Disintegration Nation | Adewale Maja-Pearce

By the time of the 2023 elections in Nigeria, we had “enjoyed” almost a quarter-century of democracy, having previously “endured” roughly the same under the military. I use quotation marks because, although the population doubled to 220 million in that period, making us the sixth largest nation in the world, it was also the case that a greater number of Nigerians fell into extreme poverty, currently standing at 133 million. Given that most of them are young, it is hardly surprising that they are also becoming increasingly restless in the face of their bleak prospects, as evidenced by the 2020 #EndSARS movement that led to the slaughter of peaceful demonstrators.

Our underlying problem is that we are not really a country in any coherent sense. What passes for “Nigeria” is an amalgam of both world religions (in roughly equal numbers) and over 250 ethnic groups, with often wildly different traditions, all of them arbitrarily yoked together by the British colonial power for its own economic interests. The British themselves knew very well that the predominantly Muslim North and the predominantly Christian South—the deepest and most obvious of our many divides—were as different from each other “as England is from China,” to quote Sir George Goldie, the man most responsible for realizing what might just be the world’s most complex country, made more so by the imbalance between its ethnicities. Just three of them—Hausa-Fulani in the North, Igbo in the southeast, and Yorùbá in the southwest—comprise roughly two-thirds of the total, rendering all the others “minorities,” as they are made to understand whenever they forget themselves.

Indeed, so dominant were these three in their respective areas—and so mistrustful of the others—that the British initially divided the country into three semi-autonomous regions with a weak center. Even so, each region has threatened to secede at one time or another, both before and after independence in 1960, a series of threats that culminated in civil war seven years later when the Igbo went the distance and declared the Republic of Biafra. Tellingly, the war itself was fought under the vacuous slogan “To Keep Nigeria One/Is A Task That Must Be Done,” which was entirely in keeping with the equally vacuous 1960 UN charter, On the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and People—“Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unit and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the charter of the United Nations”—which contradicted the same UN’s own Covenant on Human Rights: “All peoples and all nations shall have the right of self-determination.” As it happened, both the United States and the then Soviet Union supported Nigeria (and not just with “ordinary mouth,” as we say), and this at the height of the Cold War when the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was still fresh in everyone’s minds.

In fact, the real reason why the Northern Region didn’t want the Eastern Region to secede—and possibly the Western Region along with it—was economic, as the British reminded them. Originally, the Northern Nigeria Protectorate and the Southern Nigeria Protectorate were administered as two different territories but were amalgamated because the northern “promising youth” couldn’t pay and so was betrothed to the “southern lady of means,” enriched first from the proceeds of palm oil and then by the even more lucrative crude oil that was discovered in commercial quantities in 1956, most of it in the minority areas adjacent to Igbo territory included in the short-lived Republic of Biafra. In many ways, the story of Nigeria is the story of oil, the proceeds of which provided us with “the chance, clearly within our grasp, to become a medium-rank developed nation in the 20th century,” according to Chinua Achebe, the celebrated novelist, instead of which we created a cabal of fabulously wealthy chiefs in what is one of the world’s most unequal countries: the five richest men are worth $29.9 billion between them, courtesy of the $20 trillion stolen from the treasury between 1960 and 2005.

Without such change the country will disintegrate of its own accord. Indeed, it is doing so as I write.

Worse yet, it seems their only ambition is to rape girls. Take, for instance, Ahmad Sani Yerima, the former two-term governor of Zamfara State and two-term federal senator who threatened to vie for the 2023 presidency but then didn’t put himself forward when the time came. During his tenure as senator, he bought his Egyptian driver’s thirteen-year-old daughter as his fourth wife for $100,000. When it was pointed out that the senate itself had passed the Child Rights Act (which Zamfara had refused to ratify), he retorted, “History tells us that the Prophet Muhammad did marry a young girl as well. I have not contravened any law.” It should be said in this context that Nigerian legislators pay themselves more than their Swedish counterparts because, as the outgoing leader of the House of Representatives once told me, Nigerian lawmakers have more mouths to feed than their “developed” counterparts, itself the consequence of an unproductive economy in which politics is the only route to wealth. Just recently, this same No. 4 citizen flew one hundred guests to Dubai to celebrate his mother’s ninetieth birthday, perhaps because there was nowhere expensive enough to cater to his demanding dependents in the country he purports to legislate for.

