NIGERIA, IN A STATE OF NATURE AND THE WAY OUT!

What separates civilization and the state of nature are two things: order and organization. Any human society that rejects these basic foundations will naturally recede to a jungle where might automatically become a right, and brute force serves as a path to supremacy. In such a state, the strong eat up the weak, and fear hangs like a cloud over the people. Thomas Hobbes painted it lucidly when he said that “the state of nature was one in which there were no enforceable criteria of right and wrong. People took for themselves all that they could, and human life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Even when it is difficult to accept that civil society like Nigeria has declined to a state of nature, the quality of life and shortness of its span is overwhelming evidence of this declination. 

Everything Hobbes outlined in the state of nature manifest in Nigeria more than any other place on earth today. This is not an exaggeration. It is a fact that speaks for itself. Nigerians live in a terrible solitary state because the government cannot provide anything for the people. Not even the basics like clean water supply, constant electricity, an economic support system for the weak and the poor, security of lives and property, good road, hospitals, schools, sustainable salaries, employment for the youths, and so on, can be credited to this government! What else is the meaning of solitary state? What about widespread nasty and brutish behaviors that had resulted in shortness of life in Nigeria? Punch Newspaper reported that in the last seven months 3,634 people died in a road mishap. What made Nigeria different from the state of nature? Life expectancy has dropped so drastically that soon 50 years will be considered a milestone.

 The things that originally were foreign have become norms, and we discuss them as though they are now an acceptable way of life. For instance, In Nigeria, kidnapping happens daily, and the victims whose relatives can’t afford the ransoms are slaughtered in cold blood. Our forests and bushes are homes for the killers and yet the government can’t do anything. Traveling around Nigeria nowadays is a journey full of uncertainty and staying at home is not safe either. There is fear of bandits, Boko haram, marauding Fulani herdsmen, and even IPOB invasion. There is danger lurking at every corner in Nigeria. Some are crying while others are complaining and the majority are doing nothing to change the situation.

When an election comes, the majority that is bewailing the condition of life in Nigeria will foolishly file to vote, and afterward, go back to their sorrows. This is simply a sign of people who don’t know what they want and who were not only robbed of their commonweal but their minds as well. It is hard to believe that about 200 million people are held hostage by a few in the leadership who are pretending to govern with a fraudulent constitution while busy looting whatever their hands can reach, and plotting for conquest and Islamization of the rest of us. Today, there is still a window of opportunity to save whatever life is still left in us. There is still hope to save our lives and reclaim our sovereignty! 

For the information of those who wish to know, it is high time we accepted that Nigeria is dead and will never resurrect. As rational men, we must not die with her. The best we can do is to give Nigeria a befitting burial through Nigerian Indigenous Nationalities Alliance for Self-Determination (NINAS). This is a coalition of Middle Belt, Odudua, and the Lower Niger groups, who aim “to promote and foster self-determination of the indigenous peoples of the target area, in particular and among ethnic nationalities which inhabit other parts of the colonial creation that metamorphosed to become the Nigerian state of today.” 

It is true we all once chanted self-determination course through IPOB. That was a mistake in hindsight. When a leader of a group becomes a tyrant, all followers must resist that impulse. One who calls himself a freedom fighter cannot be a murderer? When he becomes a murderer as it is clear with IPOB leadership now, any reasonable person must distance himself. There is a command to kill any member of Ebube Agu in Igbo land. If this is happening now, imagine what will become our fate in the new republic? This is why now is a moment of decision to join hands with other ethnic nationalities under NINAS to forge a strong front in the struggle for self-determination and liberation from a British venture called, Nigeria.