participate in the “sharing” of the national cake than to come up with plans to deal with the environmental issues of the South East and the South-South (from erosion to cleaning up oil spills etc.). Nigeria needs a counter-Biafra movement, a counter ethnic-manipulation movement, a truth movement, one which asks real questions of those politicians and their stooges who are suddenly very vocal: where were you when a Niger-Deltan was the President? What did you do for the region then? Besides congratulatory messages and promoting an empty Ijaw agenda which only benefited those in power, what did South-South and South East politicians do to bring development to these regions when they had the chance?
Beyond the Federal Government, greater blame should be laid at the feet of the state governors of the South East and the South-South. Despite the NDDC budgets (in fact, where is the OMPADEC money?) despite derivation, where did all the money go? Who are the contractors if not cronies of these same South-South and South East politicians? Nigerians need to ask real questions rather than hiding behind the spectre of wars which happened before many of those currently agitating were born. Unfortunately, the mind-set in today’s Nigeria, has it that only acts of violence produce results. After all, we only seem to pay attention to people’s demands or suffering in this country once groups turn to violence. When do we get serious? We mustn’t only demand seriousness from our leaders. We the people need to think deeply and critically about the issues. Our short-sightedness is consistently manipulated by politicians who know exactly what buttons to press to get the right reactions from us. We keep talking about restructuring as if it were some sort of magic wand after which all our ethno-religious problems would suddenly disappear.
Our wobbly zoning arrangements hardly allow the best man (or woman) to contest for office, further trapping us in a cycle of corruption, public anger and disappointment when the “son of the soil” doesn’t develop his region (or the rest of the country for that matter) because he never proved he had the intellectual capability or ideas necessary to come up with a real blueprint for progress. We are yet to honestly answer the question of what truly went wrong with our regional system of governance, before the military coups. It was, in part, the inefficacy of those in power, their greed and corruption which served to justify the coup culture. What would be different if we returned to the regions of old? Wouldn’t it be the same crop of politicians we currently complain about who’d be up for elections? Let’s not deceive ourselves, they wouldn’t perform any better. We’ve heard all the arguments about “feeding bottle federalism” and encouraging competition between the regions and I’ve written quite a lot about them in previous articles available online. The truth is, if not for corruption, which Nigerians, both rich and poor have curiously defended by shielding their ethnic kin from prosecution, even under our current structure, we could have attained far higher levels of development. We can’t account for two-thirds of the budgets at the federal level since 1999.
Corruption is the true root of marginalisation, not ethnicity or religion. The next time you hear the word “marginalisation” ask yourself what the political motives behind the term truly are. Very few of today’s politicians are capable of leading viable stand-alone nations (or areas roughly the geographic equivalent of the South-south or South-East regions for example) without the help and support of the rest of Nigeria. Many politicians have neither the credibility, the
