Ralph Uwazurike Cannot Break …

Ralph Uwazurike
Source: www.thenationonline.net

I wouldn't refer to Ralph Uwazurike, the leader of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), as a stunted individual. If however one takes out all the wadas of Nigeria out of the equation, Mr. Uwazurike would, no doubt, go down as a Lilliputian. The orbs of his eyes seem perpetually wakeful, paranoid of dangers that are non-existent for his Igbo kinsmen but rather exist for all Nigerians.  The Igbo “liberator” is either the most ill-informed Igbo leader or pretends not to see the realities and hence tows millions of young Igbos along a tangent that undermines the tranquility that is necessary for prosperity of all interests, including the social and business interests of his Igbo kinfolk across the country. 

If Mr. Uwazurike is exploring avenues to fame where they don’t exist and explains why his argument to push his cause for a separate nation for the Igbos, native to the southeastern part of the country, is always insipid. The first time I caught an idea of his baseless arguments was when he visited the Africa Service of the BBC while in the UK, some years back. According to him, the Igbos in Jos, Plateau State, were unfairly targeted while the Jos conflict lasted. I am a living witness of the social unrest in Jos till date and I see it as needless to waste ink here, trying to clarify the circumstance of the Igbos within the context of the Jos conflict, a conflict whose place in history will, no doubt, be made obscure by the bulky hulky issue of Boko Haram in the northeastern corner of the country. The clarification is pointless because I am sure the Igbos in Jos would have already made the picture clearer to Mr. Uwazurike or Igbo leaders generally, had they been facing an unfair persecution. If they did not, he ought to have asked them first.

Recently, Mr. Uwazurike tried to jump across a gutter that is wider than his stunted legs can scale, when he suggested that all Igbos living in Northern Nigeria should return home to the “East”. It was from this suggestion of Mr. Uwazurike that I got the impression he has issues with his logic of thought, a logic that is, obviously, twisted by his desperation for heroism.

Northern Nigeria is a vast region, perhaps taking up two-thirds of the land area of the whole country. Across this region, you have Igbos in every inch of it. The Igbos are largely traders and were attracted by the business windows they saw in the region, just as elsewhere where you find Igbo entrepreneurs. They took hold of these openings, prospered and built empires. So when Mr. Uwazurike orders such a population of people to move home and crowd the region that, as far back as the sixties, already had one of the highest population densities in Africa, it naturally raises the question of how to handle the wealth many of them labored all their lives to create. Such an exodus will, no doubt, involve a lot of board-rocking, whose ending will be uncertain. This is comparable to replacing a rope suspending a heavy load with a string; the place of your wealth is your home as it is where your mind will always dwell.  Wealth, here, is not just money but the landed properties and the business ties and profiles one has built in a locality over the decades. The Igbos clearly own more wealth in Diaspora than they own in their native home.

Mr. Uwazurike had previously masterminded an attack on Enugu State House and a public radio station. I watched on social media, a photo of topless men who were alleged to have carried out the assault. The picture evoked the disturbing feeling associated with its abortiveness and what it aimed to achieve. Someone posted a comment hinting that the assault lacked brilliance and could not even measure up to the smartness of Boko Haram operations.

These vignettes of events have only worked to tag Mr. Uwazurike and his followers as a bunch of ill-advised elements. With this, I wonder how Mr. Uwazurike can fit into the imagery of a liberator in the eyes of responsible Igbo men and women. If the Igbos saw any relevance in Mr. Uwazurike’s cause, he would have been included in the southeastern delegation to the National Conference, just concluded in Abuja.

If River Niger eventually flows across five nations rather than its current four, it will be because the new nation was created either out of Guinea, Mali or Niger but not in Nigeria. While the agitations for a new nation may come, largely, from people like Mr. Uwazurike, the irony is that the Igbos, by virtue of their prosperity across the whole length and breadth of the nation, have become the cohesive matrix of the nation. This, again, underscores the belief that our diversity is actually our strength –in it there is solution to all of our challenges. Clearly, the viewpoints of a few within the population of Igbos at home and outside confront rather than meet, as far as the topic of homeward migration is the agenda.  Thus young Igbos at home need an orientation that their Diaspora have, by virtue of their extensive travel.

