Sixty-One Years of Death and Dissipation: Why We Urge Everyone to Support the Disbandment and Renegotiation of Nigeria
First of all, this essay is entitled ‘Sixty-One Years of Death and Dissipation’ because, as you may or may not know, since, its paper independence in 1960, Nigeria has never been free of wanton unwarranted wilful massacre. The Nigerian people have been the very victims of Nigeria, from State-sponsored killings, often called State repression (such as Odi) and bloody military operations (such as Python Dance), to bloody clampdown on peaceful civilian demonstrations, to bloody coups or political assassinations, to bloody elections, to bloody religious uprisings, to State-condoned pogroms, to ethnic massacres, to an outrightly intentional genocidal war.
This is in addition to the people who die as a result of the absence of existential necessities and critical infrastructures of modern and decent living — such as hospitals, doctors and drugs, schools, teachers and books, good roads, rails and vehicles, electricity, power and energy, agriculture, food and water supply, science, technology and research, factories, industries and markets, good habitations, housing and hygiene, etc. It can be said that, half of all the deaths in Nigeria, result from the failure of government. This has been so for 61 years; and now it’s time to renegotiate and reinvent a new nation.
When we urge the renunciation and renegotiation of Nigeria, we are simply representing in words, the misery of tens of millions of Nigerians — north, south, east and west. When we urge the repudiation of Nigeria, it is but the unspoken heart groanings of the miserable peoples of the Middle Belt of Nigeria, whose ordeals in the hands of the invading army of Fulani herdsmen has become a sort of a ‘comedy of misfortune’ for the news media; as well as the peasants in the rural villages of northern Nigeria, who are massacred in numbers and in a manner worse than factory chickens. But it is not in the middle belt or in the northern hinterlands alone, it is in all Nigeria. Nigeria has become a massive theatre of misery and bloodbath, of poverty and carnage; from the creeks of the Niger Delta to the slums of Lagos, from the killer herdsmen lurking with Ak-47 in farmlands in Nkalagu to the to the various brands of terror-groups lodging in the Sambisa forest, to the desolate and deserted villages of Bornu and Yobe States. Now also, to the unknown gunmen at war with the State in the South East.
When we urge the renunciation of Nigeria, we are simply representing the unsaid but ardent yearnings of all ethnic peoples who have found themselves at the crossroads of a monstrous entity foisted upon them by people who neither asked for their consent nor had any shred of regard for their collective interests and concerns as pre-existing autonomous peoples. Our campaign for the renegotiation and reinventing of Nigeria is a natural and justified reaction to the plight of all the peoples landlocked and sandwiched in the impostor-nation that Nigeria has become. These ethnic nationalities — and I mean all the ethnic nationalities that make up Nigeria: the Abua, Anang, Andoni, Bachama, Bali, Bandawa, Chibok, Degema, Ibira, Eket, Ijaw, Pulani, Isoko, Iyala, Kafanchan, Kajuru, Kaka, Mandara, Manga, Mbemebe, Ningi, Nupe, Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Yuom and all the rest — were made to accept Nigeria as a nation but they have largely been deprived of the blessings of a so-called giant-nation. They are denied the protection of a giant-army; they are deprived the prosperity of a giant-economy; they are refused the beauty of diversity; they are refused a say in the government of their country, even in the most basic way of having elections that represent the wishes of majority of citizens.
For 60 years our peoples have been hoping that the dream of a giant-nation could come true one day. But as we all know today, Nigeria has become a giant-monster, drinking the blood and the tears of its miserable citizens every other day that passes, with no respite in sight. Our forebears hoped that the post-independence crisis that quickly welcomed Nigeria to nationhood would also quickly pass away as the then young nation stabilises. But they were wrong! Alas, 60 years has passed! A whole lifetime has gone and the past has rather proven to be better than the present; and there is yet no foundation for the future. There’s nothing on ground for the future but foreign debts. Our forebears indeed hoped in vain! Therefore, to keep hoping would be foolhardiness, if not foolishness! To make matters worse, the people are getting restive by the day, bandit-groups and militias are springing up by the
https://michaelrichmondduru.medium.com/subscribe
day, soldiers — the hunting axe of politicians — are also getting more brutish; and so, blood keeps flowing everywhere every day. The various peoples that make up Nigeria, are denied their peace and safety in their own homes; they are denied basic amenities; they are denied any reasonable future; yet they are denied the right to protest or to seek to reclaim the land of their fathers. This cannot be allowed to continue!
When we urge the renunciation of Nigeria, we are thinking of a form of vengeance and reparation for millions of souls scourged with sorrow and silenced for life for the sake of an impostor-nation formed without their deliberate consent. Think of all those who have lost their lives in the senseless bid to preserve the false unity of Nigeria; think of the soldiers who died during the war, think of the children who starved to death during the war. But sadly, the harsh realities for which the war was fought are still with us today; and now not just with old Eastern Region, but with every nook and cranny of Nigeria. Think also of all those who have lost their lives, their humanity or dignity, at home and abroad, because of the ever-glaring, ever-present failure of the Nigerian State in every area of national responsibility.
