BREAK UP NIGERIA NOW 2015 IS TOO FAR

Waiting till 2015 to break up Nigeria into the various naturally occurring nations and cultural blocs might just be too long a wait and a lot more painful and too costly for all the parties concerned. The wait is unnecessary and we can spare the further loss of lives and properties by doing the right thing now – split up Nigeria today. There should never have been a Nigeria in the first place. So as we break up Nigeria today we are only doing what is naturally right; recognizing finally that human life is sacrosanct and to be valued beyond any fictitious and incongruent construct.

Nigeria of 1914 was an arrangement that was supposed to be temporary and for one purpose only at the time. That arrangement was supposed to be for the administrative convenience of the British colonial rulers at the time. At first the North and South colonies of what is known today as Nigeria were administered as separate and distinct colonies, protectorates or countries of the British Empire until later when the colonialists were short of one administrator or governor. For ease of management and for just a temporary period till they could find a replacement, the British merged the North and South colonies under one governor Frederick Lugard. However when the British home government was not coming up quickly with a replacement and they discovered that they could save administrative costs with the new arrangement, they decided to let the arrangement be for a while longer. And in no time the at-first ad hoc devise had ossified into some kind of a permanent disgusting murderous monster, one-Nigeria.

To prove how different the societies are from one another we shall look at the social norms and laws of the various societies that are entrapped in the Nigerian enclave. The social norms, laws, customs and mores and languages are supposed to be the most important binding factor that holds a society together. You can get to know a society from its set of laws. So for a society to be considered as one it must have the same set of norms and laws and they must be uniformly applied in all the parts of that society. Similarities in the people’s customs, laws and cultures cannot be compromised or sacrificed completely (as in the case of Nigeria) if a society is expected to function efficiently. The reason for this is because a society is supposed to function like a system or a machine based on the congruency of its various parts. The various parts are not only supposed to be similar but they must also operate or run on the same kind of principles or laws. The principles on which these different parts function cannot be different and conflicting and you expect a smooth, frictionless performance.

In Nigeria apart from the fact that the customs, cultures, mores, languages, etc of the various societies that are considered as the components of the country differ from one another they are intolerant of one another and deadly opposed to each other. One example will suffice us here. An instance of how basic and fundamental these differences can be is the case where in Yoruba language ota mi stands for my enemy while the same set of words with the same spelling and pronunciation stands for my friend in Ebira language. If this one example is not enough demonstration of how deadly and unreasonable this mix up in one-Nigeria is we wonder what could be. Then there are two different sets of administrative laws that govern the same country; we have the Penal Code for Nigeria’s North and Criminal Code for the South. These are clear proves that tell us that officially the country is recognized as more than one country. And rather than continue to hold the people hostage, spilling tons of blood of innocent children and women we should finally do the right thing now – divide up Nigeria today.

For those who insist on maintaining the unworkable one-Nigerian arrangement they have to brace themselves up for more jihadist killings and destruction of properties as more and more intellectuals of the North of Nigeria continue to reject the influence of Western ways due to external pressures from the Arab/Islamic world and places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. As we continue to dillydally and keep from doing what we are supposed to do today, we will continue to witness an increased violence against innocent people and Western investments in Nigeria. The biggest mistake the rest of the world will make is to continue to prolong the situation as is currently obtained in Nigeria. It will end up costing everybody very hugely because the aim of the Islamic extremists who sponsor the violence in Nigeria is either to take control of the source of the oil and gas in Nigeria or continue to destabilize the place and make it more expensive to extract the oil as a result of the sharia induced instability.

But there is a solution that can permanently fix this problem: Split up Nigeria right away. Since the area with the bulk of the oil and gas lies outside the cultural jurisdiction of the Islamic extremists this action will help end the conflict and a kind of starve the sponsors of the terrorism of the cheap funds from the oil and gas. The various stakeholders and investors in the area must see this as the best time to completely dislodge the Islamic extremists from taking over the control of the source of oil and other resources by splitting up Nigeria right away and permanently keep the terrorists away from the oil-bearing area. That was the terrible mistake that the British made in the 1960s during the Biafran War years. They sided with the wrong people then and would have prevented these current sinister events if they had sided with Biafra or just remained neutral. However that time is passed but we must find a way to fix the problem which is through the dividing up of Nigeria immediately – lives and people’s future are wasting, and the wise action of division will stop the waste.

In the mean time the people must be conscious and wary of the subtle method of the Islamic extremists as they adopt the planting of stooges within the Niger Delta and across Biafra Land. What the extremists will do is to empower such stooges with money and attractive positions. This kind of infiltration is easier for them to accomplish since they can still claim by name that all the places is in the same one country. Such planted stooges can be just as dangerous as dangerous can be because the jihadist extremists use those to try to control or have inroad into the places they would have otherwise had little or no access to. A demonstration of what we are saying here can be seen in the case of Asari Dokubo who is Ijaw but a recent Muslim convert and who is actively involved in the liberation movement in the Niger Delta. Though right now it seems that he has broken ranks with the extremist Islamists of the North by confessing not to subscribe to the negative aspects of their Islamic extremism but he needs to come out clean of the Islamic faith. No doubt many people would not want to hear this last statement but on the long run this will become a central issue if it is not properly addressed now.

The fate of the Southerners who are not Islamists by culture and religion must not be compromised as Nnamdi Azikiwe and the other first generation politicians from the Southeast did by not being discriminating in their political alliances in the past. No one needs to task their imagination too hard on the negative and disastrous consequences of what such indiscreet compromises can result to. We only have to look at what is going on around the world. It is an incontestable truism that Islamic religion cannot be separated from politics wherever its adherents are in appreciable number across the population. We will all agree that if by sheer naivety and compromises active steps are not taken to define this aspect of the Southeastern society from the onset then the people will continually exist in a state of indefiniteness that will never augur well for the society at the long run. The next generation of Southeasterners must never be allowed to go through the kind of Islamic nonsense as is going on today in the unreasonable one-Nigeria. Islamic religion as we have established in some other places can never be adhered to by a significant number of the population of any society without the adherents seeking to mix their faith and the political administration of the society.

For the sake of everything that stands for decency the world does not really need the wait till 2015 when Nigeria had been scheduled to break up. We should go ahead and get it done right away. The longer we wait the more damaging to and loss of lives and the more expensive it will become to eventually fix the problem which can only consist in the breaking of Nigeria into the naturally occurring and existing ethnic/cultural and linguistic divides.

Written by Osita Ebiem.