So when people started to call for a conference to address the national question, the rage and frustration were clearly discernible in the plethora of writing and spate of commentaries in the print and electronic media. It was little wonder, therefore, that soon after the call started, it degenerated into semantics, rhetorics and mudslinging with every ethnic group arrogating to itself a moral height and reproaching others. The print media in particular, and rather understandably, played on all sorts of sentiments and fears and traded in all manners of accusations and counter accusations, so much so that one could tell in advance which paper was going to say what, or which headline belonged to which paper or even which paper would carry which headline. Needless to say that these sentiments have only clouded our perceptions, heightened our suspicions and certainly delayed the resolution of the problems.

Now that almost everybody has had his say, we may perhaps reduce the whole thing to what it is. Simply put, nobody is happy with the union. Every party thinks it is the worst off. The thing to do is simply to renegotiate the union. In doing so, we must leave all options open and must feel free to discuss anything under the sun. The conference by whatever name it is called must be unfettered and without any preconditions. The semantics of constitutional or national or sovereign must not be allowed to take our time. After all, what is in a name, if a rose by any other name smells the same? The outcome must not be subjected to the consideration of the PRC or any other body, no matter what it thinks of itself. The outcome should only be subjected to a national referendum. To restrict the agenda of the conference or subject, the outcome to the consideration of some dubious body that does not command the confidence or respect of any of us is the height of futility and must be collectively resisted. We may perhaps ask what does this rotten institution that has plundered our resources and brought untold hardship to all of us think it is? Little god? Why do the military fear an unfettered conference? What again do they want to hide after the ‘Gospel of Mark?

If and when we succeed in sitting at the conference, we must go straight to the business and avoid digressions some of which may be deliberately sponsored through mercenaries who might be hired to release a red herring and derail the conference from the real issue. Three major issues seem to me to be uppermost. The issue of our heterogeneity, revenue allocation and our cooperate character.

On our heterogeneity, it is needless to say that these differences are both natural and beneficial. For even in agriculture, monocultures are neither the norm nor the best. Our problems started when we refused to recognise them as such. We compound the problems by pretending that despite these differences in history, culture and world-view, we must be uniform in almost every respect in order to be deemed united. We confuse unity with uniformity and insist that we must throw away our culture spanning back nearly a millennium and embrace Western values that imperialism imposed on us less than a century ago. At the NYSC camps, for example, we insist that a Muslim woman from Sokoto must wear the same trousers, shirt and cap as her counterpart from Rivers. The NYSC, it is pertinent to note, is a miniature of our attempts at unity in its philosophy, its methods, and rather naturally enough, in its failure. First, the assumptions are wrong, the foundations superficial, the methods unnatural and the results, a fiasco. We ought to have known that regimentation and intimidation cannot foster unity any more than coercion can engender cohesion. Given our cultural diversity, we can only coexist in an arrangement that recognizes and respects this diversity. This is what a federal arrangement is precisely meant to do. But we chose not to allow it to.

This regimentation to be sure was not only restricted to the NYSC camps, rather it has pervaded nearly every sphere of our lives. Take education, for example. Our educational institutions have continued to ignore with impunity a whole tradition of learning dating back fifteen centuries, which had spurred the social, economic and political developments of this part of Africa for the best part of a millennium. The Muslim University of Al-Azhar in Egypt and the Muslim University of Cordova in Spain, both established in the tenth century, three centuries before the establishment of the universities of Paris and Oxford, drew their students as well as scholars from this part of Africa. This tradition of learning has produced thousands of scholars in Africa who have produced volumes of literature covering a variety of fields of learning; the three Fodio scholars alone have together produced nearly three hundred works covering jurisprudence, politics, economics, history, etc. Yet today, our universities insist on teaching our children only the thoughts and ideas of European scholars as if on earth, we never had our own tradition or learning, scholars or books. These ideas are daily forced down our throats in a language that is not ours and even as the ideas have only worsened rather than improved our condition. This regimentation or oppression, as it were, has no parallel in the known history of mankind. Yet it continues here, all in the name of unity. But is unity worth this price?

