VIEWPOINT IN BRIEF: The polity we need

By Uju Okeahialam

I delivered a lecture in 2015, to an Igbo Congress in Los Angeles, USA.  At the congress, Nnamdi Kanu with a more forceful tone asked for the support for the Biafran cause. I felt his passion but I maintained my own sense of approach to the same problem.I was guided by the things I saw and learnt from my ministries in the Ilorin and Abuja areas of the middle belt Nigeria.

Discussing with a friend at the height of the Kanu’s suzerainty in 2017 I reminded him that it is unfortunate that the Kanu movement began without proper homework. He wanted to know what that meant, at which I asked him, who are the spiritual and intellectual leaders of this movement. I maintained that it is not enough to have young people shout aloud about something when they cannot present the issues philosophically, when enough bridges have not been built with our neighbors, and when an articulated buy-in has not been established with the business and political class—a fear which was proven when the Arewa Youth played their reverse psychological game on the Igbos by giving them a matching order out of their region. As worrisome as that order was, one would have expected the Igbo nation to embrace it but they didn’t all do so—meaning that not all were keyed in to the Kanu movement. If they were, the order to leave the Nigerian northern enclave would have been the best gift to the Biafran cause obtained without violence. But it was resisted instead. Then the question, what are we agitating for?

The agitation was for some perceived imbalance in sharing the perks of power that is solidly in the grip of the Fulani class of the North, as represented by President Buhari. His utterances and body language are not helping matters in the fractured Nigeria. However, they have awakened in nearly all segments of the Nigerian body-politic the awareness that Nigeria as constituted is so lopsided and unable to guarantee the security of all in all the places. With this observation only one thing is possible, reasonable, and less acrimonious, that is  The Restructuring  of the country. Although not all are agreed on the lines of restructuring; whether in the pattern of pre- independence regional lines, the six geopolitical zonal lines, or the states as federated—but the concept of restructuring generally accepted as something that needs to be done.

For anyone old enough in Nigeria, can remember that the problem of Nigeria is not in identifying problems, proffering solutions but being able to execute them. For good or ill,   the sores of the civil war have not properly healed and given the menace perpetrated by all sorts of armed groups and the flagrant abuse of the rights of people simply because they are  part of the others, the level of trust among the regional groups does not strongly exist again.

Moreover, Nigeria as presently constituted has most people looking up to their ethnic zones as their safe spaces and where they can run to in the face of a crisis. Although they return to base when things die down, it is in acknowledgment of this safe space in the mind and life of Nigerians that I wish that some restructuring be established before we can go into another election. It may not be the paradise we seek. It may not cure the corruption and lopsided favoritism in the Nigerian DNA, but the tension is more tolerated when it arises among people who have more in common than among those who only mouth our existence as a mere geographic expression.

*Okeahialam, PhD, is a Catholic Priest resident in Colorado, USA.