by Tunde Leye

I am going to touch on a sensitive issue. I have read severally very lengthy and detailed analysis of the great and selfish error that led to the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates to form the country we now know as Nigeria. By that action, Frederick Lugard brought together one of the most disparate groups of people together into one, to use Obafemi Awolowo’s term, geographic expression. And of course, much of the analysis of the root cause of our many problems places the blame on this marriage of unwilling partners. And there is a lot of truth in this. But, I like to ask questions and look at things from all the perspectives.

Before the British intervention that led to the colonizing of the area called Nigeria, the Islamic Sultanate that made up most of what became the Northern protectorate was on a steady push towards the coast. So let’s imagine that Lugard did not take the path of solving the colonies economic problems by amalgamating and left Northern Nigeria to be a country on its own whilst Southern Nigeria was a country.

We would then have a very Muslim country in the north which was much poorer than the more Christian southern country. The poor northern country would be landlocked and dependent on this richer southern country for access to the coast. The northerners would remember their push to the coast halted by the British, the same British who have now gone away and left their traditional systems of government almost intact. Consistent conflict would begin as the northerners fight for access to the coast and morph into bloody wars that would be multi-dimensional – ethnic, religious and economic. And if the civil war was bloody, this war would definitely be bloodier by many factors.

Whilst this possibility might sound overtly imaginative to some readers, it is a very real and feasible trajectory we could follow considering our propensity for making disastrous choices.

What we must realize is this – whether amalgamation happened or it didn’t, we could have ended up as a dysfunctional nation or nations. We must go beyond this fixation on a hundred year old event and focus on what we want to do within the realities we face now. Imagine the South Koreans fixating on what happened in 1950 and refusing to grow and develop. They didn’t. Rather, they set out deliberately to work within the realities they have and built something. We need to go away from blaming amalgamation for our woes. Unbundling Nigeria now will be a nightmare. The most feasible time to have done this was right after independence. We didn’t. Let us therefore set aside these thoughts and focus on how to make this Nigeria that we have work. I am still one of those who firmly believes that we can make it work.

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I get angry when I hear some news. We had heard the rumblings, and joined our voices to those of the soldiers to ask that the president take seriously the assertions that the soldiers were inadequately equipped to fight the Boko Haram insurgency. The spokespeople and officers of the federal government kept insisting these were untrue and couldn’t be Nigerian soldiers giving the interviews. We pointed out to them that with our soldiers’ training, the only explanations for the Boko Haram insurgents achieving victory after victory in fire fights is the superiority of their weapons. But this was termed as being unpatriotic, and not supporting our soldiers. Some of the spokespeople even went as far as posting fraudulent pictures on the internet to back their claims of adequately equipped soldiers up. Unfortunately for them, Google exposed their fraud. We pointed them to how the anarchy that happened in Mali and the overrunning of the north of that country by Tuareg insurgents was precipitated by similar non-provision of basic equipment and adequate weapons. There was even the unthinkable in Maimilari Barracks where soldiers shot at their commanding officer. In typical Nigerian manner, it was swept under the carpet.

As it is, our government criminally keeps sending gallant officers on suicide missions against Boko Haram by not equipping them to fight in spite of enormous resources taken out of the government coffers for the provision of these equipment. It is getting to a head now, as credible reports have it that soldiers are disobeying orders and refusing to fight unless they are provided with proper equipment and weaponry.

As it is, our government criminally keeps sending gallant officers on suicide missions against Boko Haram by not equipping them to fight in spite of enormous resources taken out of the government coffers for the provision of these equipment. It is getting to a head now, as credible reports have it that soldiers are disobeying orders and refusing to fight unless they are provided with proper equipment and weaponry. The army high command through Major General Minimah reacted by reminding soldiers that it is mutinous to disobey orders and the punishment for mutiny is the death sentence. No one has analysed the statement to see that the soldiers didn’t say they were unwilling to fight. They simply demanded proper equipment to fight with after witnessing repeated defeat in the hands of insurgents they know they would have beaten. The government would do well to leave the threats and address the issue. Equip these gallant officers properly.

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Tunde Leye tweets from @TundeLeye

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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