What is the Problem With My Nation, Nigeria?
As I write this article I am sure that many people will condemn me to death for daring to venture into this but truth must always prevail at all times otherwise we might just all drown in River Nigeria before the whole world sincerely looks into our problems as a nation.
It has been suggested that the British never intended to create the Nigerian nation by amalgamating over two hundred and fifty ethnic-groups into what we now call Nigeria but this came to being by accident. We can also tell that Yakubu Gowon originally arrived the leadership scene with "Arabah cry", a move that would have successfully seen the North succeeding from the country but somehow things changed and they remained within the polity. Unfortunately, Gowon has continued to hold tightly to his privileged information on the reason for this even though in situation a former leader would have at least made a disclosure of this to help the nation ascertain her failings and make amends for good.
At least we can reliably tell that the British were ready to grant self-autonomy to any part region of the country before the 1960 independence. To start with, nobody in this country not even the federal authority has been able to tell us exactly how many ethnic-groups that are in existence in this country. However, we need to ignore this and move on with the arguments on why Nigeria is either failing or has failed completely to stand as a country should.
Nigeria has never had a good leader, and I make bold to state here that the bulk of the leaders of the northern extraction we have had have all pursued northernization usually at the expense and detriment of other regions, this is obviously the beginning of Nigeria's problem and can be categorized as a leadership problem borne out tribal sentiments giving birth to several other problems or cause such as corruption and lack of focus in leadership.
Firstly, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa who was a Prime-Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs set-off on a wrong note by tying the country to the aprons of the British who still saw the country as her milk factory. Economically, the government of Tafawa Balewa lacked clear-cut economic as well foreign policies, which would have started the country well. Worse still, at home, there were no policies to industrialize the nation as the nation carried on from where the British left off. As the Hausa-Fulani continued to feed on the powers given it by British, the Ibo, Yoruba, Ijaw, and other minorities looked on. The Ibo race had presented some of the finest sets officers in the military but because of the tragic coup led by the Late Kaduna Nzeogwu in which majority of the officers killed in that coup were of Hausa-Fulani extraction, the North took advantage of this development and re-launched their attack with Yakubu Gowon, striking the Ibo born General Thomas Umunakwe Aguiyi Ironsi who was perhaps unguided and tied his ability to succeed around the waist of the north.
Yakubu Gowon tried to give further leverage and credibility to the northern domination through the census trick. Another head count was conducted in 1973. The results were so frivolous as to be ludicrous. With a population of 51.3 million ascribed to the north and 28 million to the south, it means that between 1963, the population of the north rose by 21.5 million, whereas in the same period the population of the south increased only by 3 million! General Yakubu Gowon eventually fell out of grace with the source and control centre of northern power - the seat of the Islamic Caliphate; it might have just occurred to them that he was a Christian. He was replaced in a bloodless coup while he was abroad, by Brigadier Murtala Muhammed, Brigadier Olusegun Obasanjo and Colonel Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma. (See www.dawodu.com/guardian1.htm, as culled from the Guardian October 10, 2004)
The north was still desperate to hold on to power by all means, so with Murtala Mohammed struck and got power from unsuspecting Yakubu Gowon. General Olusgun Obasanjo was to gain power, and the fears expressed by him, which still made him follow the policy of predecessor without any meaningful shift, were intact and evident. The north were still in power so they made Obasanjo a puppet come up with the infamous 25 percent of two thirds of nineteen states magic to continue to hold on to power. This policy worked out as planned for it was to later ensure that Chief Obafemi Awolowo never tasted power. We remember that while this matter was going on, Obasanjo quickly handed over power to Shehu shagari who would subsequently become Nigeria's first executive president.
Take note that this was the very first agreement Obasanjo would keep with north with the second being the north-south rotational presidency in which he handed over to Alhaji Yar ‘Adua in 2007. We were told that it was the turn of the north even after the region had held on to power far more than professors of History can remember.
