Nigeria’s elite love nothing more than a speech at Chatham House, aka the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in St James’s Square at the heart of London. Speaking there conveys a sense of gravitas and international respectability.  Presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari made an appearance in February 2015 to claim that the collapse of the Berlin Wall convinced him about the virtues of democracy.  Power Minister Babatunde Fashola was there in August last year to say a lot about the problems of power supply in Nigeria but little on how he was going to solve them. Last week it was the turn of Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai, this time to talk about the favourite buzzword in Nigeria – “restructuring”.

The eloquent John Nnia Nwodo took up the same theme when he mounted the Chatham House podium yesterday. Nwodo goes by the hifalutin title of “President-General” of Ohanaeze Ndigbo.  While opinion is divided on the relevance of this organisation in Nigeria, their profile has been raised significantly since Nwodo became the top man earlier this year.  Ohanaeze doesn’t have a functioning website and their Wikipedia profile claims: “The group represents all Igbo communities within and outside Nigeria”.   And: “Although the group is not a political party, part of its objectives of creation is to foster unity among its members in order to better allow them to be representative within the political scenario of Nigeria”. This sounds suspiciously as a vehicle for securing “jobs for the boys”.

The trouble with associations like Ohanaeze is that they tend to be made up of people pursuing self-interest and presenting that self-interest as the corporate interest of their ethnic group. This leads to half-baked analyses of Nigeria’s problems, presenting them as essentially ethnocentric.  Such analyses hardly withstand scrutiny.

Nwodo kicked off his speech on this ethnocentric flight from reality claiming that Nigeria’s pre-1960 and 1963 constitutions were "fashioned by the people of Nigeria as represented by the leaders of their ethnic nationalities".

Read on: https://www.naijiant.com/articles/ohanaezes-john-nnia-nwodo-airs-half-baked-restructuring-recipe-chatham-house/