The world was made in twos. Duality gives structure Balance. Checks and balance. The greatest problem we have in Nigeria is the lack of a counterbalance to Northern power bloc, so we stand on only one leg that makes the Nigerian polity unstable, unjust and perambulating.
Some will argue that it is the 1999 constitution that needs restructuring, but fail to see that if there was a South and Middlebelt powerbase, the constitution won’t be skewed in favor of the North whereby we have to practically beg them to acquiesce to restructuring. We have had about 4 constitutions, an unsuccessful Biafra secessionist war, different military governments, but Nigeria of my parents is worse than that of my generation and the prospect for future generations doesn’t look promising. Pastors say it is a generational curse, so we pray, fast and hand over the reins of power to a conservative Muslim and pentecostal Pastor, but still no joy.
Instead of continuing to perambulate on the same spot like Fela Kuti observed, we must look at the Social Reproduction Theory, from Karl Marx to Pierre Bourdieu, that analyzes the reasons that make us pass down failure from generation to generation, usually due to the absence or presence of some institutionalized social constructs that robs us of the social capital to improve. The theory identifies various forms of capital necessary to boost the collective social capital which includes financial, cultural, human and administrative capital. The lack of any of these capital creates a defect which is continuously reproduced in future generations.
The theory originally concentrated on the economic relationship from the individual to the group level, whereby Blacks in Diaspora and women continue to pass socioeconomic failures down generations. However, it is also applicable on a macro, global level, specifically to the Black Race and its thousands of tribes of which none has been able to become industrialized or gain global racial parity. Basically, we the majority in Nigeria, the Black heartland, lack the social and political capital to push for restructuring or any collective aspiration that can give us true economic and political freedom and justice. We won’t gain a full understanding of the root causes of our perambulation if we start analyzing from the constitutional phase of Nnamdi Azikwe, Obafemi Awolowo and our other founding fathers to the 1999 constitution and 2014 Confab sovereignty conference.
If we restrict our study to the last century, we would be ignoring the slavery, colonization and neocolonization that robbed us of our financial capital, which in turn robbed us of the ability to defend our cultural capital. We would also skip the fact that the human capital in form of the educational system that produced our founding fathers, the constitutions, Civil War and today’s money politics under a Northern hegemony. We would be overlooking the administrative capital deficit caused by the wrong unfair demarcations into Northern and Southern Protectorates and the further administrative violence of cutting the South into West and Eastern regions to split the social capital of the two largest Original African groups, Yoruba and Igbo. Ultimately we can see the defects in the various capital that deprives us of social capital to build a South and Middlebelt powerbase to achieve our collective aspirations.
The most important of the different forms of capital is the cultural capital which is inherent and which must be traced to our genetic and cultural foundations. Fundamentally there are two cultural categories based on linguistics and genetics, namely Original (Indigenous) Africans that speak the Niger-Congo ethnolinguistic languages, and Afroasians that speak Afroasiatic languages or have significant Asiatic traces in their DNA composition.
Though all Original Africans share common genetic and cultural origins, and are roughly 70% of the population in Nigeria and across Africa, they don’t have the social and cultural capital of Afroasians, who are products of different waves of cultural imperialism but unified in Afroasiatic Abrahamic dogma – Islam in West Africa, Christianity in Ethiopia.
To trace the devaluation of Original African social capital, we have to go back to at least the 1415 capture of Ceuta Morocco by Europeans, which culminated in the pressure on Senegambia Afroasians to spread westward into present day Nigeria. The 1400s influx of Afroasians and their Abrahamic imperialism resulted in the militarization of our subregion, especially with the European inspired arms race for slaves, which created an environment of Pan-tribalism and the breakup of the Original African civilization into kingdoms and empires in a race to protect their own.
The Afroasians Abrahamic cultural capital and genetic linkage with the European colonists was used as sociopolitical capital to have the demarcation of Protectorates favorably skewed to the Northern Afroasiatic Caliphate by adding Original African territory, the Middlebelt, that belonged to the Southern protectorate to the North. To further devalue Original African cultural and social capital, the British later split the Southern protectorate into West and East regions to allow a divide and rule policy.
