PHILOSOPHY AND THE QUESTION OF THE INDISSOLUBILITY OF NIGERIA: ADDRESSING THE CRITICAL ISSUES OF THE NIGERIAN STATE

Abstract

The Nigerian state has been an enigma of a sort since the country achieved independence in 1960 till date. It has been a nation in dire straits and plagued by so many challenges of diverse magnitudes and dimensions. Leadership has arguably been the country's greatest challenge and perhaps undoing. Poor political leadership has largely been responsible for the nation's numerous challenges and manifold underdevelopment and this manifests itself in various and diverse ways including but not limited to ethnicism, religious bigotry, brazen cronyism, political corruption, overconcentration of developmental programmes and action plans in particular regions to the detriment of others, lopsided political appointments that negates the nation's federal character principle, etc. When this happens, people from other ethnic nationalities naturally react and their reaction is usually in the form of demand for resource control, restructuring and in some other cases the unbridled clamour for selfdetermination among numerous others. More often than not, the response by the government in power is usually to chant the illusive and fading mantra that the unity of Nigeria is not negotiable. This old cliché has been used over the years especially since after the Nigerian civil war and has not in any critical way addressed the country's lingering and festering challenges. This paper argues that the issue of the indissolubility of Nigeria is a false narrative that has not done the country any good. This position is heavily predicated on the verifiable fact that some other countries of the world had disintegrated in the past. The paper opines that what will guarantee the continuity of the Nigerian state are good governance and a deliberate governmental policy of even development as well as less emphasis on religion, ethnicity and unnecessary cronyism. The paper is of the strong view that unless the nation's apex political leaders do the needful by providing good, effective, efficient, effectual, dispassionate and development-orientated political leadership, Nigeria will disintegrate with time and no amount of the false narrative about the indissolubility of the country can save her from disappearing from the political map of the world.