Nigerias road network is about 195,000 km road – 32,000 km federal roads, 31,000km state roads and 132,000 km are local government roads. Only about 60,000km are paved.
Basically, only state and federal roads are paved, so over 80% of Nigerians live on bad roads. In every city across Nigeria, once you turn off the paved state roads, you turn into a rough road leading to your house.
In the current top down unitary constitution that local governments are starve of funds, no matter who becomes president, no matter how intelligent, judicious and hardworking, his efforts can never be felt by the masses.
The same thing applies to the police whereby they are controlled from Abuja without local considerations, therefore are alienated from the local communities.
Local governments are normally in charge of not only roads, but other social services like fire brigade, schools, hospitals, refuse collection, security etc so until Nigeria is restructured we can never progress. Currently we are operating a unitary system preferred by both Western and Fulani colonizers. It makes it easier to exploit the masses from the center.
If our Western colonizers need our resources, they just pass the instructions to their puppets in Abuja, who will override local concerns and benefits. This is institutional slavery whereby the foreman is the Abuja central government. To correct this unfair system, we came together in 2014 Confab and deliberated on what would be the better alternative. While Yorubas showed a preference for a regional arrangement, other South and Middlebelt regions rightly believed that states should be the federating units. It was believed that regions will lead to breakup.
Taking away ethnic considerations, the best management approach is a bottoms up approach, whereby power is devolved to the lowest level of governance. Those closest to the resources and culture should be in control of their management. The USA and China models empowers their local governments in order to increase production. It was agreed at the Confab that out of their own free will Nigerian states can decide to come together to form a region, but not enforced constitutionally.
If states are in the middle of local and federal governments, whereby the local governments manage resources, states aggregate the income, and federal is just regulatory and advisory, corruption will be greatly reduced. The federal government will ensure states transparency in income declaration, for its own share of about 30%, which will help the local governments with the true accounts and their own share.
I digress. Some separatists will argue let’s just break up, but they are only time wasters. If we breakup we will go back 60yrs from a decentralized efficient system. This is because it will take decades to agree to borders, during which the new country will need to be centralized to build the army and other structures. It is only after the nation is fashioned for several decades that it will reach the point whereby constituents can start demanding for fair representation.
So we must insist on restructuring away from institutional slavery and it’s instruments of oppression. The army and police at present are occupation armies that exert institutional violence on the masses in order to make us conform to demands of our unjust exploitation.
Though restructuring according to Confab is a best management practice, it has ethnic colorations because our enslavement is rooted in cultural imperialism. We must look at the politics from a civilizational perspective and not tribal. At the negotiation table of Nigeria, we have European Christian civilization, our external colonizers, and the Afroasiatic civilization our internal colonizers. Therefore the only way we can effectively challenge the status quo is for the South and Middlebelt peoples to understand they belong to the Original African civilization which they must organize into a powerbase.
This is easier said than done because the Eurasian and Afroasian cultural imperialist attacked and divided our civilization institutionally and intellectually. At the very beginning of Nigeria, the British broke away a huge chunk of Original African civilization known as Middlebelt and added it to the Northern Caliphate of Afroasians.
Then in 1935, they broke the Southern protectorate into two, East and West regions, despite smaller than the Northern protectorate. This was to cause division between Yorubas and Igbos, the two largest Original African groups. This resulted in Yorubas having to force the Igbos back to the East to establish their own political structures.
The greatest impediment to the identification and unification of the Original African civilization was academic and religious imperialism that clouded our common genetic and cultural origins. Abrahamic dogma gave wrong accounts of our evolution that promoted Pan Tribalism and tribal imperialism. For example, Igbos that became the most Abrahamic indoctrinated group, found no peace with their immediate neighbors.
Unlike Original African civilization based on cultural understanding of our linkages, Abrahamic dogma makes you agressive and intolerant of others. It makes you believe that your way is God’s way that must be enforced on others without their consent. It makes you believe in selective justice so instead of pushing for justice for all, it becomes Justice for me and my family alone. Unfortunately Yorubas and Igbos are the greatest pushers of the divisive Abrahamic perspectives.
This has been a major impediment to our collective progressive unity which couldn’t have been resolved until the present Apocalypse revealed hidden knowledge of our genetic and cultural origins. How do you unite around a civilization when you don’t know it’s origins, traits and linkages?
Our founding fathers made the mistake of believing that we are all Africans without understanding that Africa is made up of two civilizations – Original African and Afroasiatic (Afro-Arabic/AfroGreek) civilizations.
Fortunately, the Nigerian state now recognizes this dual reality and created the traditional council to be headed by two co-chairmen – Sultan of Sokoto, the head of the Afroasiatic groups, and Ooni of Ife, the head of Original African groups. The monarchs agreed to this arrangement without a fight, but while the Northern masses are made to understand their civilizational linkages and heirarchy, Original Africans could neither understand nor accept their civilizational linkages. Even within Southern tribes, there was no unity so we constantly fell to divide and rule tactics.
Charity they say begins at home, and until we go back to our genetic and cultural origins, we will be beggars and prostitutes on other civilizations platforms. We can’t blame our Tinubus and Okorocha when we fail to give them an Original African platform for national relevance, so they have to progress their national careers on Afroasiatic or Western military platforms like Obasanjo. Some will come with their deceptive jargons of One love, one humanity, and accuse us Original Africans of hating Afroasians or Europeans. But this is emotional blackmail.
A unified Original African powerbase is not against any group, but for us to articulate and push our collective aspirations of true freedom. Infact it will bring stability and balance, instead of hopping on a one legged powerbase.
Our unity is against institutional slavery and administrative violence by restructuring towards better management principles and truly participate and representative democracy. To stop our arrested economic and political development, we must strive towards epistemic democracy – the wisdom of the multitude.
We must increase our collective intelligence that has been misguided with Abrahamic cultural imperialism. We must understand that Yorubas, Igbos, Deltans and Middlebelt peoples come from the same genetic origins whose societal foundations was based on Ifa-Afa-Iha-Eha-Fa, the 16 sector Original African Information Retrieval system aka Oracle.
The sociopolitical groups like Afenifere, Ohaneaze, Middlebelt forum and Pandef that make up the South and Middlebelt leadership alliance have articulated our collective aspirations to reform Nigeria constitutionally, what remains is for us to complete the narrative from beginning to present.
Lastly, we should not be pushing Buhari and his Afroasiatic powerbase to restructure for us, so those threatening that we should restructure before 2023 don’t understand that you can’t tell the chicken to do census for cockroach. Buhari, if forced, will give us a deceptive reform/restructuring that would be hard to reverse. So let them pack up and go in 2023, while South and Middlebelt youth and politicians organize to present a pro-restructuring Igbo presidential candidate.
Already, we can see the Afroasians looking for an anti-restructuring Igbo presidential candidate, like Umahi, in accordance to the regional rotational principle. We Original Africans must provide our pro-restructuring Igbo candidate, so we will not be distracted by ethnic arguments since both candidates will be Igbo, and we would concentrate on policies instead of tribal politics.
Anyway as our African Americans cousins say ‘too much talk make dem catch runaway Negro’, we should know what to do.