To permanentize our defective social reproduction, they used our educational system, religion and media to confuse our cultural and genetic origins. They promoted a defeatist and divisive Waka Alone tribal history that the different tribes were all chased seperately out of Middleast power centers into the obscurity of the rainforest, which was a false history designed to prevent the unity of Original Africans that spoke a mere continuum of dialects of a civilization that spread from Southern Nigeria to Southern Africa.
Essentially, the Original African cultural identity hierarchy is missing one key level that would combine all our tribal capital to empower us to maximize our Original African cultural capital. From the single family unit, we can identify as a clan, then a tribe but not our civilizational identity required to strike strategic alliances within us to form a powerbase.
The Black Power movement started in the Americas combined the cultural capital of the Black Race to fight for freedom. Nnamdi Azikwe, Kwame Nkrumah, the apostles of Pan Africanism, saw the need for a wider unity sphere than tribal to fight global White imperialism and supremacy. It worked temporarily but the fact that Black African social capital was divided into two, with the Afroasian social capital unfairly overvalued by the global colonists over Original African cultural capital, ensured that failures from slavery through colonization was to be passed on in the present mode of neocolonization.
Despite the well articulated constitution at independence, the debasement and splintering of Original African cultural capital led to Azikwe being unable to strike strategic alliances within his own Original African civilizational cultural sphere, and ended up partnering and strengthening the Northern Afroasiatic hegemony. Awolowo that started with the cultural capital of Egbe Omo Oduduwa tried unsuccessfully to combine enough Kwararafa Middlebelt capital to increase the social capital to build an Original African powerbase.
At the time there was no genetic and cultural anthropological evidence to cement the Original African cultural capital, and there is still an ongoing conspiracy to prevent the acknowledgement and propagation of DNA evidence that precisely highlight our common origins and cultural origins. Without the cultural and social capital to build our powerbase, there is no way we can achieve a fair restructured constitution nor strive for separatism, so we need to go back and assess the full range of capital.
First is the denied access to our financial capital which could be used to improve our cultural and social capital. Financial capital can be viewed as the money used to acquire media outlets, influence public discourse and policy. It is no coincidence that Yorubas collective financial capital, in the form of Lagos the Yoruba citystate and cash cow, has been hijacked by personal and external predatory interests. The lack of our financial capital also prevented us from gaining social capital to fight for the full revelation of the necessary genetic anthropological evidence in the global human genome projects to help our cultural and human capital.
Fortunately, we now have enough cultural and genetic anthropological evidence to combine our cultural capital and we have our paramount monarchs working to articulate, highlight and unify the Original African cultural capital. Sociopolitical actors agitating for a fairer restructured constitution and administrative capital have realized the need to pool the political capital of the South and Middlebelt four regions, exemplified in the South and Middlebelt leadership alliance. To strengthen the political alliance into a veritable powerbase will require the cultural capital of the Original African civilization. The African Sociocultural Harmony and Enlightenment Foundation, ASHE Foundation, was established as a cultural thinktank to increase collective intelligence and cultural capital of the Original African civilization towards an epistemic democracy.
For Nigeria to be a stable polity, it needs an Original African South and Middlebelt powerbase to act as a counterbalance to the Northern powerbase. In the alliance that evolved for the 2014 Confab, the Middlebelt made it clear that it is not in the interest of its landlocked territory, peopled with hundreds of ethnic groups, to seek separatism that would result in decades of war or leave it subjugated to the Afroasiatic North. This is similar to the Niger Delta minorities position that don’t want to be subjugated in an Igbo dominated Biafra or Yoruba dominated Odua.
Therefore, the only workable alliance is based on restructuring. With the demographics, the Middlebelt would be the swing states like those of the United States that prevent regional hegemony and would work towards fulfilling our manifest destiny as Original Africans seeking racial parity – culturally, economically and politically.
Finally, those seeking separate states fail to understand the full ramifications of global White supremacy and neocolonization, nor the fact that the world is divided into giant trade blocs based on culture, which only Nigeria, the biggest Black conglomerate can afford to compete. This is why no other Black nation is an economic, cultural or political success.
Nigeria is the only hope for the Black Race and once splintered, the Black Race would be doomed forever. Nigeria is definitely not our final destination but it is a starting point to accumulate all Black social capital towards a restructured Africa whereby every ethnicity is assured of its self determination and control over their culture and resources.
