Despite President Bola Tinubu’s repeated call for Nigerians to commit to nationhood, a professor of Political Science at Nassarawa State University, Prof Jideofor Adibe, believes President Tinubu is running one of the most clannish central governments in Nigeria’s history.
Adibe expressed the opinion during a Special Programme on Nigeria’s 64th Independence on Africa’s Independent Television, AIT.
Describing the Tinubu regime’s notion that changing the national anthem would ignite the flame of nationhood and patriotism among Nigerians as laughable, Adibe noted that nothing has actually changed since the anthem was changed.
Likening the move to one chasing rats while their house is on fire, the academic insisted that such action is not what the people are angling for. According to him, Nigerians are looking for tangible things and actions from the political class.
“You don’t mistake institutional manifestations of a phenomenon and you elevate it to the phenomenon defining characteristics.
“When you have a water bubbling and popping out, there is a tendency for people to begin to look at the popping out without considering the original thing that caused the bubbling.
“Listening to President Tinubu’s speech, I would say that there are discrepancies between what he preaches and what he does and this is causing a gulf that is culminating in crisis.
“You cannot be running one of the most clannish governments aside from that of former President Muhammadu Buhari, and you are talking about nation-building.
“You cannot have people like Bayo Onanuga, who weaponized ethnicity, in the front seat of your government and you think people are going to take your call for patriotism seriously.
“These kinds of people who take extreme positions are not banned but are put on the margin.
“If you are a mainstream politician and you associate with them, that’s your political death. It means you endorse what they are doing.
“Under Buhari, they created this simplistic binary, of we and the others, which was the cause of 60 percent of the problems of the Buhari regime.
“This is because you cannot win the battle because when you say never, those on the other side will say nevertheless and there will be a dingdong,” he said.
The professor insisted that at 64, Nigeria has not made any significant progress, aside from the fact that the people still exist under one nation.
According to him, individual Nigerians are making progress, whereas the country as a whole has not achieved much.
“Several Nigerians are now delinking from Nigeria and have begun to construct their own nation in which they believe they can achieve their manifest destinies.
“If you take a census and ask Nigerians what they think about the country, you will be shocked to find that many Nigerians, even the political class are no longer in sync with the country.
“If you say you are on the journey to nationhood, which is actually what 64 years is celebrating, how far have we come together in terms of using state instruments to wield together the constituent elements that come to create a country? How far have we come in terms of thinking as one?
“It is not about coming just to sing Nigeria We Hail Thee, otherwise someone said patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel if you force it on people,” he concluded.
