Was Nigeria Ever Designed to Function?

That Nigeria has been in the competition to become a failed state, could be explained by the hypothesis that she was never designed to function. The 1914 conglomeration, and yoking together of over 250 different nations under one country, by British imperialistic fiat, is to all intents and purposes, designed to be an impossible project. How a huge boiling pot of invariables, and polarized insularities could stew together in unity, faith and progress, without agreeing to do that, beats every rational imagination. The constituent nations all jointly and severally boast millennia of peculiarity and diversities in culture, language and worldview. They were semi-isolated ethnic pockets obeying their own rules and living their own lives, although in interdependence. And one morning without consultation, they woke up under a yoke that included them while excluding their opinions, and forced to become a nation whether they liked it or not. In fact, everything about this country has been an imposition. The country itself was an artificial creation. The union of the component ethnic nationalities was an imposition by the fiat of the British imperialists. They created Nigeria, not as a state that should thrive and propel itself independently on the paths of development, but as a huge reservoir of resources of be milked unto extinction.

Nowhere has a functional state ever been created by the fiat of a colonizing power. Countries are not created by the mandates of exploitation. Peoples unite to pursue their common interests. There was no common interest on the agenda at the creation of Nigeria. No people ever came together and dialogued their way unto a union that became Nigeria. Nigeria was decided at the British trading outposts, and sent to Whitehall for approval. Recognition for this tardiness was canvassed at the 1885 Berlin conference, and was legitimized in the eyes of the Robber baronial nations that masqueraded as colonialists. It was then imposed on the peoples inhabiting the territories affected by that decision. And till today, these people have not deemed it fit to examine the basis of their union. They spend their lives reacting to futures that have been bought and sold (Ogbunwezeh, 2005) instead of engineering their future and/managing their destiny. Impositions could work. But only when the recipients review the tenets of the imposition; accept it and make it work for their welfare. Not when they spend their lives responding to amorphous dynamics of an imposed illusion.
Nigeria's story of pain started in 1914, when Frederick Lugard, the mechanized errand boy of British colonial adventure, conglomerated over 250 ethnic nationalities into one monolithic behemoth, which his girlfriend gave a name that is at best a joke. In one swoop, strange bedfellows that were miles apart in racial stock, cultural identity, language, ethnic configuration and inspiration were lumped together in a union that is only geared towards facilitating the effective exploitation of this vast expanse of richly blessed virgin land, which their greed has given them absolute control over and above other competing interests and rivalries. (Ogbunwezeh, 2004) It was a by product of a colonial master, seeking to gorge itself full on the wealth of its colony. The country Nigeria was an imposition. The name itself is equally an imposition. So is the constitution that under girds it all. A glance through the Nigerian constitutional history proves this point beyond all doubts. Never in the history of Nigeria has the true representatives of the people ever sat on an agenda to define and dialogue out their common interests and basis for a union. The 1999 constitution that is the foundations of this present democratic experiment was a military imposition. How can a country function when the people have no common interest except their common hatred of each other, and their common oppression by a cabal of faceless rogues?
This exploitative metaphysic followed Nigeria till today. At independence, the colonial Lords, not satisfied with their apparent loss of power, still craved some influence no matter how remote. They re-engineered power into the hands of the conservative element that would uphold the status quo in everything but name (Achebe, 1983). This ensured that at Independence, Nigeria remained a British colony in everything but name. With the passage of time, the Nigerian agents of the British neo-colonial interests realized that a continuation of this culture of imposition would successfully install them eternally in power; a pedestal from which they would perpetually lord it over the rest of us, where the colonialists left off. This realization created a crop of home-grown colonial Lords, whose only manifesto is to exploit the people like their former Lords did. The only difference now is that neither is allegiance owed to the Court of St. James, nor the booty shipped to Britain, and offered in genuflection to Whitehall. The home-grown masters have now new masters: namely their inordinate greed. They shipped their loot to Switzerland; housing it in numbered accounts. The rape of the country assumed the same trajectory in both epochs. Our local pirates in some space of four decades succeeded in out-performing the colonial masters in greed, thievery and plunder of our commonweal.
The colonial experiment monopolized violence and used it to keep the colonized from raising their voices against their plunder and oppression. The “colonialists were excited by profit and seduced by adventure. To satisfy these greedy gods, they engendered chronic chaos, advertised brutality and consulted their avarice, more than their humanity. Their governance, nay maladministration of their colonies was vulgar in its opulence, convulsively ugly and malodorous in its negative flamboyance. In many instances a grand racist and supremacist ideology, as well as a denigrating anthropology of their colonial subjects informed colonial policies. This accounts for their pathologic highhandedness in dealing with opposition, either real or imagined. The Soweto massacre, The Shooting of Striking coal miners at Enugu in 1949, the deposing of Ovaremnwen Nogbaisi of Benin and the exiling of Jaja of Opobo are all historical examples of this ” (Ogbunwezeh, 2004)