Obviously, Mr. Uwazurike is already waiting for the prophesy, to come to pass, of former American Envoy to Nigeria, Terrence McCulley, suggesting that Nigeria will explode into bits in 2015.  However, the series of travels the nation had gone through seem to indicate that the bond binding Nigeria as one nation is superior, by far, to the abhorrent forces that aim to tear it apart. Thus Mr. Uwazurike may live out his life and be buried in Nigeria, rather than in Biafra. Those who belief in one Nigeria strongly feel that until the last Nigerian soul is laid to rest Nigeria will go on as one nation.

Ralph Uwazurike cannot break what Heavens has joined.

Nigeria’s Forgotten Revenue Sources

 A recent radio call show requested callers to express their opinions on the question of whether to pay or not to pay tax. One of the callers requested that Nigerians should not pay tax at all, since, according to him, the tax will end up in the pockets of corrupt government officials. There is no doubt the caller’s opinion rested on his youthful naivety; you cannot have a nation without taxation. Tax is, primarily, the source of a sustaining resource that every nation cannot do without.

In Nigeria, the corruption that a lot of people dread is actually made worse by the fact that a lot of them live under the tax radar and often search, in vain, for the strength that can be deployed towards fighting corruption as paying tax gives you a strong voice with which to challenge corruption. It is also the very reason why Nigerians lack the will to protest when government vehicles, buildings, office equipment and furniture are wrongly handled.

When we say that taxes aren’t collected in Nigeria, we are referring to taxes beyond what the big corporate organizations, whose taxes come in millions of naira and also documented workers whose taxes are taken from sources based on a fixed percentage of what they earn. The tax mechanism is so inefficient that in some instances, even these categories of tax-payers escape taxation, as recent events in Plateau State have shown: the state internal revenue board had to drag the University of Jos over accrued tax, to the tune of eight million naira. Also the state government had to seal the premises of the National Veterinary Research Institute (NVRI) Vom and MTN mobile phone communication company over tax evasion.

Before the Local Government Service Reforms of 1976, the local governments (known as Native Authorities before the reforms) were financially independent in the sense that they received no statutory revenue allocations from the federal and state governments as is the case today. Between 1991 and 1992, further reforms made it mandatory for 20% of federal revenues to be allocated to the local governments across the nation. Seven years later, it was enshrined in the 1999 constitution.

Thus the 1976 reforms outlined the sources of local government revenues to include rates, grants, statutory allocations, fees/charges, fines, earning/profits, loans and miscellaneous sources. Despite how “petty” these non-oil revenues may appear, the large population of Nigeria should give it some gravitas and is reason why they should be pursued with all gusto.

Today, the non-oil revenue sources have been forgotten by the states and local governments whose responsibility it is to collect them partly due to the ‘difficulty’ involved in their effective collection, an uncooperative judiciary and laziness on the side of the administrators who prefer to recline and wait for “bags” of statutory allocations that has become, more or less, the only source of their revenues. This is despite the over-staffing of most local governments due to pressures for employment that is hardly available outside the public service. Since there is too much personnel that is not even carrying out the work of a relatively fewer support-staff that public offices actually needs, the statutory allocations end up paying staff salaries rather than financing the very services for which the local governments where created. Such services include establishment of healthcare centers, provision of portable water supplies, building feeder roads, schools and electrification.

The implication of overlooking the non-oil revenue sources by the state and local governments is that those tiers of government don’t work and only wait for the subvention that comes from Abuja.

I once asked a friend who is a staff of the local government service why tax revenues are hardly collected. His responds was that the field staff got fed up going out to the field to generate these revenues only for senior officials to steal them through bogus financial claims.  According to him, it becomes even more painful when salaries cannot be paid the moment the statutory allocations are late or inadequate.

Besides the developmental significance of tax collection to any tier of government, its significance can also be seen in the discipline it instills in citizens, especially the youths who will learn that once you are an adult, you must have a commitment to your nation, that you don’t live in a nation for free, even if it means paying for the air that you breath.

Corruption Wasn’t a Campaign Promise

Goodluck Jonathan courtesy www.Huewire.com

I hear that the Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan wants to contest again in 2015. There are two reasons why he may not be President on May 29th, 2015. First, in the depth of their gluttony, politicians have failed to lay bare the self-restrain essential for a desired democratic stamina and as such democracy may not be with us by mid-2015. If you have the conviction that democracy is the desired political ideology, then you should not only use it but work to sustain it as well.