Some of the excuses under which this regimentation is imposed are the secularity of the Nigerian state. We refuse to ask the question, when and who made it secular? We (perhaps deliberately) completely ignore the important fact that secularism is patently Euro-Christian. Even in Europe, it developed as a result of the conflict between the church and the state. To impose this on a people with a different belief, culture and history is the height of folly and the best way to court trouble. This of course is the direct result of the acceptance of the cultural superiority of the West, the ultimate in wisdom and perfection, a reference point, the yardstick to gauge our progress, and the ultimate model to attain. We do appreciate that people who had nothing better or who have, through church missionary education, been made to mentally surrender, could not conceive any model beyond Christendom. That in essence is church education anyway. But some of us are not Christians and may not be prepared to abandon our civilization spanning over fourteen centuries to follow a people whose perception of life does not go beyond borrowed ideas and bread and butter.

Perhaps the only way out is to recognize these differences for what they are and group together people of similar history, culture and values and give them ample autonomy in a proper federation. The federation units must be free to choose in matters of education, from primary to the highest level, law and police as well as culture. Systems that are compatible to their beliefs and world-view and in harmony with their socio-cultural environment. Once the idea of proper federation is accepted, the details can be negotiated and agreed upon. The option must be left for any party, a state or group of states that doesn’t feel satisfied to opt out. There is nothing sacred about these man-made boundaries. This false aura of sanctity conferred on our unity by some ignorant of frivolous minds has neither historical nor factual basis. This is just part of that curtain of sentiments that had clouded our vision, delayed the resolution of the national question and stunted our growth and development.

The other issue of significance, that is, if we decide to continue the union, is revenue allocation. For many, these may in fact be the top of the agenda. The passion, nagging and bickering which the issue of oil evoked has only betrayed our short memories and lack of foresight. We have forgotten that until the oil boom barely two decades ago, the nation had relied on agriculture for the best part of a century. Most of the lasting infrastructures today were done in the pre-boom days. We cannot see how much doom this boom has wrought on our social, political and indeed economic life as a nation. We have become so parochial and oblivious of developments in the world that we quarrel over oil at a time when the world is moving into the post-oil age. For, as CNN viewers must have seen, there is already a solar powered car that moves 70 kmh. Some of the most technologically advanced countries in the developing world are non-oil producing countries.

All the same, if we have to live together, we should be able to work out and agree on a formula. The problem, as far as I can see, is not so much with the formula as with the honesty and probity with which these resources are managed. In other words, whatever the formula, the wealth is more likely to end up in private pockets from where it will end up in foreign accounts. All we may see of it may be beautiful and well-fortified mansions and flashy cars. But our hospitals may only perform post-mortem on corpses, our schools will graduate ignorant people learned only in cult rites and our roads will remain death traps. The woes, as we all know, are endless. The oil revenue may continue to elude the ordinary man because the problem with our oil revenue is not so much the issue of formula or legislation, it is essentially a moral problem.

Now our cooperate character. The greatness of a nation, like that of a human being, lies not in its size or its possession, but in the quality of its vision and the strength of its character. We must first recover from the inferiority complex which has largely stunted our development and progress as a nation. The notion that solutions to our problems lie in Europe or America despite our different history, culture and values is as strange as it is dangerous. To move forward, we must first have confidence in ourselves and in our ability and we must be prepared to look inward into our history, values and collective wisdom for solutions to our problems. We also need to give the issue of social morality the priority it deserves. We have been busy with forms and structures for too long and to no avail. Recently, General Obasanjo made the fairly well-known point that corruption (General Buhari would add indiscipline) more than the constitutional inadequacies we are apt to blame has been the bane of our progress. But what he did not say is that corruption is only a symptom of the real disease. The real disease is the absence of a social morality. And for as long as this is lacking in our body politic, it doesn’t matter the constitution or the type of government, military or civilian, corruption will continue to grow and destroy what we seek to build. We can wish this point away, as we have always done, but we shall keep coming back to it for there is simply no other way. We also must do something about our mental and physical lethargy. We must appreciate that we are a lazy people whose ingenuity has been consumed by a perverted urge for short cuts. There are no short cuts to progress. We must be prepared to work hard as other nations have done and are still doing. We must therefore develop the culture for hardwork, discourage lethargy, nepotism and sycophancy and punish corruption, crime, adult delinquency and 419.

Meanwhile, our greatest problem is not so much the national or constitutional conference as the capacity or lack of it, as it were of this regime to manage the conference. For the truth is that everything is grinding to a halt as if there is no government at all. The current ridiculous attempt to launch the war against indiscipline and corruption, perhaps the greatest insult this decade to the intelligence of Nigerians, is particularly frightening. Something must be seriously wrong with us! For how can the very people who institutionalised indiscipline and corruption fight it? Who is deceiving whom! They may be playing with their own intelligence, but should we also play with ours? God forbid.