European conquest of West Africa one must remember was not a charity concert. It was fuelled by adventure and avarice. This adventure was to cost Africa a great deal in men and resources. Africa was bled dry. Her sons were carted away as slaves to American plantations as human merchandize to be branded with red-hot iron and sold as chattel to slave masters, who were Christian in name only.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, the demand for slave labour declined. At this time interestingly, rose some ‘men of conscience’ whose hue and cry, coupled with the economic realities of the day, led to its eventual abolition. The dexterous, British human traders switched over to other articles that would sustain their already overflowing pockets. They traded in raw materials to fuel the industrial revolution that was already progressing in Europe. And to maximize their profits, they needed some far-reaching monopoly over wide areas, free from the encumbrances of stiff competition and rivalries which came in the form of other colonial power blocs, like the French and the Germans. And to achieve this monopoly, they exacted treaties, with the most ridiculous concessions, under threats of war, over intransigent or recalcitrant potentates of the West African hinterland and littoral states. Many kings acquiesced and succumbed to the merciless onslaught of British superior firepower. Stubborn ones tasted exile like Jaja of Opobo. Those that offered any iota of resistance were crushed and subdued like Ovaremnwen Nogbaisi of the Benin kingdom and some Northern Emirs who experienced Lugard's baptism of fire.
With full control achieved over the land from Uthman Dan Fodio's bastion of the Sokoto Caliphate in the northwest to the Kanuri domain of Mai Idris Aloomaa in the Northeast. And from there due south to the Atlantic Ocean; after their clever scheming at the Berlin conference, the British settled down, not to govern the people or to develop this virgin continent, but to advance British interests in this new territorial acquisition. Writing on this Obiora Ike in his characteristic intelligently blunt manner, recounted the colonial scramble for Africa. For him, “in the years 1884 and 1885 some European greedy powers gathered at Berlin to take what belongs to others and to scramble for Africa. This led to the eventual partition of the continent to suit new conquerors. The boundaries of the new territories were drawn on a table in Berlin, not on the fields of Africa. And until this day, the entire continent still suffers under the psychology, confusion-laden injustice and error, which this blunder has caused a continent described as the ‘cradle of civilization and the ‘origin of the scientific man’” (Obiora Ike, 1996:77)
The gradual but eventual conquest of the constituent federations paved the way for their eventual amalgamation in 1914. With amalgamation achieved, Her royal majesty's horde of buccaneers honed their scalpels to razor sharpness, to cart away unquantifiable quantities of natural resources, agricultural produce, and any other miscellaneous product that might conduce to their interest. In 1914 arose one of the greatest amphictonies to incompatibility on the African soil. This pseudo-embrace of polite strangers is destined to coagulate into a conference of mutually exclusive interests that would make a postural livelihood of being very busy pretending to be a people.
This contraption of amorphous interests, in 1st October 1960, stumbled into a political independence that was at best a charade. The freedom fighters where so consumed by their passion to offload British domination at all costs, that they failed to avail the nationalities of an opportunity of ironing out their differences and desires on the pressing board of dialogue. Suppressed furies, bottled dissensions, unarticulated rivalries and unexpressed aspirations were hence swept under the rug of our collective consciousness to incubate and hatch to our perpetual discomfiture as a nation. And as Jean Paul Sartre would have it: if suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it would go in and devastate the oppressed themselves" (Sartre, cited in Fanon, 1963:21) Today the chickens have come home to roost. The suppressed furies are exploding in the clamour for resource control in the Niger Delta, the agitation for more federal presence in the Igbo area, and the other ethnic gravitated agitations that presently deluge our political firmament.
The component nationalities temporarily acquiesced to that arrangement, because of political neotony of those early years. The freedom fighters stepped in. In their dogged fight, they equally failed to purge themselves of their prefabricated notion of independence, which unfortunately is much more than "hoisting a new flag, singing a hurriedly learnt anthem; with the colonial army marching past to give salute to a black face in a uniform that aped the imperial ceremonial splendour" (Ojukwu, 1989:4)
Today, not only Ndigbo are crying of marginalization. The minorities are equally agitating, even the Northern Oligopolic ogre once taunted, as the major oppressor of all others is equally shouting of being marginalized. They initially threatened an ARABA, (Secession) that petroleum and British greedy foresight persuaded them out of. The Ogonis and other minorities are equally crying of an exploitative ecological damage to their land and resources. Everybody is crying. If I may borrow and apply Sirkku Berg's assessment of the Middle East, to our situation, Nigeria as a country is now "soaked in a combustible cocktail of testosterone, adrenaline and oil, mixed with equal parts of fear and loathing." (Berg, 2003:14) And in a Babel like this, it is pretty difficult to distinguish between the oppressor and the oppressed. That is the confusion that is Nigeria. Amidst all these, one wonders how a functional nation could ever emerge, or how a national identity could ever be forged.
Nigeria arose as a monument to imperial greed. It subsists as a monument to the avarice of the British sculpted Northern Hausa-Fulani oligarchy and their cronies. That is why it has remained an impossible project, economically irredeemable, politically ungovernable and a sad caricature of the conflict of eternal opposites.