           

The most recent toast in Nigeria’s political space is the dust stirred by Air Vice Marshal Alex Badeh, Nigeria’s Chief of Defense Staff, when he tried to dispel rumors of a the prospect of a military takeover in Nigeria. There is no smoke without fire and the dire layback pose of the administration has created an ambiance where certain persons have started thinking that the seeming political power failure in Aso Rock has pushed too far that a forceful takeover may be looming.

The happy-go-lucky attitude of Nigerian politicians has always been the impetus behind the shortening of democratic regimes in the history of the country. The records are not hidden -the longest interlude of military tolerance of political recklessness in our history is the current spell (1999 -2014). Until now, the life span of a democratic regime in Nigeria has never been anything beyond five years. On January 15, 1966, a set of juvenile military officers of Ibo extraction revolted against Nigeria’s independent democracy as, according to them, it was unfavorably skewed against the Ibo tribe. During the Second Republic (1979 – 1983) politicians manifested lack of discipline and led an intellectually bankrupt democracy. The Nigerian edifice, built through the hard work and discipline of previous administrations crumbled exponentially as a result. Two gun-wielding soldiers, Mohammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon, “came to the rescue” on December 31, 1983.

The second reason why Jonathan may not be president in 2015 is if Nigerians decide that they have had enough of the use of Nigeria as a laboratory for the simulation of apocalypse.

No administration has ever been welcomed like the Jonathan administration in the history of Nigeria. The much talked about religious/regional dichotomy of the voting pattern was never perfect; there were many ordinary Muslims in the North who voted Jonathan, tired of the disappointments of series of northern leaders since independence. Internationally, there were powerful visitations to show support for Jonathan. I watched on the Nigerian Television Authority the visits by President Obama’s precursor, George Walker Bush who came in company of his Secretary of State while he was the President: Condoleezza Rice. There was also a visit by David Cameron and Angela Markel of Britain and Germany correspondingly. Later, former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair showed he wasn’t going to be left out.  

The opinion here is that the Jonathan administration failed this breadth of supporters, starting from the voters at home to the world powers. In addition to its terrible habit of deferment of action needed to fix fraying ends until it is belated, the bane of the Jonathan administration is its anomalous tolerance of corruption.

The same foreign powers warned that corruption will be the bane of the war against Boko Haram in Nigeria. This, in my opinion, is the first show of support. Brazenly, however, the administration brushed aside the warnings and acted as though corruption was a campaign promise it made to Nigerians. The administration ensured corruption spanned across its sub-domains: oil and gas, pension, defense, aviation, presidency, the prisons, the police, etc. Perhaps Jonathan thought he would find continuous support from Nigerians by tolerating all manner of evil aspirations. This leadership style, where people’s support is won by the tolerance of all manner of wishes of the people, has been used in some states of the country. It seems that the Jonathan administration is making the first attempt to make it universal, failing to understand that the mentality of Nigerians actually vary from region to region.

If only the administration had taken, seriously, the warning that corruption will only feed Boko Haram, it would have known that the option would only lead to a sort of apocalypse for the nation, a situation in which we now find ourselves. We have heard stories of the military taking bribes to allow contrabands destined to Boko Haram enclaves. It explains why soldiers would fold their hands even after receiving warnings notifying them of an advancing army of Boko Haramists to a town.

The obligation of building a prosperous nation rests, equally, on the shoulders of every Nigerian. While the leaders have a role to play, ordinary people, at the bottom, also have an indispensable role to play. When leaders fail to execute their own tasks fairly, common people ask why they should be the only ones discharging their portions of the obligations, honestly. Hence there are always protests from the bottom in the form of disregard to law and order. In the northeast, enrolment into Boko Haram (going by its history) represents a protest for the carefree attitude of administrations in Borno State and in Abuja. Elsewhere, the protest could take the form of sabotage to oil pipelines to steal its contents, scam, stealing of ballot boxes, “jungle justice” by citizens who have lost faith in a corrupt police force. The painful ripples of “jungle justice” come in the form of religious, tribal and communal clashes. In the end, the nation is ungovernable.

