“Late elder statesman Yusuf Maitama Sule, revealed what one of the Western leaders told them when the then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, sent himself and Shehu Shagari as emissaries to seek assistance in prosecuting the civil war:
“We know why you are here, you have come to seek our favour and support for your cause. But let me tell you, we do not care about you, all we care about are your resources. If we could get robots to exploit your resources for us to develop our economy, we would not mind a lot of you being eliminated.
“You Nigerians are a peculiar case; you have the population (and) resources; and we know your resources more than you do know about them. All you need in Nigeria is a fairly long period of say 10 to 20 years and you will be able to make it.
“You will become a very strong economy; will join the economic powers. But you need this period of uninterrupted peace and stability. But we will not allow it, because within that period, you will use your brains, and Nigeria has got brains.
“You will work hard and you are hard-working people; you will exploit your resources and you have them in abundance and you will develop your economy.
“Developing your economy needs market and you have no problem with that because of your huge population; in addition, you will have the entire West African region as your market.
“If that happens, you will be a thorn in our flesh; we would lose our source of raw materials because you would be using them in your factories. We would lose our market because you will be the market and also get other markets in West Africa.
“So, even after your civil war, we would create one problem after the other for you so that you may not enjoy the peace and stability that will enable you develop and become such a strong country.””
I am glad some of our erudite opinion leaders are getting nearer and nearer to the truth of Nigeria. It is about time we say, enough is enough to the time wasting fruitless jaw jaw and jejune socioeconomic and political analysis in Nigeria.
The truth is, if we had cared to apply our common senses to gather pertinent data about our inglorious past, about our deplorable present and about a future that, as far as can be scientifically projected, will be loaded with suffering and gnashing of teeth, it would have been glaringly obvious that Nigeria was and is still an expensive joke. It would have shown us that Nigeria, as designed, created and coupled together was not supposed to succeed to the status of a nation state not to even talk about a progressive and developed nation state.
As can be gathered from the quote above, Nigeria was created for the exploitation of both the human and natural resources on the geographical space. At ‘independence’ and in order to make assurance doubly sure that the cruel exploitation established since 1914 would go on forever, Nigeria was gifted to a caliphate, that was/is still visionless and clueless to be the principal overseers, to manage the country on behalf of the original creators who are still the true hidden owners of the country.
If it is true that Maitama Sule heard all those scurrilous things said about Nigerians by the neo-colonial leader as quoted above, I am surprised that he did not try to organise the people of his country to turn the tables against the unrepentant sponsors and perpetrators of mischief in Nigeria/Africa.
In fairness to Maitama Sule, I can recollect he made some spirited effort in 1979 to secure the leadership role as president of the country through a political party – (NPN). But he was shamelessly and treacherously schemed out of the race by the infamous Kaduna Mafia. Even though, he had a popular following in the party,
The members of the Mafia chose instead a lazy, laidback and totally visionless Shehu Shagari as the presidential candidate of NPN. The decision was based solely on inherited blue blood ancestry, personal gains and parochial group interest. They have always preferred Nigeria to stay put in the swamp of collective ignorance and mediocrity that had given and still giving them, from cradle to grave, unearned and over-the-top privileges from the national coffers.
Even then from some of the alleged statements of Maitama Sule with respect to the fact that the leadership positions of Nigeria was exclusively and eternally earmarked/zoned to the North by Allah, this type of divisive claim does not show that Maitama Sule was a man who was totally free from ethnic superiority complex, bigotry and political discrimination based on a person’s place of birth and beliefs.
Hence, when our intellectuals and social analysts go about analysing the problems of Nigeria and offering irrelevant solutions outside the context of the premises described above; ignoring the neo-colonial dimensions that had sworn never to allow peace and development in the land; and refusing to take all these sordid historical facts into consideration, they have clearly shown themselves up as either careless or uninformed. These are not good signs expected from a very serious group of elite who are in a hurry to get out of pervading and stultifying underdevelopment.
