By Ekeng Anam Ndu
The amalgamation of Northern and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria into one country in 1914 by Lord Luggard will be one hundred years old next year. Backed with spurious reasons to rationalize and market the event that will gulp billions of Naira, the Federal government is itching to celebrate the centenary. In a spirited attempt to market the idea, the federal government claims that the celebration will “emphasize the country’s history, identity and unity. It also intends to rescue hope, arouse citizen’s patriotic instincts and consciousness…it will reinforce and express the country’s shared values and beliefs. It will break the persistent national stereotype of an uncultured, unsafe and corrupt mindset.” It added that the event will not be funded by government but will be private sector driven, providing directly some 5,000, and indirectly over 10,000 jobs. Let us briefly analyse some of the claims to establish their validity or otherwise
The corporate organizations that will likely participate to “properly present themselves as part of Nigeria’s success story” are the oil corporations, Civil Engineering corporations, Telecom companies, all foreign owned. Few Nigerian businessmen will definitely participate. The success story will not be anything outside their cooperation with Nigerian officials to provide services at uniquely exorbitant Nigerian rate and cart away the add-ups for the officials. Besides, the claim that funding will be provided by private corporations is equally a farce given the common practice of rewarding participants with contracts meant to recover amounts that were donated. At the end, it will be public funds that will be involved in deals such as proposed.
The second point to examine is the objective of the celebration. We should be ashamed to canvas for the celebration of the centenary if indeed the objective is as stated above. First, do we have a history that is worth emphasizing or we want to emphasize how we waste the enormous resources from oil through syndicates of fraud; how, rather than refine oil to reduce the cost of petroleum products, we import fuel from sometimes non-oil producing countries. Do we want to celebrate bad roads; the fallen standards in our educational institutions and dilapidated buildings in our universities? Or we want to remind ourselves of how some one million Nigerians perished in a mindless Civil War? Maybe we should celebrate the slums in the Niger Delta towns as oil producing area; the army of unemployed youths who form killer squads for politicians and the hordes of harlots in our cities. Emphasizing our history means emphasizing who we are as a people for our knowledge of history, and our knowledge of ourselves are not separate matters, since history as John Lukacs reminds us, is not merely the recorded past but the remembered past, and the remembered past is what conscious life is all about.
Or is it that we want to celebrate the recorded part of our centenary? The truth will be the same. The starting point would be to understand why the colonialists amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates. It is on record that revenue generated from the Northern Protectorate was grossly inadequate to fund the administration of the territory; and so Lord Luggard used the revenue from the Southern Protectorate to augment the funds needed. He needed the mandate of the home government hence the presentation of a request before the House of Commons for a regular grant for the purpose. This raised a strong resentment in the Commons and indeed in the British public, the argument being that the project in the Northern Protectorate was a bad economic venture and therefore unreasonable to invest therein. The amalgamation of the two territories became necessary in order to formalize the use of revenue from the South to administer the North. Although the amalgamation was undertaken to further British economic interest, it nonetheless provided the historical base on which Nigeria’s fiscal federalism was structured.
For those unfamiliar with the colonial history of Nigeria, it is tempting to see the amalgamation as a marriage, as President Jonathan alluded to. Such assumption could lead to dangerous conclusions. For instance, assuming it was a marriage, who was the husband and who was the wife? And if the relationship threatens to take someone’s head, or is threatening to or making someone less human or is limiting the chances of self-actualization, would it not make sense to call it quits?
The truth of course is that the amalgamation was a union of equals joined together by British economic interest. Unfortunately, the one hundred years we have lived together have been inundated with tales of failure. All along, we have watched helplessly how those we entrust with power steal easily from our commonwealth. Because of our proclivity to competitively consume public things, we have not been able to organize politics and governance based on respectable and acceptable rules of political conduct. This has given rise to authoritarian populism characterized by institutions that have the semblance of democracy. Gang rather than party politics have logically taken over the land alongside with killer networks. Political opposition is eliminated at will without questioning. Terrorism of the Islamic vintage is on a trial run in most of the Northern States. Who knows, soon they will hit the Atlantic coast.
The truth of our situation is that we have failed as a people to use our rich natural and human resource endowments to transform our country into a modern developing state. Our history therefore is basically unfinished; it has no truth in it worth celebrating. The centenary should therefore be devoted to telling ourselves the truth in straight nationalistic terms in a memorable address to the nation. It should be capable not only of provoking anger among the Nigerian citizenry, but also of awakening a determination to succeed as a nation.
