By Obi Nwakanma

Skepticism continues to trail the on-going conference called by the President in Abuja to determine Nigeria’s future path. There questions of the legitimacy of the conference. Such a question has been raised because there is no obvious constitutional backing for the conference.

For the National Conference to convene there must be an act of parliament given it backing and legitimizing its outcomes. It would not be considered, properly speaking, a national conference. No article inherent to the section on presidential authority under the constitution gives the President of Nigeria any such powers to convene a National Conference. As  have said, for a National Conference to take place, the national Assembly, and the Assemblies of the various constituent states, which under the Federalism principle are independent governments on their own, must give the necessary assent.

So, properly speaking, what is currently going on in Abuja is the President’s Conference. Its terms are not the terms of the Nigerian nation; it is the terms set down by the President of the federation for a body of people he has selected to discuss certain aspects of the National question that his office has determined to be important to the President’s agenda. He has given his boundaries – the so-called “No go areas” – and such limiting grounds fit the president’s rather narrow domestic agenda.

The outcomes of this Presidential Conference on Nigeria will ultimately be for purely advisory rather than constitutional necessities, and is not binding on Nigerians. Nigerians had no hands in the election or selection of the conferees, most of whom were products of smoky backroom politics rather than clear citizens mandate. That ground itself constitutes the first delegitimizing principle and will ultimately cast doubts on the outcome of this conference.

It is therefore quite right that critics of the on-going conference have grounds to describe it as a most expensive form of the talk-shop; a distraction, a short-cut to defusing the ignited fuse of the nation characterized by the massive anger in the land. But I did say once in this column that it is “right for kinsmen to meet.”

Meetings, such as the one the president has called in Abuja, with all its profound flaws also have ways of throwing up important truths. such a truth was dramatically conveyed in the first week of the Abuja conference by the Lamido of Adamawa, Muhmmadu Barkindo Mustapha, who in a fit of pique said he would take his people back to the cameroons from whence they came if Nigeria disintegrates. He has a home in the Cameroons, he said, which in fact has a greater portion of his Adamawa Kingdom or Emirate: “My Kingdom has been in existence hundreds of years before the so-called entity called Nigeria and the so-called civilized people from the West who are the people who came and divided us.

The larger part of my kingdom is now in Cameroon and a part of it is named a state that is Adamawa State in Cameroon. If you go to Cameroon, you verify that.”

Two things struck me in the Lamido’s statement: the first is in the Adamawa monarch’s description of the Nigerian nation – it is for him “the so-called entity called Nigeria” and the second is the claim of a greater suzerain space in Nigeria’s neighbouring state of the Cameroons, with its own “Adamawa State.”

I think the Lamido meant to sound a note of warning for those unlike him, who have options of alternate statehood; who may not be stuck in the collapsing Babel called Nigeria, with Moloch – its national god now baying for blood. But hidden beneath the threat of secession by the Lamido of Adamawa is history. Perhaps the Lamido does not quite remember, following the 1961 referendum, the people of the Adamawa areas voted to join Nigeria and be administered as part of its nation.

It became known from 1961 as the Sarduana province. On the other hand, the people in the Southern cameroons, who were then part of the Eastern region, voted with their feet out of Nigeria, to join the Republic of Cameroon. Ahmadu Ahidjo, the Premier of the Cameroons at the time, who grew up in Nigeria, and basically had relatives, and possibly still has his family ties in Northern Nigeria did sign the treaty. My point is that Adamawa to all intents and purposes ceased to be a part of the Cameroons.

It is true that colonial boundaries fragmented many old kingdoms and nations in Nigeria, and distributed them, with the scramble for Africa in new colonial nations. But as I have argued, nation and nationality are not permanent identities. National affiliations are determined by various factors, one of which only is ethnic coherence. But even ethnic coherence is no longer grounds for determining geography. As nations form, and as people travel, or are dispersed, or even subdued by conquest.

There is not a single homogenous nation in the contemporary world. But that said, I think Nigeria has an obligation to offer the Lamido of Adamawa and the people of Adamawa, a chance to make that decision, through a referendum, about whether they wish to remain part of Nigeria or whether they wish to secede and join their common kin in the current Republic of Cameroon. This is important. Perhaps the Boko Haram insurgency might be in part connected to this attempt: disenchanted nationalist groups, fighting to reshape and restore old principalities in the old Kanem Bornu or Adamawa areas with their cross-border affiliations.

We do not yet know with certainty, and we may never know yet with certainty because the Nigerian National Intelligence and Security apparatus is weak, and has transnational loyalties.  This is a matter for another discussion, but the Lamido has only just given us an important food to chew on, and while we are chewing our cud on it, let me put this quite simply:

The Adamawa must be given the right or option to secede if that is the wish of the people of Adamawa. But that decision must never be on the say-so of an old and irrelevant institution like the monarchy of Adamawa which is, by the very construct of Nigeria as a constitutional Republic, something of a quaint anachronism.  It must be on the strength of a properly organized plebiscite.

If on the other hand Nigeria were to be a forward looking nation, its Foreign and National Commissions should have thought  up something of the “Adamawa Purchase” and the “Bakassi Purchase” – akin to its own Louisiana Purchase which took up what was then called “New France” – practically the whole of what is now Western United States from Louisiana to Minnesota and as far West as Montana then under French rule – and integrated it with the United States to expand its geographical and economic frontiers.

Nigeria could make the Cameroons a great offer to purchase the Cameroonian part of Adamawa, and the Bakassi Peninsula – and integrate them, and expand the geographic and economic frontiers of Nigeria. Nigeria should be moving towards a West African expansion to integrate those parts of the Egun, the Yoruba, the Benin, and such people with historical ties with core communities in Nigeria, for greater economic and social viability and peace in the region. But it seems that Nigerians have been distracted by powerful forces seeking to control its center purely for narrow self- interest, rather than for long lasting and shared national interests, but for purely old, primordial interests and affiliations.

No great thought is invested in creating a modern Nigerian nation. Nigeria is crippled by limited of ideas offered by limited minds who have limited visions of nation and nationhood. Such limits cause economic and social disparity, and therefore, disenchantment and rebellion.