My sincere wish is to see our social, political and economic analysts succeeding well in their chosen profession as the light and salt of Nigeria. But I seriously hope they would take the trouble to work hard to overcome their personal problems of lack of confidence in their own personal worth; to overcome the fear of losing their sumptuous privileges and to overcome their pathetic pretentious claim to scholarship that are found wanting in its application to lift up our underdeveloped societies to a higher level of development.
My second wish is that all ‘Nigerians’ would face the truthful reality that Nigeria, as structurally and haphazardly wedged together with the glue of inequality, injustice and slavery, can no longer be salvaged from the long foreseen disintegration.
And thirdly, I also wish that fellow indigenous people of this geographical space called Nigeria would accept that it is too late in the day to think that anything can be done to change our retrogressive condition for the better. Under the existing climate of a cultivated intellectual darkness that has since bred a decadent state of uncontrollable large pool of mediocrities in societies, we can not expect anything else but the rule of mediocrity in the land.
Is Restructuring to be or not to be?
The suggestion made by Dr Mailafia about the restructuring of the country into five regions – Sharia North, Yoruba West, Igbo East, Niger Delta and Middle Belt – is good and brilliant. But can it work? Yes, it can work. But it can only work under a truthful federation of autonomous regional republics. However, as long as one of the regions named as Sharia North is in the mix, we should count this good proposal dead on arrival.
For, it is practically impossible to establish a federal government that is based on the separation of religious matters from political governance when one of the regions has blatantly refused to accept a secular constitution as a fundamental principle necessary for a peaceful and smooth operation of a federal government in a multiethnic and multi religious nation. It is not a hidden knowledge that the Sharia North has fundamentally perceived a secular constitution as a man-made law and it is therefore adjudged anathema or “haram” to their inerrant religious beliefs and unchangeable way of life.
Since we are yet to resolve what to do and how to deal with the caliphate (Sharia north) and her seventh century retrogressive dogmas on political arrangements; and coupled with the fact that the caliphate establishment is a formidable satrap under the protection of the neo-colonial powers, our arch-traducers and the real elephant at the centre of Nigeria’s woes, we should therefore take away this good proposal for a federation of five regions out of the calculations for the building of a new Nigeria.
However, isn’t it time the suffering indigenous people of Nigeria began to think afresh and to plan ahead for a federation of four regions : Yoruba West, Igbo East, Niger Delta and Middle Belt?
Isn’t it obvious enough that since the Sharia North has adopted Sharia as its fundamental principle of political arrangements for the governance of their areas and people, that it has inadvertently seceded from the secular Federal Republic that all the nations of Nigeria negotiated before the make-believe independence from Britain in 1960?
Isn’t it high time ‘Nigerians’ accepted the reality of Nigeria as an unworkable experiment and stopped wasting time and lives on a phantom dream of mythical Nigeria that can never be realised as a real nation in a million years?
A Dismal Warning
Nigerians, like every member of the human race, are living in strange and dangerous times. It is a time of unprecedented uncertainties at every level of human existence – personal, family, community, local, state, national and international. This is a unique time in the annals of humanity and it is calling on every individual to embark on a rigorous personal introspection about the meaning of life. It will be foolhardy for Nigerians to continue to live in a state of adopted ignorance and permanent spiritual darkness as we have been doing before.
This moment is calling on each individual to set up a personal “Marshall Plan” of action to overcome ignorance and idleness, the major bane of our lives. We need to open all the shutters to our common senses in order to be able to perceive the signs of the moment. And to allow our mind to chew the cud of reason in order to hasten our understanding and discernment of the truth of the moment.
Without undertaking this urgent task of mind empowerment and spiritual liberation through seeking and searching for true knowledge, ‘Nigerians’ with our mythical and boobytrapped country, should wish ourselves goodbye into an eternal oblivion.
Wake up Nigerians. We are living in dangerous times.
In the Spirit of Truth
SAM ABBD ISRAEL
Read more:-
https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/03/a-destiny-among-the-nations-2/
SAM ABBD ISRAEL 