Opinion: What if Nigeria Breaks Up?

Although the group is being pacified by government’s offer of amnesty to its members, it appears to be willing to provide a ‘balance of terror’ or play the role of a dubious accomplice, to the reigning Boko Haram, an extremist Islamic sect with a link with the notorious Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Boko Haram, based in Maiduguri, Borno State in the North-east is demanding the imposition of Islamic mode of governance, the Sharia in some northern states and has in the last two years maintained bloody visibility through cold-blooded murder of innocent people and members of the police force, using guns and bombs. It claimed to have carried out the June 16 and August 26 bombings of the nation’s police headquarters and the United Nations’ country office respectively, both in Abuja, a feather’s throw from Aso Rock, the seat of power. In spite of appeals and offer of dialogue, the group still spilled the blood of the innocent on the last Independence Day when it gunned down three people in Borno State.

Indeed, in today’s Nigeria, the fear of Boko Haram is the beginning of wisdom, as the group remains adamant until its requests, including the release of all its members arrested by security agents, are met.

Besides Boko Haram and the MEND, the country is equally facing the challenge of ethno-religious crisis in Plateau State in Middle Belt region in addition to recurring security threats like armed robberies, political assassinations, kidnappings and rape. Hundreds of lives have been lost in the Plateau mayhem, for instance, often caused by ethnic and religious intolerance. So if in a united Nigeria the parties to the crisis in Plateau State are insisting that they can no longer live together, what will happen if the country collapses? Yet this kind of sentiment is not limited to this North-central state. In fact, there are states where citizens are seemingly living in peace, but constituents relate with one another with utmost suspicion. Some of these sentiments often blow into the open, resulting in an orgy of violence.

In fact, for many years, the country has been buffeted by crises of ethnic and religious dimensions, compounded by government’s inability to address issues of bad governance, corruption, unemployment and unfair representation in the political arena. Apart from coups d’état of the 1960s to the 1990s, which bred instability and bad governance, Nigeria’s many troubles have been hinged essentially on the country’s political leaders’ readiness to manipulate divisive and primordial issues of religion and ethnicity mostly when their interests are threatened. Each time this powerful clique tug at political, ethnic and religious issues, they raise tempers and cause avoidable quakes. So it was in the first, second and other failed republics.

It led to debacles like the Middle Belt uprisings of the early 1960s, civil war (1967 to 1970) that claimed over three million lives; military incursions that politicised the military leading to self (military’s) annihilation following cloak and dagger politics to retain power by all means; June 12 election validation struggles (1993) based on the cancellation of the fairest election in Nigeria’s history; the Maitatsine religious riots of the 1980s and early 1990s; the Sagamu bloody mayhem of 2000 involving the Hausa/Fulani and Yoruba; and the much recent post-presidential election riots that led to the murder in cold blood, of many National Youth Corps members and hundreds of other Nigerians in Bauchi, Niger, Borno and Kaduna states by youths protesting the victory of President Jonathan on April 16, this year. Many still believe that the outcome of this election is the main cause of the prevailing undeclared war and restlessness in some parts of the North.

Indeed, over the years, Nigeria as a united country has been bruised and brutalised leading to destruction of lives and properties. The prevailing high level of insecurity with the use of modern weapons of warfare like bombs and explosives has brought in a new dimension into protests over disagreements among stakeholders in the Nigerian project.

In virtually all the instances mentioned, Nigeria’s unity ship has been strongly rocked: people were forced to leave crises areas and return “home” to their kith and kin to prevent avoidable deaths and in some cases, there were demands for a re-structuring of the union through dialogues such as referendum and sovereign national conference, SNC. Unfortunately however, this is another area where Nigerians have not been in agreement. For instance, when in 2005, the administration of former president Olusegun Obasanjo attempted even though some say half-heartedly to convene a national conference, leaders from two of the six geo-political zones reportedly voted against it. They, apparently, were afraid that the outcome could work against their interest. Before this, when the military made efforts to organise national talk-shops they placed embargo on the discussion of certain issues.

Ibrahim Babangida as military president in 1988 warned the then Constituent Assembly against indulging in the “fruitless exercise of trying to alter the agreed ingredients of Nigeria’s political order, such as federalism, presidentialism, the non-adoption of any religion as state religion, and the respect and observance of fundamental human rights…” Except that he did not explain how the agreed ingredients came to be. Obasanjo, in 2005, also barred discussions on the above ‘no-go’ areas including federal character, fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policy and separation of powers but advised that those areas could only be updated, refined and strengthened.

The result is that by the time we come out of such exercise, Nigerians continue to live the lie they so much want to do away with. No sooner are such exercises concluded than people start all over again the agitation for justice and equity. This has given rise to the worst demand, whereby some nationalities campaign for secession, a final break off from the crisis-prone union. A more popular campaign in the history of the nation, along this line, is the one by the hitherto beleaguered defunct Eastern Region in May 1967, when it discovered that the then Easterners were no longer wanted particularly in Northern Nigeria. But the Easterners did not start the campaign for secession. Continues on the Next Page…