By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The great pity is that Nigerians are more divided today than even in the days of the civil war.
It amounts to living a lie and in abject denial not to acknowledge the fact that Nigerians live in very perilious times.
Hunger has completely taken over the land, and privation is the rule rather than the exception, yet our politicians keep on playing primordial politics.
The demons of death are on the loose, arranging mayhem and spreading annihilation.
We walk an ungodly but very familiar Nigerian road littered with shattered bones and broken dreams.
The countrywide terrorism of today points back to a ghastly past of blood and gore and death.
There is no need crying over the fact that our so-called leading political parties, APC and PDP, have been damned by a Canadian court as terrorist organisations.
The grabbing of political power in Nigeria is now a matter of devil-may-care totalitarianism of terrorism.
The country has come to the sorry pass of using federal power to fight tribal war.
Back in time there was so much talk by some Northern power-mongers that they would make the country ungovernable if Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan ever mounted the presidency of Nigeria.
Now some of the Northern hawks are touting the hosannah that its only the return of Jonathan that can save Nigeria from utter damnation.
Its a twice-told Nigerian truth that in Nigeria things change only to remain the same.
A lot of ink has been wasted on the colonial policy of the British in enthroning the North over and above the entire country.
The British ostensibly left in 1960 following Nigeria’s arrival at flag independence, but the reality today is that the potentates of the North continue to insist that this country owes them a living, even at the expense of their very own people!
The aggregation of forces in the Nigeria-Biafra war did not help matters, as the North somewhat inherited the mantle of defending the federal cause.
The then Western Region and the minorities of the South and North found a ready ally in the Northern federalists in fighting the secessionist Biafra rebels dominated by the Igbo.
The eminent historian Prof Ebiegberi Joe Allagoa points out the fact that Isaac Adaka Boro led his twelve-day revolution largely because he was afraid that power has left the North following the January 1966 coup made by Majors Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Chukwuma Nzeogwu, as he writes in his 2004 book, The Uses of Hindsight as Foresight: Reflections on Niger Delta and Nigerian History, to wit: “The Niger Delta activists also tried to forge an alliance with the politicians of Northern Nigeria. Indeed, it was the fear that the murder of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa in the 1966 military coup had destroyed the final hope of the peoples of the Niger Delta that persuaded Isaac Adaka Boro to launch his Twelve Day Revolution.”
Of course Isaac Boro died fighting on the Federal side during the civil war, and there is the official no-go area that he was actually shot from the back by his so-called allies!
The embrace of the North was taken to a new height in the course of the war and after by my friend Ken Saro-Wiwa such that when he was ignobly hanged by General Sani Abacha it became the lot of the ex-Biafra leader Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu to lament thusly: What do you want me to do in the circumstances when Ken was killed by his mentors?
The catch in Nigeria today is that a president from the South-West, a zone that was an ally of the North during the war, is being offered one-chance by Northern mandarins of power.
The perennial fear is that something grave would come upon the country if the North is somewhat not allowed to call the shots all the time.
The promoters of this fear are only being clever by half because Nigeria needs to confront her demons now.
This country is not meant for any particular group as the owners of Nigeria, and Nigerians must as a whole insist that we are ruled by constitutional means instead of the wishes of some fixed power-grabbers.
Nigeria can only survive when true democracy is in place and the peoples vote counts, instead of the turn-by-turn arrangement that has really helped nobody.
What has to be understood is that real development does not depend on where power is based.
Otherwise the dominance of the North in ruling the country over the years since independence would have transformed the region beyond all others.
Emphasis should now be placed more on the devolution of powers than piling up everything in the centre.
This way, the injurious pampering of the Northern oligarchs that has resulted into the underdevelopment of the entire country, particularly the then overlord region, will be stemmed.
Its astonishing that the South-West is brazenly aping the trend of provincial prebendalism, even as some of the tribesmen are crowing about the fiction tagged southern solidarity.
Its all so fictional, just like discovering ice in Macondo of Gabriel Garcia Marquezs novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude.
There is no escaping the institution of regional autonomy to make Nigeria enjoy true development.
The promotion of ethnic champions as Nigerian leaders has only led to the pitiable reality of the country having leaders smaller than Nigeria.
Sycophants of the ethnic hue are prone to sing the praises of the ghost workers presiding over the wasteland.
It takes a blighter to grab, snatch and run with power only to end up as a ghost worker.