Each time one logs into Facebook and condemns the administration for building a stage for corruption rather than undermining it, our friends form the South-east and South-south will argue that corruption did not start during the administration of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan. That is true! A lot of Nigerians, however, voted Jonathan believing he was going to fight corruption; they are conscious that corruption is behind the electric power shortages, poor quality of education, bad roads, hospitals with absence or inadequate doctors and drugs, the proliferation of bogus drugs, an ineffective police force, proliferation of firearms that undermine security, violation of human rights, etc

Nigerians have always known that the successions of leaders they have had in the past are unpatriotic; every action or inaction of theirs always find roots in covetousness. The Jonathan administration has demonstrated this more than all its ancestors. One thing that is obvious, however, is the fact that one has to place a limit to how much luxury he wishes to enjoy. Anything contrary will involve the constant search for means to support the endless desires and any effort to abstain from corruption becomes unsustainable. For a president who once paced barefoot, it should have been easy for him to teach Nigerians how to place limits on their love for luxuries.

The Under-Policing of the Nigeria Space

Image source: Th Nigerian Presidency

I search, online, the database of the Nigerian Population Commission, NPC, for the population figure of the town of Vom Vwang in Jos South of Plateau State, to no avail. Through other benchmarks however, one could give a picture of how big or small the town is. 

The town of Vom Vwang has eight secondary schools, each with an average population of about 250 students. In the same town, there is the Vom Christian Hospital which was founded by the Church of Christ in Nigeria in 1922.  The town also boasts of a College of Nursing and Midwifery. It is sad that a town of this magnitude has only four police personnel.

It is very easy to see the under-policing of Nigeria on the roads or highways. At a busy Junction, a female police officer directed traffic one evening. It was a T-junction. She grappled with traffic from the north, south and eastern ends. Some naughty boys down the road rode tricycles in the wrong direction, a situation that would lead to a traffic squeeze. She wished a colleague was around to handle the boys, but there was not. She couldn’t leave her primary assignment to walk down the road and deal with the boys. Eventually, the boys caused the stalemate she worked to avoid that evening. It rendered her effort of the evening a waste.

In Nigeria, it is a cliché to see vehicles making violations along the road. Vehicle owners drive across kerbs, along pedestrian paths in the wrong directions, causing inconveniences for pedestrians and panicking law-abiding road users. So long as the roads seem clear, some vehicle owners move on when traffic lights “say” stop. These are all caused by the hasty and intolerant culture of Nigerians and what is seen on the streets and highways is actually a microcosm of what one finds in the general fabric of the nation.

Years back, road users in Nigeria were scared of traffic violations, fearing the law would catch-up with them. The lawful usage of the roads started fizzling out however, when it became clear they could get away with their highway misdeeds, leading to a culture of road madness and the sour ripples always tied with it.

Road offenders get away with driving crimes because there aren’t enough police personnel along the roads or highways to discourage the illegalities. If under-policing means that crimes are not sufficiently fought, the forgotten plight of the force makes it even worse. The “I-don’t-give-a-damn” posture of the authorities has created an ambiance where taking bribes to turn a blind eye on criminal acts has become so entrenched that it is seen as an acceptable custom.

It is also the reason why the officers often transfer their traditional beliefs into the profession. Nigeria, a country of my birth and which I love so dearly, is a theater of, sometimes, deeply hilarious drama in which some police officers believe there could be crime scenes where the criminals are invisible and fire visible and deadly bullets.  At such instances, it is needless to engage the criminal. Instead, you go back and just wait for the month-end to receive a pay for crimes not fought. This represents an unquantifiable degree of under-policing.

The Nigerian Police and its affiliates are exclusive appendages of the Federal Government (FG). The FG recruits a handful of men and women into the force and disperses them to the thirty-six state and the Federal Capital Territory ( FCT) commands across the country. Often, the only things that follow are the regular entitlements of the recruited men, entitlements that often arrive famished due to the rough paths the benefits often pass through. Since there are always inadequacies of working resources for the men and women of the force, state governments often shoulder these responsibilities, mostly the provision of operational vehicles, despite this being the constitutional liability of the FG. The rationale behind this generosity is in the knowledge that such goodwill will only work to keep crime levels low in the donor states.