Soon it was the turn of Shehu shagari and northern politicians and born rulers took time and opportunity to fully and tightly sit on the governance of the nation to the exclusion of the rest of the region. Chief Alex Ekwueme an Ibo man busied himself with the position Vice-Presidency of the nation without clear-cut duties. Mohammadu Buhari somewhat diverted from the policies of his Hausa-Fulani brothers with his radical nature and the disappointed Hausa-Fulani who never expected anything less set their machine on course once again and re-launched an attack again and the result was the loss of leadership position to General Ibrahim Babangida his erstwhile Chief of Army Staff.
Ibrahim Babangida would hurriedly recall that Murtala Mohammed once planned to relocate the seat of government to the once non-existence northern city of Abuja. Ibrahim Babangida had thus achieved the relocation of the nation's capital to the door-step of the north even without the mere conduct of plebiscite to determine the choice of the citizens of the country. What mattered to him was hurriedly building the city and making sure that the capital of the nation comfortably rested in the center of the north on the flimsy and untainable excuses offered to the south by the committee set up by Murtala to look into this. A Yoruba man in the person of Justice Akinola Aguda had been assigned with this responsibility and he clearly did this work much to the pleasure of the north. Chief Ernest Shonekan, Tai Solarin were Yoruba men among several others also used by gap-toothed General.
When the north once again woke up to the realization that power concentrated in hands of a southern could prove too costly for them, General Sani Abacha who had been situated in such a way that he could easily re-capture power for the north struck and wrestled power on behalf of the Hausa-Fulani and this would thereafter be consolidated with Abudusalami Abubakar not to mention that another southerner before this time had won power in the freest and fairest election ever held in the country, not only was he denied of his mandate he also died in a circumstance still mysterious to all the people of the world. Power would return to a southerner in 1999 only when Abacha also died in a circumstance too mysterious to describe here and only when the north realized the depth of the damage and the extent the region had gone in keeping power to itself to the detriment of the rest of the regions.
Olusegun Obasajo once again assumed the leadership of the country and ruled for eight years, the first and only southerner to have ruled for this long period of time the first being Obasanjo himself as a military ruler only by accident. Eight years after, the nation began to hear of a pact which purportedly stipulated that power would shift to a northerner as agreed by Obasanjo himself before his election by Nigerians as the president of the nation. While the reign of Obasanjo has been considered too despicable to describe here owing to lack of focus, no meaningful policy and widespread corruption, those of the rest southerners are obviously too short to evaluate here.
But by far, the result of bad leadership has amounted to a lot of problems for the country with many of these proving insolvent. Lack of good leadership has continuously caused Nigeria a lot of problems. Constant power failures have been it with children born in the country and as old of twenty years not having experiences on what it is to have constant power supply. Last week, over a dozen of youths who had gone for the immigration and prison service recruitment reportedly died during the exercise.
Our Honourable Minister of youth Development, Akinlabi Olasukanmi stated that 64 million of Nigerian youths are unemployed (We know that this is far less than the true situation) and that of the 16 million engaged 1.6 million of them are underemployed while 80% of the 80 million Nigerian youths are unemployed (See Sunday Punch, July 20, 2008)
Teachers are still on strike are their demands are yet to find solution; the result is that teeming number of students are home.
The Niger-Delta problem is still raging with widespread kidnapping going on, the result again is that people whether foreigners, citizens and indigenes are afraid to live or stay in the region. Marginalization of the Ibo is still the major complaint among the people of southeast and their brothers and sisters within the Delta and Rivers state. Education now lies in the hands of private individuals with government looking elsewhere. Churches now own tertiary institutions in Nigeria especially the universities and education is fast becoming elusive to the common masses with exorbitant school fees and other charges.
With these problems on ground, the hungry citizens of this country continue to read or hear of billions of naira and sometimes dollars in the accounts of public officials. Today's Punch for instance has as its headline "How Judge, 8 others hid N1.4 billion unspent funds" with a rider "Awards contracts to eight unregistered companies" Developments like this have completely reduced the status of Nigerians to abject poverty with no solution on sight.
One only hope that the Federal might intervenes as millions of Nigerians are suffering and can no longer feed themselves. The authority surely needs to be hasty in actualizing policies that will put food on the table of Nigerians. Our leaders should make a deparure from our known politics of inaction and make progress.
