NIGERIA will continue to remain as one indivisible entity only if efforts are made to find out all the foundational wrongs in the country's amalgamation and correct the anomalies, Governor Abiola Ajimobi of Oyo State has said.
Speaking at the 20th memorial of the death of a renowned economist, Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade, at the Development Policy Centre (DPC) in Ibadan, Ajimobi said that accelerating development and building a real nation from the multiplicity of ethnic groups and nationalities that make up Nigeria have been the major challenges that successive governments have avoided.
According to him, they prefer instead the pretence that the country has already arrived at its destination, but "political development and power calculation have further balkanized the country and resulted in moving the country farther away from addressing the problems of national unity, correcting subsisting historical injustices and ameliorating the lopsidedness of the federation".
Ajimobi, who spoke on the topic, "Nigeria's Amalgamation and National Development," expressed support for the celebration of the centenary of the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates.
However, he preferred it be done with sober reflection and intellectual brainstorming on how to forge a way forward from the historical wrongs of soldering together two disparate protectorates. He added: "The greatest calamity would be that we go back to our historical vomit after the centenary celebrations, with no lesson learnt and no strategic move made to move forward as a better nation.
"Though it may not be absolutely right to put all the blame for the nation's dismal economic performance and backwardness squarely and solely on the amalgamation, it is, however, impossible not to argue that today's problems of disunity, slow development and contemporary backwardness cannot be traced to this unholy marriage of convenience between the Northern and Southern Nigeria.
"Almost 100 years after this marriage, Nigeria remains till date a badly fractured country being held together by a combination of force and deceit."
Nevertheless, he noted that there was nothing wrong in bringing two strange bedfellows together to become one as long as reasons and opportunities abound for them to forge a common sense of direction.
The governor expressed regrets that the nation's development was being hampered daily by youth unemployment and adult under-employment, general insecurity, decaying physical infrastructure, unbridled elite corruption and ostentation and pervasive hopelessness in a country so well endowed, yet so cursed by lack of visionary leadership.
However, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan (UI), Prof. Tekena Tamuno, was optimistic that Nigeria would overcome all its socio-political and economic challenges.
In his remarks, he urged those predicting the disintegration of the country to channel their efforts towards other productive ventures, even as he called for more freedom of expression and the need to consult Nigerians before the new constitution being worked on by the National Assembly is put in place.
