Daily Independent Online.
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Wednesday, July 07, 2004.
Settlership: A challenge to the Nigerian State
By Mike Ikhariale
[email protected]
There is the overwhelming evidence that the idea of
Nigeria is still quite distant and somehow alien to most people despite their
being “trapped” within its jurisdiction. They continue to identity
themselves as “indigenes” and “subjects” of their
respective tribes and ethnic nationalities while others are regarded as
intruding aliens or settlers. The position of our Constitution (until 1999) was
that every Nigerian has the status of a citizen and that remains valid wherever
he finds himself within the territory of Nigeria. That simple juridical
postulate has proved to be too difficult for our people to accept, governments
and individuals alike, and has contributed in no small measure to the ruination
of the Nigerian Dream upon which the federal republic was built, namely, unity
in diversity. Rather than “unity and faith” as the original motto
of the nation prescribed, we are growing apart in “disunity and
despair” as we now wear the divisive labels of “aliens” and
“settlers”, depending on where we find ourselves in the country.
It is either the colonial administration that turned
over sovereignty to the emergent Nigerian State in 1960 could not eliminate the
strong affinities that subsists between the colonialised people and their
hitherto existing pre-colonial ethnic nationalities or that the nationalists that
took over power from them mischievously repudiated the sovereignty of the new
state and reverted to their ancestral nationalism in their myopic hope of
carving out monopolistic empires for themselves from their various tribal
cocoons.
The truth however is that both suppositions cannot be
valid in the face of the new political realities that gave meaning and
signification to the idea of Nigeria as a sovereign entity. It is a proposition
too plain to be contested that when individuals get their citizenship from the
same source, none can claim superiority over the others. Illusion aside, the
only legitimate linkage between a Nigerian and the state is the status of
citizenship. Unless we say that the concept of Nigeria has gone legally otiose
and out of relevance, then, there is no other valid classification that can be
made about any Nigerian citizen without running the risk of defamation, more
so, when it is a fact that the highest honour that the state can bestow on any
national is that of citizenship. That
is why the President is often described as the “first citizen”. How
come that some people have been making some arcane distinction between
themselves and other Nigerians as “indigenes” and
“settlers”, respectively?
In the good old days Nigerians moved far and wide to
trade and school freely. While people belonged to ethnic groups for cultural
and sectarian renewal, they saw themselves first and foremost as Nigerians,
able to settle anywhere they liked. But today, not to belong to one ethnic
group or the other is to open oneself to severe vulnerability within the
society as the official mechanisms for citizens’ protection have all
broken down. Notably, the ethnic card has been very helpful for mediocres in
government who shamelessly play it to obtain what ordinarily was beyond their
ability and the result of that is the progressive devaluation in the quality of
services from government. The same can be said about the nation’s
educational sector where the quota system and allocation of spaces along nepotistic
ethnic lines, euphemistically called federal character, have killed merit
thereby leading to a generation of mediocres.
The 1999 Constitution which was foisted on the nation
by the retreating military seems to have added additional impetus to the settler/indigene
nonsense by making it constitutionally mandatory for certain positions to be
filled in accordance with the appointee’s indigeneship. This is a
veritable recipe for national catastrophe and what is happening now is merely
the harbinger of greater evil ahead. It should have been anticipated that
good-for-nothing political scavengers would latch on this indigeneship clause
to foment trouble if only to keep others from the national cake. We must here
congratulate Governor Tinubu of Lagos State who bravely broke out of this
myopic bondage by hiring people according to their competences once they are
Lagos residents, instead of their ethnicity.
I recall that when the President said recently that
anyone who cannot die for Nigeria is not fit to be a Nigerian many people
derided him. But I think he is quite right. The only missing element in the
equation is that Nigeria does not seem to be capable of avenging the death of
its martyrs simply because the state itself is in trouble. The prevalent of the
indigene/ settler dichotomy is one of the unmistakable symptoms of a failing
state.
The strength of Nigeria ought to be in her diversity.
Many nations that had played the racial cards paid dearly for it and had wisely
abandoned the divisive ideology. America has since discovered that it became a
better nation since it embraced cultural diversity and today, the man who
argued that a person should never be judged according to his race but his
personal qualities, Martin Luther King, is a national hero. Same with Nelson
Mandela who transformed apartheid South Africa into the “rainbow
nation” that it has become today. Unfortunately for Nigeria, we continue
to have tribal bigots as political leaders who in turn fuel ethnicity.
Why did the military introduce divisive criteria as
bases for disbursing public positions and recklessly ventured into sectarian
indiscretion like joining the Islamic OIC, thereby undermining the secular
nature of Nigeria? My explanation is they were naively unable to appreciate the
philosophy under which the Nigerian state was brought into being. It also
served their "divide and rule" stratagem because they were usurpers
of power. Even now it still only those with strong military ties that are in
power. So, instead of strengthening the federation by inclusive polices, they
have embarked on a misguided unitarism that actually promote divisions and
mutual hatred amongst the various peoples of Nigeria. Another explanation is
that the idea of “indigenes” and “settlers” in postcolonial
Nigeria is a painful reflection of the fact that the Nigerian state is yet to
gain subjective acceptance before the people and that the vacuum is being
filled by the various pre-colonial tendencies as well as the failure of
contemporary leadership to prove its relevance.
It is a shame that after forty years of nationhood,
we are still debating who and who is a Nigerian and what rights do they have.
For a country that fought a civil war to preserve its corporate existence, such
ideas ought to be by themselves treasonable, but when the government and its
officials continue to allocate resources on the basis of ethnicity, religion
and other petty considerations, then, it is good time to question the viability
of Nigerian state.
As a federation, Nigeria is broken into states and
citizens are at liberty to live in any of them without any sense of
inferiority. Accordingly, residents of a particular state may claim certain
privileges that are directly derivable from their higher responsibilities of
sustaining that state over non-residents but such privileges must not be
allowed to derogate from the fundamental rights that are constitutionally
attributable to all Nigerians irrespective of where they come from. The idea of
“state of origin” or “indigeneship” as official
classifications is clearly counterproductive, if not discriminatory. We should
rather be talking about “state of residence” instead of
“state of origin” because we may never know the origin of our
origins since the whole of humanity has been proved to be of a common source.
The present constitution is fundamentally flawed as an
instrument for nation building and until it is replaced by a more forward
looking one, our attitude to the Nigerian Project may never be positive. The
case for a Sovereign National Conference thus speaks for itself and it is only
a government that is playing the ostrich that would refuse or postpone it. The
dichotomy of settlers/indigene is a challenge to the Nigerian state and the
earlier we tackle it the better all.
