Fani,
In an environment where the gluttony and want of wealth always trumps principles, a clamor for unison based on those tribal commonalities is a waste of time. These are not limited to the South West alone.
South Westerners generally can respond to tribal sensibilities without the projection or practice of purity. We always have welcomed people in our mists, the evidence are overwhelming. The opinion leaders and the political class are however miles apart and they can’t be reconciled.
They can’t be reconciled because the differences between those two groups are irreconcilable. While politicians have the pulse of the people, they are gluttonous and self-centered and lack a strategic cohesive plan or nation (Oduduwa) building.
They enjoy the benefits of chaos, the advantages of having peoples pulse at their finger tips and thus have the upper hand. Things are the way they are because people want them that way; otherwise they won’t posses those invincible but real powers.
The Upper class in the South West are uninteresting, bored, either beaten to apathy by the perceived futility of participating in politics or shear laziness, I don’t know. To crown it, the scramble to acquire wealth is not a scourge afflicting just South Westerners; it’s the whole South, the whole country, the majority of Black Africa.
Only a block head will believe in Nigeria, I don’t have to elaborate. The youths are the ones I bemoan.
Intellectuals (or technocrats) cannot create or rule Oduduwa and the Rich Elite are too selfish for nation building. The political class with pulse has to do that (Short of taking it by force). This artificially created behemoth (Nigeria) is a shaky center holding because the people that have stolen us dry have investments across the Geo political zones and they don’t want to lose that. THEY WON’T.
While it is practically impossible to accommodate militant Islam with secularism and tolerance, which we practice in the south, yet the deafening silence over the preponderance of these militancy is note worthy.
Noteworthy in the sense that there is no sense of outrage about it, until these recent Boko Haram and the recently fashionable “BRING BACK OUR GIRLS”.
What works in our South West is tolerance, tolerance of differences, tolerance of other tribes, and tolerance of religious diversity. We (South West) are not a rigid non tolerant land (Nation). Rather than pursue a peaceful break up from Nigeria and create a Nation bursting with development, ideas, cultures, the South Western Political class who have the pulse of the Nation follow their egotistical acquisitive reflexes and thus we nudge ahead at snail speed pretending togetherness in a farce called NIGERIA.
The quicker the country can peacefully break up into convenient and natural factions, the better it would be for those units to manage their natural existence.
Wanting a nation based on Tribal commonalities is not faux anthropology; genocide is bad management of processes leading to that. Wanting a nation is not an awful thing, quite the opposite, it is inherent in the human spirit, to be able to control one’s destiny, govern one’s self and welcome others within those confines. The Southwest has a successful history of these open-mindedness, all we have to do is look within our individual lives, kin, family and experiences within our geographical boundaries.
Nigeria has degraded Our Nation (Southwest) into a drifter nation, always conniving for crumbs of currency, short gains benefitting a few and consistently under developing its most essential assets, its people…
Oduduwa (Or whatever it will be called) remains a fantasy, because like my (Political) friends will say, the facts on ground don’t support your argument. Those facts are its people (The political class who comprehend the machinery of thoughts)
Charles Sogbesan