When Plateau State suffered a sequence of conflicts between polarized groups, the tragic events played up the need for state police in Nigeria. The Plateau State Governor, Jonah David Jang, observed that each time trouble started, police reinforcements were often required and since he hasn’t powers to mobilize a police contingent from other parts of the country, it was the reason why succor often came late. Furthermore, the police command in his Plateau State isn’t really answerable to him and where the President fails to promptly give an urgently needed directive, it leads to regrettable damages. He was motivated, by these realizations, to propose the idea of state police in Nigeria. Support to his proposal was divided; northern governors and legislators kicked against the proposal while their counterparts from the south supported the proposal. Since the FG was not in support of the proposal, it did not endure through the night to see the light of day.

Then the problem of Boko Haram surfaced and became a monster, messing up the Nigerian nation direly. At a point, Shettima Mustapha, the reigning Governor of Borno State, where Boko Haram is headquartered and largely operates, was ignorantly blamed for his inability to end the bloody chaos. His respond was that he hasn’t any control of the security apparatus in Nigeria: the police and the military are all organs of the FG. Also the Ombatse problem in Nassarawa State broke out and the Governor of Nassarawa State, Tanko Al-Makura was also berated for allowing the recurrence of the unrest. His respond rhymed with the respond of his counterpart from Borno State. Thus the true presence of a manpower vacuum in the force led colleagues, who initially opposed Governor Jang, to subconsciously gravitate to his position on the debate.

It is obvious that the FG’s refusal to support the idea of state police is founded purely on the pedestal of morbid interest as the force is often deployed to serve them, especially during elections when it is used to bully political challengers. The significance of humanity must, however, be stressed. The FG must see the damage the deficiency of manpower in the force causes the nation and recruit the thousands of men and women needed to close the manpower gap. On the reverse, it can legislate to allow states to own police forces to guarantee effective policing of Nigeria.

Review- Chicken -Efemia Chela

Caine Prize 2014 is here. The short listed authors have been announced. One of them is a 21-year old Efemia Chela whose story is titled, "Chicken".

"Chicken" is an emotional story of a young educated woman by the name of Kaba, daughter of a wealthy African family. Kaba’s got quality academic degree for which the African employment market is not ready for. Her parents insist she go back to campus for what they consider a better degree, in Law, especially since she is still young. She is not ready and takes up a job as an intern in a global firm, hoping to use it as a springboard to a paid job. All she comes up with is a business card, stolen from the pocket of a superior, made lame by drug addiction.

Life becomes extremely tough since her parents have become increasing unsupportive in terms of the stipend they have provided to help her pay rent and take care of other recurrent demands. The parents are using this as a weapon to get her to cave in to their demand that she have a professional switch. Eventually, the hard knock life pushes her to prostitution. But seeing that prostitution isn’t going to make things easier, she remembers the stolen business card and where it points to: an agency accepting the donation of female sex cells which are made available to needy couples.

In the end a baby results from her donation. Her experience teaches her that for every individual, life presents a spectrum of options: benign and otherwise. She is not mothering the result of her ovum donation but prays, so deeply, that life sways the destiny of the baby in a direction entirely opposite to her own bitter experiences. 

Efemia writes with an extremely covert chic, demanding that one reads with highly concentrated mental energy. The theme of her writing is, definitely, creative, demonstrating that besides those issues of poverty, corruption, war and crime that has preoccupied the minds of most African writers, there are other issues that have been little explored or never at all. Thus her story features the issue of same-sex relationships which Efemia appears to favor. She calls attention to the kaleidoscope, there is in African cuisines and not forgetting to cause a splurge on the struggle for the possession of the minds of Africans, between Africa and the West.

Young Efemia, in her writing also showed how permissive she can be when she writes: “it (the wind) pranked me in public, lifting my skirt. I got used to a flash of my thigh and untrimmed hedge creeping just past my briefs. I wasn’t having enough sex to be greatly concerned with my appearance down there.”

There is a little of that collision that plays up the fiction that the story is.  Such wealthy parents, especially in Africa, would hardly allow their children to go through such ordeals. They haven’t got that guts; they love the child plus they would not be able to shoulder the reputation crash that comes with such abandonment.

