Nigeria At Terminus: The Unspoken Disputations
By Tony Nnadi
09 December 2021
(First published elsewhere on 3 November 2015, updated and edited for shortness by Ndidi Uwechue)
No more doubts, records and current events show that Nigeria was conceived in greed, born in deceit, and nurtured in wickedness and violence. It entered Independence limping already to its grave. Those who fought for its independence ended up very far away from the government houses vacated by British taskmasters, all by manipulation. Straight from the Independence elections, Azikiwe became ceremonial President. Awolowo went to jail. Enahoro fled into exile, to the very arms of the British he fought relentlessly through the preceding two decades. The British who had presided over the entire shenanigans laughed heartily at him when he arrived for political asylum on their soil, fleeing from the machete-chase of the very people who opposed Independence to the point of violence. It dawned on him that what they had embraced as Independence was actually a mere transition from external British colonialism to internal Caliphate-led colonialism.
It was in celebration of this great bequest by the British to the North that the Premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello declared to his lieutenants in the very week of Independence in 1960 that:
“The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great-grandfather Uthman dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities of the north as willing tools and the south as a conquered territory and never allow them rule over us and never allow them have control over their future ” Parrot Newspapers, 12th October, 1960.
On the 29th of May, 1962, so bad had things gone that the then north-led so-called Federal Government, in violation of the then Nigerian Constitution, suspended the government and Constitution of the Western Region, imposing a state of emergency and appointing a Sole Administrator, Dr Majekodunmi.
One thing led to another and by early 1966, Nigeria collapsedcompletely. Massive xenophobic killings targeted at Easterners in the north were repeatedly enacted by northern officers including one Lieutenant Muhammadu Buhari in what became known as a pogrom.
The attempt to revive the dead Union at Aburi in January 1967 was frustrated by willing-tool genocide-General Yakubu Gowon and his Caliphate masters. The mayhem that followed quickly degenerated into a full-scale genocidal war between 1967-1970 which consumed 3.5 million people in eastern Nigeria, and which had sought to preserve the living by declaration of the Republic of Biafra. In the name of War, the oil and gas assets of Eastern Nigeria were seized and confiscated to date.
Post-War, in 1970, the assets of returning Easterners were by Decree, declared “Abandoned Property”, seized and shared out. The Military task force that ejected the owners of the so-called abandoned property in Port Harcourt was one Captain Bonaventure David Mark.
It was during this period in the early 1970s that the so-called Indigenization Decree and programs were enacted and executed, thus shutting the Easterners out from the commanding heights of the economy. By 1978, the Land Use Act was imposed to make a clean sweep of whatever was left untaken.
The NYSC was a scheme by which the children of Port Harcourt, Enugu and Lagos, are sent away to the danger-infested Potiskum, Kaura Namoda and Gashua with no prospects of any meaningful employment, while the children of Kano, Sokoto and Maiduguri are sent to Lagos, Port Harcourt and Warri where they end up in CBN, NNPC and Chevron. This has gone on consistently for 48 years since 1973. Has anyone tried to find out how both the Land Use Decree and the NYSC Decree got into the impregnable fortress of the 1979 Constitution, now called 1999 Constitution, both under Obasanjo’s watch?
The 12 States created by Gowon on the 27th of May, 1967 to undermine the then FEDERATING Regions have now been multiplied to 36, none of which can fend for itself. Our Federalism which suffered the first major assault on 29th May, 1962, in the Western Region, got decapitated by the creation of those States in 1967. The other consequence of that decapitation is the emergence of a contrived political majority which now hold sway in Abuja. The other terrible consequence is the 68-item Exclusive Federal Legislative List which taking one example, forbids today’s south eastern states from generating and transmitting electricity from theirabundant coal deposits, and for which the Oji River Power Station built by the Eastern Region Government has been shut by Nigeria since over 20 years, leaving the whole of the region without a single power plant, just to kill Aba, Onitsha and the Nnewi industrial hubs. It is also this List that makes it impossible for Lagos to own and control its ports. To make matters worse, who can tell us why since Independence, no single Yoruba has been found worthy of being the substantive Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service? It has been an unbroken chain of the political scions of Ahmadu Bello.
Those who did not understand why the great Awolowo went to prison for winning the Independence election, or why Abiola waslocked up and killed for winning the 1993 elections or why the Arewa spokesmen in 2010 threatened to make Nigeria ungovernable if Jonathan or anyone from the South should become President in 2011, should take a closer look at the Ahmadu Bello Mission Statement and Battle Script of 1960.
Those who wonder why the teaching of history as a school subject had been banned in Nigerian Secondary schools, should consider what would happen if the children who are now chanting democracy and change were to know the truth as outlined above. I could go on and on for those who feign surprise at the massive support for Self-determination
The three Solemn Assemblies of the peoples of the Lower Niger Bloc, then Oodua Bloc, then Middle Belt Bloc in 2015, 2017, and 2018 respectively set the ball rolling towards Referendums on Self-determination.
When in 2007 what is today the NINAS Movement filed a court suitchallenging the legitimacy of the fraudulent 1999 Constitution, it was an attempt for peaceful reconfiguration (reconstruction). The choice even now remains, peaceful change by Referendum or violent change by doing nothing. The NINAS Movement prefers the peaceful option.
