Segun Adeniyi: Nigeria still battling with excessive hangovers of military rule

Segun Adeniyi, journalist and best-selling author, says Nigeria is still battling with the excessive hangovers of prolonged military rule.

Speaking at The Platform, the flagship programme of Covenant Christian Centre in Lagos, on Monday, Adeniyi said the task of nation-building has hardly been done in the country.

He condemned the deployment of troops to states over matters concerning internal security.

“The rights of citizenship are still shackled by boundaries of state of origin and ethnicity. The excessive hangovers of prolonged military rule are still with us in the form of impulsive arbitrariness. Our government still finds it easy to call in military force to quell elementary civil unrest,” he said.

“We are yet to teach our citizens from infancy the values of group living and how to compete as individuals without resorting to primordial hate when we cannot prevail.”

Adeniyi added that Nigeria’s greatest problem, however, is the challenge of creating enough wealth to cater for the need of the teeming population.

He said if Nigeria remains a poor country with an external reserve “less than the cash holding of Facebook alone, our competitions might get more bloody and our future more speculative and tentative”.

“Our task, therefore, is to make Nigeria a land of equal opportunity for all, a nation whose unity is not decreed as non-negotiable but is guaranteed by the practical incentives it offers for all to want to stay in and perfect the union,” he said.

“We should see ourselves as allies in a struggle for a better country that is bigger than any, and yet needs all of us working together. We should not continue to listen to the naysayers in our midst who do not mean well for our country.

SOME IGBO LEADERS WERE PRACTICALLY GENUFLECTING BEFORE NNAMDI KANU

Adeniyi expressed sadness at the way some leaders from the south-east responded to the agitations of the Nnamdi Kanu -led Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)”.

He said Kanu was ignored by the leaders and allowed to take hate speech to an “unprecedented level, even by the standards of our country,”he sai.

“Even when he was presented a golden opportunity to champion the genuine grievances of his people with civility, following an ill-advised treason trial that catapulted him into national limelight and prominence, Kanu could not rise beyond the mediocrity of the adulation of some street urchins.

“However, while I do not know why Kanu believes spreading hate and violence would help his cause, the Arewa youth counter-response was also very much unfortunate because the inference was that because Kanu is Igbo, all Igbo people must suffer the consequences of his action.

“Unfortunately, the message that was lost on the authorities in Abuja is that you cannot build an inclusive society when you react to national security threats in a manner that suggests some people are above the law; although many people across the country also felt let down that some otherwise respected senior citizens from the south-east who ought to have called Kanu to order were practically genuflecting before someone young enough to be their grandson!”