For far too long, Nigeria’s founding compact has been broken, and there’s no sincere person that will make any bones about it. As it stands, the only honest path left is a peaceful, orderly partition [or rather repartitioning/division according to its major geopolitical regions/major ethnic nationalities and the minorities contiguous to each], and not another round of “restructuring” that will continue to maroon disparate peoples inside a forced union.
Nigeria was built on an unwritten tripod of rotational power: The three major ethnicities (Igbo/East, Hausa-Fulani/North, Yoruba/West) and the minorities contiguous to each. However, save for a brief period after Independence, the North, through successive military administrations insensitively monopolized power. And that’s how the cookie began to crumble.
By hindsight, the Northern monopoly of power appeared not to be by accident but by some pre-Independence secret plot that was merely waiting for the right opportunity to hatch. So, in some sense, the East and West were too trusting or were hoodwinked. Some will say, naive. But not anymore.
However, this pattern of exclusion shifted a little under the 1999 civilian zoning that has produced mostly Presidents from the North and West, but never produced an Igbo president, even as President Jonathan (from the old East) emerged by providence, manifested through the political foresight of President Obasanjo.
Nonetheless, lopsided state creations left the Southeast with five states while the Northwest has seven and the others, six. This directly affects seats for the Senate, House of Representatives, local government numbers, and federal allocations to which the Southeast and the contiguous Igbo lands (in SouthSouth) contribute a chunk far greater than all the three zones in the North combined.
Boundary adjustments and brazen gerrymandering carved ancestral Igbo territories, particularly oil-bearing areas, into non-Igbo states, followed by an enormous federal pressure on natives to question their Igbo identity, or even to outrightly deny it. And the post-war “abandoned property” measures made matters worse for the Igbo, materially and psychologically. You can add the persistent under-representation in strategic federal appointments and capital projects arrayed against Southeast since 1970.
To be sure, all these did not begin in 1966, or its aftermaths. Pre-independence violence against the Igbo in the North (Jos 1945, Kano 1953) already showed the fragility of one Nigeria. The 1966 pogroms and the civil war that followed destroyed any remaining trust for vast majorities of the East, reinforcing the sense that the original compact has been breached to a point of no return.
Nonetheless, in a desperate search for a panacea, some interests resorted to suggestions of some restructuring that will preserve one Nigeria, but this has been on the table for so long that it has become hackneyed and boring, especially given the self-evident lack of sincerity and the political will to carry it through.
Conferences, zoning formulas, and federal character clauses have not corrected the incentives created by the post-war state structure and fiscal centralization and injustice. For a group that experienced mass killings, war-time starvation, property losses, and subsequent political marginalization, incremental internal reforms lack credibility.
In the midst of this never-ending drift, Nigeria must borrow from other multi-ethnic states which chose orderly separation when foundational principles failed, or became counterproductive by effluxion of time.
Czechoslovakia’s 1993 Velvet Divorce divided the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia through negotiation, with no war and subsequent prosperity inside the EU.
The Soviet Union’s 1991 dissolution produced fifteen successor states largely by elite agreement rather than by war. Serbia and Montenegro separated peacefully in 2006. These cases show that clear procedures, asset division, minority protections, and political will can produce stable outcomes that birth new nations out of the old.
It has therefore become more urgent for Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities to convene a sovereign process to decide how many new countries will be carved out and on what terms. In plain terms, let there be a “referendum”.
Possible configurations could include an Eastern/Biafran entity, one or more Northern entities, a Yoruba West, and autonomous minority homelands in the non-Igbo Niger Delta and non-muslim Middle Belt. Resources, citizenship, property, and movement would be settled by treaty rather than by force or some fiat.
Let it be clear that this is not only about Biafra. It is also the most and only realistic path to a permanent solution for the other demands pulling at the fabric of the federation, including particularly the surging religious terrorism in the North, which is rooted in local ideological, governance, socio-economic differences, and political control. In other words, the North is also embroiled in an agitation without calling it by its name.
There’s no gainsaying that the risk of delay is clear. Yugoslavia’s contested breakup produced wars, ethnic cleansing, and roughly 140,000 deaths because elites and the military could not agree on orderly secession. Forced unity under deep grievance plus armed non-state actors do not guarantee stability; it often multiplies the violence when the center finally collapses.
Anybody timid about the foregoing, just because of the oncoming 2027 general elections, should hear this: Holding the elections under the present constitutional and fiscal arrangements simply entrenches the status quo. The next best thing therefore, is for the National Assembly to enact a special Act postponing the elections by six months and extending the tenures of the President, Vice-President, Governors, Deputy Governors, and all federal and state legislators by the same period.
This temporary, extraordinary measure would create space for a properly constituted national conference, or a series of referenda to determine the future political maps, after which founding elections of any successor states could proceed under the new arrangements.
For avoidance of doubt, the alternative is not permanent unity. It is an increasingly probable, and far more costly, violent or chaotic disintegration. The peoples (or part thereof) who constitute Nigeria should be allowed to decide, soon and peacefully, how many new countries should emerge from the present federation.
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