By BEN OGU As already established, the problem of Nigeria is neither hunger nor kidnapping nor fuel. These are real problems, but only micro symptoms of the real underlying ailment. The real problem of Nigeria is the 1914 amalgamation that yoked a disparity of nations of incongruities and varying religious and cultural temperaments in a death tie, with stooge, conscienceless and hedonistic leadership working in a vicarious capacity for foreign masters. This is worsened by base religious bigotry on the jugular of the country, raining bloody hell on every life to exterminate and occupy every space. Yet other negative factors still glue the ethnic nationalities together in the fantasy and euphoria of perilous indivisible unity of intensive death. These factors are further enhanced and made unfelt by distracting ethnic mutual hatred and mistrust, sustained by fear of death for seeking disintegration and by the lure of oil money, which entices to death but is scooped and enjoyed by only a few of our vampires and proxy lords. Ethnic mutual hatred and mistrust is the mechanism deliberately instigated and fanned by internal slave masters among the ethnic nationalities to make it impossible for them to agree to a revolution, reformation or disintegration for a workable alternative Nigeria. The anger meant to vent against the outlived amalgamation that lumps them together and a strangulating constitution that binds them as utility commodity for insensitive leaders and religious fundamentalists, they rather vent against each other, perceived as competitors for Nigerian patrimony. The gridlock of the artificially engineered mutual hatred is groomed in a systematic and selective injustice and divide-and-rule policy by the political class to make the ethnic groups grumble against each other as disposable opponents, to weaken and ward off their common and collective hostility against the political oppressors and the Nigerian union of their harvest. Consequently, instead of venting their venom against the irritating unitary structure, the 1999 stifling constitution and the oppressors who are their real enemies, the oppressed Yoruba, the Igbo, the Middle Belt and the South South turn against each other and particularly against the Igbos, erroneously perceived as their adversary. Thus the Nigerian masses become a house divided against themselves that, distracted, cannot stand to confront obvious oppressors, but instead defend and protect them to their detriment. Diversionary servitude An independent Yoruba nation would comfortably compete with most sovereign Western, European and African nations, as they have all the potentials to thrive far better than Nigeria that trivializes them. The Igbos, on their part, prefer to traverse and spread themselves ubiquitously – developing a country they are not counted as one – instead of losing the vast material investments and individual political crumbs they subserviently enjoy in Nigeria at the expense of collective dignity and a liberated Igbo. Their leaders prefer their on-the-ground crumbs for errand boys of Nigeria, which lubricates their appetite to abandon and donate their people as blood transfused to sustain the life wire of Nigerian unity. Nnandi Kanu is a typical victim of this brazen anomaly, whose travail most South Eastern politicians and governors contributed to with sealed lips, passivity or direct active collaboration to delete him as price to keep Nigeria going. The South South, created and imbued to hate the Igbo, are only content with their resentment of the Igbo and across-the-bridge alliances rather than their immediate neighbors or their liberation. With the massive oil deposit scooped under their buttock, which leaves them with environmental degradation, they are rather satisfied with mere pittance for errand boys and watchdogs protecting Nigerian oil for the boss, so long as Igbos remain their adversaries. The North, benighted by the myth of power and oil control, ignores their wasted expanse of land, natural and agricultural resources that could make them greater than Nigeria, just to hold tight the helm of power, oil and religious barbarism. Given all the negative ligaments that bond and glue the nationalities in a deadly grip, they neither enjoy the oil nor are able to confront their common prison masters. The Yoruba West, with their enviable waterway location, the South South and their oil reserve, and the North with inexhaustible mineral resources and fallow vast land, all have the potential of thriving in a confederated or totally independent arrangement, while the Igbos have only their daring industriousness to strive with. But their preference to suffocate in mutual hostility, scrambling for a common wealth bread, and extend their beggarly palms to the mama-put indivisible central pot of Abuja monthly allocation defies common sense. The imperative In the face of the prevai
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