*Paper delivered during the 7th yearly lecture of Freedom Online www.freedomonline.com.ng on Thursday September 3 at Sheraton Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos.
2027 is already fraught, ominous with grim ugly uncertainties. But in the usual Nigerian paradigm, the most crucial election will be won, disputed perhaps more fiercely than ever before. Someone will eventually triumph and we will wobble through however with monumental structural challenges.
But I do not want to be detained by 2027 alone. But at once I do not dismiss it as another election cycle. This one is crucial to national survival.
But to comprehend the hurdles of the moment and gain resolute clarity, these four indices: 2027 Elections Economy, Security and Nigeria’s future must be pivoted and subsumed in a more comprehensive enquiry: Is Nigeria a nation state in the classical sense?
The answer is no. And we all know it or pretend not to acknowledge the obvious.
What then is a nation -state? It is important to understand this question to sift through the Nigerian muddle and invariably process a gainful enlightenment.
In the purity of the Athenian testimony which has become the guiding corpus of national identification, a nation is about shared dreams. It is about common beginnings and shared values. It is about the collective ideals and the guiding principles everyone preserves and treasures. These are the ingredients that make Singapore thrive, and equally all other successful democracies.
But here in this orbit. We are disparate distinct ethnic groups forced into an imbalanced, inequitable union.
We do not have agreed destiny or unifying vision of a common destination. We are stripped of the necessary commonality of national journey without which a nation cannot grow or long endure.
We are without the instinctive cohesive verities that transformed a dirt poor, small island on the Malay Peninsula in the Southeast Asiatic waters in 1965 to a First World nation in 2026.
The famed Lee Kwan Yu was not a magician. His genius was in a principled fixity of selfless patriotism. The founder of Singapore and his lieutenants though were of disparate ethnic groups, they mastered discipline, selflessness and a treasured devotion to the national union.
They abhorred corruption. Sanctioned anyone regardless of position or status who would pollute the state.
They feverishly invested in education, healthcare, roads, various developmental infrastructures and of course a well paid civil service that had no business to steal from the commonwealth.
To build a nation-state you must also deliberately cultivate the unifying national standard of putting the goodness of the nation first before anything else. It must be above tribe, above filial relations or any other secretive withdrawal that may reduce national signification.
But we are addicted to the ethnic laager. We are halted by provincial preserves and that destructive narrowness of purpose which perceives the state itself as a treasure hunt, wherein we all hurry to the center in a great, greedy stampede to take our own share of the spoil before it is too late.
With this innate psychological untidiness, we have reduced the state itself to an orphan; unloved, unwanted, treated with mechanical isolation, with disdain, cultivated in mercenary largeness.
We rush to the centre without emotional guidance, without the restrictiveness of a moral compass but merely to take something back home.
We all now reside in this grim alienation of the national identity despite our false preachment.
The Correctives: The parochial ethnic based culture must be discarded for a superior moral armor of national identification.
Merit must replace nepotism
Governance must be perceived as a privileged national assignment anchored on selflessness and deliberate sacrifice for the general good.
Everyone must be seen to be equal before the law. An inequitable state provokes lawlessness and insecurity.
The institutional building blocks of nationhood must not only be seen to be independent in theory, they must be independent in practice.
Those who trample on the agreed national norms must be sanctioned without exception. When the rich and the powerful are treated differently from the poor, the society becomes inequitable and will invariably diminish and wither, tumbling into the unknown abyss.
The Nigerian Union will only endure when the disparate groups are aligned in regional autonomy which preserves regional values and local leitmotif, allowing every region to grow at its own pace, with all the necessary guardrails of sectional autonomy and independence.
With a parity of resource control, without the intrusive monolith of an omnipresent center, acrimony will be lessened, the once unitary center will disappear, weakened , unattractive as everyone graduates to the local familiar orbit.
The most conclusive aspect of a failed or failing society is always the delusional triumphant paces of power that perceives itself in some eternal luster, scoffing at renewal, indifferent to the verities of nature.
Whereas this is definitely not a cure-all solution. There is none. It is a road to peaceful accommodation and ultimate national redemption, but only if we are conscionable enough to steer away from the dark omens hovering above us all.
*Prince Uthman Ademilade Shodipe-Dosunmu is the Apesin Ola Eyo Oba Alakete Ekun.
