coups of 1966 ruptured its fragile federal arrangement, and the civil war that followed, declared by Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in his bid to carve out Biafra, and save his people from targeted extinction, nearly sealed its fate.
However, when the guns fell silent in 1970 under the leadership of Yakubu Gowon, the slogan was “no victor, no vanquished.” Yet slogans could not cauterise psychological wounds, especially when it was dubious . The war ended militarily; it lingered emotionally, economically, politically.
Thereafter, Nigeria oscillated between khaki and agbada, between barracks and ballot boxes. Military ruler governed by decree, centralising power and shrinking trust. Civilian administrations returned intermittently, but they inherited, and often preserved, the bloated centre the soldiers had perfected. Federalism existed on paper; in practice, the centre grew obese while the federating units atrophied. Oil revenue became both lifeline and leash. Wealth flowed from the Niger Delta, yet poverty congealed around it.
If Nigeria appeared to have expired, it was not for lack of talent. Its citizens thrived abroad, excelled in global institutions. The Nigerian spirit was never defective. The Nigerian framework was.
Backward leadership hollowed out the promise of statehood. Power was too often distributed not by competence but by calculation, ethnicity, religion, patronage. Elections became arithmetic exercises rather than moral referendums. Governance resembled conquest: the victor claimed spoils, the vanquished nursed grievances. Institutions weakened under the weight of personalisation. Merit suffocated beneath mediocrity. National identity remained secondary to primordial loyalty.
Thus Nigeria seemed less a federation than a federation of resentments. Kidnapping metastasised along highways. Banditry migrated from forests into townships. Sectarian rhetoric simmered. Secessionist agitations resurfaced in the South-east and South-west. Resource control debates intensified in the South-south. Communities in the Middle Belt felt besieged. The North grappled with insurgency and deepening poverty. Every region bore grievance; every bloc brandished complaint.
Would separation have been better? It was an alluring thought. Marriages sometimes dissolve not because affection never existed, but because suspicion corrodes trust beyond repair. Advocates of fragmentation argued that smaller, culturally cohesive entities might govern more efficiently. They pointed to ethnic homogeneity as stabilising glue. They asked whether forced unity justified perpetual friction.
But history counseled restraint. The civil war demonstrated the price of rupture. Fragmentation risked multiplying borders, militarising disagreements, and manufacturing new minorities within new majorities. Secession did not guarantee justice; it merely relocated tension. The ailment was not size; it was structure. Not diversity; inequity. Not plurality; partiality.
Northern bloodshed is a national red flag. Violence ignored in one region spreads. Without urgent, decisive action, today’s northern crisis becomes tomorrow’s nationwide catastrophe.
Nigeria faltered not because it was too diverse, but because it never entrenched fairness deeply enough to manage its diversity. Equity, not uniformity, was the missing covenant.
A genuinely federal Nigeria would have devolved power meaningfully, empowering regions to harness resources, design development trajectories, and compete constructively. A just Nigeria would have ensured that no group felt permanently excluded, no region perpetually marginalised, no faith systematically privileged or persecuted.
Equity would have demanded independent courts, transparent institutions, credible elections, and security architecture that protected all without prejudice. Fairness would have meant appointments reflecting competence and balance, revenue allocation encouraging productivity and responsibility, policy debates driven by national interest rather than ethnic megaphones.
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The tragedy was not simply that Nigerians refused to blend; it was that the system rewarded separation. When federal power determined economic survival, identity became insurance. When leadership modeled parochial loyalty, citizens retreated into ethnic fortresses. Disparity bred distrust; distrust fermented division.
Yet even in its supposed expiration, Nigeria retained an undercurrent of shared life. Its markets pulsed with interethnic commerce. Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Port Harcourt thrived as plural cities. Intermarriages defied inherited stereotypes. Youth culture blurred linguistic boundaries. In moments of sporting triumph or collective grief, the green-white-green flag still stirred something primal and unspoken.
If Nigeria were written in the past tense, it would be both obituary and indictment. It would chronicle squandered promise and rebuke leaders who mistook power for entitlement. It would criticise citizens who defended corruption so long as it wore familiar ethnic garb. It would expose the cost of sentimental politics and transactional patriotism.
Backward leadership was not merely chronological; it was philosophical. It clung to patron-client politics in a digitised century. It resisted structural reform. It prioritised short-term appeasement over long-term architecture. It celebrated ribbon-cuttings over systemic repair. It weaponised difference rather than harmonising it.
But the citizenry was not absolved. Ethnic champions were canonised even when corrupt. Religious rhetoric eclipsed reasoned debate. Elections were framed as wars. Social media amplified paranoia. The disparate people did not always attempt to blend; sometimes they sharpened their separateness.
And yet the paradox endured. The same citizens who distrusted one another politically collaborated seamlessly economically. The trader from Onitsha partnered with the cattle dealer from Kano. The coder in Ibadan built tools used in Maiduguri. The filmmaker in Asaba cast actors from Sokoto. Nigeria functioned organically from the bottom up, but dysfunctionally from the top down.
What, then, would have held the expired union together? Not coercion. Not propaganda. Not sentimental invocations of indivisibility. It would have been a deliberate recommitment to equity: constitutional restructuring that redistributed power responsibly; fiscal federalism that rewarded productivity; localised security accountability; educational reform that cultivated critical, national-minded citizens.
It would have required leaders courageous enough to confront their own constituencies with uncomfortable truths, that domination was unsustainable, that grievance could not substitute governance, that unity required sacrifice across divides. It would have required citizens mature enough to vote beyond tribe, to criticise their own, to demand transparency without exception.
Separate ways might have offered symbolic catharsis. But the economic and geopolitical consequences would likely have dwarfed emotional satisfaction. Fragmented states might have faced border disputes, currency instability, military vulnerability, and new internal minority crises. The expired union might simply have multiplied into smaller expired unions.
Nigeria’s salvation, therefore, lays not in dissolution but in redesign. The structure requires renovation, not demolition. The land remains vast, the human capital immense, the cultural vibrancy undeniable. The fractures are in governance and trust.
A union expires when its members conclude they gain nothing from staying. Nigeria hovers dangerously close to that precipice whenever inequity hardens into policy and impunity masquerades as authority. Yet it endured each tremour because, beneath grievance, lay an intuitive understanding: the sum was greater than its fragments.
Equity and fairness are not sentimental luxuries; they are strategic imperatives. They are the only adhesives potent enough to bind Hausa and Igbo, Yoruba and Ijaw, Tiv and Kanuri, Christian and Muslim, majority and minority. Without them, unity is a cage. With them, unity becomes choice.
Nigeria in the past tense would have been a cautionary tale of squandered opportunity. But it would also have been a manifesto: that diversity unmanaged becomes division, but diversity governed by justice becomes strength. The union did not fail because coexistence was impossible. It faltered because fairness was inconsistent.
Had Nigeria fully embraced equity, not as rhetoric but as practice, the obituary would have remained unwritten. The expired union would have evolved into a mature federation, imperfect yet stable, diverse yet cohesive.
The lesson is stark: nations endure not by accident, but by deliberate fairness. And in that deliberate fairness lays Nigeria’s only durable future.