The Nigerian Security Apparatus and Boko Haram

When the Islamic Jihadist, Boko Haram, started in the town of Maiduguri, North-eastern Nigeria in 2007, many thought it was going to be a flash in the pan. Today, it has grown into a callous, mass-murdering monster, consuming in its way, many of its cynics and casting a blanket of uncertainty on the future of Nigeria. Thus Boko Haram has become the bitter toast of Nigerians and the true salt of the earth.

Also, the question on the same lips is the question of why it has become difficult to defeat this bunch of poor kids who are either uneducated, quasi-educated or miseducated. It is difficult for one to believe that the Nigerian security agents lack ideas to how to overcome the religious combatants. One can, however, presume that they have run out of ideas on how to end the deadly shootings, slaughtering, abductions and widespread subversions of the political errand boys turned terrorists.

Without doubt, Boko Haram is a descendant of International terror organizations with Al–Qaeda as the ultimate ancestor. Critically-minded Nigerians worried about the frequency of mass killings, are of the expectations that the Nigerian security organs should have studied their American counterparts to understand how Al-Qaeda was brought down and rendered slumberous, thereby making America and other target territories safe.

The defeat of Al-Qaeda was made possible by the fact that it is (or was) organogramic.  The Americans reasoned that if they can get at any member within the leadership ranks and covertly track his movements, it will lead them to the ultimate target, Osama Bin Laden, who was the founder and leader of Al-Qaeda. Getting to any of these leaders was possible since field combatants who take orders from the top were often arrested and many where in Guantanamo detention camp. That was how Bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed Al-kuwaiti’s name was mentioned to the American interrogators at Guantanamo. Since Bin Laden was said to have trusted Al-Kuwaiti so much, the Americans figured out that if the superior was alive, there was a good chance the two were together.  It worked and Bin Laden’s hideout was discovered through a phone call Al-Kuwaiti made from a house where the two lived with siblings, wives and children in a town called Abottabad in Pakistan.

Bin Laden had remained on the run for close to ten years because of the level of sophistication of the operations of Al-Qaeda. Boko Haram, on the other hand, lacks that level of advancement. It is made, largely, of ignorant and misguided youths whose desperate search of what to do made them easy targets of recruitment into Boko Haram.

The operations of Boko Haram can never be successful without an organizational structure too. Getting at the members of the leadership ranks should, hence, be relatively effortless. A lot its field combatants are already undergoing interrogations at various detention centers across the country. It is the reason why Nigerians wonder the sort of questions these detainees are being asked, given that the killings, mayhem, burnings and general sabotage have continued like normal daily routines. Nigerians are of the hope that detainees should be answering questions such as: who are the other leaders besides Abubakar Shekau? Where are your camps? How do you mobilize yourselves for major operations or atrocities? Where are the weapons coming from and how do you bring them into the country? … At this point too, the search for mobile phones numbers of the key leaders should have also become crucial in the effort towards undermining the leadership of the sect.

Courageous youths in the city of Maiduguri, who go by the name of Civilian Joint Task Force (Civilian JTF), have volunteered themselves to fortify the security apparatus towards overcoming the unconventional soldiers. This decision of the youths does not imply they are punks who do not value their own lives. Hence Nigerians feel that the Civilian JTF should have been used in a manner that minimizes the frequency of their deaths. There are people who feel that the Civilian JFT should have been used, covertly, to infiltrate the rebels of Boko Haram, bringing out useful information. This can lead to uncertainties within Boko Haram, a situation that will undermine their confidence.

There is the need for the Nigerian security apparatus to act fast and wisely. The extent of killings has reached an unbearable extent.

The Vile Face of Born-To-Rule

Nigerian Flag

Without a shadow of doubt, the uniqueness of Nigeria’s history worked to place power in the hands of a Nigerian with a northern root. There is nothing irrational about that. If our colonial ancestors must relay the baton of power to Nigeria, there had to be a Nigerian, who must come from one part of the nation, to inherit and become the indigenous successor of Lord Lugard, as it was at the time. What was unacceptable was the manner the inherited power was perceived and put to use. The power was perceived as belonging to the North and was used to ensure that it remained that way. This was a mistake because the implication was that the others will remain slaves.