To be true to the facts, Nigeria is nothing but an intensely monotonous collection of incompatible units, in an amorphous, undefined relationship that is stewing with pretence, platonic hatred and mutual suspicion. Awolowo identified it “as a mere geographic expression” created by colonial misadventure. And it will perpetually resist any genuine attempt at integration. In Ojukwu’s own considered view, the very name Nigeria is meaningless, yet, for what it set out to do, it was most appropriate. As a noun, it was at best a half-truth; as an adjective, it was suitably elastic to accommodate future exposition of imperial design. The name, we were told, was born of the amorous dementia of a certain Flora Shaw. It was coined some four thousand miles away to encompass peoples on whom the romantic eyes of the lady had not set. This name became a burden ever since that time (Ojukwu, 1989: 55)

It became a real burden ever since then. This is why the country is an island of underdevelopment, a citadel of mediocrity and a nation of disgruntled, corrupt elements. Ironically, Nigeria sees herself as the giant of Africa. But I am yet to come to terms with the criteria, basis or paradigm of this construction. Thomas Paine holds that a country is and could be adjudged as great, not as Nduka Eya would say, by the number of jeeps and other pleasure cars that ply its roads and countryside, or a la Martin Luther King Jr., by the number of skyscrapers dotting its skyline. But when, and only: when it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy: neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them: my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive: the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government (Paine, 1954).

