Don’t celebrate 1914 amalgamation

August 19, 2012 by Editorial

IT is amazing that amid the serious crisis of nationhood afflicting the country, the Jonathan administration is busy planning a year-long centenary celebration in 2014 to mark the 1914 amalgamation of the northern and southern Nigeria protectorates. But the British amalgamation was nothing but the culmination of years of conquest of independent kingdoms, empires and states that were then forcibly yoked together for greater exploitation. No people in the world celebrate their defeat and subsequent subjugation by a conquering colonial power. Nigeria should not be the exception.

What started as a seemingly bad joke was given traction recently when President Goodluck Jonathan, while visiting Jamaica, invited that country’s prime minister for Nigeria’s upcoming centenary bash. Earlier in June, in an event that attracted little media attention, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Pius Anyim, had inaugurated a 10-man presidential committee to produce a centenary book headed by the celebrated historian, Takena Tamuno. While the task of producing a compendium of Nigeria’s past since 1914 is commendable and long overdue, celebrating the event in whatever way is misplaced. The plan is particularly provocative, coming at a time when the fragile unity of the country that was forcibly yoked together is under considerable stress and an increasing number of stakeholders are questioning that forced marriage of 1914.

Jonathan missed the crucial fact that he was in Jamaica for the Caribbean nation’s 178th Anniversary of Emancipation and 50th Independence. The Jamaicans were not celebrating the capture and peopling of their islands with their ancestors who worked the sugar plantations for British colonials as slaves. What they rightly found reasonable to celebrate were the emancipation of slaves in 1834 and their achievement of flag independence in 1962. United States also celebrates the July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence because it laid the framework for a nation that would endure and grow, inspiring similar independence movements around the world. It was the day the American founding fathers crafted the immutable self-evident truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”An ex-prisoner may celebrate the day he regained his freedom, not the day he went to prison! We might as well celebrate the British defeat of Sokoto in 1903, the crushing of Benin Empire in 1897 or the defeat and banishment of Nana Ebrohimi of Itsekiri and Jaja of Opobo!

Respected statesmen like our former Ambassador to the United Nations, Maitama Sule; former Defence Minister, Theophillus Danjuma; and former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Emeka Anyaoku, have recently voiced concern that the nation is tottering and suggested urgent remedial action. Other groups have called for positive steps to prevent a United States State Department analysis in 2005 that Nigeria could fragment by 2015. The latest ranking of failing states by the Fund for Peace, which places the nation 14th, does not seem to go far enough for some analysts. The division of the country into 36 states has done little to calm the storm.

A World Bank unit has continued, for seven years, to list Nigeria as one of the world’s fragile states with its economy falling off the cliff. Thirteen years into the Fourth Republic, ethnic and sectarian violence and the desperate contest for presidential power, among others, have killed over 5,000 persons, making analysts to recall the famous quip by the late premier of the defunct Northern Region, Ahmadu Bello, on the need to correct “the mistake of 1914″ and the reference to Nigeria as “a mere geographical expression” by the late premier of the defunct Western Region, Obafemi Awolowo. Nigeria, almost 100 years on, remains both a mistake and a geographical expression.

Regrettably, President Jonathan has not shown a sound understanding of this dire situation. The urgent task before our leaders therefore should be how to restructure the nation for development in the face of the failure of the current structure to deliver either development or unity among the over 250 ethnic nationalities. The Boko Haram insurgency has reopened the deep fissures in the polity, demonstrating, sadly, how different we are, not how compatible, despite 98 years of forced union. The terrorist group has reportedly killed over 587 persons in the last two years. Yet, unlike every other country in the world confronted with terrorism, the insurgency has divided Nigerians and reopened the clamour for a national conference to give today’s generation of Nigerians an opportunity to discuss their future, which their parents did not have in 1914.

Instead of heeding such calls, Jonathan and key elements of the ruling class are working to amend the military-imposed 1999 constitution with no input from the people and no plans for a referendum. We must break this inertia that has trapped Nigerians in under-achievement and despair. It is a federation where a single police force exists; where, despite being all endowed with some of over 430 mineral types, the 36 states cannot benefit from their natural riches; where sections of the polity are issuing threats over derivation from oil revenues and value added tax, and where the centre takes over 50 per cent of all federal revenues while most of the states cannot survive without the monthly federal allocations.

The perilous times call for vision and courage. Nigerians urgently need to reassess 1914 when insecurity has become so rampant and participants in the 39-year-old National Youth Service Corps scheme are rightly refusing postings to some volatile northern states where ethnic and sectarian hatred simmers. How do you celebrate the absurdity where, 100 years later, at least 12 states out of 36 have adopted a religion-based criminal code that discriminates against non-adherents in a multi-religious country?

While nations do remember every stage in their past, celebrations are for positive steps achieved. That is why the Koreans remember the Japanese occupation; Europe, the Nazi Germany invasions; and South Africa, the arrival of the colonising Whites. They however celebrate emancipation and independence. Jonathan and his cabinet should stop making Nigeria a laughing stock in the international community.

Rather than expend energy on a wasteful celebration of ignominy, the government and every stakeholder should now come to terms with the reality that Nigerian peoples need to renegotiate the basis of their togetherness or else go the way of most artificial countries such as former Sudan, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. We must accept the dreadful truth that Nigeria is composed of different peoples with diverse histories, cultures, religions, worldviews and values.

The National Assembly should not vote public funds for this frivolity. Other pressure groups should insist on structural reforms to make this union workable. Nigerians must have a choice; the last thing they need is an insensitive government celebrating their ignominious loss of local sovereignty 100 years ago.