The US Report and Nigeria’s Survival

The issuance of a report by the United States’ National Security Council stating that Nigeria could break up within 15 years has revealed just how unserious we are in this country. While the report in itself has revealed nothing new about the path that the country has been treading for the last thirty-five or so years, the Nigerian ruling class has once again disappointed me with the quality of their response to the report.

While some have called the United States all sorts of names for “daring” to impute that our “great” country could break up, others have described it as a prophet of doom. Some cheeky ones have even gone as far as saying that the United States is merely expressing it envy of Nigeria, via the “damning” report. Citing the many “revolutionary and forward-looking policies and activities of the present administration”, they claim that only a blind man (or country!!) can see that Nigeria is on the mend. If I were not a Nigerian, I would have laughed myself silly upon hearing or reading these comments.

Many of our leaders seem to be assuming that Nigeria’s progress as a nation is measured by the kind of reception our president gets at the United Nations, the Commonwealth or the White House. The level of progress of a country, as the experts at the various UN and other development agencies will readily state, is measured by the quality of life of your people – whether they have better schools to go to, are in better health than they were same time last year, how much each family earns and the availability of basic requirements like electricity, housing and potable water. Like Mao Tse Tsung would say, “white cat or black cat, any cat that can catch a mouse is a good cat”, therefore any “democratic” government that cannot “catch” and deliver the “mouse” of development/infrastructural progress to its people is a failure. And successive Nigerian governments have been failing us for decades.

Should Nigeria break-up, the most painful part of it would be that after millions of people have lost their lives and livelihoods, the resulting patchwork of nations that would emerge from the ruins of the old Nigeria would not be better off than the old Nigeria we all lost. Why? Because the Igbos, Yorubas and Hausas will not import leaders from space to govern them. They will choose from the same clique of crooks who have pillaged the country in the last 45 years. They will choose from the same local government chairmen who casually divert teachers’ salaries to fatten their bank accounts or even add a new house to their present five. They will choose from the same senators, governors, party chairmen, ministers, commissioners etc who have brought this country to it knees. Even if this group of elite are wiped of the stage, what makes one so sure that the new ones replacing them will not be worse? My friends from Liberia can lecture us extensively about their experiences in this regard.

This is why I continue to state that it is in the interest of every sane and far-seeing Nigerian to allow this country exist as one country. The country can be redesigned, it can be made more “citizen and nationality-friendly”, but it must remain Nigeria. For the alternative to this is chaos and a catastrophe like the continent of Africa has never seen. If a war starts, it would not be like the last civil war, where my father was still able to complete his education and find a good job in Lagos, while people starved to death in the east. This time, nobody would escape the ensuing carnage.

When the bloodbath begins, one may ask where our leaders would be? Where would the individuals who fanned the embers of ethno-religious jingoism for their personal gain be? They will no doubt have found their way out of the country through the various public and secret pathways and routes of the Sahara and the Atlantic, only to come back to the scramble for their “share” the remains of the old country after the dust has settled, if the dust ever settles.

So there are a lot of reasons for us to be concerned about the US report. Americans are not like Nigerians, in that they like to think ahead and plan ahead of time, preparing, taking precautions in their nation’s interest. You don’t become the most powerful nation on earth by being mediocre and adopting a “siddon-look” attitude sin your approach towards issues. America knows that Nigeria is a major supplier of its crude-oil, and its leaders are already using the information from these kinds of reports to prepare in advance to protect that country should anything happen to that oil-supply at anytime in the future. Our leaders on the other hand, do nothing but consume and steal not only what is due to their brothers and sisters, but also the rightful dues of their children, grandchildren and great-grand children.

It is therefore necessary for the Nigerian people to force our leaders’ heads out of the sand and take the US report seriously. Concrete steps must be taken to ensure that the Nigerian state not only survives, but also thrives. We must vehemently resist their various well-worn diversionary tactics, which they have used to hold this nation back and stop the rot that is killing Nigeria in instalments. The Nigerian people do not need to all die of hunger before we rise in unison to defend our fate. Unlike our leaders, we have no foreign accounts and no stately homes in alien lands to fall back on. Unfortunate as it is to say this, it is clear that the masses have a greater stake in the survival and progress of this country than our leaders; we have no alternatives.