Nigeria: A union of ethnic mistrust and hatred

By BEN OGU  

As already established, the problem of Nigeria is neither hunger nor kidnapping nor fuel. These are real problems, but only micro symptoms of the real underlying ailment. The real problem of Nigeria is the 1914 amalgamation that yoked a disparity of nations of incongruities and varying religious and cultural temperaments in a death tie, with stooge, conscienceless and hedonistic leadership working in a vicarious capacity for foreign masters.

This is worsened by base religious bigotry on the jugular of the country, raining bloody hell on every life to exterminate and occupy every space. Yet other negative factors still glue the ethnic nationalities together in the fantasy and euphoria of perilous indivisible unity of intensive death. These factors are further enhanced and made unfelt by distracting ethnic mutual hatred and mistrust, sustained by fear of death for seeking disintegration and by the lure of oil money, which entices to death but is scooped and enjoyed by only a few of our vampires and proxy lords.

Ethnic mutual hatred and mistrust is the mechanism deliberately instigated and fanned by internal slave masters among the ethnic nationalities to make it impossible for them to agree to a revolution, reformation or disintegration for a workable alternative Nigeria. The anger meant to vent against the outlived amalgamation that lumps them together and a strangulating constitution that binds them as utility commodity for insensitive leaders and religious fundamentalists, they rather vent against each other, perceived as competitors for Nigerian patrimony.

The gridlock of the artificially engineered mutual hatred is groomed in a systematic and selective injustice and divide-and-rule policy by the political class to make the ethnic groups grumble against each other as disposable opponents, to weaken and ward off their common and collective hostility against the political oppressors and the Nigerian union of their harvest. Consequently, instead of venting their venom against the irritating unitary structure, the 1999 stifling constitution and the oppressors who are their real enemies, the oppressed Yoruba, the Igbo, the Middle Belt and the South South turn against each other and particularly against the Igbos, erroneously perceived as their adversary. Thus the Nigerian masses become a house divided against themselves that, distracted, cannot stand to confront obvious oppressors, but instead defend and protect them to their detriment.

Diversionary servitude 

An independent Yoruba nation would comfortably compete with most sovereign Western, European and African nations, as they have all the potentials to thrive far better than Nigeria that trivializes them. The Igbos, on their part, prefer to traverse and spread themselves ubiquitously – developing a country they are not counted as one – instead of losing the vast material investments and individual political crumbs they subserviently enjoy in Nigeria at the expense of collective dignity and a liberated Igbo. Their leaders prefer their on-the-ground crumbs for errand boys of Nigeria, which lubricates their appetite to abandon and donate their people as blood transfused to sustain the life wire of Nigerian unity. Nnandi Kanu is a typical victim of this brazen anomaly, whose travail most South Eastern politicians and governors contributed to with sealed lips, passivity or direct active collaboration to delete him as price to keep Nigeria going. 

The South South, created and imbued to hate the Igbo, are only content with their resentment of the Igbo and across-the-bridge alliances rather than their immediate neighbors or their liberation. With the massive oil deposit scooped under their buttock, which leaves them with environmental degradation, they are rather satisfied with mere pittance for errand boys and watchdogs protecting Nigerian oil for the boss, so long as Igbos remain their adversaries.

The North, benighted by the myth of power and oil control, ignores their wasted expanse of land, natural and agricultural resources that could make them greater than Nigeria, just to hold tight the helm of power, oil and religious barbarism. Given all the negative ligaments that bond and glue the nationalities in a deadly grip, they neither enjoy the oil nor are able to confront their common prison masters.

The Yoruba West, with their enviable waterway location, the South South and their oil reserve, and the North with inexhaustible mineral resources and fallow vast land, all have the potential of thriving in a confederated or totally independent arrangement, while the Igbos have only their daring industriousness to strive with. But their preference to suffocate in mutual hostility, scrambling for a common wealth bread, and extend their beggarly palms to the mama-put indivisible central pot of Abuja monthly allocation defies common sense.

The imperative

In the face of the prevailing analysis and a state where citizens are degraded and mortgaged to daily death by theocratic bigotry, with intent to impose, kill or convert with government passivity, an emergency referendum for the nationalities, who in their inalienable right to survival and self-determination, should be convened for them to declare their interest in Nigeria or otherwise – their respective independence from the deadly ruptured boat – as a matter of utmost imperative.

