Since January 2020, I have been part of a team of six Nigerians, comprising three males and three females, three southerners and three northerners and three Christians and three Muslims, that was put together by the Lux Terra Leadership Foundation to work on a project, tagged Network and Advocacy Group (NAAG). With support from the McArthur Foundation and Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), the Network and Advocacy Group of the Lux Terra Leadership Foundation was to help mobilize voices of moderation in a highly polarised and tense polity in order to douse tension in Nigeria and promote the culture of social justice, peaceful coexistence, amicable conflict resolution, unity and democratic citizenship through inclusion and national integration.
Under the leadership of Reverend Father George Ehusani, a renowned Catholic priest, scholar and intellectual patriot who in the last four decades has been a frontline advocate of democratic governance and social justice for the Nigerian people, my team at Lux Terra embarked on a project that was aimed at rebuilding the Nigerian nation using bottom-to-the-top approach. The highly respected and revered reverend elder statesman assembled us to embark on this project at the time because Nigeria was on the brink of state failure and eventual collapse as a result of the near absence of social justice, peace and unity in the administration of the affairs of the Nigerian state.
Arising from the thorough mismanagement of Nigeria’s ethno-geographic and religious diversity and the elevation of sectionalism to a pseudo policy of the Nigerian state by the Muhammadu Buhari administration, many Nigerians were excluded and marginalized and made to feel like outsiders inside their own country. Feeling deeply hurt and frustrated with a political leadership that was tone deaf to pleas for more inclusion and redressing of all genuine cases of marginalisation, Nigerians began to resort to self-help. Separatist agitation spread across the entire southern half of the Nigerian federation just as insecurity heightened across the country as the centre could no longer hold.
To quickly arrest this state of deep divisions and avert the slippery road to state failure, Fr. Ehusani posited that “it will require a higher level of consciousness to solve a problem than that was created by a lower level of consciousness.” And this position became the guiding philosophy of various engagements in the course of project execution of the Network and Advocacy Group of the Lux Terra Leadership Foundation. In the course of our research, regular interactions with a cross-section of media personalities and situation analysis by members of our think tank, we were able to isolate the phenomenon of “division in oneness” as the lower level of consciousness that created the fundamental problems of Nigeria, just as we identified “unity in diversity” as the higher level of consciousness that citizens of Nigeria can attain to help the country over its existential challenges.
In our engagements with community stakeholders that were drawn from ethnic and religious divides, select serving members of National Youth Service Corps and basic education teachers, we were deliberate to calibrate our training modules to impact on them the higher level of consciousness of the imperative unity in diversity and that Nigerians are essentially one people with its diversity, which can be likened to the colourful feathers a beautiful bird as only physical manifestation various languages, culture and norms that are environmentally acquired and does not constitute a skin-deep difference among the peoples of Nigeria. The objective of this project was such that the participants would become agents of positive change in the larger society.
To drive home this point, we took a deep dive into history and brought to the fore material evidence of the historic, geographic and linguistic commonalties of the peoples of Nigeria and their culture that are essentially a variety of the same Black African cultural commonwealth. And Nigerians are members of the same family living in different parts of the family compound as reflected in our various ethno-geographic origins. This effort is in recognition of the fact that, for social justice to be entrenched, the constituent peoples of Nigeria must have a sense of oneness enough to desire for others what they desire for themselves and to be able to do unto others what they want others to do unto them.
However, while it is important for the peoples of Nigeria to evolve the new consciousness of our oneness even as we appear diverse, the role of the political leadership of the country at various levels is far more important. In our various advocacy visits to influential Nigerian leaders, past and present, we identified the need for a deliberate process of inclusion, fairness and justice as a practical demonstration of the oneness of the Nigerian people, irrespective of ethnic or religious “differences”. While we didn’t see much of this deliberate act of nation building in the last eight years of the Buhari administration, the efforts of the current administration are as noteworthy as they are heartwarming.
In every of his statement, pronouncements or address so far, Nigeria’s President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and his Vice, Kashim Shettima, appear to have adopted the oneness of the Nigerian people and the imperative of its unity in diversity as a national philosophy. Tinubu was quoted as recently saying that “Nigerians are members of the same household living in different rooms”. Whereas, the Muslim/Muslim ticket of the Tinubu/Shettima presidential bid religiously polarised the country going into the 2023 presidential election, they appear set to heal a fractured country through a deliberate process of nation-building through an inclusive leadership style. And Shettima appears very eager and willing to drive this national healing, reconciliation and unity agenda.
Upon his election as Vice-President, Shettima, former governor of Borno State and senator of the federal republic, made a public show of his personal security appointments when he announced his ADC to be a Christian of South East origin and his chief security officer as a Christian from northern Nigeria. In post-Buhari Nigeria, for the highest political office holder from the Muslim north of Nigeria to entrust his personal security to Christian security personnel is a big deal as well as a courageous move towards national healing and unity. Describing his choice of entrusting his life in the hands of Nigerians of other religious and ethnic background as “deliberate” Shettima was only being consistent as a pan-Nigerian nationalist who understands the imperative of inclusion, social justice, equity and fairness in the administration of a diverse country such as Nigeria.
In addition to having adopted children that are southerners and Christians into his family as governor of his home state of Borno, northeast Nigeria, Shettima adopted the principle of residency in his appointments into his administration. That was why his cabinet as governor was a reflection of Nigeria as it included people that are otherwise considered “non-indigenes”. This deliberate act of nation-building through inclusion, fairness and equity was primarily responsible for Shettima’s insistence on power shift to the South after years of Buhari’s northern presidency. And, whereas his vice presidential bid was a counterweight against PDP’s fielding of Atiku Abubakar, a northerner, in an attempt to scuttle power shift to the South, Shettima appears fully conscious of the need to heal a divided country.
His passionate appeal for the Muslim north to allow for the emergence of southern Christian senate president in order to give a sense of belonging to Christian Nigeria was patriotic and forthright.
Unfortunately, his well-meaning statement to the effect that in the current circumstance, that even ‘’the most incompetent Southern Christian is better than the most puritanical Northern Muslim’’ was deliberately twisted out of context and given a completely different meaning by subscribed interest groups, that were working for the emergence of Muslim Senate President in a country with a Muslim president and vice president. The effect of this distortion of a clarion call for inclusion, fairness and equity, drew such a backlash that Vice President Shettima had to withdraw his statement and tendered an apology to the many people who felt offended. While it is not a sign of weakness for leaders to take responsibility whenever they misunderstood, it is hope that this sad episode will not discourage Vice President Shettima from advancing the course of social justice, equity and fairness through his deliberate act of building an inclusive Nigerian nation.