Nigeria: Beyond protest against hunger, kidnapping and fuel

By BEN OGU

Nigeria is a country of those who neither understand their problem nor the root cause. Otherwise, it is nauseating that a country of learned and intelligent citizens of over two hundred million, blessed with a superfluity of natural resources and yet held in bondage of penury by a minute percentage of politicians, are, rather, always protesting against hunger, fuel, kidnapping by herdsmen, bandits, and now, abduction of school children in droves. It is most ridiculous that they are naively appealing to the government who benefit from these ailments to voluntarily end bad governance, as if they care. Protesting for hunger, fuel or abduction is typical of the biblical Esau, who condescended to ask for mere food in exchange for his birthright; or the biblical Israelites, who reminisced and nursed nostalgia for the food in the slave land as an alternative to total liberation from the land.

In the present harrowing situation, it is ridiculous that Nigerians should be protesting against suffering and kidnapping, instead of liberation from the furnace of the imposed and enslaving 1914 amalgamation and the 1999 cringing unitary constitution that are the root cause of their malady. To ask the government to voluntarily end bad governance or their grip on the unitary entity by themselves is typical of shouting to or hugging the stone, which is clinging to futility. It is like asking a man to personally tear a lucrative business dynasty he enjoys, just because it discomforts you, when you should disband it yourself, if you have the capacity to do so. Therefore, the often sporadic and erratic protest for government to end bad governance crafted to benefit them is as fantasizing and illusory as romancing with the stone.

Hunger, fuel price and abduction are only symptoms and not the core problem of Nigeria. The squeezing in a terminally dysfunctional and incongruous structure, orchestrated by internal and external minders, is the architect of all the maladies, and extrication from the structure is the only panacea. There can be no other solution, as no successful good governance can result in a foundationally disabled template as the Nigerian union.

Every Nigerian election is externally superintended, and stooge presidents are installed, while their exit is also masterminded and orchestrated by the same external diplomatic disguises, should they fail to do the master’s bidding. This is why Nigerian presidential aspirants always go to external countries for the determination of their candidacy before election. Only freedom from these shackles of external masterminding and control of the sovereignty or restructuring of the incongruous unity is the imperative.

The Real Problem

The problem of Nigeria transcends leadership ineptitude and regime change and defies them. The 1914 arbitrary amalgamation of components of disparity and the strangulating 1999 constitution are the bedrocks of the Nigerian problem and irredeemably doom it from the foundation. In all justified scepticism and pessimism, no election or living Nigerian, including Peter Obi with all his acclaimed refined character, can successfully bring the country to a civilized human standard and order. This is because the present Nigeria is an internally incongruous bundle, tied to an umbilical cord of internal and external parasites. It is not by accident that any presidential aspirant suspected to hold a prospect for solution to Nigeria’s crippled state would be halted except he agrees to work on the terms of some proxy masters. 

The country is cancerously and terminally diseased by its unity and the organized conspiracy of internal and external political elite which thwarts whatever tends to work. Not with this entrenched interest at its jugular to harvest the heart of Nigeria will the country ever function, as it makes the country exist for others, and its chemistry of incompatible ethnic components makes the internal ailment terminally incurable.

Nigeria is screwed to progressively retrogress, deteriorate and loop in deathly decadence, so as not to compete with her masters. What is needed to end this tied-to-death union is not intermittent feeble hearted and impulsive run around the road protest that avails nothing, but a seismic revolution that interrogates the lethal union and sets the ethnic groups free and autonomous of the paralyzed structure. The continuous protest at the prompt of fuel and food price rises, or abduction, kidnapping of school children or demand of minimum wage, is mere conventional placard display of caricature and absurdity.

Population Illusion

It is ridiculous that Nigerian citizens still revel and glory in the myth and euphoria of “united”, “populous”, “great” and “oil nation”, which works only in the frenzy World Cup TV view and psychologically instills emotion of identical and collective citizenship and diverts attention from their dehumanization to a false feeling of common fatherland. Unfortunately, the track of global stigmatization and humiliation associated with Nigerian citizenship on account of its contiguity with the country’s disrepute make the myth of citizenship, population and nationhood vanish into abysmal dishonour and disgrace. It only makes the citizens loathe association with the jinxed green passport. But much more grieving is that every diseased Nigerian regime holds this myth of population and unity with a false and feigned pride and coerced decree of “indissolubility” and “no go area”, even as the masses bleed to death in the furnace of the union without the least attempt to repair its damage.

