Even with German occupation during World War Two the French never considered secession as an option 

Ayo Akinfe 

(1) With the latest set of agitations calling for the balkanisation of Nigeria into 100 different mini kingdoms, I believe we have a perfect opportunity to debate the insanity of such nonsensical suggestions. To take the debate about our future forward, we need to banish such misguided, ill-conceived, irrational, and primordial thoughts once and for all 

(2) I still cannot get my head around how any averagely intelligent person can respond to the actions of 15m Fulanis by destroying a nation of 200m people. It makes no sense whatsoever. A more sensible course of action would have been to expel this Fulani minority. Why not suggest dipping the 15m minority into the  Atlantic Ocean so 185m can live in peace and prosperity?

(3) I have decided to use the example of France during World War Two to illustrate how ignorant, illiterate, primordial and politically immature all this talk of secession is. After the German victory in the Battle of France in 1940, Adolf Hitler offered the French an armistice under which they would keep control of half of their country 

(4) Under the terms of the German armistice, the French would keep control of the east of the country, while the Germans would occupy the west of France. The whole idea was that the Germans wanted to control the coastal strips from where they could mount an invasion on Britain and also forestall any amphibious attack 

(5) In the German occupied zone, the French were terribly humiliated and treated like colonial natives. German SS divisions murdered anyone remotely suspected of colluding with the allied powers or supporting the French resistance. By the same token, any member of the French resistance was either hanged or shot by firing squad. These summary executions took place without any proper trials, reducing the great France to an African colony 

(6) In addition to this humiliation, the Germans changed the French national motto Liberty, Equality and Fraternity to Work, Family and Fatherland. Humiliation does not get any worse than this as the Germans reversed all the gains of the 1879 French Revolution. France, the world’s first democratic republic was now governed by military decrees promulgated by an occupying force 

(7) This humiliation did not end there as the puppet Vichy government put in place to govern the east of France enacted strong conservative laws that censored the press, prohibited divorce and made abortion a capital offence. This regime was headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, a retired French military general who was a World War One hero. He was basically reduced to being Adolf Hitler’s errand boy. At the end of the war he was sentenced to death but President Charles DeGaulle commuted this to life imprisonment

(8) My point is that despite all this humiliation, at no point did the French seek to carve out Vichy France from the main country. They knew that what they were going through was a temporary setback and were aware that their future lay in a strong, united and vibrant France. After the war, France bounced back in typical fashion, setting new world records for high speed trains and in aviation with aircraft like Concorde 

(9) I get very exasperated when I see Nigerians calling for the balkanisation of their country whenever they have any temporary setback. If they had any iota of the history of our continent, they would know that Africa was so easily colonised by the European powers because she was made up of small, disparate and weak kingdoms. If we had an African kingdom as large and powerful as Nigeria in the late 18th century, the Europeans would not have been able to conquer and colonise her 

(10) It beats me how anyone with an average IQ would contemplate carving up the world’s largest black nation because of the actions of a few thousand illiterate herdsmen armed with nothing but AK-47s. Common sense should tell anyone that these mini states will be weak and easily dominated by global powers who will use them as dumping grounds and seek to armtwist them as the did during the colonial era. Besides, why would any sane person want to change the name of his/her country, flag, passport, currency, etc just because of a smell minority who make up less than 7.5% of the population? Please, let us keep this debate intelligent and come up with more rational proposals than secession!