The Nigerian National Question – Again
By Femi Olugbile
A few days ago, yet another effort to define the boundaries between ‘Indigene’ and ‘Resident’ or ‘Citizen’ through legislation came to the awareness of the public. It emerged that a bill which aims to confer an entitlement to ‘Indigene-ship’ on anyone who has lived in a place for ten years, or who is married to an ‘Indigene’, has passed through a First Reading in the House of Representatives.
This column, on 8th April 2022, in a piece entitled ‘Indigene versus Citizen – the national question in Nigeria’ discussed the 68 Constitutional Amendments that were put to the vote in the National Assembly of the day. One of the proposals rejected by the Assembly was a Constitutional Amendment that would have made a citizen eligible to be regarded as an ‘indigene’ anywhere in Nigeria after residing in the locality for five years.
It was, in your view, an effort to throw a sop at a crucial matter that went to the very heart of the Nigerian ‘To Be or Not to Be’ question.
Some proponents at the time quoted the example of some states in the USA where people acquired citizenship and voting rights in their place of domicile after residing continuously and paying taxes for, say, five years. But Citizenship and Voting Rights were not the same as being an ‘indigene’. In any case, the USA had no ‘indigenes’ – except the ‘American Indians’, who have been almost completely exterminated.
Indigene-ship derives from ethnicity, culture and a relationship with the land. ‘Tribe’ is the foundational basis of human society. In an ailing pluralistic society, it is easy to surmise glibly that ‘tribalism’ is at the root of the dysfunction. But such thinking is fundamentally flawed, otherwise African-Americans would not be spending millions of dollars on DNA Ancestry investigations annually to reconnect with their ‘tribes’ on the African mainland. It is not the awareness of tribe that is the problem, but the management of that awareness, where issues such as denial, deception, domination, entitlement and a whole variety of other qualifiers and paralysers with which the Nigerian space is rife come in to foul up the air.
At the centre of every human being’s ontological anxiety is a fear of being ‘swamped’ or being changed into something else forcefully by others. A large part of the psychological underpinning of the current anti-immigration sentiment in Europe and USA is the fear of being swamped by ‘foreigners’ with alien cultures, and ‘replaced’. The fear may be exaggerated. There is, also, sadly, an unmistakable undercurrent of racism and Islamophobia.
In the United Kingdom, the political ascendancy of Kemi Badenoch within the Conservative Party was premised on a promise to re-define ‘British-ness’, including a pledge to tailor immigration to an acceptance of, and a readiness to identify with, and live by, British values. A person who does not wish to be British, who is dreaming of a London-istan someday, or who prefers to live in a ‘Little Bangladesh’ where adults speak no English and their children thumb their noses at British culture, should not rightfully have a place in the Britain envisioned by Kemi. Labour leader Keir Stamer may mock her as ‘the defender of Western Civilization’, but her points resonate with the British public, and remain the timeless ingredients for successful migration anywhere, whether ‘internally’ within a multi-ethnic society, or externally across oceans and continents. Strangely, this ‘common sense’ logic continues to be the subject of endless disputation in Nigeria.
Nigerians have been great travellers and mixers, even before the Amalgamation. The polyglot character should be one of the most enduring strengths of the nation, if it is actively and intentionally managed.
Unfortunately, this intentional management has not been done so far. It is the reason why it is impossible to agree, irrespective of pious platitudes and even well-meant governmental invocations to ‘Patriotism’, on five years, or ten years, for when a ‘settler-citizen’ becomes an ‘indigene’ – in Kano, Lagos, or Enugu.
We may return to the implied assumptions from Kemi Badenoch’s litmus test. If you don’t like a set of people, if you feel you are better than them, if you have contempt for their way of life, it is not appropriate to ‘settle’ among them, but to find a place where you can feel greater love and affinity.
Irreducible requirements such as love, respect, a readiness to assimilate, including learning the language and imbibing core values, even while retaining a ‘native’ identity of one’s own – all of these have been missing from discussions of internal migration in Nigeria. What is in the air is entitlement and the supposed protections of a defective constitution and a dysfunctional federation.
We may end with two examples from Lagos. The Eyo Masquerade came from Iperu, another part of Yorubaland, allegedly as accompaniment to a favourite daughter going to her husband’s house in Lagos. Nothing, and nobody, is more ‘Eko’ today, than the Eyo.
In the same vein, the famous Oshodi family of Lagos derive their ancestry from Oshodi Tapa, a Nupe man who became the war chief of Oba Kosoko and led the spirited defence of Lagos by Kosoko when Lagos was invaded by the British in 1851. Nobody is more ‘Eko’ than the descendants of Oshodi Tapa today.
Until Nigerians are ready to engage in honest, respectful and non-invasive discussions on these matters, until people realise they cannot simply leave their ‘home states’ behind to create, live and work in their own versions of ‘Little Bangladesh’, and mischievously struggle over the pickings in other people’s homes, until people know they cannot ‘bus in’ immigrants from their village or even outside national borders to fight elections, it is probably best to keep the present ‘two track’ arrangement, and leave the subject of ‘promotion’ to ‘indigene-ship’ well alone for a more enlightened, more integrated, and less bigoted future generation to tackle in a Nigeria that will have become a true Federation and a real nation – if such, indeed, is on the horizon.
