By Prof. G.G. Darah
Pandef, Pandef, beware of false prophets masquerading in electronic garments. There is sour mutilation of historical facts in the narrative on “How Tinubu Is Reversing The Damage Ironsi Did To Nigeria” attributed to Reno Omokri.
During British colonial rule, Regions were created in 1939 and their elected goverments were in office from 1951. The Regions were three in number: Eastern, Northern, and Western. There was gross inequality and injustice in the regional system. For example, the territory of the Northern Region was larger than the combined territory of the Eastern and Western Regions.
This lopsidedness triggered agitations for more political restructuring. Furthermore, hundreds of minority groups were lumped with more populous and hegemonic ethnic groups. The situation in the Northern Region was more bizarre as about 300 ethnic groups were put under the political yoke of the Fulani-controlled Islamic Sokoto Caliphate.
From the 1940s agitations for more regions or states rattled the colonial regime. The agitation of the oppressed minority groups for autonomy dovetailed into armed uprisings in the Benue-Plateau areas, leading to federal armed campaigns to quell them. At the 1957-58 constitutional conferences in Lagos and London, the demand for the creation of states caused stablemates.
The British responded by setting up the Henry Willink’s commission on the fears of minorities and how to allay them. The commission toured all of Nigeria and received bundles of memoranda from freedom-seeking minorities. The commission’s report did not support creation of new administrative units with the excuse that doing so could derail the march to Nigeria’s independence scheduled for 1960.
But the agitations continued unabated after independence, culminating in the creation, by plebiscite, of the Midwest in 1963. The emergence of the fourth Region fired more insurgent demands. The military governments from 1966 inherited this unresolved problem. Gen Aguyi Ironsi’s quibbling approach fuelled more intense agitation. Gen Yakubu Gowon, from the ‘ulltra-minority’ Ngas ethnicity in Plateau province could not ignore the matter.
Thus, on May 27, 1967, he created 12 states, six each in the northern and southern halves of the country. Recall that the vast majority of the combants in the armed forces were from the oppressed minorities in the former Northern Region, among whom was Gowon himself. Therefore, from 1967, the idiom of federalism shifted from regions to states. There are now 36 states.
The 2014 National Confab recommended 18 more in furtherance of a more balanced federal system for the 389 ethnic nationalities in Nigeria. Perhaps, with the exception of the Igbo and Yoruba separatist extremists, the option of returning to regionalism is not on the agenda of the other 387 ethnic nationalities.
Therefore, President Tinubu is swimming against a raging historical flood with his “panel-beater” method of “smuggling” the issue of regional governance into the national political discourse. His efforts are likely to end up in fiasco because the existing States will not meekly accept the option of “impeachment” and unconstitutional replacement which President Tinubu’s regional gamble portents.