It has been suggested that the British never intended to create the Nigerian nation by amalgamating over two hundred and fifty ethnic-groups into what we now call Nigeria but this came to being by accident. We can also tell that Yakubu Gowon originally arrived the leadership scene with "Arabah cry", a move that would have successfully seen the North succeeding from the country but somehow things changed and they remained within the polity. Unfortunately, Gowon has continued to hold tightly to his privileged information on the reason for this even though in situation a former leader would have at least made a disclosure of this to help the nation ascertain her failings and make amends for good.
At least we can reliably tell that the British were ready to grant self-autonomy to any part region of the country before the 1960 independence. To start with, nobody in this country not even the federal authority has been able to tell us exactly how many ethnic-groups that are in existence in this country. However, we need to ignore this and move on with the arguments on why Nigeria is either failing or has failed completely to stand as a country should.
Nigeria has never had a good leader, and I make bold to state here that the bulk of the leaders of the northern extraction we have had have all pursued northernization usually at the expense and detriment of other regions, this is obviously the beginning of Nigeria's problem and can be categorized as a leadership problem borne out tribal sentiments giving birth to several other problems or cause such as corruption and lack of focus in leadership.
Firstly, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa who was a Prime-Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs set-off on a wrong note by tying the country to the aprons of the British who still saw the country as her milk factory. Economically, the government of Tafawa Balewa lacked clear-cut economic as well foreign policies, which would have started the country well. Worse still, at home, there were no policies to industrialize the nation as the nation carried on from where the British left off. As the Hausa-Fulani continued to feed on the powers given it by British, the Ibo, Yoruba, Ijaw, and other minorities looked on. The Ibo race had presented some of the finest sets officers in the military but because of the tragic coup led by the Late Kaduna Nzeogwu in which majority of the officers killed in that coup were of Hausa-Fulani extraction, the North took advantage of this development and re-launched their attack with Yakubu Gowon, striking the Ibo born General Thomas Umunakwe Aguiyi Ironsi who was perhaps unguided and tied his ability to succeed around the waist of the north.
Yakubu Gowon tried to give further leverage and credibility to the northern domination through the census trick. Another head count was conducted in 1973. The results were so frivolous as to be ludicrous. With a population of 51.3 million ascribed to the north and 28 million to the south, it means that between 1963, the population of the north rose by 21.5 million, whereas in the same period the population of the south increased only by 3 million! General Yakubu Gowon eventually fell out of grace with the source and control centre of northern power - the seat of the Islamic Caliphate; it might have just occurred to them that he was a Christian. He was replaced in a bloodless coup while he was abroad, by Brigadier Murtala Muhammed, Brigadier Olusegun Obasanjo and Colonel Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma. (See www.dawodu.com/guardian1.htm, as culled from the Guardian October 10, 2004)
The north was still desperate to hold on to power by all means, so with Murtala Mohammed struck and got power from unsuspecting Yakubu Gowon. General Olusgun Obasanjo was to gain power, and the fears expressed by him, which still made him follow the policy of predecessor without any meaningful shift, were intact and evident. The north were still in power so they made Obasanjo a puppet come up with the infamous 25 percent of two thirds of nineteen states magic to continue to hold on to power. This policy worked out as planned for it was to later ensure that Chief Obafemi Awolowo never tasted power. We remember that while this matter was going on, Obasanjo quickly handed over power to Shehu shagari who would subsequently become Nigeria's first executive president.
Take note that this was the very first agreement Obasanjo would keep with north with the second being the north-south rotational presidency in which he handed over to Alhaji Yar ‘Adua in 2007. We were told that it was the turn of the north even after the region had held on to power far more than professors of History can remember.
