The Fragile States Index for 2020 ranks Nigeria 14, with a point of 97.3, and in the group of countries placed on the “alert” status. This position places Nigeria four positions away from sliding into the “high alert” status with countries like Afghanistan, Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And it is dangerously nine positions away from the “very high alert” and failed states like Syria, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. These statistics has the advantage of bringing the fundamental significance of local debates about politics, governance and development down to earth. For many years, and since independence, Nigeria had been standing at the precipice of national calamity. There have been several tipping points that we have miraculously overcome. And we seem not to have learnt from history in order to rethink our national path. Unfortunately, we are still in the eye of the storm” – Professor Tunji Olaopa.
At the best of times, Nigeria has always been on Tenterhooks. This, for instance, is how amazon.com introduced Walter Maier’s ‘THIS HOUSE HAS FALLEN’ , published 13 July, 2000 to its clients on the website:”To understand Africa, one must understand Nigeria, and few Americans understand Nigeria better than Karl Maier. This House Has Fallen is a bracing and disturbing report on the state of Africa’s most populous, potentially richest, and most dangerously dysfunctional nation. Each year, with depressing consistency, Nigeria is declared the most corrupt state in the entire world. Though Nigeria is a nation into which billions of dollars of oil money flow, its per capita income has fallen dramatically in the past two decades. Military coup follows military coup. A bellwether for Africa, it is a country of rising ethnic tensions and falling standards of living, very possibly on the verge of utter collapse — a collapse that could dramatically overshadow even the massacres in Rwanda,”.
If that was 20 years ago, the Nigerian condition has since gone worse, especially in the past five years when the management of its diversity has been abysmally woeful with several parts treated like they are inhabited by some conquered, non citizens.
This is how, cryptically the Ohanaeze Ndigbo Acting Publicity Secretary, Chief Uche Achi-Okpaga described the suppurating cataclysm:
“If you are talking about federalism, it is a collection or agreement that exists among federating units and in the case of Nigeria, the federating units have to do with the Federal Government and the 36 states, and the Federal Capital Territory as is captured in the constitution”. “But here, the Federal Government lords it over states and the Federal Capital Territory. “Virtually everything is on the Exclusive List and you are still calling it a federation”. “What has a federation got to do with education? What has it got to do with agriculture? What has it got to do with water resources among others? “The federation should concern itself with foreign affairs, the economy and some specific issues but here everything has been taken over by the Federal Government. “We are not observing any federal character in Nigeria. In practice, it doesn’t exist. Do you know that appointments are no longer advertised? Check key agencies and parastatals, you can hardly see them advertised. Nigerian Ports Authority; when last did you hear them advertise for jobs? But they employ every time. The only one you see is the police recruitment. Customs only advertise for junior officers and in the course of recruitment, people just go and lose their lives. “At the top echelons, you can’t hear them recruit. You can’t see the adverts because one particular section of the country will fill all the vacant positions.
Though scathing, and withering, nothing can be more factual than the Editorial opinion of The Punch of Thursday 1 October, 2020 from which we shall be quoting at some length.
In its opening stanza, it declares: “SIXTY years after independence, the abject condition of the Nigerian state is everywhere in evidence; rancour, distrust, fear of implosion and deprivation are the talking points. Hitherto sanguine believers in the myth of “unity in diversity” are joining the majority to agitate that the country reverts to genuine federalism. In the borderlands and rural abodes where insurgents, bandits and militias hold sway, facts on the ground are outpacing polite debate. The country has been taken over by sundry criminals and society is in excruciating pain. A toxic mix of ethnicity, religion and corruption drives public sector affairs. Femi Mimiko, a political science professor, once said: “Ours is the textbook definition of state capture, where a tiny governing elite runs the system in its own interest and for its own good. It is a system of political and economic exclusion, which fuels anger, and a feeling of marginalisation.”
That is not its most ascerbic, though very true description of the Nigerian condition, as the editorial further states, matter of factly, as follows: “The purposes of a state — security of lives and property, welfare of citizens, actualisation of individual and group potential — are in short supply, with the situation deteriorating by the day. Built on a foundation of injustice, fraud and a rigged administrative structure, unity and inclusion have always been elusive. Never since the run-up to, and the Nigerian Civil War, have the ethnic nationalities and major faiths been so mutually antagonistic. Political inertia cripples everything: crime has become monstrous, featuring an 11-year-old terrorist insurgency, heavily armed and organised bandits, Fulani herdsmen-militants converging in the country from all over West Africa, kidnappers, cult gangs and violent thugs. Unlike its peers, Nigeria has no clearly defined national goals, no future and no hope. The country has lost the capacity to deliver medium or big-sized infrastructure projects. In 2011, a presidential committee found 11,886 abandoned projects, costing N7.78 trillion. More have piled up since then. The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the Second Niger Bridge, the Ajaokuta Steel Company, the East-West Road, the Mambilla Power Project, rail and road projects and the seaports in Apapa are conspicuous indices of a failed state.
Corruption is an untameable monster. The Human Environment Development Agency said Nigeria lost $600 billion to sleaze between 1960 and 2019. Efforts by succeeding regimes to combat graft have failed woefully. PwC concluded that corruption could cost Nigeria up to 37 percent of GDP by 2030. In 2018, Nigeria, with 20 per cent of its population, overtook India as the extreme poverty capital of the world”
All these have culminated in the Fragile States Index (formerly failed states index) report published by the US think tank, Fund for Peace, stating that “based on factors like weak or ineffective central government that has lost control of part of its territory, lack of public services, widespread corruption, criminality, refugees, and persistent economic adversity, Nigeria is rated the world’s 14th most fragile state. All the social, economic and political factors cited by the FFP are amply present. Politically, the state is being de-legitimised”.
Dire will be inadequare to describe the Nigerian condition today.
Fortunately, all is not lost.
While eminent Nigerians from all parts of the country have called for restructuring, an eminent Northern statesman, and leader of the Northern Elders Forum, Professor Ango Abdullahi, has returned to the old call for a sovereign National Conference (SNC) when he, a professor of Agronomy and one-time Vice Chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University, who attended four constitutional conferences on the way forward for Nigeria said as follows in an interview with the Sunday Sun: “The North is ever ready for the dissolution of Nigeria and the way to go about it is through the calling of a formal meeting with complete powers to terminate the legal relationships between the constituent parts in Nigeria. According to him, If we agree that we should live together as a people and as a country, so be it, but if the general consensus is that Nigerians want to go their separate ways either on the basis of ethnicity, culture, history or religion, why not; why not, adding, “if anybody tells you that the large informed opinion in the North is against the dissolution of Nigeria, he is telling you lies.”
Continuing, he said: ”the only thing we have not done which I prefer we do is a Sovereign National Conference where the decision of the people will determine whether Nigeria stays as a country or people will go in as many separate ways as they choose.”
Rather than delay and allow the various calls for separation lead to bloodletting of any kind, I believe that the President should move, pro actively, to address the various problems mitigating against peaceful and healthy being of the country, on top of which is the inequitable manner of appointments, both by him and some of his top appointees, which non Northerners see, and can only marvel, almost on a daily basis.
Unless President Muhammadu Buhari is ‘ad idem’ with the Miyetti Allah people who daily claim that Nigeria belongs to Fulanis, who arrived the country only in 1804, working towards achieving a peaceful resolution of all contentious issues in the country is what should now concentrate his mind. And that requires no robotic science.
Credit: Femi Orebe