National unity threats: Fayemi, Sultan, Jega, experts proffer solutions

By JOHN NWOKOCHA, Abuja

Eminent Nigerians, politicians and academics took turn to reiterate the need to promote national unity.

The eminent persons who included, Governor of Ekiti state, Dr Kayode Fayemi, Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Abubakar III, Professor Attahiru Jega, Gen IBM Haruna (Rtd), traditional rulers and academics spoke when they converged on Abuja during the 2021 National Summit, on Wednesday.

With a theme: “Nigeria: The Imperative of Unity”, the summit organised by the National Prosperity Movement, a non-political organization, seeks to find how Nigeria could foster national unity in the face of rising divisions among its nationalities, and other issues threatening the country’s unity.

While appreciating the Nigeria’s diversity speakers at the event noted that inclusion, equity and economic prosperity are necessary ingredients to attaining national unity. The speakers also decried the attitude of political leaders to the issue of national unity, stating that the leaders have not paid the desired attention to it.

While the keynote speaker, Professor Attahiru Jega traced the origin of division among citizens to the country’s post-independent leaders who campaigned for “forgetting” our differences rather than “trying to understand”,  to attain a united Nigeria, for the Sultan, the conversations have to be driven by facts and figures rather than ignorance and emotions.

He emphasised the need to embrace individual diversity rather than encourage hatred.

In his view, Governor Fayemi who is also the Chairman of Nigeria Governors Forum, believes that fostering unity in a context of multiple diversities requires fulsome attention to equity, justice, fair play, and merit.

The Sultan who was represented by the Emir of Keffi, Shehu Yamusa III, urged “The that discourse has to be an informed one driven by facts and figures,  otherwise we would find ourselves boxed into dialogue of the daft where no one understands the other.

“We also have to avoid confusing unity with uniformity, we don’t have to be uniform to be united. The length of our fingers are not the same because each finger has a unique role to perform.

“We should try to understand diversity and indeed celebrate it. This can only happen if we ask our scholars to lead the debate. Some of us that went to unity schools and served in the military find it difficult to understand the unnecessary hatred it comes from”.

In his address, Governor Fayemi said: “To be sure, unity cannot endure where injustice, exclusion, inequity and marginalisation are embedded in the practice of governance. I have often shuddered at the spectacle whereby some among us who have been entrusted with leadership responsibility very easily slide into the role of ethno-regional champions, xenophobes, and zealots.”

Fayemi opined that “while it is normal that leaders must have their ears to the ground and feel the pulse of the people who have elected them – imbibing, reproducing and spilling out raw and crude bile and pushing scorched earth solutions crosses the line of representation to become an exercise in the shirking of responsibility.

“Unlike the bulk of their followers, leaders are positioned and privileged to know that in matters of nation- and state-building, the world is far more complex than the simple and many a-times simplistic binary divisions that are frequently deployed to oppose black and white.

“Leaders must truly lead by using the broader, more complex, and better nuanced understanding they have to help moderate and modulate seasons of deep division in the polity, rather than becoming the ones who add fuel to a raging fire.”

In his keynote speech, the former chairman of the Independent National Commission (INEC), Jega, described unity as a desirable goal that is uneasy in a diverse setting like Nigeria.

Unity, Jega said can be “deliberately forged, nurtured and entrenched through citizenship mobilization, sensitization and education.”

Said he: “There is in present-day Nigeria, evidence of remarkable erosion of national unity and seeming whittling down if not abandonment of yesteryears lofty projects of national integration.

“The resurgence of, and violent activism by, insurgents and irredentist militants with a clear agenda for dismemberment of Nigeria, is indicative of the sorry state of national unity. So is the increasingly indifferent and apathetic disposition of teeming youth with regards to serious national affairs, which ordinarily would require their active engagement.

“Indeed, many young men and women are so frustrated that they are diverting their energies to aggressive behaviour and creativity to all sorts of criminality. Some have even given up on Nigeria and are merely looking for opportunities to “check-out”.

Jega listed terrorism, ethno-religious sentiments, hate speech and fake news as threats to Nigeria’s integration.

Other speakers included academics who were members of a panel of discussion at the summit. Among them is Amina Salihu, a political scientist. She expressed displeasure at what she described as systemic exclusion of women and youth in governance.

She observed that the call for a united nation may not be attained if women and youth, who formed a better part of the country’s population, remain sidelined in the process.

“A lot of the time we paid lip service to the issue of women’s rights, the issue of youth rights. But in this same country, we know that women make up 49.7% of the population, 50% of the population so to say.

“Just take a look at our National Assembly. And look at the number of senators we have out of 109, we have about seven and it’s no better in the House of Reps. It is worse at the state level, whether the state legislature or executive.

“Now we’re talking about nationhood, and we talk about social investment. Where exactly does our social investment lie? It’s definitely not going to people who need a voice to participate. And so if I feel excluded, which is the exact opposite of inclusion, if I do not feel affirmed or respected, then I do not feel a shared affinity,” she said.

Governors Simon Lalong of Plateau State, Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State, Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia State and Abubakar Bello of Niger State were absent at the event.