Therefore, while some today, rightly see Nigeria as a failed State, it should rather be seen as an impostor-nation; a nation that never was. An impostor is someone or something who pretends to be who or what he is not. An impostor-nation is a nation that claims you as its citizen, but denies you the basic privileges of citizenship, the basic amenities of decent social life, the basic opportunities of economic prosperity. Nigeria claims to be a united nation State, but everyday her very leaders show us by their actions that this is false. The appointments and governance style of President Buhari speaks volumes about the fallacy of a united Nigeria. We are trapped in an impostor-federation that yet confiscates our resources, our security and our autonomy. We are yet to create a nation or nations for ourselves and our children and the time to do so is now.
When we urge the renunciation and disbanding of Nigeria’s oppressive sytem, we are thinking of a radical remedy to her legacy of corruption and fraud, of nepotism and tribalism, which have become something more than endemic and systemic in all spheres and at all of strata of national life. There is deep-seated corruption, not only in the political and governance systems, but also in the legal and judicial systems. There is corruption and nepotism in the heart of the armed forces; there is corruption in the economic and financial systems; there is corruption in the rank and file of the Civil Service; there is corruption in the whole stretch of the education system; and worst of them all, there is corruption among the anti-corruption agencies. We all know that this is plain truth without any exaggeration.
When we urge the disbanding and re-coupling of Nigeria, we are thinking of a way of breaking the tenacious grip of Nigeria’s common criminals and common enemies, namely the politicians and political oligarchs, on the political, economic and social fabric of their victim-nation called Nigeria. And this can only be done by all of us; by all the peoples united by the common denominator of suffering and oppression in Nigeria, irrespective of race and religion. It is not an overstatement to say that Nigeria is only a few steps away from John Locke’s State of Nature; a country where judges give judgments against the law itself, where presidents and governors ignore court orders,
where legislators are above the laws they make, where government officials do not obey traffic rules, where policemen forcefully, openly rob citizens, where soldiers are free to wipe out a whole community because somebody angered or attacked them. This is the Nigeria we have seen for sixty years and we are done with it.
As it is today, one of the following is the bitter fate that faces every ordinary Nigerian, if he survives the usual perilous menace of bad roads and fake drugs. If the police did not kill you for refusing to give them bribe at checkpoints, SARS will abduct you, rub you, brutalize you or waste you, especially if you are young and have dreadlocks or have an expensive phone. If you dare to protest police brutality or bad governance, then the Army is more likely to kill you, burn your corpse and lie to the world about it. If rather you are busy minding your business and hustling to make a living, then highway bandits, to whom government and security agents have seeded the interstate roadways, are likely to trap you down, snatch you away into the forest, force you to sell your properties to pay them ransom and yet afterwards may dispose of your carcass in the forests; otherwise, homegrown kidnappers, made up of frustrated youths, will track you to your home, pick you up and torture you until you give them whatever they ask.
If, however, you chose to become a farmer and to hide in the village — doing your farming, — then it is likely the herdsmen that will come after you. They will use your crops to feed their cows, if you complain, you or the entire village will be taught the lesson of a miserable death. And you can be sure, there is no police or army that your surviving relatives can report to for redress. Worst of all, If you a northerner and a Christian and you are not living in Abuja. Then you will most likely be woken from sleep and mowed down one day, by rains of bullets from terrorist Boko Haram or the new brand-named Bandit Herdsmen. It’s clear that Nigeria has been a dangerous adventure, a monstrous political entity that has swallowed up millions of our various peoples, and this is true, even as you read this summons.
We decidedly chose to call out Nigeria and her leaders for the very reason that we have no other place to go. We have no other place to create for ourselves a country that we can call mother. We have no other patrimony or homeland or motherland! We have no other place to run to, to hide, to love, to serve, to cherish, to build. Nigeria has proven to be a usurper of our right to nationhood. Far way too long the contraption called Nigeria has usurped our right to the joy and pride of a peaceful and prosperous fatherland; and this cannot be allowed to go on any further. The right of our various peoples to nationhood, to a self-determined nation and country can no longer be sacrificed at the altar of British and other foreign interests, as foisted upon us by the Berlin Conference of 1885 or Fredrick Lugard’s 1914 travesty of amalgamation. The God-given right of Nigeria’s nationalities — from the Northern highlands to the Lower Niger — to nationhood, to a self-determined nation and country can no longer be sacrificed at the altar of soulless politicians and their self-serving politicking; nor at the altar of the fear of persecution, which has silenced the voices of Nigeria’s Mahatma Gandhis.
Nigeria has become an impostor that has impersonated our true nation for 61 years. This impostor nation has denied all of us the pride and joy of true citizenship, nationhood and nationality. But we cannot run away from our ancestral home, our fathers land, because of the impostor-nation that Nigeria has been turned into. We cannot abandon our motherland, just as we cannot run without our buttocks. Therefore, it is upon us to dismantle the impostor-nation, the impersonator of Nigeria, the usurper of our nation. It behoves us to extricate ourselves from the 61-years old deathly shackles this impersonator. It behoves us to destroy the impersonator, in order to, by ourselves, give to ourselves, a nation that would work for us, a nation that would serve the interest of our peoples, a nation that would befit our dignity as free, unconquered and autochthonous/indigenous peoples. In renouncing the impersonated-Nigeria and in campaigning for a renegotiated Nigeria, we are choosing to exercise our divine prerogative of self-sovereignty and self-determination and we urge everyone to do so without further delay, without any feelings of guilt and without fear of treachery or felony or unpatriotism.
Michael Richmond Duru
0th October 2021
https://michaelrichmondduru.medium.com/subscribe
