Who is "Nigeria"?

We complain a lot that "Nigeria" has problems, or that "Government" did or didn't do this or that.

But who is "Nigeria"?

Some days ago, I read this article on the food crisis currently afflicting the Northwest and Northeast regions of our beautiful Federal Republic. It is really bad. And we knew little or nothing about it because our governments (at all three tiers) keep things like this secret for as long as they can.

It isn't a secret to the people and the states that are experiencing it, and one would have thought the media based in those regions would have done more to sensitize the rest of the country about what was happening, but ....

It got me to thinking about people, Nigerians and foreigners alike, who say things like "the government neglected the Niger-Delta (or Lagos or Southeastern highways or the oil refineries or the football stadia or etc.)", as well as people who insist "Nigeria has failed" or claim "Amalgamation is the worst thing that ever happened".

The truth is we are responsible for our mutual neglect of each other. Our ancestors did not protect each other from the Slave Trade, and did not protect each other from the British invasions. We, the present-day "Nigerians" do not look out for each other either. Our collective non-reaction to recurrent starvation in the North comes from the same places as our collective non-reaction to recurrent pollution in the Niger-Delta.

As individuals we are all weak relative to the entities that impose hardship on us. The only way any of us could hope to frighten the powers-that-be into changing what their are doing in our individual neighbourhoods is by counting on the massive support of all of our countrymen, including the mega-majority not directly affected by what is happening in our neighbourhood.

The British never had enough soldiers in Nigeria to hold the entire country if the entire country rose up in revolt at the same time, but they never had to worry about it. If one community rose in revolt, they had all the time and freedom to crush it with the full might of their tiny army. Come to think of it, their tiny army was made up mostly of Nigerians anyway, so it was we Nigerians crushing each other on behalf of the British (sort of how we hunted down ourselves to sell as slaves on both the Saharan and Atlantic trade routes).

Look, so long as we refuse to stand for each other, we will fall alone.

We need each other. This is something you never hear in our politics. The loudest, most-heard voices in Nigeria belong to people who sell this idea that we would all be better off apart from each other, but that is nonsense. It started being nonsense the moment the European "explorers" rounded the west coast of Africa, and has been nonsense ever since.

We need each other. We need to start thinking about each other.  And we need to start fighting for each other.