How Nigeria can break up without war, by Professor Banji Akintoye, historian, politician, elder statesman

Says, breaking into different countries is not as a big disaster as people think

Professor Stephen Adebanji Akintoye, a celebrated leading African historian, is a man of many parts. As politician, he was in the Senate in 1982 under the umbrella of the defunct Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), which manifesto he wrote. He is also an elder statesman and close associate of the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo

The 84-year-old Ekiti State-born academic was the Director, Institute of the African Studies, University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Osun State.   In this interview with RAZAQ BAMIDELE in his Lagos residence, the vocal and very agile old man opined that through dialogue, Nigeria can break up in peace without a war, recalling instances when big countries broke up without expending even a bullet. However, he warned that, even some big empires where wars were declared to force citizens to remain together, they still broke up at the end but not after several lives had been senselessly lost. To the elder statesman, it is better to jaw-jaw to prevent war-war because even after the war-war, there will still be jaw-jaw to settle the vexatious matters involved. Though the South-west leader wants the polity restructured through a round-table, he is convinced that the much-mouthed Sovereign National Conference (SNC), is currently inadequate to solve the problem at hand in Nigeria today.  

By your own estimation, sir, is Nigeria not drifting towards war?

Not necessarily. Nigeria is moving towards something historic. There may be no war. I think the accumulated experience of the peoples of Nigeria today will very, very likely point Nigeria away from the direction of war. We are not likely to have a war.

What then are we likely to have with the current unpleasant situation in the country? 

We are likely, I believe, to reach a point and I believe we are reaching that point. The point is where we would sit down and negotiate. To negotiate is not a matter of National Conference, but negotiation around the table about the very critical questions about being in Nigeria. And the most important question will be, do we really want to be Nigeria? If we want to be Nigeria, what are the terms that will satisfy all or most of us as nationalities in Nigeria? I think we will come to that point. And it is the best thing to do because, that way, we will avoid needless destruction, needless of accumulation and heightening of hatred because that is what war produces.

And we can come to a conclusion without having to beat the drums of war and create hatred and destruction and bloodshed. I believe we can do that.

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How then did we arrive at this situation in the first place?

In the society, it is the leadership that decides the direction the society will go. If the leadership will consciously wish to achieve that, we can achieve it. If we can talk to one another in a way that gradually builds conviction that something needs to change rather than scream at one another in ways that heighten tension and passion, we can achieve it. What I am saying is that, we Nigerians who God has given the privilege of being recognised as leaders of our different peoples need now to go into very statesmanlike postures, concerning Nigeria. Especially the situation we find on our hands today is that a section of the country is declaring itself at war against the rest of us. Some people may say that is over assessment of the situation; it is not so. The people themselves are saying we are coming to conquer you. We are coming to kill, maim among you and take over your territory and push you out and banish you from your land and so on! And they have not stopped saying it. They are saying it louder and louder, clearer and clearer. So, there is a declared war by a section of Nigeria against another section. Now, what that shows very clearly is as follows: War is always between different countries. A country says you are hurting our interest; we declare a war against you and you then defend yourselves. And then there is war. Or a section of a country says we are seceding and others don’t want that to happen and use the resources of the state to declare war against the people, who say they are seceding. Then there is war. Those are the possible scenarios you can have war. But in the case of Nigeria, we have a situation in which there is a country called Nigeria. It is country bound by law and constitution and by assumed common interest as a country. And a section of the country, even in those conditions are saying we are coming to invade your land to kill, to maim and destroy among you and banish you from your land as well. They are already declaring that we are no longer a country. It connotes that we are a country and you are a country and we are coming to conquer you. That is what they are saying in effect. And we who are being threatened, that is, the people of the South and the Middle Belt, need to operate in such a way that can guide this country to negotiation table and get that matter sorted out. Continuing to make old noises like demanding restructuring and so on and so forth is not unreasonable, it is not adequate any more. There has to be a higher level of statesmanship of conception of issues and of carefully conceived responses to the issues. That is what will lead to negotiation. And Nigeria does need negotiation urgently. There is no need for our killing one another.

Is this posture common to all involved?

