A Fool's Paradise

It is only a fool who will buy into the conviction being expressed by British and other European leaders that accepting the charade that took place last month in Nigeria in the name of elections is worth getting rid of Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo who stage-managed every step of that process to retain control of the status-quo in Nigeria’s power establishment when his attempts to alter the even flawed military imposed ‘constitution’ to perpetuate himself in power beyond May this year failed. What they forget each time when they spring one of the band-aid type solutions to avert the threat of implosion in Nigeria is that two wrongs can never make a right. It's only in a fool's paradise that such a wish can obtain. Nigeria does not seem to be such a place.

The crisis that Nigeria’s unitary political structures represent is gradually and consistently limping out of control. The consistent interest in the quest to keep Nigeria the way it is even when it remains clear that Nigeria as it is lacks equity and justice for the distinct nationalities that constitute it is the cheap hydrocarbons that the West receives from the Niger Delta. But the state of affairs in the Niger Delta today has radically shifted from what they used to be in the decades before the 1990s. Its inhabitants have signaled their unequivocal resolve not to stand by and watch the unmitigated rape of their environment for those hydrocarbons even as they exist in dire poverty while the rulers of Nigeria loot and share the proceeds from those hydrocarbons.

Although the West may have succeeded in keeping Mr. Obasanjo out of power by accepting his brazenly rigged elections to install his hand-picked candidate, Mr. Yar’Adua, it had better think twice. I don’t see the chances of getting the inhabitants of the Niger Delta to back down in their resolve to engage the Nigeria state where it is most vulnerable. They will sustain their efforts to disrupt the extraction of hydrocarbons from their land. Their resilience in those regards will deepen the crisis and time will come when there will be nothing left to salvage out of Nigeria.

Now therefore is the time to do the only right thing capable of solving the crisis. That one thing is the restructure of the Nigerian state to reflect its composition. Nigeria as a true federation is the answer. To accomplish that will not translate to the disruption of the supply of hydrocarbons to the West. It will simply guarantee it.