LAST week, I said that President Jonathan should avoid caving in to demands for a Sovereign National Conference, SNC, largely because I believe that a massive talking shop at which religious and ethnic grievances are aired will generate more heat than light and possibly lead to the complete collapse of Nigeria.

I am sorry to say that I was overwhelmingly overruled by Vanguard readers. Only a tiny handful agreed with my stance. Ninety-nine percent of those who contacted me insisted that we cannot move forward in any meaningful sense until an SNC takes place.

Several categorically stated that they wanted the country to split up. Interestingly, every single person who claimed to have totally lost faith in the idea of Nigerian unity was an anti-Northern Southerner.

It is sad that we have come to this. I had mentioned on this page that I’d recently had breakfast with a Northern friend who felt increasingly despised by Southerners; and I was taken aback when a guy who described himself as “Garden City Boy” and “a political observer”, posted the following hostile response to my comments on the Vanguard website: “Since you don’t want to be involved and prefer to fraternize with compulsive butchers, leave it to us”.

This kind of reaction chills me to the bone because it reminds me of the disgraceful bigotry that White racists directed at Black South Africans during the apartheid era…and of the Germans Nazis who, having decided that all Jews were scum, cold-bloodedly murdered six million of them in the l930s and ‘40s.

It’s fine to dislike individual Northerners who are evil or have misbehaved in one way or another. It is fine to wish Boko Haramists a taste of their own medicine.

It is fine to shower insults and contempt on selfish, short-sighted Northern leaders who partly caused the terrorism problem by impoverishing their masses…and ruled this country appallingly for over three decades and stole zillions of dollars worth of oil revenue, while folks from oil-producing areas suffered.

And I guess that it’s also fine to conclude that you will feel more comfortable and achieve more personal growth within a smaller, less politically complex, less culturally diverse unit. I have expressed the view that there is strength in numbers, but I concede that numbers can also be unwieldy and that it won’t be the end of the world if the North and South eventually go their separate ways.

However, there are good and bad people in every tribe, region and village. There are plenty of wicked Southerners and plenty of kind-hearted Northerners. So how can a blanket condemnation of the entire North be morally justified? Is it not dangerous to allow oneself to become so filled with such irrational hatred?

Frankly, I am ashamed of Mr Garden City. My state capital, Port Harcourt, used to be known as The Garden City, so I am assuming that he is from my part of the country. And what I want to tell and ask him is this: Dear Bros, please be more reasonable! How can any true child of God honestly believe that every Northerner is a compulsive butcher and that there is something not quite right about Southerners who have Northern friends?

Anyway, let me conclude by reproducing one of the most thought-provoking emails I received about the SNC issue. It came from John, a Ghana-based Nigerian professional and was titled SONACO: Not now, not ever!

“Apart from the very valid reasons you gave for your opposition to SNC at this time, I will also add the following. As a Medical Practitioner, we are taught that the only cure that one can plan for is one targeted at the underlying cause of the problem.

The underlying cause of all the unrest in Nigeria is bad governance, period! And, it is found at all levels of government, and in every nook and corner of the country. The SNC approach being bandied around is one founded on representation by ethnic nationalities, whereas this bad governance has no ethnic colouration! A faulty prescription to a misdiagnosed problem!”

An ethnically driven SNC will be founded on the principle that the various nationalities must sit down and decide how they want to live together. But the ethnic clashes and disturbances that are generating this demand are only symptoms of deepening poverty and frustration.

In the immediate post-independence days, Major Nzeogwu, a patriotic Nigerian had already diagnosed the problem. I cannot quote him exactly now, but he said that the enemies of Nigeria are those that collect “10 percent”, and make the country look big for nothing in international circles.

The local government, for instance, is the closest level of government to the average Nigerian and is meant to provide solutions to “bread and butter” welfare issues: primary health care, pipe borne water, functional primary schools, etc.

These local governments are currently the most dysfunctional level of governance in Nigeria. Yet local government chairmen and councillors, are in most cases, our brothers, uncles, cousins, or our ethnic kinsmen!

A friend of mine, a one-time Local Government Chairman in Ogoniland, spent his whole tenure in office building private villas in Abuja and Kaduna. The same analysis can be extended to other levels of government. The eight years of Governor Modu Sheriff (Borno State) was a case study in bad governance, a major reason explaining the emergence of the Boko Haram sect.

When Sheriff was criticized for non-performance by journalists, he replied that he thanked God that his people were illiterates and could not even read these newspapers criticizing him! Can anyone beat that?!

Fighting for good governance

Nigerians should channel their vast energies into fighting for good governance in every facet of national life. If you split Nigeria into smaller republics, people will still go back to their local government areas and continue “chopping”!

Last but not least, we should look at the circumstances that lead to the convening of successful SNCs in the African continent. In Benin and Mali for instance, which are very representative of the context in other countries, the SNCs emerged from the sudden collapse of long standing military dictatorships.

Mathew Kerekou and Moussa Traore had been in power for at least 20 years, with no liberty of expression to canvass alternate models of governance. Dictatorships just crumbled overnight, with no credible substitute institutions to fill in the void left. Even then, participation in these successful conferences was based on representation by professional groups, and not ethnic orientation.

We are far from this situation in Nigeria, despite the deep imperfections in our current institutions, the most scandalous being the high cost of recurrent expenditure and inefficiencies in governance.

What we need is a mechanism for forcing the issues that are dear to the long suffering average Nigerian. An ethnically driven forum is surely not the way forward. I also feel that, deep down, the vast majority of Nigerians want to remain together in a country that puts the welfare of its citizens first.