Ironically, the United Kingdom, where Nigerians troop in for greener pastures and survival, is a super world power with only an estimated population of 66.97 million. The United States, and proudly acclaimed first country of super world power, is greater in population than Nigeria only by a little above 100,000 million. Yet the United States adequately feeds, protects and cares for her population and accommodates million citizens of other nations. Russia, another thriving world power, is estimated 246,151,000, only a miniature number higher than Nigeria. Even in the midst of a raging war, Russian and Ukrainian citizens live far better than Nigerians who live in a “peace of graveyard” of huge population.  

France, estimated 67.97 million, far lower than Nigeria, belongs to countries of world fame and reckoning. Israel too, a country of acclaimed world fame and reckoning, has an estimated population of 9,387,021, far lower than Nigeria, with little or no natural resources, yet it is thriving. 

All these countries exist with laurel and trophy of global dignity and integrity not attached to humongous population or oil, but thrive in wellness, while Nigeria, an oil nation and one of the tenth highest populations of the world, prides itself on nothing more than empty population and false unity.

Other notable sovereign nations of the world with populations far smaller than Nigeria are San Marino, estimated only 33,660, but famed as one of the richest countries in the world. Others with lilliputian populations include Australia, 26.7 million, Dominican Republic, 71,293, Mongolia, 3.4 million, etc.

Each of the major Nigerian ethnic groups, including the South South, politically created to deplete and divide the Eastern region, has oil resources that compare with many sovereign nations of the world. So is the great Yoruba South West, a nation latently and potentially greater than Nigeria. Each can comfortably stand independently. There is therefore little justification why Nigerians should relish in a deathly grinding amorphous population and unity, where they are squeezed to suffocate, as if population alone is a mark of national dignity.

Unfortunately, with discordant and conflicting interests, the ethnic groups are divided on the resolve to extricate themselves from the Nigerian dungeon, or make it function, contrary to America, USSR, Sudan and others, who struggled to liberate themselves from their colonial and parent nations. Hence, in every attempted protest to resist or reform the Nigerian structure, the ethnic nationalities display characteristic tower of Babel selfish discordance for divergent ulterior motives hinged on orchestrated mistrust that always leaves them stuck.

In the protest against a dud government in August 2024, for instance, the Igbo South East refused to join, but for reasons most obvious, plausible and justifiable. Massacred and forcefully disfranchised by other Nigerians for daring to vote for the right person perceived as their Igbo kinsman, they found no reason to join in protest against the unilateral choice of others whose administration is now judged a failure. The Yorubas refused to join the protest because their kinsman was in power, and allegedly invoked a curse on fellow citizens who dared to join protest against their own kinsman in power, irrespective of obvious fiasco of governance. They only attempted and quickly dispersed to allow their kinsman consolidate his turn at Aso Rock. The North too attempted to protest because it was not their kinsman who was in power. They went as far as raising the Russian flag in furious revolt, but were quickly paused and dispersed in anticipation of their turn after the Yoruba. 

To finally scuttle the protest, the embattled regime packaged their own paid protest group against the anti government protesters. And because the entire citizenry could not agree to collectively hold their grip, they fizzled out, and the regime treated them as inconsequential light featherweight, deserving no attention, and further tightened the knots of suffering by raising the fuel price further the same year. After evaluating the entire citizenry as a collective pack of weightless and wind buffeted cards, and ethno centric dry winter leaves easily blown apart for lack of collective will to negotiate their destiny against a failed union, the government trashed them back to the usual Holocaust dungeon for another election of indissolubility. But behind the Southern vacillation and equivocation to extricate from the union and its iron decree of unity of indissolubility is the ploy to gradually exterminate and suppress them until they are totally consumed and assimilated by a certain religion group that abducts them.

The Anachronistic and Obsolete

From its 1914 amalgamation, the 1999 constitution and civilian administration till date, and from the accursed PDP and APC comic regimes, Nigeria has unrestrainedly retained the dark record of world’s headquarter of poverty, corrupt, terrorist, schoolchildren abduction, and now a hungry stricken country. The citizens perspire in vain to eat ordinary food. The majority are in massive exodus including to pariah African countries for dignified asylum, livelihood and citizenship. A country that cannot guarantee the security and dignified citizenship of her subjects, less still feed them, automatically justifies its own alternative.

Such a country lacks no justifiable reason to bring treasonable charge on those who question its existence and call for its dissolution. This justifies the ideological tenet of the protagonists of Oduduwa and Biafran Republic like Sunday Igbogho and Nnamdi Kanu before they were tagged treasonable. Till today, Sunday Igbogho remains validated by the intractable invasion and abduction of his people of Oyo and Yoruba West, and Nnamdi Kalu by all that prove the country insoluble. They and every sane citizen have rightly confronted the anachronistic and obsolete state of Nigeria and question the validity of an existence that remains in the realm of the archival. These inquisitors for the state of Nigeria remain the most patriotic Nigerians and ever justified until an alternative Nigeria is achieved.

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