New Telegraph

Nigerian crisis: A case against Britain (1)

The Nigerian crisis or the trouble with Nigeria, as Chinua Achebe would say, is squarely a British act which Britain will ever be held responsible in the court of law, court of international public opinion and posterity. At the end of the World War II, the Allied Powers of which Britain was one of the principal members met in several conferences especially at Yalta and Potsdam and drew up the legal order that would govern the world affairs.

The result of those conferences was the formation of the United Nations Organisation with the guiding charter which gave all nations and people freedom, and human rights drawn up in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Self determination for all enslaved or colonised societies and people throughout the world. As a result of the new legal order, Britain being a chief signatory to this charter was obligated to conduct itself in compliance with this charter and its international obligations which more or less placed all colonized states under their colonizers as trust territories.

Moreover, by the terms of the Berlin Conference and Brussels Conference treaties, colonisers were placed under the authority of these international treaties as trustees to manage these colonised territories as trust until their independence and national self-rule were restored.

In this wise, Britain stood in loco parentis as a trustee to Nigeria. And standing on this legal pedestal, Britain was legally obligated to relate with Nigeria as ‘guardian’ and trustees of the various people it constituted under the state and country with the imposed duties of care, management and trust.

If Britain breached any of these duties imposed by the international trust bestowed upon it, it was liable to be impleaded before a court of competent jurisdiction such as the International Court of Justice at The Hague for remedies such as reparations where injuries to the Nigerian state or people or the respective indigenous people have occasioned. British relationship with Nigeria effectively took off from 1949 when it appointed John Beecroft as Consul over the Gulf of Guinea and subsequent British imperial officers who, in the guise of stopping Slave Trade, dabbled into the local affairs of communities such as Lagos in 1951 when it was attacked, conquered and colonised in 1862.

The conquests of Niger Delta States (Opobo, Bonny, Akassa, Brass, Calabar, Koko, Benin, etc.) and the hinterland communities such as the Igbo village republics especially Arochukwu, and Idah, Nupe, Abeokuta, Ibadan, the Sokoto Caliphate induced serious socio-economic and political dislocations in these communities.

The transfer of these communities that later constituted Nigeria to a commercial company driven by profit motives further worsened the well-being of these communities as the company (the Royal Niger Company) in the pacification of the communities through violent military expeditions conducted and led by the then Captain Frederick Lugard from Niger Delta to the Sokoto Caliphate deployed humongous violence against them to conquer and exploit their economic resources. Worst of all, the people that survived the wars of pacification suffered debilitating economic dislocations under the monopoly imposed on the territory.

By 1900, when Britain revoked the Royal Niger Company Charter and took over direct administration its parsimonious attitude to colonisation business made it to adopt the Indirect Rule system which was tantamount to a re-conquest of the 249 ethnic nationalities and subjugating and subjecting them under the alien rule of the Fulani Caliphate of Sokoto. This has been at the root of Nigeria crisis as Britain had insisted, and still insists from 1914 to date that its chosen structural and constitutional framework must be accepted without change in several historical junctures between 1951 and 1970. There is historical evidence to indict Britain in its direct, unabashed interference with Nigeria’s constitutional development by way of maintaining it as a neo-colonial state.

At least, the declassification of British imperial records and publishing them have afforded all colonised people an opportunity to source those documents and study them to know how Britain related with their communities during the discharge of its mandate as coloniser/trustee.

In all the volumes of those documents running into thousands of pages, the detailed accounts were unearthed and put to public scrutiny. In the case of Nigeria, discounting entries in the several volumes covering 1900 – 1942, the entries in the British Documents on the End of Empire (Nigeria), Managing Political Reforms (1943–1953) and moving to independence (1953–1960) and edited by Martin Lynn and published by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London in 2001 are very critical and mind-boggling. Volume one is 643 pages while volume two is 801 pages.

In several correspondences between the Colonial Office in London and British Colonial authority in Lagos, the deliberate policy to make Nigeria ungovernable, prone to crisis and therefore unstable but authoritarian was carefully worked out and entrenched in legal instrument derogatorily called ‘constitutions’.

In the first of such instruments (The Letters Patent, 1913 and the Proclamation, 1913) Nigeria was constituted as an autocratic entity in 1914 and while Lord Lewis Harcourt was approving the measure with Sir Frederick Lugard as the enforcing officer dismissively directed that the well-behaved Northern youths (meaning by that Hausa/Fulani aristocratic rulers) has been married off to a Southern Lady of Means (meaning by this raciest slur the southern ethnic nationalities) and derisively mandated Lugard to proclaim his blessing upon the forced marriage (meaning the forcible amalgamation he decreed against the Nigerian ethnic nationalities to be constituted as nation-state and country). Even as the amalgamated entity started their unholy union, Britain continued to sow seeds of discord between the supposed ‘husband’ and ‘wife’.

Britain did not allow legal consummation of the marriage by allowing any kind of socio-economic intercourse but only permitted limited political interaction when both the husband had reached an age it no longer care for reproduction just as the supposed wife had attained menopause. So, the union was childless, barren and unfruitful. Being socio-economically and political infertile, the family has been ravaged by sundry social vagabonds in the guise of insurgents, cattle herders and rustlers, armed robbers, kidnappers and violent bandits. Even before these social vagabonds took over the country, the custodians of the Nigerian state popularly called politicians who had been mentored by British colonial officials had taken over the country after Britain got tired and transferred instrument of authority to them.

Britain knew that there were two objects it set out to achieve in constituting Nigeria: one is by creating Nigeria to become a dominion like Canada or Australia but the factors of unhealthy environment spewing forth tropical diseases especially malaria will not allow such end to materialize even assuming that the politicians being then nurtured under the Native Authority System were to be faithful and they proved adept at upholding British values and designs. Second, it was hoped that failing to have Nigeria as a dominion in the mode of Canada or Australia, that it will be constituted a pitiable neo-colonial state forever tied to British apron string. This second objective has succeeded beyond the wildest imaginations of the British authors and they acknowledged this fact.

‘The neo-colonial agenda gained currency immediately, but the Southern elements (educated products of the Christian missionary schools) attained political consciousness and started challenging British colonial intentions and actions but Britain dismissed them as political misfits who lacked political roots and organic essence. The battle was drawn from 1930s but these Nigerian nationalist proved ill-prepared for the tasks of nation-building and nationalism.

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