By Lucky Okoedion
Nigeria has experienced an irreversible deterioration under Buhari. This is not me being pessimistic. Nigeria will not get better without any full scale restructuring. No time in history has a nation been as divided as this and then successfully return to normal without a civil war occuring as a means to express the frustration.
When a nation gets this bad, it must purge itself and get rid of frustration, either through a civil war, peaceful disintegration through a referendum, or a drastic restructuring and change of constitution.
The addiction of Northern political elites to Niger Delta crude oil is the cause of the problem of their region and of Nigeria at large.
It is they who kept using poor youths through cheap labour as herdsmen. You will discover this when you realize that most of the cows are not owned by those poor Fulani youths who are the herdsmen we know. Those cows belong to their political elites who don’t pay taxes from the business and thus can afford to build ranches. But they will not use their proceeds from the private business to build ranches because they have a mischievous, land-grabbing agenda.
Never in history have Northern Nigerians supported progressive change. Their grandparents opposed the almagamation of Nigeria at first. Again, when it was time for us to get independence from the Brits, they opposed independence. It took a bloody riot in Kano which led to several loss of life for some of them to finally accept the needed progress.
If they don’t want to support the motion to restructure Nigeria, we should excuse them to go and form their own country or we carve our own countries out of this abusive union.
We wish that this will not require a civil war, but unfortunately, we may need a civil war because the Northerners, just as their ancestors did during fight for independence from the colonialists are naturally opposed to change, and they seem to have an inferiority complex and feeling of insufficiency that makes them think that they cannot survive alone.
From what we can gather from their history, they are ready to keep the status quo even when they see the whole nation in flames, even if the whole of the North gets reduced to a Somalia and the whole of Nigeria to a Venezuela, they will still sit tight in the ruin. So long as they are sure of making paradise, getting seven virgins when they get there, and as long as their political elites keep getting access to crude oil money, they don’t care about anything else. They don’t care about the killings or even the rampant poverty in their region.
It is so sad. Hence we must stop waiting for them. Each region must continue setting up their own security outfits and getting ready for war, though we pray it doesn’t get to that. It is better to die free than to live long as a coward.
Lucky Okoedion is a believer of a new Nigeria where true democracy is practiced. He writes from Benin City, Nigeria. He can be reached on +2347038820118.
