A JOURNEY THROUGH THE LAST DAYS OF NIGERIA! - BY YINKA ODUMAKIN (A Must Read)

Brian Hall spent the spring and summer of 1991 traveling through Yugoslavia, even as the nation was crumbling in his footsteps. Having arrived a week after the catalytic May 2 massacre at Borovo Selo, he watched as political solutions were abandoned with dizzying speed, and as Yugoslavia’s various ethnicities, which had managed to reach a point of tolerant coexistence, tipped into the violence of civil war.


Hall, one of the last foreigners to travel unhindered through the region, has captured the voices of both the prominent and the unknown, from Serbian demagogue Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic to a wide variety of everyday Serbs, Croats, and Muslims: “real people, likeable people,” as he says, who have been pushed by rumor and propaganda into carrying out one of the most intense and brutal ethnic conflicts in world history. At the same time, he provides the indispensable historical background, showing how the country called Yugoslavia was cobbled together after World War I, tracing the “ethnic cleansing” practices that have marked the area for centuries, and explaining why every attempt at political compromise has met with such suspicion and resistance.


The output of his journey was “The Impossible Country :A Journey Through The Last Days Of Yugoslavia”.A year after Hall’s publication of his book the country that never should have been ceased to be.


As we inch closer to the most divisive election in the history of Nigeria,one can only pray that any Hall who is doing our own version of “The Impossible Country” would find the manuscript of being no use when we are done with this season.But the signs are troubling as the war drums are sounding disturbingly.


From Ango Abdullahi and his northern elders to Tompolo and fellow ex-militants of the Niger Delta,we may just be in the last days of this acrimonious empire if the results of the 2015 presidential elections did not go their ways.
Yet in our usual state of denial we all continue to pretend we are going for elections when all appearances indicate that we are heading for war.This would have been needless if we he had listened to Prophet Obafemi Awolowo.


The sage on June 12,1967 from CELL DUP2,CAlABAR PRISON signed off his book “Thoughts On The Nigerian Constitution” where he warned on us about the juncture where our vehicle of nationhood has broken down.Awo wrote on page 56 of the book


“Besides,it is not difficult to forecast that the work of government in Nigeria under a unitary constitution is bound to become unduly complex,inextricably tangled,extremely unwieldy and wasteful,and productive of disunity and discontent amongst the people.Unless we have veritable supermen at the helm of affairs,the administrative machinery would eventually disintegrate and break down under the crushing weight of ‘bureaucratic centralism ‘“.


That is where we have worked ourselves to as result of structural defects.All that is about to set the country on conflagration is the internecine battle for political power to have economic control.What the power mongers would not openly admit is that there 92 oil blocks whose licensed are due for renewal this year and that is the call of whoever wins on February 14.It is D or D!


Oil has been made to assume this dimension in our lives because we have failed to apply ourselves as a people due to centralization.I remember Fuji act,General Kollington Ayinla singing at the Onikan Stadium in Lagos during the presentation of Yotruba Agenda thus: eepo o,epo o ma ni pa wa,eepo o epo o ma ni pa wa o(Let oil not kill us).


Ten years down the line ,oil is about to kill Nigeria.Yet we had a way out of this at the 2014 National Conference.The geological map of Nigeria showed that there is no state in Nigeria that does not have rich mineral deposits that have remain largely untapped .The conference recommended a new constitutional spirit that allows everybody to go under their soil to bring stuff out and get busy with developmental strides.Such a countrywide prosperous people would be concerned more with positive competition in the fields of progress rather than having time for “rig and roast” shenanigans of political entrepreneurs who would not mind burying millions of people to satisfy their greed.


Returning Nigeria to a proper federalism is our route away from Yugoslavia!

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About Unknown

Deji Sadiq, a.k.a DEJI OF LAGOS is a LASU trained Economist turned freelance journalist, a Blogger, an information strategist, a public affairs analyst and a committed activist with a passion for equal opportunities.