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Designing The United States Of Nigeria From Scratch By Port Harcourt, Nigeria. False Federalism: Two great events occurred in Europe in the 19th century: the unification of Germany, and the unification of Italy. The whole world, (which in those good old "olden days" meant the European universe), welcomed those "triumphs of nation building". At long last, Germany and Italy had left behind all those silly little bishoprics, city states, dioceses, dukedoms, kingdoms, principalities, papal provinces, and republics, and finally evolved to become proper modern nation states, empires, colonisers, or/and even "superpowers", just like Spain, Portugal, France, and Great Britain.
Germany and Italy had become "unified", like France, whose local feudal despots were effectively contained by brute force; or like England, whose kings and queens had successfully conquered, and psychologically subdued the Welsh, Scots and Irish, then proceeded to dominate the rest of the planet outside "Old Europe". The same thing happened at the far eastern fringes of Europe. Ivan (The Terrible) of Russia, conquered Central Asia, as far as the Pacific Ocean, while Peter (The Great), took over the Baltic region, most of Poland, and western Ukraine, and "unified" them accordingly.
Throughout Europe, public opinion welcomed the fact that Germany, and Italy had finally joined the gentlemen’s club of imperial powers, the so-called "superpowers". However, and unfortunately, in the 20th century, the eventual outcomes of the unification of Germany and Italy were a catalogue of horrendous misadventures in territorial expansionism, conquest, the devastating loss of life visited on young rural Europeans in two World Wars, and the rise of populist demagogues like Adolf Hitler (of Germany), and Mussolini (of Italy), as well as their later-day Nigerian imitators who, to this day, claim and believe very strongly that "L'état c’est Aso Rock." In other words, if by the special grace of God Almighty, them dey kámpé for Abuja, then we all dey kámpé for Nigeria. Finito!
Today, Nigeria has reaped a whirlwind harvest of military politicians, from General Ironsi to General Obasanjo, who have argued for "national unity", from every point of view, whether economic, social, administrative, or/and political. For reasons best known by them, and them alone, the "indivisibility", "corporate existence", and "unity" of Nigeria are "paramount", "sacrosanct", and "non-negotiable": i.e. the so-called "NO GO AREAS" of Nigerian reality, as dictated by Nigerian dictators to hapless and gullible Nigerians.
Needless to say, today, in efforts at achieving the kind of custom-designed "unity" promoted by Nigeria’s omniscient rulers, we now have a multitude of extremely crafty "resource controllers", bureaucrats, meddlers, and influence peddlers alike in Abuja, all of them dishing out all manner of "top-down" directives, decrees, edicts, "matching orders", "riot acts", "orders from above", and similar other barrack-style Freudian slips, and dictations, about who may repair which public highways, or how many COJA BMWs may go to who, or which state Governor loves the President most, or whose wife may be addressed as "First Lady", or who may use sirens with impunity, or which traditional ruler may get police protection, or which three (3) of Nigeria’s over two hundred and fifty (250) languages may be taught in the so-called "Unity Schools", which they, and they alone (in Abuja, as usual) may always decide where to site, or whether stock fish, or tokumbos may be sold in Nigeria, or how much petrol or kerosene may cost, whether in Effurun, Enugu, Okrika, Otta, Kaduna, Kaura Namoda, Calabar, or Koma, or who gets to buy Benue Cement Company, or Eleme Petrochemicals Company Ltd, or where, and who to zone the presidency in the year 2015.
It is rather strange that the Nigerian media gleefully reports such tragic trivia, but gives far less attention to another equally valid undercurrent of pan-Nigerian opinion that is evolving from views expressed by a wide spectrum of political interests that dare to argue that, worldwide, the notion of the "nation state" is, in fact, a phenomenon of bye-gone centuries, which, like a dinosaur, is obsolete, and has no useful future in the context of a stable and progressive 21st century Nigeria.
