The senior citizen that reads this column every week, almost without fail, called in the other day, neither to endorse nor condemn the view expressed here on the posturing of Northern Nigeria’s political establishment that is wont to threaten to use its phantom voting strength to upset Nigeria’s political applecart.

He came with the suggestion that there must be a way to ensure that Nigeria’s political elite, in all the realms of the nation, have a consensus on principles, concepts and values that they all will share, regardless of their ethnic, regional, religious, ideological or partisan leanings.

The tendency of Nigerian politics has continued to be centrifugal such that policymakers and their policies seem to serve only sectional, ethnic, regional, and even religious interests, and not the common interest of all Nigerians.

In his book, “Pathway to Nigerian Freedom”, Obafemi Awolowo, the first Premier of Western Nigeria, observed, “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no ‘Nigerians’, in the sense as there are ‘English’, ‘Welsh’, or ‘French’”.

The word, ‘Nigerian’, is merely an appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who do not. Could Awolowo’s conclusion be partly responsible for the failure of Nigerians to think or act Nigerian?

In a verbal spat with the late National Leader of Pan Niger Delta Development Forum, Edwin Clark, former President Olusegun Obasanjo said, “Tribe has to be suppressed for the (Nigerian) state to emerge. And until the state emerges, Nigeria will not make the desired progress as tribesmen will always sacrifice state for tribe.”

A politician of Nigeria’s First Republic was reputed to have been extremely intentional in employing Nigerians mainly from his ethnic stock into the Nigeria Railway Corporation, so much that other Nigerians thought they should not seek employment there.

As a result, NRC suffered gravely from the herd mentality of its management and staff, most of whom shared the same language and culture. In recent years, the same ethnic orientation wrought incurable lethargy on the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and its successor, NNPCL.

This esteemed caller, a retired corporate guru, thought that the Nigerian Institute of Political and Strategic Studies, on whose founding committee he served, was a good place to fashion the consensus of values for Nigerian leaders. NIPSS was founded in 1979 as a think tank for policy formulation, research and training for bureaucrats, military officers and private sector leaders.

But regrettably, many who attended NIPSS courses hardly demonstrated the value they supposedly acquired in their choices of policies, programmes and projects as they worked in the legislatures, courts, government ministries, departments and agencies.

Thus, the NIPPS’ Director-General, Prof Ayo Omotayo, who boasted at the institute’s recent graduation ceremony, “We have made significant strides in making our research outputs relevant to today’s critical issues… (as) the (graduating) class represents a new wave of leaders equipped to drive change in  Nigeria,” may just be talking to himself.

Governance in Nigeria, civilian or military, has not been very inspiring, despite the quantum of alumni of NIPSS and the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria that have had the privilege to run the affairs of this great country.

Maybe the British template of catching the future political elite young by putting them through an interdisciplinary course of study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at institutions like Oxford and Cambridge universities will do the trick.

PPE explains the complex interactions of Britain’s capitalist or market-driven economy, the welfare aspects of public policy, the political institutions, culture and conventions, international relations and diplomacy, the universities, the media and social institutions.

By going through the same intellectual drills, those who studied PPE and ended up as prime ministers, ministers, senior civil servants, and military officers of Britain have a shared knowledge of the core values, institutions, goals and visions of the British realm. And so, they do not work at cross-purposes, as it obtains in Nigeria.

They understand the role and nuances of Britain’s Unwritten Constitution and its conventions, the monarchy, the political parties, the parliament, the cabinet, the civil service, the military, the secret service, the private sector, the media and other agencies of governance.

When you tell a Briton about The Firm, Westminster, 10 Downing Street, Whitehall, the City, Fleet Street, he instantly knows that you are talking about the monarchy, the parliament, the prime minister, the civil service, the British equivalent of America’s Wall Street or the private sector investors and the media, respectively.

As of 2024, 31 of the 58 British prime ministers attended Oxford, and another 14 attended Cambridge, making 45 or roughly 78 per cent of the whole. Incidentally also, 20 and 7, or roughly 47 per cent, of the prime ministers, attended either Eton College or Harrow College, two of Britain’s most prestigious elite secondary schools.

Just as you might accuse these individuals of inbreeding of ideas or even parochial herd mentality, you must also agree that shared values can lead to easy agreement and swift decision-making in the interest of the people of Nigeria.

Perhaps the underlying cause of the inability of the political elite to agree on what is best for Nigeria is the 180-degree divergence of objectives and political philosophy between Northern and Southern Nigeria.

British parliamentarian, Thomas Fowell Buxton, saw a difference in the characters of Northern and Southern monarchs, and suggested, “Whatever difficulties (Britain) may… encounter with the chiefs of the coast (of Nigeria)… there is good reason to believe that we shall find a better disposition on the part of the Sultans and sovereigns of the interior…”

Britain used missionaries and traders in relating with the Southern Protectorate of Nigeria, with a “deliberate effort to teach, to elevate and to influence by direct contact”. On the other hand, the Northern Protectorate was run by Lord Frederick Lugard, with “the soldier’s love of discipline, ranks… for (whom) law and authority proceeded downwards… and not… through discussion and democratic process”.

In his book, “A Fatherless People”, Dele Ogun notes that the British “recognised the reality of differences between the two Nigeria, to the point that it produced two types of British colonial administrations, those recruited for Northern Nigeria, schooled in (Islam and) in Arabic, and those for Southern Nigeria”, largely Christian, fluent in English and familiar with Judeo-Christian traditions.

Thus, democratic values and Christianity were encouraged in the Southern Protectorate by British officers and their Nigerian successors that were derogatively called “natives”, and the Northern Protectorate was ruled by force of arms and indirect rule that grafted the Moslem traditional institutions, designated as native authorities, to British colonial administration.

This dual ruling template was adopted when the British colonialists began to observe that Western education and the emergence of the newspaper were fast corroding their hold on the people of the Southern Protectorate. They reasoned, “Let us, rendered wise by the experience elsewhere, set our faces like flint against the ‘Europeanising’ of Northern Nigeria.”

Though the British colonial masters have set the values of Northern Nigeria against those of the South, those who identify as Nigerians must find a way to overcome this dilemma. As long as the people of the Nigeria area continue to relate with each other through ethnic prisms, so will the Nigerian state of their dream be elusive.

X:@lekansote1, lekansote.com,