So why do we, the “people,” the “masses,” tolerate such levels of obscenity? Consider that the victor in the 2023 presidential election, Bọ́lá Ahmed Tinúbú, claims to be a descendant of the most successful indigenous slave trader in nineteenth-century Lagos, after whom a prominent downtown square is named. It says something about our warped or perhaps nonexistent sense of the history no longer taught in our public schools that nobody has yet suggested renaming it, perhaps for fear of drawing attention to our complicity in selling our brothers and sisters to the White Man anchored off the malaria-infested coast. Even more humiliating (although shame is necessarily not among Tinúbú’s attributes), the descendants of the slave trader have themselves disowned him; but then Tinúbú has lied about many things, including his name, age, place of birth, and qualifications. Such is the caliber of the person who would seek to rule us. He is also a thug, but then that is the nature of our politics. Not that Atiku Abubakar, the second of the three leading hopefuls in the run-up to election day, was much better. The third, Peter Obi, was something of a phenomenon because of the way he was unexpectedly taken up by the youth in order to bring about the change they persistently craved, with no demand on his part to be paid for services rendered. This has never happened before and looked to many to be the miracle that all but the chiefs and emirs fervently pray for in our myriad churches and mosques, Nigerians being a worshipful people.

Without such change the country will disintegrate of its own accord. Indeed, it is doing so as I write, what with the Islamic fundamentalists, cattle-rearing bandits, and kidnappers who have rendered travel by road and rail unsafe in any part of the country since 2019. But there is a deeper, existential sense in which we have lost our way, recognized as such by the same Achebe, deemed the “father of African literature” on account of Things Fall Apart. Both at the beginning and the end of his illustrious career, which concluded with the publication of There Was a Country, he obsessed over whether he had committed a “dreadful betrayal” of his mother tongue and therefore his culture by writing in the language of the colonial master. But at least he spelled his name correctly. Not so the English-language Yorùbá writers who eschew the diacritics or accents with special characters that are the distinctive feature of a language in which vowels are of greater importance than consonants and tones are of greater importance than vowels. This obviously simplifies matters for the audience at whom their work is primarily aimed, a readership under the influence of what Fẹlá Aníkúlápó Kútì, the legendary Afrobeat musician dubbed “colo-mentality”: the anxiety to be understood by others ahead of ourselves. As Wọlé Ṣóyínká, the 1986 Nobel laureate, once remarked, “To go back and say that you will write only in your local language is, for me, very defeatist . . . Why should I speak only to the Yoruba alone?”

But perhaps speaking “only to the Yoruba alone” is the whole point. Moreover, for a playwright especially, there was, as Oyekan Owomoyela writes, already a long tradition of Yorùbá folk opera which had thrived in its modern form since the late nineteenth century:

As early as 1882, a correspondent of the Lagos Observer had made a strong plea for discarding “borrowed plume” in the form of European . . . literature in favour of “the legends connected with our own ancestors as handed down to us by tradition.” By the turn of the century, the African amateur dramatists, mainly drawn from the ranks of the secessionist churches, were performing works mainly on local themes and in the native language—Yoruba.

The real innovator was Hubert Ògúndé, who led the revival of traveling theatre in the 1940s and was celebrated as such by a visiting oyibo (white) man, who wrote in the Daily Service newspaper:

Since my arrival in this country, I have seen many African plays and operas . . . but I had the greatest surprise of my life when I attended the rehearsal of the African opera entitled Mr Devil’s Money by the African Music Research Party of Hubert Ogunde . . . scheduled to be staged at the Glover Hall on Monday, May 6, 1946.

The theme is based on an old African story depicting the theme of “here and after” of a man who signed a pact with an evil spirit in order to be wealthy. To see the cast rehearsing the Opera dances, to hear the cheap Native drums supplying the music with precision without any mechanical aid, the clapping of hands, and the high standard of discipline maintained throughout is to think one is back at a London theatre. The singing is excellent. Dance formations, lightings and the stage setting are concrete proofs that the African is no more behind as many people think.