The emerging scenario of governance in a truly federated Nigeria that such Nigerians are struggling very hard to articulate, is the establishment of effective links between, say, Abriba, Beriberi, Edo, Efik, Fulani, Gwari, Hausa, Ibibio, Idoma, Igbo, Ika, Ijaw, Itsekiri, Kalabari, Kanem Bornu, Ogoni, Tiv, Urhobo, Waawa, Yoruba, or/and any of the other myriad groups in Nigeria, major or minor, as consenting geopolitical entities, founded on mutual respect and equality, with agreed and clearly defined reciprocal obligations, rather than as today’s shamelessly rabidly parasitic so-called "ethnic nationalities", each aggressively seeking to extort maximum exclusive relative economic advantage, and/or to assert its cultural chauvinism in a post-Ironsi Nigeria. Ironically, for close to forty (40) years now, the political and economic centres of gravity of the Nigerian Federation have always been somewhere else, and are now firmly domiciled, and entrenched in far away Abuja, the metaphorical and real-time epicentre of all the Zero Sum games that Nigerians habitually play.
Historical Astigmatism: In the course of the wave of nationalism that swept across 19th century Europe, there were a few dissenting, and, (with the benefit of hindsight), prophetic opinions, urging a different style of governance, predicated on federalism. One such dissenter was Proudhon, who focused his efforts on the idea of a federation, in complete opposition to the concept of a nation state.
Proudhon was a citizen of Italy, then, a newly unified and rigidly centralised nation state. Proudhon feared the unification of Italy on several different levels, so much so that he was constrained to escape to Belgium in self-exile. In 1858, he predicted that the creation of the German Empire would bring only trouble to the Germans, and to the rest of Europe. He then extrapolated that argument into the politics of a "unified" Italy.
According to Proudhon, at the fundamental level, was history, where natural factors shape local customs and attitudes. According to him, Italy was federal in all its being. Italy was federal by its territorial structure; by the diversity of its inhabitants; in the nature of the collective genius of Italians; in their traditions; and in Italy’s prehistory. Therefore, a federation would make Italy as many times free as there are independent states in the Italian Federation. For Proudhon, centralisation is the disarming of a nation for the benefit of a clique in central government.
The Netherlands, for example, has a reputation for its compassionate penal code. The Dutch society has traditionally been based upon religious, and ideological, rather than class lines. Over time, the major religious groups in Holland created their own social institutions in all major spheres of public life. This process was responsible for nurturing, and propagating a pragmatic, and tolerant general attitude into an absolute social must, as expressed in Dutch Law and constitution today.
In 1886, the Dutch replaced the Napoleonic Code with their own "home grown" version of a Dutch criminal code, that was based on their unique cultural traits, like "tolerance", and a natural tendency to wholeheartedly welcome and accept minorities, non-conformists, eccentrics, or/and even deviants. And so, modern Dutch attitudes are entrenched in the diversity of the medieval city states of Holland and Zeeland.
In other words, it is diversity, and NOT unity, which creates the kind of society in which human beings can live comfortably. Clearly, a desirable future lies in accommodating local differences.
Political Myopia: The Russian Empire provides Nigerians another good example of how central governance and central funding destroyed improvement of local conditions through arrogance, ignorance, incompetence, and institutionalised corruption, including the destruction of age old traditions of communal coexistence, which might have enabled ordinary Russians to manage their own lives at their own pace, peacefully. Ultimately, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the Russian political machinery was suffocated and brought to a grinding halt by boredom and fraud, just like it is in Nigeria today.
Today, Nigerians live in one of the most centralised countries in the world. The dominance of central government in Nigeria has immeasurably increased during the past thirty (30) years. Nigerians, somehow, successfully rolled back the frontiers of foreign colonial subjugation, only to see the emergence of an indigenous variant of colonial rule, with a Nigerian super-state, exercising dominion from Aso Rock, Abuja. This is completely delusional. It simply does not relate to reality. And one does not have to be an apostle of "true federalism" to perceive this anachronism for what it truly is: a charade. However, it demonstrates how far some Nigerians are from conceiving the truth that Nigeria is too large to be a viable colony.
