25 Jul 2009 |
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On reading this title, you might be led to believe that I am one of those Nigerians who believe that (in the words of Yakubu Gowon) “to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done”. However, my proposal in this article could not be more different. I propose that rather than splitting Nigeria into three, four or five regions, it should be split into many, many more units instead.
In more detail, this is what I propose: * The smallest possible political unit should be determined. In other words, what is the minimum number of people that a country needs to be self-governing? What is the minimum number of people from which there will be a sufficient number of people with the various skills that the country needs to support itself? We know that a country needs more than one person to function; we also know that it doesn’t need to have a billion people. So this means that this number is somewhere between 1 and 1 billion. I would put the number at around 1 million people. * Nigeria should then be broken up into self-governing entities, each which has 1 million people.
Now you may ask, why break Nigeria up in this way? To answer this question, there are several advantages of having smaller political entities: * People relate more to their local immediate environment than they do to a larger, more distant one. This means that they are more emotionally invested over what happens in a smaller country as this will be more local to them, and they will be less willing to tolerate bad leadership; * The small size of the country also means that it is harder for bad leaders to do implement and execute bad policy and have it go unnoticed, since the spotlight is more focused on them; * A smaller country is less likely to be plagued by ethnic and religious tensions, since there will likely be a clearly dominant ethnic group whose culture will form the basis of the country’s laws. This also means that decisions affecting the country’s welfare can be taken based more on their actual benefits rather than with a view to placating various powerful ethnic and religious groups; and it also means that it is easier to reach consensus on national issues.
Now to the questions: Q. How would the nations function? A. They would be no different from any other small nation, with each in charge of its policy regarding foreign affairs, defence, internal security and the economy.
Q. But splitting Nigeria into hundreds of countries would make border control chaotic! It would mean that people would have to cross several borders to get from home to work. A. There need not be such rigorous border control for everyone. Several of the small nations could form a free movement zone, where if a person showed that they were a national of one of the nations, they could move freely within the zone. But again, the splitting of the nation need not follow the ‘minimum number of people’ formula where it is obvious that there would be issues; the nation could be split along city lines, so that each big city (along with its hinterland) could form a nation on its own.
Q. Splitting Nigeria into hundreds of countries would leave it open to attack from Benin. A. First of all, I doubt that Nigeria risks being attacked by its neighbours. But even if this was an issue, the various nations who saw this as an issue could form defence treaties with each other so that if one was attacked, the others would join in its defence. This would offer more flexibility to each nation in deciding which defence treaty to join, compared to the current situation where the Gboko nation is obliged to ‘join’ a defence treaty to defend the Egba nation against attack from Benin.
Q. What about the economy? Nigeria as it is currently constituted offers the advantage of a huge trading zone. A. Again, there is no reason why several small nations cannot form a free trade zone where no tariffs are charged. And again, it is up to each nation to decide which nations it wants to trade freely with; it may make more sense for it trade freely with some nations than others.
Q. This can never happen. It’s way too impractical. How do you see Nigeria breaking up into hundreds of nations? A. I agree that the path to this is not immediately obvious. But I have noted that events often have an unexpected way of unfolding. Note that the so-called Federal Government seems not to be very interested looking after its citizens, and is largely leaving them to resort to self-help to provide for themselves. Right now, this is very difficult, given the amount of money that needs to be raised to do this… but what if technology improves to the point where it becomes fairly trivial to set up your own infrastructure? What if people now begin to encourage their local or state governments to do that which was formerly seen as impossible without Federal Government money so that the Federal Government becomes irrelevant? Who knows…
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