NIGERIA: Uzodinma Iweala suggests her dissolution

The Daily Post newspaper has reported that the author of the novel, Beasts of no nation, the son of Nigeria’s former Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has stated that the country needs another independence and should be dissolved.

Uzodinma declared this in an article, ’Nigeria’s Second Independence: Why the Giant of Africa Needs to Start Over’, published in Foreign Affairs, an American magazine. 

Foreign Affairs is a magazine of international relations and United States foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

In the piece, the author argues strongly that one of the solutions to the political crises confronting the Nigerian nation is its dissolution.

Amid the serious political, security, and economic problems the country faces, the author challenges Nigerian citizens to decide if they want the nation to continue existing as a state or to expire.

The Harvard graduate believes that Nigeria’s problems, which have defied solutions for so long, cannot be solved by any one individual, no matter how well-intentioned he may be. This is coming as the nation is preparing for general elections in 2023. 

He argues that the tags given to the country’s problems, which suggest that they are products of the politicians’ moral failings or poor leadership, are essentially wrong.

He wrote: 

“Nigeria’s political system defies neat packaging.

“Scholars have labeled it everything from the facetious “chaosocracy” to the more benign “entrepreneurial democracy” to the pejorative “kleptocracy.”

He, therefore, suggests that nothing, including the dissolution of the country, should be off-limits in discussing the way forward for the nation.

He tends to align with the school of thought held by some Nigerians that Nigeria was put together for the administrative convenience of its colonial masters without the consent of the constituent peoples as indicated by the following excerpt from his piece:

“Before doing anything else, Nigerians need to decide: Do they want the patchwork entity named Nigeria to remain Nigeria?

“It is a reasonable question, given that the country is the arbitrary product of colonial boundaries.”

The award-winning novelist also suggests the need for home-grown solutions to the nation’s problems where citizens would not “limit their thinking to outdated and flawed U.S. and European models of democracy”.