President Goodluck Jonathan did say he would not preside over a disintegrating nation. This was in an interview granted recently to a national newspaper which had broached the question of the possibility of a dismembered Nigeria.

The president was unequivocal in his affirmation of Nigeria as a complete and indivisible nation. I think President Jonathan was too optimistic. His optimism is also quite understandable. As the incumbent president he has become a very serious “stake-holder” in project Nigeria.

It would have been more interesting to hear his views not long ago when he was just an “ordinary Nigerian.” And if Dr. Jonathan cares to look a bit closely, he’d find that an increasing number of Nigerians do not quite share his hope and optimism. Here, my emphasis is on “hope” and “optimism.”

Faith in the meaning of Nigeria and in its corporate direction has dwindled exponentially since the end of the Nigerian civil war in 1970. More Nigerians feel themselves locked into a historical vice-grip from which escape is near impossible and from which escape is in fact a matter of survival.

Many call Nigeria “Lugard’s cage” – a zoo of some sorts in which all its inhabitants are reduced to either committing or helplessly watching others commit acts of bestiality and mindless brutality.

In this cage, Naijaskeptics argue, progress is impossible, prosperity is impossible; our full humanity is impossible because Nigeria as a concept is impossible. Nigeria is impossible, some even argue, because we inhabit profound differences in culture and in inherited values.

Nigeria sustains the very complex example of what the French philosopher and cultural theorist, Jacques Derrida calls a differance – is both a deferred and a differentiating order of meaning and reality.

To these people, of course, it is possible to point out the naiveté of over-essentializing the meaning of nation, yet it is impossible to deny the nature of their discomfort with the very nature of Nigeria as a nation. Nigeria has proved to be a carnivorous nation, consuming the flesh of all that is good within it.

I have placed the origins of Nigeria’s disease – its self-questioning as a nation – to what I call “Awoist antinomy” in the formation of nation. In 1947, as a way of legitimizing his own quest for power, a brilliant but profoundly short-sighted politician, theorized his concept of Bantustan federalism which reduced the possibility of Nigeria as a nation: “The north for the north, the west for the west and the center for all of us.”

It erected imaginary and irreconcilable boundaries of identity in a new nation in transition. It afforded him the philosophical grounds, aided by his British minders, to challenge and destroy the nationalist imagination circulated by the nationalist movement – the NCNC. It was a ploy for power which Awolowo almost came later to recant when it was already too late.

At the roots of Awoist thought was also a certain hubristic disregard and even fear of cultural contamination; the fear for instance of a robust, mobile, and freedom loving people like the Igbo, with a healthy disregard for kings and a fearless relationship with God, whose dispersal in the space of the nation carried with it the possibility of pollution – the contamination of this shared space with their excess of freedom and liberty and disregard for any undemocratic authority.

This threatened the societies, with their settled hierarchies of Kings and commoners, with whom the Igbo made contact in a shared nation.

It was a fear which leaders of the upper north shared with Awo and who gained from Awo’s theory of nation, the necessity to create the internal boundaries of power and legitimacy that has made Nigeria the cauldron, today, of ethnic nationalist vehemence.

The Igbo naturally came to embody the face of the national contradiction, and gave Nigeria what we must now call the “Igbo problem” – the fear of border crossing, settlement, and the demonic energy of industry that sometimes comes with a certain fearless overreach which others sense as lawless individualism.

The Igbo, by their dispersal within Nigeria, gave meaning to the possibility of Nigeria as nation, and helped through their various imaginative acts, to forge a nationalist idealism embodied in the life and work of Nnamdi Azikiwe.

But Igbo nationalist idealism was put to test in the civil war from 1967 and 1970 when in utter frustration a generation of the Igbo, glimpsing finally what they felt was the futility of Nigeria, attempted to secede and establish a new nation, and shape it as they wished.

That aspiration was defeated and the Igbo returned to be part of Nigeria again with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But by the middle of the 1980s following sustained federal policies that sought to contain them and limit their full aspiration and citizenship in Nigeria, the Igbo withdrew emotionally from Nigeria.

Igbo nationalist idealism gave way to disenchantment with the idea of Nigeria. Igbo relationship with Nigeria remains from then on tentative and utilitarian.

Without Igbo idealism, Nigeria flounders because no other major group yet sees itself as fully Nigerian and willing to create it in the same way as the Igbo. A succession of corrupt and oligarchic leadership since 1970 produced an elite that saw Nigeria as war booty; and it had neither its soul nor its shapely ideas fixed on the idea of the nation but outside of it.

The result to put it briskly is a nation in crisis. Nothing can be more symbolic of Nigeria’s crisis today than in the fact that its most symbolic institution – the structure of its national security – is in utter shambles. Today, it is Boko Haram that wishes to challenge, upturn and appropriate the power of Nigeria as a nation and replace it.

According to the statement by the leader of Boko Haram in a recent interview, it wishes is to spread Islam in Nigeria and govern it according to the Sharia. This is a brazen affront to a nation that founded itself on the fundamental principles of its secularity.

Not even Ahmadu Bello had the temerity to declare Sharia in the north not to talk of the entire Nigeria. But we speak here of a nation that drifts. Nigeria’s transition from the hope of Africa to its laughing stock is a classic irony.