Faced with the challenges of increasing poverty, insecurity and corruption, many Nigerians from various ethno-geographic and religious backgrounds appears to be united on the need for the restructuring of the Nigerian federation. With the inability of successive administrations since the beginning of the 4th republic in 1999 to provide welfare and security for the Nigerian people, restructuring has now become the holy grail of good governance; the final solution and silver bullet that will kill corruption induced economic crisis as well as insecurity.

But the problem with the clamour for restructuring is the lack of unanimity among its proponents about the proper definition. Depending on which side of the divide you belong, restructuring could mean resource control, regional autonomy, devolution of powers or imposition of Sharia rule; a clear reflection of Nigeria’s deep rooted internal contradictions. These contradictions are believed to have come about by British colonial experiment of creating a modern nation out of a multiplicity of ethnic nationalities through the process of amalgamation in 1914. It is generally believed that a process, in which the people concerned, had no input as they were not consulted on the nature and form of the emergent modern state of Nigeria, within whose boundaries they are bound to live in, has continued to create socio-political tension that is straining the very foundation of the basis of national unity. It is believed by many that there is an urgent need to renegotiate the terms and conditions for oneness of the Nigerian nation by the Nigerian people.  However, the clamour for restructuring along ethnic lines is not only retrogressive but a recipe for an infinite smothering of the Nigerian state out of existence.

No nation on earth has a perfect structure of state as every case is a work in progress. Nigeria’s current structure is not an exception. Nigeria’s problem is not so much that of structure but the operation of the structure by various operators of state affairs at all tiers and arms of government.  Nigerians yearn for ‘’true federalism’’ in the mould of the first republic semi-autonomous federating units. But the Romanticisation of the first republic obscures the fact the 1963 constitution didn’t quite work out because it created in the Nigerian a conflict between citizenship of Nigeria and regional indigenship, which was a bulwark against social cohesion and national unity. The failure of the first republic leaders of Nigeria, to resolve the question of national identity and lay a solid foundation for a united and cohesive Nigerian nation has remained the bane on Nigeria’s national socio-economic development.

No nation was divinely decreed into existence. In the process of evolving into nation states, colonialism plays and continues to play a critical role through, trade, diplomacy and in some cases, conquest by warfare. These interactions have its pains as well as gains. The emphasis on the pains of colonialism by pan-African historians has obscured its enormous gains. Between 43 AD and 410 AD, Great Britain, Nigeria’s colonial master was a colonial province of the Roman Empire. The name, Britain is believed to be the anglicised form of the Roman Britannia. And by the second half of the 11th century, the Normans, led by William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy conquered England and occupied the English throne.

The lessons not learnt from Nigeria’s colonial experience is the strength in unity of the British people, which made a small Island nation of about  18 million to colonise a country of 50 million people at the time. The systematic conquest of the various kingdoms and city states that make up Nigeria by the British was possible because the native peoples did not present a united front against external aggression. The British engaged on individual basis each native kingdom and city state in diplomacy, trade and warfare to ease the process of colonisation for its own benefit otherwise no nation on earth could have conquered a united Nigeria in its current form.

Interestingly, one unintended benefit of colonialism was a coalescence of the various native peoples into larger ethnic groupings by the way of backward integration of sub-ethnic groups into larger tribes that led to a new identity for the natives, which roughly corresponded to the administrative federating units that were the regions of the first republic. British sociologists and anthropologists, who carried out extensive exploration of the British sphere of influence around the Niger area, successfully isolated and identified similarity in norms, culture, tradition and language of otherwise distinct peoples leading to the current ethnic groupings by which Nigerians are identified. Before this backward integration, there was no ethnic group known as Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa. In the western region, it was Oyo, Ijebu, Egba, Owu, Ijesha, Ife etc, with Yoruba as the language of communication. In the eastern region; it was the Igbo language speaking Aro, Bende, Ngwa, Ikwere, Onitsha Ado, Wawa, Oru, etc.  Similarly, in northern Nigeria, Hausa functions less as an ethnic group but more as a linguistic group of a cultural common wealth of ethnic groups that shares commonalities in geography, culture and tradition. The Hausa language was thus enriched greatly by the original vocabularies of the various adoptive ethnic groups that congregate under the cultural common wealth of northern Nigeria.