In Nigeria the obverse of these criteria abundantly obtains. Our poor are unhappy, angry, disgruntled, frustrated, hungry, famished and hopeless. Ignorance in consolidated and convoluted dimensions seems to be native to our land, while to prove the distress levels present here, heaven is inundated with the prayer for “Nigeria in distress”. Our jails overflow with men who have been denied justice by the delay occasioned by our congenital incompetence. Need we talk of beggars? They fill and over flood Nigerian road junctions, bus terminals, street intersections, markets, church and campus gates. They even visit lecture halls and other sundry arrangements asking for alms. What about the aged? They are swallowed up in abandonment by the government. The families are now joining the fray in abandoning the aged to die under the weight of weak and sagging bones. Many of them who are pensioners are denied their pensions.

So many others have collapsed and died on pension queues; waiting to collect non-existing; and in most cases, embezzled pensions. I would not talk about taxes. Nigerians don’t pay tax. They evade it. And rightly so because, when it is paid, those who should hold it in trust for them and use it to better their lot embezzle it. I don’t blame them for it. Nobody believes in this contraption called Nigeria. Nigeria is simply a huge cow to be milked dry by anybody fortunate enough to grab the levers of power. Why pay tax, which would eventually end up in a numbered personal account in Zurich, Basel or Nassau? The rational world is not a friend of Nigeria. Every great country in the world embraced the rational world, but rationality came to Nigeria and was crucified. If not, why has the educational system collapsed in Nigeria? Why has the university campuses turned into certified brothels, abattoirs for human slaughter, cultism, and ivory towers of mediocrity? How can the rational world be our friend, when the mentally challenged man gets a post that he is grossly under qualified to smell let alone hold? That is why happiness is not a friend of Nigerians. The rich Nigerians are not happy. They are afraid. They are afraid of today and tomorrow and whatever it portends. The poor are not happy. They are angry and hungry. They have lost every semblance of hope in a system that cares no hoot for their welfare, let alone whether they dined or died. All these unfortunately form the miserable landscape of our daily lives in Nigeria, and to that end, any insinuation that dresses Nigeria in the borrowed and oversized robes of a giant is a disagreeable rumour. And by the dereliction of major sectors of her existence, coupled with the demise of education, Nigeria as a country has written the obituary of her tomorrow. Nigeria is dead. Only a sovereign national conference can either revive her or give her a befitting funeral. Anything short of this would amount to an explosive disintegration.

What could one make of a situation that is synonymous with hopelessness? The reaction to Nigeria’s sorry state is characterized by the inchoate variance that has defined her amorphous character. On the domestic front, Nigerians react randomly and variously to the rot that is Nigeria. The elite who can afford the luxury would turn their back on the whole mess and emigrate into some comfortable slavery in Europe, America and other “Treasure Islands” tidied up by someone else’s intelligence and discipline (Ogbunwezeh, 2002). Those who are structurally disenfranchised and impoverished abandon themselves to the mercy of the elements. They fly into the patronage of religion, where other unscrupulous thieves fleece them off their meagre possessions in the name of God (Ogbunwezeh, 2002). Why wouldn’t that be the case? The government has abdicated its responsibilities. The economic situation is so inclement, harsh and excruciatingly strangulating. The people are hungry. Their wages are left unpaid. They are daily harassed by a conglomerate of forces led by shylock landlords. The utilities are dysfunctional, yet the companies namely NITEL and NEPA terrorize people to pay for the long periods of silence and darkness that they are traditionally forced to endure daily. The roads are not safe due to potholes and hoodlums. Their houses are not even safe at nights as unemployed youths in a bid to assuage their hopelessness, take up arms to wreck havoc and destruction on the battered frame of an already terminally frustrated populace.

On the international scene, she is a pariah variously treated with polite subterranean scorn meant for a race of criminals. The treatment meted out on passengers bearing Nigerian passports and international flights originating from Nigeria, at various international airports and other transit points, reeks with unvarnished humiliation. For these people, every Nigerian is in the most proximate potency, a drug baron, a thief, and an illegal alien, while every Nigerian lady personifies a closet prostitute or a drug courier.

