By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Nigeria is in a class of its own.
Other countries may talk of “winner takes all”, but in Nigeria the standing maxim is “rigger takes.”
If you don’t agree with me, go to court!
If any bloke raises further doubts, I’ll just make the fellow to disappear from the face of Planet Earth!
Do you know who I am?
I am that immortal phenomenon that can fly a plane safely to its destination without the need of the presence of a human pilot.
Ever since former President Olusegun Obasanjo was appointed as the Navigator of Change, it is as though Nigeria turned into a plane flying hither and thither looking for where to crash – ever so dangerously.
The late comedian Mohammed Danjuma once told the tale of how he was mid-air inside a plane only to see one man with an umbrella, sorry, parachute, knocking on his window and telling him: “I don go-o! Na me be pilot of this plane-o. If you like-o, continue to stay there-o, but me I don go-o.”
I am that pilot, and I am gone to where you can never find me.
Nigeria’s place on the map of the world is being called to question, and the leaders have their heads buried in quicksand.
East, West, North and South are in disarray as so-called majorities and minorities are insisting on the right to self-determination.
Names like Nnamdi Kanu, Sunday Igboho, Asari Dokubo etc are all the rage, and the mantra is driving at cross-purposes.
It’s as though Nigeria now exists in a vacuum, and the centre cannot obviously hold as things have completely fallen apart in the manner that WB Yeats wrote in his poem “The Second Coming”.
To continue in the mode of Yeats, today in Nigeria “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
The ferment cuts across all the ethnicities and regions of Nigeria.
The denizens of the Southwest are following the lead of Oga-at-the-Top with the solidarity of “it’s our turn.”
The eternal power-brokers of the North who had to be appeased with a Muslim-Muslim ticket are now kicking, rejecting the proposed national tax reform.
The nagging question is whether the Southeast is even still a part of Nigeria, having tagged as IPOB zone replicating a Biafra that has obviously refused to die.
The South-South mandarins are now talking of going North as though they had just discovered ice in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Macondo in the iconic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Time is fast running out on Nigeria on the inescapable need to restructure the country.
When the conference people of any country cannot provide an answer through talking across board, violence supervenes.
The world has in fact lost count of the number of souls lost in the many battlefields that ordinary conferences would have prevented.
The Nigeria-Biafra war would not have been fought if the Aburi conference had succeeded in every material particular.
Many moons after that horrendous war, the issues that elicited the war in the first place remain unsolved.
General Yakubu Gowon is still telling tales by moonlight that he went to the conference unprepared.
Insecurity is the rule rather than the exception all over Nigeria, and something will definitely give if not addressed holistically.
A late friend and brother of mine, Sixtus Chibueze Ezennaya, posed this loaded question: “One Nigeria! One Nigeria! One Nigeria! When was it agreed upon?”
The European colonial powers that set up shop in Berlin in 1884-85 to allocate the area now known as Nigeria to colonial Britain acted in spite of the nationality groups then inhabiting the land.
Sir Frederick Lugard amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates so that the South will serve as “the lady of means”, in the words of Lord Harcourt, to feed the arid North.
Thus from the very beginning Nigerian history became replete with obfuscating contradictions.
Some idealistic but very naive military majors thought they could change history by staging a coup in January 1966.
Northern military officers fomented a revenge coup in July of the selfsame 1966.
After taking over power, Yakubu Gowon had prepared a speech to announce the dissolution of the Nigerian Federation on August 1, 1966 and the secession (araba) of the North until he was prevailed upon to change his mind by the British High Commissioner in Lagos, Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce.
The pogrom unleashed on the Igbo people in the North put a heavy question mark on the existence of Nigeria.
The Aburi conference in Ghana had to be convened as a last ditch effort to save the country from war.
The agreements at Aburi became subverted, and the Nigeria-Biafra war ensued.
After the war, the military and Northern domination of power came to a head with the unconscionable annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election won by Chief Moshood Abiola.
General Sani Abacha locked up Abiola, and the country teetered on the precipice until somehow Abiola and Abacha died after one another.
It took the re-emergence of Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo for the Northern military to anoint a civilian fit enough to be trusted with power.
Then Obasanjo was eventually named the Negotiator for General Muhammadu Buhari to kick hapless President Goodluck Jonathan out.
President Tinubu is now on the saddle, and there is the fear of a creeping “rigger takes all” totalitarianism by the NPN back in 1983. Nigeria cannot forever continue flying giddily in the skies like a plane without a pilot now that I am out of sight.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author