Yes. My intellectual colleague, Dr. Ango Abdullahi, has said a number of times that, if we found that we cannot live happily with one another in one country, let us sit down peacefully and sort it out and let us part. He has said that a number of times. And Senator Sola Adeyeye in a lecture also said the same thing. The unity of a country, he said, should be a means to an end. The unity of a country is not an end itself. And the end should be suitable, sensible, peaceful, acceptance of us as one country. If we cannot do that by accepting ourselves as one country, it is better to ignore the calls for unity and so on and to sit down and do what is needful in the interest of the human beings involved. And, in Nigeria, we are not talking of a few human beings. We are talking of about two hundred million human beings. And in the interest of human beings in Nigeria, we need to sit down and sort out the question; do we want to be a country? And if we had come to the conclusion that we cannot be a country, that we have tried, not that we haven’t tried, we have tried since 1960. Even Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the first Prime Minister of Nigeria, had also said again and again that the bases for unity didn’t seem to be there. He said Nigeria’s unity was British intention for Nigeria, but it had no basis in reality among the people of Nigeria. Yes, he said that. And General Yakubu Gowon, when he came to power as military ruler in 1966, repeated the same thing more or less. He said the basis for unity is not just there. We cannot ignore such things. We should not ignore such things because that is wisdom from the highest level of leadership of the country. I think it is high time we looked seriously at such things.

But what has been preventing turning the assertions into reality since?

Yeah! It is not easy to get the people to throw away what they already have. You know, we have Nigeria; we bring our children to the world as Nigerians. They go to school and do some other things as Nigerians. And they want that to continue. And they are predominantly the leadership of the country. And they too are bringing their own children as Nigerians. So, the American declaration of independence said, Government long established should not be thrown aside for light and transient courses. It is not easy for man. Man is very conservative by nature. He doesn’t want to throw away what he already has in his hand. And that is all what has been keeping Nigeria together since. We must reach a point. You have to reach a point in the interest of people because this is not an elite thing. Government can be an elite institution, but the purpose of government is not elitist, it is for the people. If you reach a point and you found that what you are holding is not working and it is hurting people, and it is likely to keep hurting people, then you need to do something different. You should begin to seek something different. That is the way human beings behave.

With your submission, it appears you are not interested in 2023 Yoruba presidency….

(Cuts in) Ah, it is okay for our young politicians to begin to have that ambition. It is okay. Why not? But there has to be higher considerations. The higher consideration today is the wellbeing of the Yoruba people. If we can maintain and sustain the wellbeing of Yoruba people within the thing called Nigeria, why not? But what is happening now is that if you ask most Yoruba people, in their villages, in their towns, market places and motor garages and so on and so forth, if you ask them today that, is this Nigeria good for maintenance of your wellbeing? The answer is most likely to be no! The answer is mostly no! So, while our young politicians want presidency in 2023, and it is a good thing to have one, I would love to see a Yoruba presidency in 2023. But I must not let that blind me to the greater need of our people, the welfare of our people.

At 84, is there any hope of witnessing Nigeria of your dream?

Ah, the Nigeria of our dream when I was young was huge, was big and beautiful thing. By the 1970s, I was already mature enough to give expression to the dream. And when Chief Obafemi Awolowo came out from prison, and came to see us university professors, to talk about building Nigeria, we were very enthusiastic about it. He met us in Ife, University of Ife in Nigeria here. I was the Director of the Institute of the African Studies and he came to talk to us about Nigeria, about how we can build Nigeria to make it a great country with her enormous resources, the human resources, the possibilities and so on. And we rose up to it. And we gave it all that we could.

He used to come and hold endless meetings from morning to morning, talking, planning, investigating, designing and creating the Nigeria of our dream. And it reached a point that some of us, people like me began to say, yes, we can build a Nigeria that would become Black Man’s Power of modern time. And we wanted to do that and we were ready to give it everything. And Chief Awolowo was ready for it. He was in his 70s but he was ready for it. And so, we went to work and we worked hard. We worked extremely hard. We put together the packages that would end up Nigeria to become the Black Man’s Power of modern time. I was at that point of my career and position; I was frequent to travelling, to give papers, to read papers at international conferences, attending intellectual conferences abroad about development of African historiography. And I used that very mightily to work for this new movement for Nigeria. When I went to attend a conference in Brazil, I would stay behind and look at how Brazilians were handling certain things. I went to the Philippine to attend a similar type of conference; I would stay behind and study how Filipino were handling areas of development. I went to many countries in the world doing that for the Movement. I wrote reports upon reports for the Movement. In the end, I wrote the manifesto of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). It was a great vision, great dream. Can we see it now? All of that have been eroded. There is nothing like that anymore. The resources are still there. But the human responses, the human attitudes have changed dramatically. And the question is, is it possible to put all that together again and make it a reality? I wish I could say yes. But, I can’t. I don’t think we can, anymore. I don’t think Nigeria can rise to the position of the kind of dream we aspired. An American wrote few months ago and he was writing seriously. Is it possible for a country that has dragged itself so far down as Nigeria has done to manage to push itself back again? Well, he said, nothing is impossible but I doubt that this can happen.