Successive regimes have paid deaf ear to an official referendum for self-determination, and rather bring treason charges on those that call for it. But if subversiveness and undermining of one’s state is a treasonable offense, then all previous and present regimes are guilty of the most unimaginable treasonable perfidy against the state and people they callously trash to the most abysmal level of indignity. All known regimes of the country have ruptured and disfigured the sense of dignity of the citizens and the state beyond identity. It is not Nnandi Kanu, Sunday Igboho, Sowore, or EndSARS protesters who shout “end Nigeria”, or those who write for its disintegration that are guilty of treasonable offense, but the political leadership and structure which bear the barge of treasonable existence. Their moral and political disposition make them the best proponents of disintegration and necessitate the union’s being already in an irredeemable ditch devoid of all condition for human habitation.

There is no nation in the world whose qualifying condition for sovereignty and habitation is predicated on population and oil, but on protection of life and property, employment ability, respect for the dignity of citizenship, freedom and wellness of the human element that makes it worthy of a nation. This is what Nigeria has abysmally failed to realize over a century of foisted amalgamation, a failure that has subjected the citizens to total fatality and endangered them as species under varieties of ferocious religious cannibals variously nicknamed herdsmen, bandits, Boko Haram, kidnappers, with a ring of suspected government connivance or complicity. The floundering condition of the country from 1960 feigned independence to 2026 tragic leadership defies solution by mere sporadic protest against food, minimum wage, fuel, kidnapping or abduction. It begs for a revolution of total liberation and disengagement from the foisted Holocaust entity, because having lost the people-value which is the basis for political formation, it automatically questions its basis and reason to be.

No justification to be

A country whose citizens are flung out as negotiable merchandise and ransom for all manner of carnivorous predators parading unhindered on highways and street corners, with institutions of livelihood totally crumbled and replaced with institutionalized kidnapping for ransom negotiated and monetized by government, while working professionals are left unattended, but politicians, senators, presidents and governors hoard the national wealth for mere leisure, loses the justification of sovereign nationhood. A country where citizens are hacked to death in unabated routine by religious marauders, and many more drop to death by hunger, frustration and self-settling suicide, automatically abnegates its existence.

As the most consumerist and unproductive country of the world, with brain drain of finest citizens as the only exportable value, Nigerian citizens get gleefully self-exiled to countries where their human slave-value is treasured and priced as workforce, and their blood sucked in xenophobic resentment for their survival rascality. The continuous singsong entertaining protest of “he must go” and “end Nigeria” that cannot alter the trend is self-caricature and deceitful parade, as no better Nigeria can emerge from the present by entertaining road-walk protest. There can only be progressively worse to death, or otherwise an alternative Nigeria, as no regime or personality change can hold a prospect for solution to its problem. Its clumsy mix of incongruous antagonistic nationalities leaves it with inherent terminal disability that overwhelms any born or unborn Nigerian to grapple with. Any hope of a reformed or better Nigeria by mere protest or contraceptive elections remains in the fluidity of absurdity and futility, and the greatest lie is to hold that Nigeria will ever be better without revolution or disintegration; to believe it is to live in eternal illusion or false pessimism.

There can never be a healthy fruit from this rotten tree, but there might be some remnant seed of humanity from the geographical ends of the North, South East and West of the country who can plant totally independent trees in place of the old root in the manner the great America was replanted from Britain, and multiple children from the old USSR. In the alternative, there can be nothing less, when reason for unity is in question and fades into nihilism.

I have been challenged to accept that Peter Obi and his likes can restore Nigeria if given the chance to rule. This is only a precarious postulation. Peter Obi has no doubt presented an enigmatic and superior character that stands him out as capable, but the Nigerian structure and polity is deafly defiant, resentful and resistant of good men. Nigerian politicians already perceive Peter Obi as a good man, and therefore a threat to their status quo of established evil order. In the 2023 election, he won and yet lost to their greed and conspiracy theory of “Igbo will never rule”, having cautioned that what Nigeria needs is not a good man – an admittance that he is a good man. But being a good man and coincidentally an Igbo, and that a doom-fated nation does not want a good man, automatically qualified him to lose a won election.

But even the best man will not rule Nigeria outside the already established bedeviled structure and its internal and external claws that tear to dregs any well-intended leader and replace him with one that serves their orgy. The strange truth remains, therefore, that what Nigeria needs as panacea to its incurable disease is neither entertainment and cajoling protest, civil war, nor nocturnal election result for change of leadership, but a civilized dialogue for a peaceful separation into totally independent partitions which will only remind us that “there was once a country” but now there are countries where human life and dignity matter and are prioritized over religion and power.

The post Nigeria: A union of ethnic mistrust and hatred appeared first on Vanguard News.