The troubling questions about Nigeria came with the formation of Nigeria in 1914 by British agent Lord Lugard. British trading concerns in the coastal and hinterland regions of what now constitute Nigeria started with commercial, scientific, religious/philanthropic ventures.
By 1830s, British trader, William George Tubman Goldie had organized all British firms into a combine and chartered it as Royal Niger Company. This company was granted control over both the coastal and hider land of Niger Delta covering present South-South, South-East, North-Central zones but excluding South-West and Lagos colony which since 1861, had been administered under different arrangement.
However, due to the scramble for Africa and the resolution of the Berlin Conference of 1885, Britain took direct control of areas under Royal Niger Company in 1900 and paid off the company.
After Royal Niger Company was paid off and Niger Coast and hinterland areas ceded to Britain, British government deployed Captain Lugard (erstwhile soldier of fortune hired by Royal Niger Company as its security officer) to administer the area. On assuming office, Lugard combined all the areas after carrying out blistering war and pacification of the areas including the conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate. He amalgamated the areas previously administered as protectorates and colony into a single country called Nigeria in 1914. Then he took a political and constitutional policy that altered the fate of Nigeria.
After the conquest of Sokoto Caliphate, Lugard saw the caliphate’s administrative system and liked it. He grafted it and imposed on all the other communities now constituted under Nigerian State. History adjudged Lugard’s introduction of Indirect Rule over Nigeria as conquering and subjugation of all these communities outside the Sokoto Caliphate under the rulership of the Sokoto Caliphate.
The first person to raise alarm over this abnormality was Sir Hugh Clifford who succeeded Lord Lugard in 1919. Sir Clifford was appalled by this ruling scheme that he condemned it as amounting to levelling down Southern Nigeria and subjecting it under the control of Northern Nigeria. He made a proposal for a change of the system of Indirect Rule to British government which rebuked him for attacking a system already approved by the British Crown and directed him to implement it as designed.
It was at the height of military autocratic rule spanning the period 1966 to 1999, of course discounting the brief civil rule interregnum under Alhaji Shehu Shagari that the existential questions underlining and troubling the Nigerian State and society started manifesting in manifold ways.
And these troubling existential questions became quite obvious to Nigerian polity as the learned and the unlearned, the knowledgeable and the ignorant, the rich and the poor became affected and agitated. And people started raising questions about these troubling questions in popular news media especially in newspapers and news magazines. But as the din of these questions were getting louder in Nigeria’s public space so also the military rulers pretended they did not know or hear about the agitation. At least one of the most intelligent, pragmatic and effectual military rulers in Nigerian history, General Ibrahim Babangida declared in 1989 or thereabout that he does not understand what people mean by national question? But what are these existential, sometimes termed ‘national’, questions?
It is difficult to define these questions as acknowledged by General Babangida. But it is better and easier to describe the situation rather than offer it accurate epistemological definition. After the troubles of 1964 to 1967 when a new faction of the ruling elite comprising soldiers and civilians seized the Nigerian State and its political community by violently overthrowing the 1963 Constitution and replacing it with its own basic law called the Nigerian Constitution (Suspension and Modifications) Decree, No. 1 of 1966 and when its provisions were challenged in the defunct Western State of Nigeria which is now the six states of the South-West zone in the case of Lakanmi v. Attorney-General of Western State and the Supreme Court headed by Adetokumbo Ademola, CJN gave judgement in favour of Mr. Lakanmi.
The Supreme Court in that locus classicus held that the seizure of citizen Lakanmi’s property without due process by the military governor of defunct Western State in pursuance of the Federal Military Government anti-corruption war was illegal, unconstitutional, null and void as the Edict of the then Western State and the decrees of the then Federal Military Government were not superior to the unsuspended provisions of the 1963 Constitution.
The Supreme Court hinged its decision on the fact that the Nzeogwu coup of 15th January, 1966 failed consequent upon which the then Federal Executive Council headed by the Minister of Defence, Mallam Ribadu, being the most senior minister and the National Assembly under the leadership of Chief Nwafor Orizu who was also acting President/ president of the senate duly convened a meeting of these organs and resolved to hand over power to the military institution for the stabilization of the state and restoration of law and order in Nigeria.
To the Supreme Court, the handover to the military under the leadership of Ironsi and the subsequent takeover of government by General Yakubu Gowon pursuant to Murtala Mohammed’s July 29, 1966 coup were all under the same legal thread or strand connecting the nexus of a constitutional process under the 1963 Constitution. To the military junta now headed by General Gowon, this piece of judicial decision was a heresy which must not only be allowed to stand but would be subjected to the most callous application of naked, crude and uncultured power.
What followed next by way of rejection of the judgement was abrupt promulgation of a decree called the Constitution (Federal Military Government, Supremacy and Enforcement of Powers, etc.) Decree, No. 28, 1970. From then, the state and government elevated itself above the law and nobody or any other institutions or even the society has the power to question the actions or inactions of Nigerian State and government.
Nigerian State with its government became law unto itself and operate under no canopy of law as it is law itself because the Supreme Organ of Nigerian State, the Supreme Military Council or its mutations became a composite-whole, consisting of the Legislative, Executive and Judicial, all rolled into one body. From then on, Nigeria was transformed into untrammelled autocracy spoken against and warned of by Sir Clifford when he took over from Lugard in 1919.
This robbery/theft of Nigerian state has been observed and criticized by no less a person than Wole Soyinka in his autobiography, “You Must Set Forth at Dawn” where he, after his release from prison in 1969 into a society radical different from the one he had lived in before his imprisonment, had bemoaned the fact that Nigerians were wallowing under slavery imposed on them by the military/ civilian ruling clique but unfortunately were celebrating freedom supposedly gotten for them by the defeat of Biafra.
The other notable person who observed this incongruous situation was a member of the ruling clique, General Mohammed Chris Ali who in his book, The Federal Republic of Nigerian Army (The Siege of a Nation), simply reduced the problem as the theft of a state and its conversion as personal estate by that class of rulers from then to date.
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