Lest the roof collapse

Also published in Daily Trust

The high rate at which Nigeria’s social fabric is weakening as a result of the actions, inactions and utterances of Nigerian politicians warns of an abrupt collapse of this roof the Nigerian state which, having failed to properly utilize its resources to nurture and develop a viable country since its independence from Britain more than half a century ago, has only been able to survive somehow miraculously.

Though I am not arguing for or against the continuation of Nigeria as a corporate entity, which in any case appears to be unsustainable, I wonder how these politicians, who are after all the sole beneficiaries of the status quo, fail to realize how their reckless show of desperation for power and their apathetic attitudes towards the resulting intercommunal distrust, socio-economic and political turmoil in the country increasingly erode what remains of the already shrinking pillar that underpins the country.

This is despite the fact that, should the country collapse this way, the aftermath would be too chaotic to allow for rebuilding it, and no state or region thereof would be able to create a viable and sustainable political entity out of its wreckage, for that matter.

Nevertheless, such unscrupulous and desperate politicians who are unfortunately the majority among both the incumbents and the opposition alike, continue to fan the embers of social discord across the country under various platforms and disguises, especially against the backdrop of the upcoming general election in 2015 and the growing uncertainties in the country amid deteriorating security situation particularly in the North.

Obviously, amid the persistently growing clamour for self-determination by the country’s various ethnic and regional components, and considering how the status quo, which appears to be getting irreversibly hopeless, and in view of the amount of social tension it generates, which also frequently degenerates into bloody confrontations among the country’s increasingly divided ethno-religious groups, the only solution appears to be a serious and sincere resolve by all stakeholders to engage in a peaceful negotiation process to renegotiate the future of the country to eventually divide it into as many independent political entities as possible, and in a way that would guarantee sustainable peace and progress for each entity.

After all, even after defeating the secessionist attempt launched more than four decades ago by the South-East in their failed attempt to secede from Nigeria, the clamour for separation has never ceased in the South and has ever since then gained popular support across the other sub-regions thereof i.e. South-West and Niger-Delta.

Also, even in the North which has always and vehemently opposed the idea of dividing the country, and which has indeed frustrated many peaceful and violent attempts to divide the country, there has now been a gradual growth in the number of people who support the idea and indeed call for dividing the country, even though it is obvious that this support is not necessarily out of real conviction that the region is actually ready for separation.

Northerners’ support for separation is largely a face-saving strategy in reality, to counter the insult and ridicule they are often subjected to by their southern countrymen who look down at them and describe them as lazy ‘parasites’ who feed on the ‘resources belonging to others’ while they contribute a very negligible percentage to the national economy.

In any case, under the current circumstances, the North, which is already relatively disadvantaged economically, is not in the right position to support let alone work for separating the country, at least for now. Instead, due to its peculiar and particularly monumental challenges, it is high time that, the patriotic and honourable elements among the region’s politicians, academics, professionals, businessmen and other stakeholders launched serious, sincere, concerted and painstaking efforts to detect the exact roots of the protracted and deteriorating security, and socio-economic crises that have ravaged the region and turned it into a sprawling killing field amid grinding poverty and growing despair.

Once they manage to detect such roots, they can draw appropriate and comprehensive reform policies with appropriate implementation mechanisms to rescue the region from the looming doom that, if care is not taken, would throw its entire inhabitants and perhaps the country at large into perpetual misery.

It is only after achieving this that the northerners will be expected to explore and properly exploit their abundant but largely abandoned resources and potential, to place the region on an equal footing with the southern region in terms of economic viability, and consequently enable it assert itself as an indispensable component for the country’s overall socio-economic and political development.

Obviously, for this process to succeed, it has to be conducted by the calibre of northern elements I mentioned above, regardless of their political affiliations. After all, the region’s crises are not actually due to any political marginalization or conspiracy, as many of the region’s incumbent political office holders insinuate in their futile attempts to justify or cover up their failures to deliver, or as many of the region’s politicians from the opposition often claim in their political tricks to achieve their self-centered political ambitions.

The truth, which only a few northerners want to admit is that, the region needs profound attitudinal transformation from the grassroots level, in the first place. Interestingly enough, the South-East suffered real, unofficial yet systematic marginalization for decades at the hands of successive Nigerian regimes after the civil war, yet with their impressive sense of resilience, the south-easterners considered it a challenge that they should overcome, which they indeed achieved by  hard work, entrepreneurial drive and, of course, education.

Therefore, without such attitudinal transformation in the North, I am sure even if eventually a northerner is elected as president and all those northern politicians from the opposition get top political positions, the situation would not change in the region anyway. After all, the region produced many leaders in the past, yet all developmental indicators in the region remained below average even in Nigerian standards.