This accounts in part for the sustained derogatory conceptual prejudice that holds sway in Western social and justice system today. In this concourse of Justice, every Nigerian found within the vicinity or precinct of a crime is automatically the principal suspect. If eventually arraigned in court, he is disadvantaged as he faces a jury that is already prejudiced against him. There he gets a fine kangaroo hearing and a fair hanging. Where the maximum penalty is discretionarily advised by the statute books, most judges consult this reservoir of frozen bias in their considerations. The Nigerian foreign mission in those places are merely informed, not even consulted on those issues where the lives of Nigerians are at stake. Even where they are consulted, the rot in the country seemed to have followed them to their various missions abroad. The Spanish authorities on June, 9th 2007, murdered a Nigeria, national, Mr. Osamuyi Aikpitanhi under the ruse of deporting him, but Diaspora Nigerians that organized a demonstration protesting that murder could not get the co-operation of Nigerian missions in most countries (http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/board/protest-note-govt-spain/38063-nigerian-citizen-gagged-killed-spanish-authorities.html)

In this Nigerian situation where bottled anger, boiling frustration, powerlessness, and consequential irrelevance admix, it brews a distilled medley of brutal viciousness. This viciousness is a survival strategy and the only option between a miserable existence and a miserable extinction. Nigerians being good and altruistic gamblers naturally listed towards a miserable existence instead of a miserable expiration. And in this miasma, holy means could be conscripted into unholy ends. Angels could be arranged to run ahead of a satanic convoys. Thieves could take up residence in the churches instead of the prison yards, while touts change their playgrounds from the motor parks to the Government Houses and State Houses of Assembly. The sacred Chalice scandalously welcomes the unholy dregs of the infernal kingdom in her bosom. And unreason is conscripted to rule over right and pure reason. This couldn’t be any other way because a chicken can never give birth to a goat. Nigeria was designed to be a chicken. She must always be prisoner to the crooked demands and instinctual baggage of her genetic blueprint. She is like a child that was denied the psychosocial reinforcements imperative for a sound and integral development.

Due to this intrinsically flawed birth of Nigeria, its course of unfolding naturally took a crooked pattern. This crooked dynamics paved way to the advent of corruption. It equally conduced to the dethronement of virtue by social viciousness. Every shade of retrogressive impulse was generated and represented. Hoodlums were enabled and unwittingly empowered to graze on the people as a hungry cow would on pasture. Thieves and gangsters battled for the soul of the nation. This is on the elitist side. The hoi polloi took to the oldest professions in history, namely prostitution and thievery. Prostitutes evangelized and admitted disembowelled women-folk into their fold. Italy, Soho, and other European flesh Bazaars became an unholy Mecca for Nigerian feminine flesh. Not only that, thieves equally proselytized, and baptized their inglorious trade. Their reward became Chieftaincy titles of all ramifications. Their place was moved from a Supermax Correctional or Penal facility, to a whitewashed pedestal that is sepulchral in ontology, but pseudo-relevant in appearance. Grace and charm became automatically eroded by the merciless floods of social directionless wanderings. Vice was bleached to saccharine whiteness. Wrongs were condoned and evil was celebrated either with non-challance or with conspiratorial tolerance. Everybody joined the fray. Those who couldn’t join in lieu of conscientious reasons became unwitting collaborators to a regime of decay.

Why the ontology of Nigeria’s evolution took this trajectory leading to anomie has been subject to controversy. Many countries with similar or worse ontologies of birth surmounted these obstacles and forged functional geopolities. Why is Nigeria’s case different? And why were pathologies enabled, consolidated and reinforced in Nigeria to go on releasing its toxic loads of socio-political instability and underdevelopment in our land? Achebe, (1983:1) posited a categorical answer. The trouble with Nigeria is leadership. It is not rocket science. It is governance (Ogbunwezeh, 2006)