Calls for secession and the balkanisation of Nigeria are tantamount to taking just as extreme a position as the Taliban’s fundamentalism 

Ayo Akinfe 

[1] We all know Nigeria is in a dire state. First of all there is ethnic mistrust, then we have a unitarist form of government which destroys any hope of prosperity and to make matters worse, cronyism and corruption are rife 

[2] As if that is not enough, we now have the added menace of armed Fulani herdsmen who want to slaughter everyone in sight. Sometimes one gets the impression that the herdsmen want to ethnically cleanse the Middle Belt in particular 

[3] I for one have always argued that all this stems from our weak economy. We only have a gross domestic product (GDP) of about $400bn and an annual budget of about $33bn. For 200m people, we need a GDP of about $2trn and an annual budget of about $200bn to live at ease with ourselves 

[4] We are currently a mono-economy with crude oil exports accounting for 90% of government revenue, our 36 governors are shamelessly dependent on federal handouts to run their states and we are currently borrowing from the IMF and World Bank just to pay salaries. Until all that changes, we are going nowhere as a nation 

[5] This current government has thrown the cat among the pigeons adding further to our woes by dividing Nigerians along ethnic lines. We now have an unfortunate scenario where a majority of Nigerians support or oppose the government based on what part of the country they are from 

[6] Faced with all these challenges many people advocate the balkanisation of the country as a solution. However, their suggestions cannot stand up to scrutiny as secession is based on raw primordial emotion and devoid of intellectual content. It is like a default position or a kid throwing his toys out of his pram in a tantrum rather than look for solutions to his problems 

[7] Ask any secessionist for their policies on healthcare, education, housing, transport, sports, youth, industrialisation, the environment, clean energy, etc and they start stammering. Ask them how many countries they want to carve Nigeria into, where the borders will be and what will define citizenship and they start talking gibberish 

[8] Like the Taliban who have no coherent policies, secessionists are of the deluded view that you can run a country based on ethnicity or religion. I always ask people who advocate balkanisation to give me their annual  economic growth targets and always ask them why the corruption that has pervaded Nigeria since 1960 will disappear in their phantom republics. Whenever I do so, they either start calling me names or begin trumpeting incoherent nonsense 

[9] More worryingly, all these secessionists fail to realise that their proposals involve decades of bloody wars. Do they not see the body counts in Afghanistan and Bosnia? It is naive in the extreme to even think that you can balkanise Nigeria without at least 20 years of war and 10m deaths 

[10] Secession is for the intellectually lazy and academically lightweight. Like the Taliban, such people lack the mental capacity to come up with solutions to the plethora of Nigeria’s socio-economic woes. They subsequently fall back to the easy and primordial default position like the Taliban. All men and women of substance should disassociate themselves from the ignorant slogan of secession and balkanisation