Soon it was the turn of Shehu shagari and northern politicians and born rulers took time and opportunity to fully and tightly sit on the governance of the nation to the exclusion of the rest of the region. Chief Alex Ekwueme an Ibo man busied himself with the position Vice-Presidency of the nation without clear-cut duties. Mohammadu Buhari somewhat diverted from the policies of his Hausa-Fulani brothers with his radical nature and the disappointed Hausa-Fulani who never expected anything less set their machine on course once again and re-launched an attack again and the result was the loss of leadership position to General Ibrahim Babangida his erstwhile Chief of Army Staff.
Ibrahim Babangida would hurriedly recall that Murtala Mohammed once planned to relocate the seat of government to the once non-existence northern city of Abuja. Ibrahim Babangida had thus achieved the relocation of the nation's capital to the door-step of the north even without the mere conduct of plebiscite to determine the choice of the citizens of the country. What mattered to him was hurriedly building the city and making sure that the capital of the nation comfortably rested in the center of the north on the flimsy and untainable excuses offered to the south by the committee set up by Murtala to look into this. A Yoruba man in the person of Justice Akinola Aguda had been assigned with this responsibility and he clearly did this work much to the pleasure of the north. Chief Ernest Shonekan, Tai Solarin were Yoruba men among several others also used by gap-toothed General.
When the north once again woke up to the realization that power concentrated in hands of a southern could prove too costly for them, General Sani Abacha who had been situated in such a way that he could easily re-capture power for the north struck and wrestled power on behalf of the Hausa-Fulani and this would thereafter be consolidated with Abudusalami Abubakar not to mention that another southerner before this time had won power in the freest and fairest election ever held in the country, not only was he denied of his mandate he also died in a circumstance still mysterious to all the people of the world. Power would return to a southerner in 1999 only when Abacha also died in a circumstance too mysterious to describe here and only when the north realized the depth of the damage and the extent the region had gone in keeping power to itself to the detriment of the rest of the regions.
Olusegun Obasajo once again assumed the leadership of the country and ruled for eight years, the first and only southerner to have ruled for this long period of time the first being Obasanjo himself as a military ruler only by accident. Eight years after, the nation began to hear of a pact which purportedly stipulated that power would shift to a northerner as agreed by Obasanjo himself before his election by Nigerians as the president of the nation. While the reign of Obasanjo has been considered too despicable to describe here owing to lack of focus, no meaningful policy and widespread corruption, those of the rest southerners are obviously too short to evaluate here.
But by far, the result of bad leadership has amounted to a lot of problems for the country with many of these proving insolvent. Lack of good leadership has continuously caused Nigeria a lot of problems. Constant power failures have been it with children born in the country and as old of twenty years not having experiences on what it is to have constant power supply. Last week, over a dozen of youths who had gone for the immigration and prison service recruitment reportedly died during the exercise.
Our Honourable Minister of youth Development, Akinlabi Olasukanmi stated that 64 million of Nigerian youths are unemployed (We know that this is far less than the true situation) and that of the 16 million engaged 1.6 million of them are underemployed while 80% of the 80 million Nigerian youths are unemployed (See Sunday Punch, July 20, 2008)
Teachers are still on strike are their demands are yet to find solution; the result is that teeming number of students are home.
The Niger-Delta problem is still raging with widespread kidnapping going on, the result again is that people whether foreigners, citizens and indigenes are afraid to live or stay in the region. Marginalization of the Ibo is still the major complaint among the people of southeast and their brothers and sisters within the Delta and Rivers state. Education now lies in the hands of private individuals with government looking elsewhere. Churches now own tertiary institutions in Nigeria especially the universities and education is fast becoming elusive to the common masses with exorbitant school fees and other charges.
With these problems on ground, the hungry citizens of this country continue to read or hear of billions of naira and sometimes dollars in the accounts of public officials. Today's Punch for instance has as its headline "How Judge, 8 others hid N1.4 billion unspent funds" with a rider "Awards contracts to eight unregistered companies" Developments like this have completely reduced the status of Nigerians to abject poverty with no solution on sight.
One only hope that the Federal might intervenes as millions of Nigerians are suffering and can no longer feed themselves. The authority surely needs to be hasty in actualizing policies that will put food on the table of Nigerians. Our leaders should make a deparure from our known politics of inaction and make progress.
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