Umar Ardo, Ph.D
The historical and cultural backgrounds of the various nationalities of Nigeria do not lent credence to any separatist proposals in our nationhood. None would be better off in creating a peaceful and harmonious society on its own. In fact, if anything, the North would be better placed to forge a peaceful and viable nation state by itself than the rest of the component parts of the country. The North had demonstrated this ability under the regional umbrella where the Caliphate provided the Premier and the Sultanate provided the Governor.
The North is basically divided into two groups – the Caliphate and the Non-caliphate North. The former, which has geographical contiguity, religion and lingua franca as unifying factors, is made up of the Sokoto Caliphate and the Sultanate of Borno. And the latter, which varyingly calls itself the Middle Belt, is made up of several distinct ethnic groups and religions. The Middle Belt is thoroughly segmented with no contiguous areas, no common language and culture, and no common bond other than to assert itself independent of the former. Statistically, the former is about 80% of the population and landmass, leaving the latter with about 20%. For the latter, therefore, the Nigerian state is the centripetal force holding it together as an entity. That’s for the North.
For the SS, I’ll only quote Prof. Emmanuel Ayendele’s description of the precolonial society of the region to buttress the notion that forming a peaceful independent state amongst its people is near impossible. He said the region “is an atomistic society perpetually at war with itself”. Hence, the Nigerian state with its current states and local governments is also the guardian and guarantor of peace, harmony, prosperity and order. And one should well believe our learned professor of history.
And the SE is traditionally a community based people. I don’t have the actual figures, but roughly there cannot be less than 500 different communities in the zone, each independent and sovereign community answerable to no other authority but God Almighty, and in rivalry with other communities. And with the experiences from colonial times to date, the attempt to forge any semblance of central identity with a common authority have so far proven unsuccessful. Nothing yet, including years of attempts at political fusion, has changed the narrative.
And for the SW, it is on record that there have never been a warring people in Nigeria than those of the SW. In fact, Yorubas are the only Nigerians that are historically recorded to have even voluntarily invited the British to come and colonize them so as to end for them the internecine feuds, wars and conflicts raging in their homeland; because try as they did for ages they could not resolve their disputes by themselves!
Therefore it is the Nigerian state that’s holding us all together. The moment we lose it, then we all relapse back to our old feuds. Now under these conditions, or worse still, reversing to such situations, creating a fusion to build a harmonious society as so-called ethnic nationalities maybe conceiving would take a dozen Hercules to do so – and for now the Hercules haven’t manifested yet.
