As Buhari plans his cabinet (2)

 WHERE Azikiwe preached political inclusion and
strategic integration, his political opponents preached
exclusion based on historic difference. The defeat of
the Zikist vision of nation was the ultimate Nigerian
tragedy; in its place have triumphed the Awoist and
Sarduana models of Nigeria, in which “the North is
for the North, and the West is for the West, and
Nigeria for all of us.”
 These are the people we celebrate today for their
“sagely” vision that basically argued that a single,
organic national space is impossible and must be
fought. This belief in the “ethnos” is the powerful
drive against coherence; and against the emergence
of Nigeria.
Nigeria of course deserves its heroes. For many
years, the Igbo modelled the dream of a pan-
Nigerian nationalist identity; the possibility of an
organic Nigerian state. They dispersed in this belief
to all corners of this nation, willing to be nothing else
but Nigerian: they made the railways run; they made
the civil service function; created institutions; men
like Kenneth Dike ran universities at global
standards; created the Nigerian National Museum of
Antiquities; the National Archives; the National
Institute of Social Research; the International
Institute for Tropical Agriculture; the National
Institute of International Affairs; etc.
But in 1966/67, the Igbo were forced out of Nigeria,
and when it became clear as Gowon only recently
confessed that “Nigeria was better with the Igbo as
part,” Nigeria fought a war to bring back the Igbo. The
Igbo were forced back, not as equal partners, but as a
defeated part of Nigeria which must only be
tolerated, but whose political and economic rights
remain severely abridged since 1970.
As a result, a high number of the Igbo continue to
dream of a separate nation of Biafra. The Igbo are
still to return spiritually to Nigeria. Over the years,
many Igbo have bought into the ideology that Nigeria
is no longer worth their time; that it is a
“contraption;” a “mere geographical expression,” a
“mistake of 1914.” The Igbo have created a myth of
Biafra and handed it to their children, and just like
the Jews mythologized Jerusalem, only a return to
Biafra, will mark their ultimate triumph and liberty.
It is only in this “New Jerusalem” called Biafra that
they would unleash what they see as their talents, of
which in some estimation, Nigeria is undeserving.
This is of course a highly romantic vision, of which I
too as an Igbo occasionally indulge, only because,
there is a certain power to dreaming about historical
purpose. It is the absence of “the dream” and clarity
of a historical purpose; a fundamental myth of
nation; that makes Nigeria fragile and impossible,
and of very little worth to the imagination.
The reason why modern Nigerian art – its poetry, its
fiction, its drama, its visual arts, and even its music –
is fixed within a tragic sensibility is fundamentally
because there is no redemptive myth of nation.
While Azikiwe gave us that from 1937-1957, the
result of which is the aesthetic and moral force that
drove Nigeria’s early vision of itself as the “giant of
Africa,” or as “the new black hope,” this age, with its
recondite and separatist will; its religious fanaticism;
its sectarian and ethnic impulsions, think of itself in
the measure of teaspoons. Its mind is inferio