Paradigm Shifts: A major obstacle to the attainment of a true Nigerian Federation (of consenting geopolitical zones or regions) is the concept of a nation state: a notion that evolved from the defunct "Federal Military Governments" of the late-1960s’ 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, that metamorphosed into today’s predatory autocracy. If Nigerian politicians really want to have any meaningful influence on political thinking in the coming decades of the early 21st century in Nigeria, then they should be promoting the justification for consenting geopolitical zones or regions. In other words, "Think Nigeria, and act locally" should be one of the useful political slogans of the movement towards better federal interactions in Nigeria.
In order to achieve the desired objectives of liberty, justice and peace in Nigeria, and to render civil war impossible among the various peoples which make up the Nigerian family, only one course lies open: i.e. to constitute the United States of Nigeria (USN) from scratch. This means that states must be replaced with regions, since the formation of a workable United States of Nigeria can never come about between the 36 states of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as currently constituted, (arbitrarily, and unilaterally created by military fiat by Generals Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Mohammed, Ibrahim Babangida, and Sanni Abacha), specifically in view of the monstrous disparity which exists between their various powers.
Not even if it called itself a so-called "Federal Republic" could a centralised bureaucratic, and by the same token, groups of essentially autocratic, authoritarian, or militaristic states enter seriously, and genuinely into a meaningful federation. Incidentally, the ultimate absurdity in Nigeria’s recent history is the oxymoronic reference to predatory autocratic military juntas as "Federal Military Governments", and their ring leaders unwittingly referred to as former "Head of State", or even "Military President". They were/are not.
By virtue of the Abdulsalami Abubakar Constitution (1999), which in itself is an explicit denial of the individual liberty of Nigerians, given the circumstances of its surreptitious imposition on Nigerians, again, by military fiat, it would necessarily imply a declaration of permanent state of war between Nigeria’s military elite and over 127 million Nigerians worldwide, and in fact, a serious threat to peaceful coexistence between the disparate interest groups in the country.
Consequently, all supporters of the idea of a proper federal arrangement in Nigeria should bend all their energies towards the reconstruction of their various ethnic domains in order to replace the old Nigeria, founded upon violence and the principles of foreign or/and indigenous colonial authority, with a new entity that is based solely upon the interests, needs, and inclinations of today’s Nigerians, and owing no obligations other than that of the free federation of consenting individuals into communities, consenting communities into provinces, consenting provinces into geopolitical zones or regions, and consenting regions into the United States, first of Nigeria, then of West Africa.
Of course, the vision gets bigger and bigger, but it must also include the acceptance of secession. Just because a region was part of Nigeria, even if by voluntary accession, it by no means follows that it incurs any obligation to remain tied to it forever. No obligation in perpetuity is acceptable to human justice. The right of free association and equally free secession comes first and foremost among all political rights; without which, federation would be nothing but centralisation in disguise. In other words, there must be a right of secession in a true federation.
Finally, it must be noted that the concept of the nation state occupied a relatively small segment of world history. We have to free ourselves from our escapist fixation on the notion of Nigeria’s "unity", "corporate existence", and "indivisibility" in order to be able to act locally and think regionally. Both will enable us to become citizens of a better Nigeria; not of mutually antagonistic ethnic groups, or of a pseudo-federal centralised predatory autocracy, or even of bogus trans-national super-states like ECOWAS or the AU. I welcome your comments (via e-mail: kombomasonbraide@msn.com), and encourage this article to be freely reproduced, published, photocopied, scanned, faxed, reprinted, reformatted, broadcast, digitised, uploaded or downloaded, in whatever manner or form, with or without acknowledgement, or further permission. Dec 2003
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