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, 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.
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.
Lopsided state creations have 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
In Nigeria, possible configurations could, through referendum produce 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.
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 that are pulling at the fabric of the federation, including particularly the surging religious terrorism in the North.
There’s no gainsaying that the risk of delay is clear. Yugoslavia’s contested breakup produced wars, and ethnic cleansing, because elites and the military could not agree on orderly secession.
Anybody timid about the foregoing, just because of the 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 all elected official 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.
