Has Nigeria Ceased To Be A Federation?

Tony Nnadi, a lawyer and Co-ordinator of Lower Niger Congress (LNC)- has been quite vociferous in his claim that Nigeria ceased to be a federation since 1966. For the pro-restructuring group, all governments since 1967 are ‘’criminal and treasonous usurpation of entrapped constituent regions by a suzerainty now erected under the rogue 1999 Constitution.’’

The argument of the LNC is that the late General Ironsi, a unitarist, was killed July 29, 1966 by people who allegedly pretended to be protesting Ironsi’s Decree No 34 of 1966 which was an Emergency Measure by Ironsi to restore order and restabilise the country from the widespread breakdown of law and order that precipitated the failed coup of January 1966 (failed coup as the Plotters, Nzeogwu and his compatriots did not take power).

Decree No 34 of 1966 tagged Unification Decree only dismantled and replaced the Legislative and Executive arms of the then Regional administrations with military governors who together with new military Head of State formed the Supreme Military Council that took over the administration of Nigeria from the government ousted by the coup.

According to the LNC, Decree No 34 did not all tamper with the structure of the four regions that constituted the Nigerian federation.

‘’It was Gowon’s Decree No 8 of May 27, 1967 which fractured the then four federating regions into 12 states that tampered with and destroyed the structure of the regions and the federation of Nigeria for the first time. It was also from that point that the Assets and Rights of the regions (including the oil and gas as well as the ports of Eastern Region) got confiscated and hijacked by the rogue Federal Government that emerged from after the collapse of the federation of Nigeria.

‘’The Aburi Meetings of January 1967 between the military governors of the 4 regions and the then Lt.Col Yakubu Gowon, was the last ditch attempt to resuscitate the federation of Nigeria that collapsed in 1966. (The Peacemaker/Mediator and Host of the Aburi meetings was the then Ghana’s Head of State, General Ankrah who could not bear the thought of watching the young neighbouring Nigerian go up in smoke. Aburi is a town in Ghana).’’

Continuing, LNC says a clearly worded agreement was reached in those meetings (Aburi Accord) ‘’but the Caliphate-controlled so-called Federal Government of the time, abandoned the Agreement upon return to Nigeria and resorted to force (which the the Aburi Accord expressly forbade), levying a 30-month genocidal war to force the then breakaway Eastern Region which had in self-defense declared itself Republic of Biafra back to the collapsed federation which had become a Unitarist imposition since May 27, 1967.

‘’That war consumed the lives of over 3.5 million Easterners and left the East devastated and debased to date while the post-war punitive policies of the rogue federal government since 1970 have not only been retained but have been reinforced with the imposed Constitutional Framework such that the One-Nigeria (the dummy of Nigeria) that emerged from the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-1970 became for the East, an adverse Occupation Force to date. This was how Nigeria lost it federalism and became the unitarist state it is to date.’’

Perhaps, the 12 states created by Gowon to decapitate and undermine the regions (particularly the Eastern Region) were subsequently fractured further into 19, then 21, then 30, to the present 36 caricatures we still call states by Generals Murtala Mohammed, Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha. It seems those deeds have caught up with us now and people who ought to be finding answers to the quagmire are lost in the labyrinths of deliberately crafted falsehoods.

The way things are, it is like the Constitution of Nigeria that is holding together the territory called Nigeria.

What follows is the viewpoint of the LNC: ‘’The demise of the fraudulent and fundamentally flawed 1999 Constitution by the express actions of the constituent component blocs of the defunct federation threw up an imperative in which the erstwhile federating regions began to work out post-Nigeria arrangements, in the manner silhouetted by our broken map, from which formation, willing, compatible contiguities will forge fresh Protocols, in unfettered self-determination, using Referendums and Plebiscites to validate the formations and the Fresh Protocols.

‘’Our 4-Bloc Map represents the formations in which the entrapped Constituent Nationalities of the Defunct Federation of Nigeria are working out their future.

‘’The 12-State Sharia contiguity (Green Bloc) seceded from the Secular Union of Nigeria when in year 2000, they simultaneously imposed Sharia, in repudiation of the 1999 Constitution upon which the Union is Federated, flawed as that Constitution is.

‘’The Blue Bloc is the Yoruba Contiguity (including the Yoruba of Kwara and Kogi States) which by their September 7, 2017 Solemn Assembly at Ibadan, Repudiated and Rejected the fraudulent 1999 Constitution as the basis of Nigeria.

‘’The Brown Bloc is the Lower Niger which at its 2015 Solemn Assembly in Port Harcourt, Rejected and Repudiated the so-called 1999 Constitution as the basis of Nigeria, adopted the 1885 Ethnolinguistic Map of the Lower Niger as the Geographical basis of the Prospective Lower Niger Federation and Mandated a Self-Determination Referendum.

‘’The Purple Bloc is the Middle Belt which is currently under a bloody siege from the Jihadists of the Green Bloc. It will be recalled that it was the compromise of substituting Sharia (which Ahmadu Bello wanted for the Northern Region) with the Penal Code by the Willinks Commission in 1957 that made the Middle Belt a part of the then Northern Region. (The Predominantly Christian Middle Belt had in the run-up to Nigeria’s Independence, insisted on being a Region of their own, in rejection of the Sharia that the Predominantly Muslim Far North wanted).

‘’The year 2000 simultaneous imposition of Sharia by the 12 Contiguous States of the Predominantly Muslim Far North, spanning from Sokoto to Borno (Green Bloc on the Broken Map), was a grand repudiation of that 1957 compromise and by extension, a repudiation of Federating with the Middle Belt and moreso, the rest of Nigeria, as Sharia is mutually exclusive with Democracy and Constitutionalism.

‘’It is this irreconcilable clash of civilisations, introduced by Sharia, into an already inequitable Union, (with a Federating Basis that collapsed since 1966 but held together by brute force and guile), that is responsible for the current unraveling of what has become a Union of Attrition for the entrapped Constituent Components.’’

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