And despite of what the country needs to be conscious about, we need to recognise that breaking into different countries is not as a big disaster as people think it is. Yes, we are conservative human beings and we don’t want to lose what we have, but we need to ask ourselves, is it such a disaster? It is not such a disaster, seriously speaking. India started as one huge humongous country in Asia. But over time, five countries have come out of India – India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka; they were all one country. Indonesia came as a huge country spreading over large expanses of sea. And at the beginning, if anybody tried in any far-distant province began to show any sign of agitation towards separation, Indonesia mustered the army and went after them with a big bang and with a big hammer and so on. But over time, they also knew that there was no country that can sustain itself like that. And so, they gradually reconciled themselves to the idea that some people may go away. And so, a number of small countries have had their ways from Indonesia. It is not as a huge of human disaster as we think.

The Soviet Union, the largest country in the world and one of the two most powerful countries in the world, particularly controlled the government people were afraid of all over the world. I visited Soviet Union in 1982. I was a Nigerian Senator then. I was invited to the country and I was taking visits to various parts of what was then Soviet Union. I spent three or four days in Uzbekistan, which was then one of the republics in the Soviet Union. I spent three or four days in their capital city of Tashkent. I visited their old city of Samarkand and so on. And there was a huge feeling among the people, who liked to have a country of their own. But everybody was so scared about Moscow that they dared not mention it. You could feel it. If you were in private conversations and there was a Russian official around, you would shut up. That was 1982. And years later, the Soviet Union broke apart. And now there are 14 different countries out of the Soviet Union. So, what are we talking about? And they did it without war.

In the case of Yugoslavia, there was war, massive, irresponsible destruction of human lives. But it was a product of the fact that one of the ethnic groups, the Serbs, did not want the others to go away and thought that they could use the military to suppress them. It used the military and used it very viciously indeed. But in the end everyone of those people went away. And now, I believe there are eight countries from Yugoslavia, living their lives and prospering. So, there is no need for war. If they haven’t fought a war, and they have met and decided that they were going to break up into many countries, there would have been the same result that was achieved by fighting. So, they fought to achieve the result they could have achieved if they had not fought.

So, we need to look at it. God has made us prominent men among our people and we must look at such things. Do we need to fight to achieve a result? Is there any situation now of which the Federal Government can compel all of us to stay in Nigeria, using the Nigerian Armed Forces? I doubt it. I think the situation is different now. In 1967 when Biafra was declared, it moved powerfully against the gain of Nigerians still rejoicing about having Nigeria. And there was a great deal of determination to have Nigeria going. It was poorly timed. The timing was poor. That was why the Nigerians ganged up against the declaration. But today, nobody is going to gang up against anybody because everybody knows that there is nothing anybody is particularly gaining to gang against anybody for. So, that is it.

Sometime in the past, the government yanked off History as a subject from our school curriculum. But now, the government is returning the subject. As a renowned historian, what is your take on this development?

I think Nigeria reached a point about 1980 or so that we are going to make Nigeria mainstream, which means that all the ethnic groups would be discarded and all of us would be nothing but Nigerians. It is not possible. There is no country in the world where that ever happened. Large empires come, big empires come, combined many different nationalities. They always broke up in the end for the nationalities are always there, they never go away. So, the idea that we can discard the nationalities in order to build a mainstream Nigeria is a laughable folly.

