By Chris Ngwodo
NO bad idea is repeated as constantly as the notion that the solution to chronic violence in Nigeria is for her to break up.
THE case for Nigeria’s disintegration surfaces routinely after tragic episodes of violence and has emerged following the recent increase in sectarian terrorism. Some perspective is necessary.
Since the days before the civil war, beating the drums of separatism has become a sort of pre-programmed response to national calamity. Rumours of our impending divorce attended the 1964 elections, the June 12 1993 crisis, the death of Moshood Abiola in 1998 and the Sharia controversy in 2001.
In 1990, a gang of over-ambitious soldiers attempting to oust the Babangida regime even purported to evict five northern states from the federation. Thus, current debates about the durability of Nigeria are nothing new.
It is intellectually lazy and astonishingly parlous thinking to suggest that the solution to our national crisis is disintegration. It is true that much life has been expended on the Nigeria project to no apparent redemptive effect, but what we owe the dead and the unborn as well as ourselves is clear-minded thinking on the fate of our union rather than just emotive polemics.
The usual suggestion is that Nigeria be divided between a ‘Muslim North’ and ‘Christian South’ or among its so-called big three : the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo.
Beyond these imprecise propositions, there is little specificity as to what shape post-Nigerian nations would look like except perhaps for the preposterous suggestion that every ethnic group should become a nation.
These arguments are fallacious. Nigeria is not and has never been a country of monolithic religious halves. Christians and Muslims are scattered in substantial proportions and ethnic variety across the country. There are Fulani Christians and Igbo Muslims. Millions of Yoruba families contain adherents of both faith.
Nigeria is far more complex and diverse than the Hausa-Yoruba-Igbo tripod. Making each ethnic group a nation throws up problems. What would we make of Ijaw communities who hug the coastline stretching from the South to the South West?
The sheer diversity and interlocking spread of hundreds of ethnic nationalities makes tidy disintegration a virtually impossible proposition.
A popular fallacy is that prior to the advent of the colonialists, Nigeria’s ethnic groups existed in self-contained cocoons of utopian bliss unburdened by the necessity of interaction with others.
But many of the ethnic and regional identities which are now presumed ‘sacred’ are in fact colonial creations. For instance, it was only after colonisation that the term ‘Yorubaland’ began to be applied to the realms of all rulers who claim descent from Oduduwa, instead of only to the Oyo Kingdom.
Before the British came, the Egba, Ijebu, Ekiti, Ijesha and Ilorin peoples fought costly inter-tribal wars among themselves. The longest pre-colonial civil war was the 16 years Kiriji war which was fought between Yoruba city states.
Yoruba nationalism was forged by Obafemi Awolowo, who rallied the descendants of Oduduwa as a political force in the new nation. Similarly, Igbo were organised into separate and autonomous republics.
Many of them had scant contact with each other with some entirely oblivious of others before the advent of colonialism. Consequently, Igbo fought no wars as a collective. Igbo national consciousness was largely the handiwork of Nnamdi Azikiwe, who at one point preached the manifest destiny of the Igbo in Africa. Hausa city-states co-existed through times of war and peace.
Even when Uthman Dan Fodio’s jihad established the Sokoto Caliphate, the new emirates were never synonymous with ‘the North’, which was a later British invention and was fortified as a political identity by Ahmadu Bello.
Significantly, pre-colonial societies were not based on ethnic units but rather on age groups, occupations, residence and settlements.
Instead of monolithic tribal blocs competing for a share of the national cake, city-states, inclusive kingdoms and republics for the most part made up the area that was eventually christened Nigeria and experienced centuries-long commercial links and cultural cross-pollination.
Dissolving the Nigerian federation will not resolve the violence that bedevils places like Jos, the conflicts between the Ife and Modakeke in Osun, the Aguleri and Umuleri in Anambra or the Ezza and the Ezillo in Ebonyi, the Jukun and the Tiv or the Itsekiri and the Urhobo.
Nor will it end conflicts between nomadic Fulani pastoralists and agrarian communities stretching from the north to the south. These are essentially either local or intra-ethnic conflicts.
Ethnic homogeneity cannot indemnify society against conflict. Somalia, the world’s poster child of failed statehood, has only one ethnic group, the Somali, only one language and is 100 per cent Islamic.
South Sudan which only recently celebrated its divorce from Sudan is now embroiled in inter-ethnic conflict within its borders. Back home, we need only look at Bayelsa State and other ethnically homogeneous states to establish conclusively that ethnic homogeneity is not a predictor of peace, social justice or smart governance.
