In this precis, I employ three frames for summarizing the lecture and discussions, which were very wide-ranging. These are: the key questions posed to guide the discussion; the issues analysed; and the application of Chief Awolowo’s interventions to these questions and issuesw. At the core of all these is the intense concern for Nigeria’s current trajectory and what the future portends.
The guest speaker articulated “Whither Nigeria?” as the question of how staying together as a country can be realized. This overarching question he operationalized to encompass three particular concerns: Where are we as a country? Where are we going? And, Where should we be going?
I suggest that these three questions impel three additional ones if the discourse would be productive of an intervention: Are Nigerians agreed on where we should be going? How should we get there? And, How do we manage these two processes of first, finding the common ground of our aspirations, and secondly, of agreeing on the means for achieving those aims?
Given the comprehensive nature of the discussions, it would be impossible to mention all the themes that emerged from the dialogue. The issues addressed ranged widely from the Boko Haram insurgency to Biafra separatism, Yoruba irredentism, the “Fulani upsurge” and the “scramble for Nigeria” to analysis of successive government efforts at resolving these, and so much more.
I summarise these here in form of certain key contentions or tensions. These dialogic dualisms posed Nigeria’s existential contentions as: structural versus process problems; institutions versus state leadership; ethnicity versus governance deficits; security versus fear; the dispersion and balance of terror versus state monopoly of the use of force; traditionalism and obsolescence versus modernity and progress; and historical wrongs versus future prospects. I suggest that while all these issues are indeed valid subjects of interrogation and debate, there is a sense in which such binary analysis elides the considerable areas of existing linkages and intercourse among these ideas which would be useful for framing solutions.
III. Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Legacies as Solution
Permeating the entire discussion was constant recourse to the legacy ideas, policies and philosophies of Chief Obafemi Awolowo as resounding and redolent into the present time and for the foreseeable future. In particular:
*Education for all Nigerians
*Unity, which must not be taken for granted, but deliberately and assiduously worked for
*Federalism—pragmatic, workable, and developmental federalism, as the best expression of our diversity and the best hope for our progress
*Constitutional re-engineering to achieve the common aims and aspirations of Nigerian peoples as the nation evolves
Closing:
Chief Awolowo’s sage observation, back in 1947, remains as true now as they were then, that: “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no “Nigerians” in the same sense as there are ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ or ‘French’. The word Nigeria is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who do not.” Our shared history in the past century has given Nigeria much more in common than boundaries, certainly, but truer remains the fact that a “nation” has not emerged. This calls for constant attention to constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing , and—to use a very Nigerian political concept—restructuring the “imagined community” of Nigerian nationhood in order to reach the proverbial promised land.
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