So what is wrong with Nigeria and why does she seem to be disintegrating? To answer this, we must consult nations in Europe first, we do so because, it was European nations that converged in Berlin in 1884 to decide upon and went ahead to create countries for African nations.
It is mostly in Africa that tribes were subjugated to European colonial powers and shaped by their divide-and-rule policies, wherein such policies were never intended to build up nations rather the linguistic and cultural were exploited to keep them entrenched in Africa. We need not overlook this point because we all know why these Europeans scrambled for Africa in the first place.
While in India, they applied similar divide-and-rule policies by tapping into the religious differences between Hindus and Muslims. However, the case of India was later resolved though not amicably as Hindus headed East while Muslims headed West to form Pakistan, thus the bottled religious intolerance was somewhat resolved.
Back in Europe, Switzerland remains a typical example of a country where religious and language boundaries do not overlap. The country after the civil war in 1848 began a transition to building a nation. The question in the minds of the Swiis was what to do with a space where the people spoke different languages, and in different religious affiliations.
Living in what they call Cantons, they stumbled upon how to live together by settling for Consociational Democracy, wherein the Cantons take turns administering the State. This system of government has yet to be replicated anywhere in the world; in Nigeria’s parlance, these people have oil in their heads.
While this novel political system originated in Switzerland, folks in Belgium are still grappling with what to do in a multi-linguistic country. When in 1831, Belgium became independent of the kingdom of the Netherlands, the new rulers declared French the official language to the consternation of Flemish speakers, who felt themselves being in an internal colony. Thus early nation-building attempts failed in Belgium because the language became heavily politicized.
Today the country of Belgium is close to breaking apart along the linguistic divide.
In the case of Romanov Russia, where most linguistic minorities also adhered to a different religion than the Russian-speaking and Russian Orthodox majority, the minorities were held in greater Russia mostly against their will. And thus, as soon as the empire fell apart twice, once after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, and under Gorbachev, the people were let loose.
The unity under the Soviet Social Republics has long been led to waste in “our very before” as Zebrudaya will put it. The minorities have now found their voices in their tribal enclaves. This is the natural thing to do.
As Professor Andreas Wimmer argued in his book; “Nation Building, Why Some Nations Come Together While Others Fall Apart”, that if individuals can converse with each other, in a shared language, culture, and religion, disagreements can easily be resolved and compromises negotiated.
This is in line with Morton Deutsch’s early theory of nation-building. He posited that linguistic and cultural divides tend to slow down the speed of political networks across a territory.
He continued that a uniform script, that is when newspapers, books, political pamphlets, and jingles in any media are in the same language, nation-building has a higher chance of success. Cast your mind back and interrogate, the different campaigns in the mosques in Nigeria, and the opinions of the sheiks and the Obas who speak to “their people” in the language they understand.
