Nigeria, the house built by Herbert Macaulay and Lord Lugard is on a shaky foundation.
Unlike many other countries like the US where the basic principle of equity, fairness, and equall opportunity is enshrined into the constitution, our modern founding fathers simply look at our nation only from their own ethnic, religious, and personal points of view.

Martin Luther King professed the equality of all people regardless of the color of their skin. The result has been the rejuvination of the American dream. A dream manifested and examplified by immigrnats who usually arrive the scene with little of no money, work hard, and eventually elevate themselves and their future generations by sheer hardwork.

Thus, we have the early American Jews who arrived as street vendors, hawkers, and petty traders, who then became money lenders, bankers, and bigtime upper class. Then we have the Itallians and their catholic faith. These catholics where the butt of jokes in America as we know it, but today, they too have found the American dream. The story goes on for the Polish and other estern Europeans, then the black immigrants from both the south and overseas arrived.

Today, the Mexicans and other Latino immigrants are on the scene. The theory has been that as long as a group was able to work hard, obey the law, and be good citizens that there ought not be any impediment to their rise in the society, because if one group is allowed to rised today, another and a totally different group would be afforded the same opportunity tomorrow.

In Nigeria, we laid the foundation stone backwards and upside-down, based on ethnic, tribal, and unfortunately religious parameters. Today, the unstable result result is evident all over the place; from the civil war to the perenial tribal riots, to monumental corruption, to inefficiency, etc.

The following video by the late Sarduana of Sokoto is a testimony to the fact the Nigerian foundation was laid on shaky grounds and may not survive.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y1Zpk4DrlA&feature=related

The fallacy of Sarduana's arguement is so obvious, and I wonder whether he has ever been historically and scientifically challenged for his statements and points of view.
This is no basis to make a blanket statement lumping ALL IGBOS to the same sociological trait as if it the said trait is genetically linked.

The same lazy arguement has been used to ethnically attack and "cleanse" a group, for example, we all remember how Hitler tried to convince his fellow Nazis that Jews, all Jews were the problems of his republic. In modern times, we have have ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and of course the Hutu/Tutsi imbrelgio in Ruwanda.

Indeed we did not have a NATIONAL leader when we started

Sardauna - Sokoto caliphate - centric - but I admired his charisma with the North, even though he gave them a wrong view of many things
Awolowo - Oduduwa centric - but I admired his excellent development economics foresight
Azikiwe - Afro-centric: Funny but he just seemed to want the emancipation of Africans from imperialists

^^^
I can't agree more.
The Sarduana was obviously a very smart man, he knew and saw Igbos as the greatest threat to his Hausa/Fulani oligarchy. Remember, he's also on record for patronizing the middle beltters of Benue-Plateau, espacially the non-christians, promising to use them as stepping stones on his way to greater heights, and later discarding them.
I suspect that if we had a citizenary that had understood that the Sarduana's evil focus on Igbos would simply shift to them once Igbos were eliminated from from the equation, we would have a more stable society today.