Awolowo’s appointment as vice chairman of the Federal Executive council in 1967 was to help the military prosecute the civil war determinedly. Awolowo had right to be bitter against his enemies but he did not show it as a disciplined man. He however allowed himself to be put in a tight corner when he defended the federal blockade of Biafra during the civil war which led to starvation of the struggling people of Biafra. In spite of all attempts to bridge the East-West divide in Nigeria, it has not been possible. The Igbo and the Yoruba have always been on opposite sides in Nigerian politics. The Igbo supported Shehu Shagari and Alex Ekwueme became vice president after the military left power in 1979 but when Moshood Abiola won the presidential election in 1993, the Igbo elite were not on his side until the poor man was murdered in military detention. When Jonathan was in power, the Igbo elite ensured the absence of the Yoruba from the government. The Yoruba joined other disgruntled Nigerians to bring Buhari into democratic power in 2015 and 2019 but unfortunately to the disappointment of everybody.
The Igbo blamed the Yoruba for all the evil of the Buhari regime especially his nepotism and religious and regional bias in his appointments. One can therefore understand the anger of the Igbo in the fact of the Tinubu candidacy in 2023. But the question to ask is whether Tinubu’s contest of the 2023 election was necessarily against Igbo interest.
There were two political parties in Nigeria, the APC and the PDP. Because of putting all their eggs in one basket, the Igbo were marginally represented in the APC as they have pitched their tent for the past 23 years with the PDP. It was in this situation that Tinubu emerged the presidential flagbearer of the APC and, against the PDP’s unwritten rotational constitution, Abubakar Atiku the former vice president bulldozed his way into being the presidential card carrier of the PDP. This was his third time of being a presidential flag carrier of a major party. He ran against Buhari in 2019 and Peter Obi was his running mate. Realizing his failure to win the ticket in the PDP, Obi went over to Labour Party as a born again socialist even though he is a self-declared billionaire. Millions of young people flocked to him as a liberator from the deadweight of the two existing parties the PDP and the APC. Democracy is not necessarily defined by elections, but in fact by the rule of law, independent institutions, free press and right of free association and religion are as important as periodic elections in a democracy. But to have a thriving democracy, everyone must abide by the rules of engagement and accept the decision of the electorate as announced by the electoral umpire.
This is where we are today with a disunited country underlapped by existing festering sore of tribalism and ethnic hatred complicated by fight for territorial sovereignty and group rights. This has become the usual scenario in our country where losers always say they have been rigged out and their mandates have been stolen. A bevy of lawyers encourages them to feel this way and that the courts would eventually declare them winners. The lawyers do this out of enlightened self-interest and for the huge Naira harvest they expect to reap. Most times the courts uphold the decision of the electorate. Sometimes the courts’ decisions favour those who lost at the polls. The acrimony surrounding the elections of 2023 has been at the greatest decibel that I have ever heard since I have witnessed electoral contest in Nigeria. The anger has been laced with ethnic jingoism bordering sometimes on call to arms by the losing candidates and their ethnic cohorts. One would have thought that anybody contesting an election should have known that the probability of losing is a possibility. But it seems that Nigerian politicians are the worst kind of people in the world because they go into elections with wrong motives and bank on the certainty of winning to the extent that some borrow money or sell properties just to contest elections and when they lose, they will want to bring the entire state structure down on everybody’s heads including those of the electorate.
I grew up in a political home and I can assert that this tendency is a new thing to me. Any casual reading of the last election cannot but come to the conclusion that it was the most competitive election we have had in this country. What followed were calls for cancellation, even asking the military to take over or secession. I would have dismissed these vituperations but for the fact that they came from very senior ethnic jingoists who have served at the higher echelons of the federal government just because their ethnic cohorts lost election which, on all grounds of probability, they could not have won. Politics is a game of numbers. It is also a matter of aggregating interests and coalitions to pursue such interests in a peaceful way. Sometimes in the heat of the competition, less disciplined and knowledgeable people get carried away and misbehave but that is not sufficient grounds to throw away the baby with the bath water. Issuing threats of planned disruptions of constitutional process is not the way forward.
What the 2023 election and its aftermath have taught many of us is that we are probably not ready to abide with democratic practices and principles guiding electoral competition. The second lesson, I think, we should all learn is that, we as a people, are still the same as Awolowo described us in his 1947 book with the title of Path to Nigerian Freedom that ‘there are no Nigerians as there are French or Germans and that Nigeria is ‘a geographical expression’. The man who became the first and last prime minister of the federation of Nigeria in 1957, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa also agreed with Awolowo that ‘Nigeria was a British intention’. When the politically ebullient Nnamdi Azikiwe told the leader of the Northern Peoples Congress, NPC, Ahmadu Bello on the eve of independence in 1960, that Southern and Northern Nigerians should forget their differences, he was quietly told that ‘they should not forget their differences but they should rather understand them’. These comments were pregnant with meaning for the post-independence Nigeria and even for now.
I am a beneficiary of the size of Nigeria. I will always favour preserving the federation as a going proposition but not at all cost and at the expense of the people’s happiness. My best friends are not Yoruba people and I have people I cared very much for outside Yorubaland. I have had to endure being subjected to ethnic recrimination if not outright hatred because somebody from my ethnic cohort won an election in a plural country. I want this country to succeed but it is not through insults and bullying that the country can be united. I would like us to give every ethnic group or nation because we are actually a multinational country, with equal right to hold the highest position in the country without weaponising region and ethnicity to accomplish it. I also would like to keep all my non-Yoruba friends without fear that there is an undeclared mistrust between us because of being born in two different ethnic groups, a situation that we could not control. This is why we have to come up with a grundnorm that will preserve individual territorial interest within an overarching federal structure and sovereignty.
I would like our leaders to eliminate the possibility of my children and other Nigerians holding each other in contempt or disrespect because of the birth places of their parents. I do not want any group to be subject to group ethnic abuse and hatred and anything that can be done to prevent this should be done. This will include education right from kindergarten to university on civility and respect for individual and group territorial rights as well as constitutional device to loosen up the country instead of unity at the point of the gun that has been pointed to our heads since 1966. To start with, our government must do whatever it can to control the social media to prevent them from plunging the country into ethnic war on the scale of what happened in Burundi and Rwanda.
Unfortunately the mainstream media are beginning to source their information from the social media. Unfortunately this feeds foreign media which is then given back to us as revealed wisdom! Media without control cannot be justified on the grounds of their fundamental human rights and democratic rights to express themselves. There can be no absolute rights in an explosive situation where lives and society itself are threatened. There must be a state of people living in peace before they can enjoy democracy!