By ’Toye Olorode
THANKS so very much, Comrade Femi Aborisade, for your views in “Secession’ll not solve Nigeria’s problems” in New Telegraph!
There are always two segments of Nigeria’s ruling class in this unending debate on whether Nigeria should, or will, break up. There’s always the segment in power which supervises the looting and the auctioning of Nigeria and which, while in power, brands itself “patriotic” and the segment, contesting power of looting with it, “unpatriotic.”
If they must keep cheating Nigerians, they must keep them divided! Even inside homogeneous ethnic groups, the same conditions subsist. Which of these ethnic warlords is defending the right to work and to decent wages, protesting the escalation of poverty. Which of them is raising objections to the auctioning of public assets to members of the ruling class or arbitrary increases of electricity tariffs or petrol price?
All Nigerians who have been, even marginally, conscious in the last twenty years or so, know that there are no political or ideological boundaries between these two segments. Buhari knows this; Obasanjo and Danjuma know; Afenifere, Ohanaeze, and Arewa Consultative Forum, all know. Various segments of the Nigerian middle class that aid the looting class also know! That’s also why the political parties which are largely ethnic coalitions are organisations for trading, accumulation, and negotiations.
If they must keep cheating Nigerians, they must keep them divided! Even inside homogeneous ethnic groups, the same conditions subsist. Which of these ethnic warlords is defending the right to work and to decent wages, protesting the escalation of poverty?
Which of them is raising objections to the auctioning of public assets to members of the ruling class or arbitrary increases of electricity tariffs or petrol price?
Which ethnic group owns the GRA’s in Nigeria’s state capitals, the massive property in Abuja, Ikoyi, Banana Island, the banks, the PFAs, the massive private agricultural lands that have reduced rural people to labourers on their own land?
In the circumstance, this ballyhoo will be maintained since the various factions of the bourgeoisie started jostling for “accumulation of power” in the mid-1940s.
For the avoidance of any doubts, what we see inside countries is also what inequalities, produced by the triumphs of capitalist exploitation and neo-liberal accumulation around the world, have produced globally – escalation of racism and right-wing nationalism.
Only the unity of the oppressed, poor, and marginalised can resolve this crisis. A resolution rigged on the foundations of racist, ethnic or confessional ideologies simply manipulates the oppressed, prolongs the suffering of the victims and postpones the evil days!
A brief opinion by Prof Olorode, as a snap commentary on the trending issues of restructuring of Nigeria.