As an editorial in the same newspaper remarked, “Our progress as a country does not depend solely on the number of so-called enlightened politicians but on the development of as many aspects of our national life as possible. We must advance on all points—in politics, in education, in art and in poetry—if we are to prevent a lopsided development.” And yet, within four years of independence, Ògúndé was banned from performing following the popularity of his play Yorùbá Ronu/Yorùbá Think, which toured the towns and villages criticizing the Yorùbá leadership for promoting internal divisions in service of their own selfish motives. (His immediate response was another play, Òtítọ́ Korò/ Truth Is Bitter.)

Ironically, the person responsible for the ban, Chief S. L. Akíntọ́ lá, had been editor of the same Daily Service (which at the time promoted the same Ògúndé) but was now premier of the Western Region and seemingly hell-bent on “a lopsided development” in which education, art, and poetry had no place. A further irony is that Ògúndé had previously suffered in like manner under the colonial government when two of his plays—Strike Hunger and Bread and Bullet—were similarly banned in the 1940s, thus demonstrating early on the continuity between colonial and post-colonial politics. Not that any of this stopped either Ògúndé or the others who wrote only in Yorùbá—over a hundred by the 1970s, according to one source—from retaining the adulation of a language group now put at forty million, as the irrepressible German impresario Ulli Beier recorded when yet another practitioner, E. K. Òg ́unmọlá, returned to the stage in 1972 following a protracted illness:

It was an incredible event. The nightclub, which sometimes serves as a theatre for Yoruba Operas, could normally hold perhaps three hundred people, but on this occasion there must have been at least a thousand, tightly packed, filling out every square inch . . . and crowding the street outside. The excitement and the noise were incredible.

Meanwhile, to keep “the people” distracted, the chiefs we allow to lord it over us cynically evoke ethnic and religious sentiment even as they “chop and clean mouth” in the National Assembly, all in their traditional attire, Nigerian men verging on the peacock, a dandyism which unites all the otherwise disparate ethnic groups, and which at least makes the brigandage a colorful affair. However, should “the masses” become restless with their antics, as they show increasing signs of doing, out comes the military to crush peaceful demonstrators asking, for instance, that the police desist from killing young men as suspected scammers simply because they happen to be driving flashy cars. But then Nigeria was designed as a militarized state by the colonial “master” to whom we continue to pay obeisance, whatever the noises about the democracy that has been tested once again, which was why said masters’ handmaidens dutifully reported to Chatham House in London a month before the 2023 vote, a contest that nobody expected to be peaceful, free, or fair; but whether the great army of youths could pull off what would have amounted to a peaceful revolution by electing Peter Obi for no other reason than that they wanted competent government—or, at least, the beginnings of it—was the first challenge.

I don’t believe that the break-up of the country is the way forward because I don’t believe in yet more “independent” but impoverished nations lorded over by elderly chiefs at the service of the “colonial master.”

The second challenge was to convene a genuinely sovereign national conference where all the different interest groups—ethnic, linguistic, religious—would sit down together and decide whether they even want to stay together and, if so, how. This would be the true meaning of the “independence” we were apparently granted “on a platter of gold,” in the words of an early nationalist. Devolution of power is inevitable if we are to remain one country, as the leadership itself well knows, which is why they twice attempted to appease the clamor by convening pretend conferences. The first was in 2005 when President Oluṣ́ ẹ́ gun Ọbásanjọ́ and the thirty-six state governors handpicked four hundred delegates to discuss our future, with the proviso that “our disagreement must not lead to disintegration,” after which Ọbásanjọ́ himself was to have the final say on which of the conference recommendations, if any, would be implemented.

Ṣóyínká, who was nominated without his consent, called it “a distraction.” A similar charade was repeated in 2014 under Goodluck Jonathan, who made his name by being the only president to graciously concede defeat at the polls because “my ambition is not worth the blood of any Nigerian.” He did it to enable the ascension to office of President Muhammadu Buhari, who had threatened to form an interim national government if he lost, which is ironic in the light of what was to happen in 2023.

Meanwhile, let me make my own position quite clear. I don’t believe that the break-up of the country is the way forward because I don’t believe in yet more “independent” but impoverished nations lorded over by elderly chiefs at the service of the “colonial master,” but I do believe we need to devolve power to the component parts—a big ask, I readily concede—as even the same colonial master understood. Sub-Saharan Africa, with fewer people than either China or India but with vastly more resources of every kind, must speak with one voice before it can get anywhere in the face of the global reality, but in saying this I have hardly said anything new: Nkrumah said it, Sankara said it, Fẹlá said it. Enough said.