For almost four decades, power remained, firmly, in the grips of the Northern political class. This was made possible through a string of military dictators with, occasionally, short spells of democratic regimes. Democracy which should have corrected this power lopsidedness was locked out and kept in the cold. Democracy would have given us that break with which to pick, as leaders, individuals with the extremism of desire for a nation we would have all been proud of, a nation Nigerians would stop at nothing to protect.  Democracy would have given us leaders with a strong precognition to see that the denial of sameness to all Nigerians would amount to building a castle in the air.

Four decades was a long enough period. It created a feeling of superiority and pride in the minds of the commoners of the north and a contrasting feeling of inferiority and despondency but also the art of patience in the minds of all deprived Nigerians. The long period created the notion that the North was born to rule the folks of the other regions, hence the offensive phrase,” Born-to-rule” that became common among reckless commentators of the North.

Ordinary people of the North find pride in Born-to-rule as it made them feel superior and so the backed it. The unpopular political ideology however had a restrictive benefit, benefiting just the political class of the North and their southern conspirators as it did very little to bring the desired progress across the nation, with the host region of Born-to-rule most awful.

The truth is that the oil wealth of Nigeria is largely the reason why Nigeria is among the richest nations. This oil prosperity comes form the Niger Delta. The stunning ravages of Born-to-rule was not just the denial of the region of the subterranean resources it possess but taking away basic resources for subsistence such as the nourishment of farmlands and the coziness of marine habitats, dealing a huge blow to the economic life in the creeks and the coastal areas and defiling drinking water, the most basic of all human needs. While the peasants of Olibiri and sister villages reel in dire need of the basics of life amidst the abundance of the land, the benefactors of Born-to-rule flaunt Nigeria’s oil riches in the best shopping streets in the world: Fifth Avenue, Bond Street, Rodeo Drive … The people of the Niger Delta see these and considers them a huge transgression against them.

To understate the fact, Born-to-rule created a melancholy in the heart of Nigerians but a psychological storm in the minds of Niger Deltans. This is manifested by the highest degree of defiance to constituted authority that one sees in the Niger Delta today. “We were often told that the things we have always asked for were in the pipelines, so we resorted to breaking the pipes to get them fast.” This has become a saying among some Niger Deltans trying to rationalize pipeline sabotage. Another Niger Deltan raved with furry when asked to comment about oil theft in the region thus: “the people of the Niger Delta do not see it as stealing when they go getting a resource that actually belongs to them.” When the Niger Deltans got fed up with Born-to-rule and its greedy traditions, they resorted to building unauthorized quasi-military groups for the emancipation of the region. In desperation for a splurge, they found solace in pipe-breaking and arm stockpiling with which to hold the nation at ransom.

It is sad that with the uncertain situation that Born-to-rule has engendered, northern political leaders have remained stiff-necked, upholding the old tradition by insisting that power must come back to the north. There are people who strongly feel that Boko Haram is an extension of the struggle to preserve Born-to-rule and that some of the northern political powers are actually financiers of the ferocious religious movement.

A this critical moment in the history of the nation, it is expected that the political class of the north must be having knowledge of the reality that the nation now stands on edge and can fall over with the slightest push.  Hence they should be working to return the nation to well being. They should insist on having a leader with a capacity to tow the nation to that position where all Nigerians can be certain that the future will be brilliant for posterity and hence sleep with all eyes closed.

The political class of the South-south must also understand that the responsibility of rebuilding faith in the minds of Nigerians is not just the onus of the northern political class but theirs as well. As a matter of fact, the burden rests more on them, given that the man who calls the shots in Nigeria at the present is one of them. Rather than designing the nation so that the South-south can keep on trucking, they must join hands with the wise from the rest of the country to find a successor with the wisdom and courage to reverse what seems a looming apocalypse to the state of Nigeria. The region a new leader comes from should not be criteria. What should be criteria is his quality.

The ordinary people of the north must understand that they have a role to play in the search for a nation of their dreams, that building a nation involves courage and sacrifice, that the nation is heterogeneous and fellow Nigerians elsewhere across the country have feelings as well and that they cannot truly love the nation without respecting the rights of other Nigerians.

 In a way, one could say that the ex-militants of the Niger Delta have become power brokers Nigeria. Despite the wrongdoings of Born-to-rule, not just to them but the state of Nigeria at large, they can channel the power they now wield towards a better nation, rather than looking at it as a tool of blackmail. It takes sacrifice and humility but the humble, as often said, shall inherit the earth.