This backward integration was so successful that the various ethnic groups that now identifies as Yoruba of the southwest region of Nigeria fostered a common socio-political identity with which they negotiate a fair share of national resources. Interestingly, the man who is often credited by historians with working hard on the political unity of the Yoruba in the modern era, Obafemi Awolowo, was an Ijebu; an ethnic group that does share with the rest of the Yoruba, the Oduduwa ancestry. He was greatly aided by no less a person than Sir Adeyemo Alakija, a Saro[ descendant of returnee ex-slaves from Brazil]. The Yoruba Identity was further enhanced by the traditional sanction of the Ooni of Ife, who some historians agree is not a bloodline descendant of Oduduwa, the patriarch of the seven original ruling dynasties of Yoruba land, as the supreme leader of the Yoruba tribe. Similarly, the Igbo tribe was united under the political leadership of Nnamdi Azikiwe, whose origin is traced to Onitsha Ado; a distinct group among the larger Igbo ethnic groupings that traces its roots to the ancient Kingdom of Benin. The political leader of the north was Ahmadu Bello, a descendant of migrant Fulani from Futa Djalon. His administrative genius was deployed to build a very cohesive northern region by assimilating and integrating the various diverse ethnic groups in the north in an Arewa identity. The high point of this effort was when Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a son of the servant of the Madaki of Bauchi, whose origin was traced to the Jarawa, a minority ethnic group in then Bauchi province as Prime minister of Nigeria on the strength of the majority seats won by the NPC in the first republic federal parliament. The success of the backward integration of the Nigerian peoples and culture is a clear indicator, that we were not really irreconcilably different as a people. We simply didn’t realize how intricately connected we were. If the Oyo, Ife, Ijesha and Egba resolved to unite under the Yoruba identity, under the leadership of Obafemi Awolowo, an Ijebu, who unlike the other Yoruba do not share the Ododuwa ancestry, the Aro, Wawa and Bende came together under the leadership of Nnamdi Azikiwe, a descendant of Benin Kingdom through Onitsha Ado to evolve the Igbo ethnic nationality as we know it today, while the confederation of various ethnic groups in the north assumed a new, unified, Arewa identity, under the leadership of Ahmadu Bello, a descendant of Uthman Danfodio of the Toronkowa Fulani clan with origins in Senegambia region of west Africa, then the various ethnic nationalities in Nigeria can all come together and adopt a pan Nigerian identity by way of forward integration. All it will take is a purposeful leadership and the collective resolve to be Nigerians and not so much of physical restructuring because a people are who they decide they are.

Therefore, the rigidity with which Nigerians currently hold on to their ethnic identities, which are largely colonial creations that was further deepened by political expediency by our  founding fathers and has led to the clamour for restructuring along ethnic lines is a sad narrative that should have no place in a modern nation. The diversity of Nigeria is simply the beautiful plumages of one big bird and should not be allowed to degenerate into deep fault lines that are largely based on a superficial ethnic grouping. We need to let go of the rigidity with which we hold on to this superficial ethnic identity.   

Unfortunately, the desired forward integration of the current ethnic groupings into a Nigerian identity has been hampered by the failure of African social scientists and anthropologists to further the study in isolating and identifying the common similarities among Nigerian peoples and culture. The unfortunate practice of some leading intellectuals in Nigeria, to reduce public discourse to promoting ethnic supremacy of one group over another has drastically rolled back the existing backward integration that was achieved over six decades ago making restructuring along ethnic lines a recipe for infinite disintegration.    

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