By Yinka Odumakin

PROFESSOR GG Darah of Delta State University is a versatile instructor with his folklorist bent. As my Literature teacher in Ife, his class was an exciting place to be. I still carry a mental picture of each of his sessions at the serious ideological battle ground that the Ife of our time was. I recall the day he took a large class to the amphitheatre at Oduduwa Hall to treat D.O Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Demons, Soyinka’s translation of the Yoruba text: Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmole.

Within two hours, Darah took us through the entire novel in a very exciting journey and ended with a materialist critique of Fagunwa’s worldview “How a journey that starts from Oke-Igbo terminates at the gate of heaven calls for serious interrogation”, he concluded the gripping session.

That session was replayed in my mind days back when this great teacher stood at Daily Independent Newspaper “Man of the Year ” award ceremony to take this country through an unforgettable “class”  on the fiercest issue in the land today: restructuring. Anyone who cares about the future of this country and missed that classic presentation should check the archives of this newspaper on Google for :Who is afraid of restructuring, by Prof GG Darah.

Historical odyssey

As one of the foremost intellectuals on the subject and a delegate to the 2014 National Conference, where some delegates from Far North asked for his head when he said that Fulani herdsmen were raping women in Delta villages; Darah’s delivery was effortless, lucid and engaging.

He took his listeners on historical odyssey on how what we all know as the traumatising and problematic country called Nigeria came to being with all the blow-by-blow details. It is a bumbling account of the coupling of dysfunctional entity that would have been the 8th wonder of the world if it had worked out.

In his Daranic fashion, he dismissed the heresy that God could have had a hand in such ungodly arrangement .

Those who say that God had a purpose for cloning Nigerian peoples into a single country are guilty of blasphemy. God had no hand in the stealing of peoples’ lands and resources to make the Nigerian colony. Rather, Nigeria was created by British military adventurers and capitalist plutocrats to generate maximum profit from the exploitation of human and natural resources. The economic motive for creating Nigeria is evident in the final process of the amalgamation that started in 1900. The British faced a dilemma at this point. The British knew that the Northern Protectorate was financially famished and could not generate the public revenue for running its administration. There were practically no tax payers and commercial firms to pay tax. The Colonial Office in London did not want British tax payers to bear the burden of subsidising an African colony that could not raise taxes internally for its survival. But Southern Nigeria already had business conglomerates many employees, commercially viable cities, staff of government and private institutions, and ports yielding export and import duties. To get revenue to subsidise the insolvent Northern Protectorate, the then Colonial Secretary, Lord Lewis Vernon Harcourt, made a proposal on how to sacrifice Southern Nigeria to subsidise Northern Nigeria. In his memorandum on the matter, Lewis Harcourt declared triumphantly thus:

“We have released Northern Nigeria from the leading strings of the Treasury. The promising and well conducted youth is now on an allowance on its own and is about to effect an alliance with a Southern lady of means. I have issued the special licence and Sir Frederick Lugard will perform the ceremony. May the union be fruitful and the couple constant.”

The teacher of nationhood admits that the above prayer has been answered but not in the interest of a party in the forced Union. “True to the prayer of Lewis Harcourt, the union between Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria has been “fruitful” for 100 years for foreign business exploiters and their Nigerian associates. But the union has been unfruitful and harmful to the people of Southern Nigeria. Southern Nigeria is still paying the bulk of the bills for running government in the northern states of Nigeria.”

2014 National confab

He went on to trace the history of agitations for federalism in Nigeria,how our founding fathers negotiated a federal Nigeria at independence and its gradual subversion from the first coup in 1966 to the complete unitary arrangement we have today that has completely wiped off the titles of the owners of the constituent  units of Nigeria in the service of conquest and domination.

His illuminating presentation of the major recommendations of 2014 National Conference highlight the grave injustice that would be done to the future of Nigeria if the contents are ignored  with his closing lines: “I would like to add by affirming that the President  Buhari administration can only ignore the report of the Conference at its own peril. In any case, judging from the current mood in the country, there is hope that even if President Buhari demurs in the implementation of the Confab report, the Nigerian people will restructure the country by whatever means necessary.”