If We Don’t Terminate Impositions of Unitary Nigeria Soon, We’ll Pay in Blood – Warns LNC Scribe, Tony Nnadi

The embedded YouTube video was a keynote presentation by the Secretary-General of the Lower Niger Congress (LNC), Mr. Tony Nnadi, to the Annual Retreat of an International Network of Church Leaders, held in Lagos, Nigeria on January 10, 2019. Mr. Nnadi was invited to elucidate Nigeria’s geopolitical conundrum by delving into the past in order to better understand the present and then how to plan for and manage future options and opportunities. Mr. Nnadi obliged because he took his capacity audience into the historical archives to reveal the sinister schemes that led to the colonization of our people as well as the tacit agreement between colonial Britain and the Sokoto Caliphate to collaborate in exercising suzerainty over the territories belonging to the indigenous constituents of Nigeria. Colonial Britain kept its own side of the bargain by positioning minders of the Sokoto Caliphate, in the pre-Independence period, to impose its will over the entire country after the final exit of colonial rule in 1960. Blatant gerrymandering predicated on lies and fabrications was wielded to give majority political powers over Nigeria in eternity, if possible, to the Fulani aristocracy.

During the First Republic, the Northern ruling elite, which is dominated by the Fulani aristocracy, sought to take over the Western Region through direct intervention in the region’s electoral process. The reverberations from ensuing political crises in the Western Region of the mid-1960s are believed to be the underlying reason for the first military intervention of January 15, 1966. The botched bloody coup d’état led to a counter-coup, the pogroms against Easterners and the 30-month Civil War that cost the lives of millions and national ruination from which the country has yet to recover after more than half century. 

The post-war period was further exploited as a unique opportunity to unfurl the parochial agenda nursed by the irredentist Fulani nationalists since the demise of their great grandfather, Uthman Dan Fodio. two centuries earlier. In more ways than one, the series of military rulers of post-civil war Nigeria did everything humanly to obliterate all the relics of parliamentary democracy which ushered in Nigeria’s self-rule of October 1, 1960. From the seizure of all lands belonging to constituents to the arbitrary appropriation of all the country’s wealth, the central government was transformed into a domineering Unitary machine that strides over the Nigerian geopolitical space like Colossus for more than two generations.

Agitation by advocates of civil democracy, such as the NADECO and PRONACO, succeeded in galvanizing popular opposition against autocratic military rule. When it was impossible to sustain blatant military rule over Nigeria, the same Fulani aristocracy used the military rulers to produce the 1999 Constitution which was imposed by decree to become the premier legislative document for operating the Fourth Republic. It is noteworthy that the 12 contiguous states of the Arewa North adopted the Sharia Islamic rule in the second year of the Abdulsalami Abubakar-decreed 1999 Constitution.

According to the LNC scribe, the 1999 Constitution is the arbiter of all the ills of Nigeria. Arbitrary seizure of constituents’ lands and natural endowments and deliberate prevention of the indigenous peoples from all self-help initiatives were inserted into the 1999 Constitution so as to assure that the master-servant characteristics of the imposed Unitary state shall endure forever. But the Fulani irredentists, as smart and determined as they might be, are not God. In fact, their ungodly dispositions and practices have betrayed their evil intentions for even the blind to see. In circles of knowledge, it is universally agreed that Nigeria and its citizenry are doomed unless the imposed 1999 Constitution is jettisoned and replaced with a constituents-derived and approved terms for future Nigeria as a nation-state. Failing that, immediate steps must be taken to devolve Unitary Nigeria into constituent regions as determined through free negotiations by all concerned.

The audience at the “Consecration 2019” organized for a multinational meeting of church leaders in Lagos on January 10, 2019.

The Consecration 2019 outreach to the self-determination gospel is a wise and judicious thing to do. Other church groups throughout Nigeria ought to emulate this example and begin sooner to tell their large congregations the gospel truth about their existential woes in today’s Nigeria. The LNC and its expanding self-determination partners in the South and Middle Belt are willing and ready to share the gospel of self-determination to all Nigerians because it is only by doing so that a sure prosperous future can be guaranteed to all without the incessant murder spree that has become second nature to an imposed Unitary Nigerian state.