A close friend of mine, Professor Yusuf Bala Usman, sat down under the auspices of the Centre for Democratic Research and Training in Abuja in 1999, 2000, 2001 and wrote some very powerful treatises in which he advocated that the solution to Nigeria’s problems is to disregard the existence of all the nationalities. And he said all these entities called ethnic nationalities are really no nationalities at all. He wrote that the Igbo did not recognise themselves as a nationality until very recently and many of the sub-groups that are still in the Igbo nation even don’t accept themselves as Igbo. He also wrote that the Yoruba are just combination of some small tribes like the Ekiti, Ijebu, Ijesa and so on. He said they are not nation at all. That the Urhobos, in his words, are just a congress of fragments from among the Ijaw, Igbo, Edo and so on and they do not deserve to be regarded as a nationality at all. So, he went on and on and on and came to the conclusion that, what are now called the nationalities today are products of imagination of politicians, who are looking for bases for their support. But it is not true. He was not telling the truth. He and I had worked together when we were younger. I was a young lecturer and he was also a young lecturer. I remember that I presented a paper in 1968, I believe, in the Conference of the Historical Society of Nigeria in which I have shown that there was a great deal of friendship between the Yoruba, the Hausa and the Nupe and so on, on a lot of trade, which is the truth. We were friends and we cannot cease but be friends whether Nigeria stays or does not stay. The forces of nature make us inevitably friends. We moved across the Niger, traded together and inter married. When the first European group entered Yoruba land in December 1825, and they travelled from Badagry northward to what is now Yewa to Oyo-Ile to yonder to the North to Hausa land like Sokoto and so on, their testimony was that there were Hausa trading communities throughout Yoruba land. Our Yoruba trading communities were also everywhere in Hausa land. And on the journey to the North, there were masses of Yoruba traders and masses of Hausa traders as well moving north or moving south together and so on. I presented that paper and he was very excited and we cultivated a little more to beef up the description of this ancient very old relationship between our peoples and so on. And at some point I added just not Yoruba and Nupe but also the Kanuri with whom the Yoruba had a lot of trade and a lot of relationship. So, when in 2001 I began to read his new historiography of the ethnic groups being fake, that they do not exist in reality, I couldn’t believe it. Yes, the ethnic groups do exist. And they are ancient ethnic groups. We have historical, archaeological and DNA evidence that many of the ethnic groups we have in Nigeria have been in existence many, many tens of thousands of years and have broken into many directions. But Yoruba have become the most urbanised people among all these ethnic groups. They are urbanised communities in big towns and cities and so on and so forth and creating a very superior kind of political cultures. There are kings, Obas and so on. The ethnic groups broke into various directions. The Hausa too had their own kingdom city-states but not as many as Yoruba. But they had too. The Kanuri, an ancient empire, had had diplomatic relation with the earliest Muslim civilisation in the east of Africa. And as such, they had relationship with the Arabs empires in the Mediterranean as far back as the middle-ages, and the earliest things ever written in Arabic were written by the Kanuri. Do you say those people don’t exist?! That they are just imagination of politicians? Forgive me, it is not true. So, back to your question, history is very important. We have to know history so as to know how to behave and how to handle the affairs of the people. We do need history.

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What advice can you give this generation toward making Nigeria a reality?

I don’t know about making Nigeria a reality. I think what I know is to make your life a reality and stop chasing shadows and work for your own reality because the shadows would not produce anything concrete.                                   

 The unity of a country is not an end itself. And the end should be suitable, sensible, peaceful, acceptance of us as one country. If we cannot do that by accepting ourselves as one country, it is better to ignore the calls for unity and so on and to sit down and do what is needful in the interest of the human beings involved. And, in Nigeria, we are not talking of a few human beings. We are talking of about two hundred million human beings. And in the interest of human beings in Nigeria, we need to sit down and sort out the question; do we want to be a country?

   Man is very conservative by nature. He doesn’t want to throw away what he already has in his hand. And that is all what has been keeping Nigeria together since. We must reach a point. You have to reach a point in the interest of people because this is not an elite thing. Government can be an elite institution, but the purpose of government is not elitist, it is for the people. If you reach a point and you found that what you are holding is not working and it is hurting people, and it is likely to keep hurting people, then you need to do something different. You should begin to seek something different. That is the way human beings behave.

In 1967 when Biafra was declared, it moved powerfully against the gain of Nigerians still rejoicing about having Nigeria. And there was a great deal of determination to have Nigeria going. It was poorly timed. The timing was poor. That was why the Nigerians ganged up against the declaration. But today, nobody is going to gang up against anybody because everybody knows that there is nothing anybody is particularly gaining to gang against anybody for. So, that is it.

There is no country in the world where that ever happened. Large empires come, big empires come, combined many different nationalities. They always broke up in the end for the nationalities are always there, they never go away. So, the idea that we can discard the nationalities in order to build a mainstream Nigeria is a laughable folly… History is very important. We have to know history so as to know how to behave and how to handle the affairs of the people. We do need history.