With President Tinubu — reputed to be a champion of restructuring — in the saddle, it is hoped that concrete steps will be taken to reinvent the house that Lugard built and make it an enduring edifice. That will be the ultimate legacy. Happy Democracy Day 2024! “This house must not fall”, I wrote in my column of 1 January, 2014, published in Daily Trust to mark 100 years of the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria.
I have always believed that if we run an inclusive system, which allows all parts to retain their cultural identities and achieve their potentials, while also identifying with a larger unifying umbrella, then we have a chance of strengthening the house that Frederick Lugard built. The least one would expect is that all parts of the country would subscribe to the same set of general values — e.g.
responsible parenthood, compulsory primary/secondary education, girl child education, equality of citizenship and acceptance of the supremacy of the constitution. If we aspire to be one country in deed and truth, then we generally shouldn’t have any problem subscribing to those values. North/South But we hardly agree about anything.
Most times, it is possible to correctly predict the ‘southern position’ on an issue and the ‘northern position’. This is in spite of the fact that there is no such thing as a Southern Nigerian political structure, nor is there one for the North. Both areas have fiercely independent minority group.
