WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com | justme4justice@yahoo.com
There are many dislocations in the Nigerian education system. My initial intention this week was to x-ray the contribution of the dislocations in the present day education sector of Nigeria to the political and economic decay as well as the mass corruption that is the defining factor of the country, but I made a u-turn at a point when I saw a work that made an attempt at discussing the effect of cancelled history on the distorted minds of Nigerians who today are picking up arms against their own country thinking they are fighting to correct wrongs that were never inflicted.
We got so many things wrong as a people; and now we have become encumbered on all sides by problems and calamities that ought not to be associated with us but for our carelessness and greediness for power, sectional superiority and individual wealth. We have gradually become the worst that a divided nation could be, fighting ourselves within and from all sides. We got to the point where our singular reckoning with recognition is to enforce it by destroying ourselves from within; every region, tribes and groups raising militias to wage internal war against their own country as their preferred means to be heard. And to achieve this, we advertise for support and acceptance from the people flagging disrupted history and narration of past events that suit our desires. I assumed it is an intentional omission and erasure of our past that brought us to this point where we ended up with created versions of our past to suit the narratives we created for the present.
At just 61 years, we have intentionally disrupted our history to the point that the reality of who we had been in the past is restricted only to the archive. We are now at that point where the youths are only abreast of the version of our past we erroneously present to them. To imagine that in today’s Nigeria, we all have chosen to castigate the Fulanis as enemies that are bent on usurping our lands; when we, especially the elders in the land know too well the history of Fulani interrelationship with every other tribes and people in Nigeria, even before the nation’s independence. We wouldn’t tell the youths of the peaceful coexistence between the settling, nomadic Fulanis and their hosts across the country for decades. We wouldn’t tell them of how some of the Fulanis have forgotten their original states of origin and have become more indigenous than most of us in our communities and states. We would rather want everyone to accept the created narrative of a ‘killer’ tribe bent on taking over the country; and go all the length to give life to the lies we fabricated to achieve our ominous and devilish ends.
When we talk of the perceived imbalances in the distribution of the national wealth, rather than truthfully discussing the problem, we formulate in our usual manner the narrative of a northern conspiracy to enslave other tribes through the control of power and national resources. In the media, we present stories that imply the North has been structured to emerge as the sole owner of the country. We apply all unholy measures to call for the defeat of the North and the restructuring of the country; so much that today, every average Nigerian youth, ignorant of the truth, sees the North as the enemy of all other tribes! We would not tell them of how some Igbo elements, at a time in the history of the country, packaged the mission that ended the regional system in the country and established the current structure that we are complaining about. How many youths in today Nigeria know that once upon a time, a man of Igbo extraction, at the dictate of a President (Military Head of State) also of Igbo extraction, concluded for whatever reason that what the country needed most was the abolition of the regional system, the removal of the powers of the regions to be economically and politically independent to some extent, and the entrenchment of the unitary system that deposited substantial power of the state at the center.
Many analysts have submitted that the only reason the East made the move to cancel the existing regional autonomy then and enthroned the unitary system was because they thought the country was theirs to take, control and plunder; but unfortunately, their control was short-lived as the second coup of 1966 ended the rule of Aguiyi Ironsi and brought in many Northerners in succession. Professor Nwabueze, the chief drafter of the constitution that took away the semi-independence of the regions in 1966 at the behest of the Head of State, Aguiyi Ironsi is still alive today and surprisingly also in the forefront of the call for the restructuring and possible balkanisation of the country; ironically busy castigating the North and the present leadership of the country for what he was the architect of the creation. Not once now, has he informed the Biafra agitators and the innocent youths about what they did to the country when they held power in the past.
The version of the Nigerian Civil War account that is prevailing and still spreading, the version that enrages the youths of the South-eastern Nigerians against the North-controlled Federal Government, remains so distorted, screwed and propagandised that no rational person wouldn’t react on hearing it. We all failed woefully with what we did with our history, perhaps we wish to cancel our past for the narratives that are desirable. No one speaks of the constitutional mandate of the Nigerian head of state to crush separatists attempt(s) wherever it is from; no one is discussing that this constitutional provision was established by Aguiyi Ironsi as a weapon to crush expected attempt of units attempting secession after the Isaac Boro attempted plan to take the part of the country now known as the South-south out of the Nigerian territory. The youths are not told how the Igbo Head of State came hard on the secession plan of the Isaac Boro-led South-south, crushing them before enacting the anti-secession clause of the Constitution that roundly nailed the subsequent Ojukwu-led secession just a year after. In 1966, the Igbo declared an attempt to secede from the union a treasonable offence, unpardonable and punishable only by death, but in 1967, wanted to secede and leave the union and expected no response from the Nigerian leadership.
When we tell the story of the Nigerian Civil War today, we intentionally distort it to exclude the Nigeria’s government reluctance to attack at full force from the onset, because the government was burdened and saddened with the idea of killing its own people; rather we exemplify the withdrawal of food supply at the latter’s end during the war. We talk about the ‘betrayal’ of the West and the ‘wickedness’ of the North; but never about the onslaught on the minority groups of the South-south by the Biafran army even as the war proceeded. We don’t want the mention of the takeover of the lands and renaming of territories in Rivers state and others even while the war was going on by Ojukwu and his Biafran army.
How can we face the future without without knowledge of our past? It is high time we recognized the need for mandatory history education as a tool to salvage the devastating effects of fake news and halt the declining loss of faith in the country by the population of our youths that have been erroneously fed with fabricated lies of what our past was. It is only the return to our history archive that would reveal how it was the people of the East, headed by Nnamdi Azikwe that stood in the way of correcting the errors of The British unsolicited amalgamation of Nigeria.
GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!
