By Chido Onumah
I borrowed the title of
this piece from my new book, Nigeria is Negotiable, which is due for
public presentation on Tuesday, August 20, 2013, in Abuja. I shall be quoting
profusely from the various contributors to the book to buttress the argument
for an urgent national dialogue on the future of Nigeria. Since the pre-event
publicity started a few weeks ago, I have received numerous enquiries about
what I mean by the term “Nigeria is negotiable”.
Some of the enquiries
border on the comical; others border on a disturbing lack of appreciation of
the enormity of our problems as a nation. Very few actually seek clarification
on the main thrust of the book. Of all the comments I have received about Nigeria
is Negotiable, none has been as engaging as that of Gen. Alani Akinriande
(retd.).
I met Gen. Akinrinade
last week at MUSON Centre, Lagos, during the 70th birthday lecture for
Prof. Ropo Sekoni. At the end of the event, I walked up to the retired general
and gave him a copy of Nigeria is Negotiable. He looked at the cover of
the book intently, turned to me and said, “Of course, Nigeria is negotiable”. He
then went ahead to explain his position. According to him, time was running out
on the issue of negotiating Nigeria; that we were lucky that people were ready
to talk and that we shouldn’t take it for granted; that a time may come when
people would no longer be interested in talking.
That statement has
resonated with me ever since. It is not that I never imagined that the country
could get to a stage where it would be impossible to “discuss” or where war,
violence or civil strife would be the only means of “discussion”; but the tone
and how emphatic and unambiguous the retired general was, heightened for me the
inevitability of this urgent national dialogue.
There are three fundamental issues in the
debate about negotiating Nigeria. The first is to understand that many, if not
all, of the problems that assail us as a nation are rooted in the structure of
the country. The second is that restructuring Nigeria through a process of
negotiation is not a silver bullet or cure-all for our problems. And the third
is to understand that Nigeria has always been negotiated, so there is nothing
really new in the call to negotiate Nigeria.
Right from the very beginning, whether we are
talking about how the country itself came into being or what happened at
independence; whether we are talking about the civil war, how it was prosecuted
and what happened when it ended; the situation the country found itself after
the assassination of Gen. Murtala Ramat Muhammed in February, 1976; Gen
Olusegun Obasanjo’s handover to Alhaji Shehu Shagari in October, 1979; the June
12 debacle; the emergence, first of Shonekan as Head of the Interim National Government
when Gen. Ibrahim Babangida stepped aside in August, 1993 after annulling the
June 12, 1993 presidential election won by Chief M.K.O Abiola; the subsequent
emergence of Olusegun Obasanjo as civilian president in 1999; and finally
Obasanjo’s decision to double-cross those who made him president in 1999 by
selecting a sickly Umaru Yar’Adua as president in 2007, Nigeria has always been
a product of negotiation.
The only problem, unfortunately, is
that Nigeria was first negotiated on the terms of a marauding band of merchants
and empire builders; and has subsequently been negotiated by a military cabal and
its civilian collaborators who do not mean well for the country. Now is the
time to negotiate it on the terms of the mass of our people who bear the
brunt of its inequitable features. If we are concerned
about the survival of Nigeria, now is time to embark on the onerous task of
negotiating it in the interest of majority of Nigerians.
According to Prof. Anthony Ochefu in the
introduction to Nigeria is Negotiable, “Between the official versions of
the decolonization history that give a prominent role to our nationalist heroes
for winning independence from the British and others who believe in the ‘conspiracy
theory’ of decolonization, the process of how the region with the least
democratic credentials ended up as the driver of a new democratic enterprise epitomizes
aspects of the negotiated experience”.
When we talk about negotiating
or restructuring Nigeria, we are not talking about merely “remapping” the
country or creating new fiefdoms for ethnic warlords. We are talking about many
things, including the nature of our federalism, the question of resource
control, the secularity of the country and the rights of citizens in a federation.
These are very tough choices.
As Dr. Chidi Odinkalu noted in the preface, “Nation building is
not a project for the faint-hearted or for those with a short memory. It needs
statesmen and women, thinkers and active citizens. And it takes very little for
granted.
“In law as in politics, countries are defined
by a population within bounded territories under a common sovereign. “Boundaries,
howsoever defined, are, however, not facts of nature; they are artificial. They
can be formed, re-formed, un-formed, negotiated and re-negotiated.
“Within one generation, for instance, the
Soviet Empire collapsed into middling, hardly remarkable, entities; Yugoslavia
disintegrated into a collection of warring states and statelets; Germany
evolved into one country from two; Ethiopia went the other way, becoming two countries
instead of one, (indeed, Menelik II had sold Djibouti to the French about 116
years ago to finance the modernisation of Addis Ababa); Sudan has similarly
become two countries (in which further splintering cannot be ruled out) and the
United Kingdom itself could be reduced to England and Wales in 2014 depending
on the outcome of the proposed referendum on Scottish Independence.
“A little further
back in time but still not too long ago, Tagore’s India, the subject of the
composition “Mind Without Fear” in his Nobel Literature Prize winning
collection, Gitanjali, went from one territory to three countries
(India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) in just under a quarter of a century”.
Perhaps, Gen Akinrinade’s admonition is one
that we ought to heed and urgently too. I agree with Prof Ochefu that, “As a country on its
“third missionary” journey to a truly democratic nation, the fundamental
questions of nation building that began over 100 years ago have not been fully
and or properly answered.
“The corporate existence of the country has
been formally broken once and pronounced broken once. It took a horrible civil
war to restore the entity when it was broken and an equally brutal attempted
coup when it was pronounced”.
“As we approach 2014 that marks 100 years of
our negotiated existence, a ‘humpty dumpty’ scenario can easily be envisaged.
If this happens, the colonial map that was drawn in 1960 will certainly change.
We must collectively negotiate to ensure that we retain the map but change the
way we exist under that map”.
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