African Studies in Geography from Below

3. The Future of the Nation-State Project in Africa: The Case of Nigeria

3 The Future of the Nation-State Project in Africa: The Case of Nigeria Nduba Echezona As the Cold War cycle played itself out, some of the multinational nation-states which had been taken for granted such as the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia suddenly dissolved. Their splitting pointed towards a direction which had hitherto been a trend in world politics, namely that the nation’s territory had to be synonymous with the territory of the state, the nation being made up of people with shared cultures and myths of blood ties. This direction in Europe might have set a worldwide pace. Africa has shown very little sign of complying with it. Africa entered the post-Cold War era with seemingly high prospects of territorial disintegration. This was exemplified by many civil wars in recent years, some with genocidal features. But, except for Eritrea and, to a lesser extent Somaliland, the political map of Africa’s states and borders has remained remarkably unchanged. Wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo have not caused these states to split. Nonetheless, wars have led to spatial recompositions, to emerging spaces of sovereignty within state territories and to renewed challenges to the official geography from above — the latter being defined by: thevariouscorporationsthathaveorhavehadthepoliticalortechnocraticvocation ofestablishing,defendingormodifyingforeignorinternal(administrative)borders of established states and organizing their geographical space (regular armies, diplomaticcorps,colonialorcontemporaryadministrators)(BenArrous1996:17). 80 African Studies in Geography from Below In Nigeria, the colonial and postcolonial efforts to construct a nation-state from above rather than from below produced an ‘uncertain’ Nigerian; somebody with equivocal national feelings and many other allegiances. This ‘uncertain’ Nigerian has gone a long way to contest the state’s sovereignty and its determination to mark up its borders. Since the onset of civil, democratic rule in 1999, the duality of movement between geography from above and geography from below has shown itself in the competition for spaces between national, religious, ethnic and even ‘resource’ groups. This calls into question whether the resort to an authoritarian pattern can indeed be adequate in constructing a nation-state; whether a nation-state, artificial so to say, can be made to look like the European nation-state, its point of reference, when in fact, no nation-state in the world could be said to be mono-ethnic or made up of one social class. One belief of the postcolonial state in Nigeria is that since a nation, a community of people who are culturally and linguistically the same, is much more a ‘moral community’ than say a collection of ethnic groups, the nationstate had to be constructed with a sense of being blind to Nigeria’s ethnic and religious diversities. At the same time, the state assumed a narrow ethnic base and expected that a nation-state would simply appear through a deus ex machina. That has not been so and since the emergence of democratic rule in 1999, Nigeria has been awash with new identity manifestations and agitations. This study wants to show, first, that Nigeria’s recurring and worsening crisis of governance stems from the resort to geography from above rather than geography from below in constructing a Nigerian nation. Nigeria or indeed the aspiring nation-states in Africa are uniquely different from nation-states in Europe due, of course, to their origins and in fact, their experiences differ markedly from those of Europeans. In Nigeria, for example, almost every ethnic or religious identity claims to be marginalised by the state to the extent that the whole issue of marginalization appears like a myth when those who are the bearers of institutions of marginalization are difficult to identify. Second, in the several years of authoritarian rule, federalism was jettisoned for commandism. This study argues that the present identity agitations are contesting commandism and calling for a return to true federalism, a federalism that would take into consideration the unique experiences of Nigerians, namely that there are nations which had hitherto achieved state structures of their own before they were frozen by colonial intervention; and that politicization of life in general has woken up other identities, that were hitherto dormant, into challenging the territorial framework of the nation-state project. 81 Echezona: The Future of the Nation-State Project in Africa The Nation-State Project in Africa With the experiences of African states since the end of colonial rule, it is justified to argue that the...