Newsfront Online …Telling the Public as it is
Imminent Collapse of the Judicial System in Nigeria
Those killing themselves for secession, balkanization, true federalism, devolution of power, etc, may well be exerting unnecessary energy for the stage is being gradually set for the dismemberment of the country. Nigeria was built on a faulty foundation of the 1914 amalgamation of the southern and northern protectorates of British oil Rivers colony. This amalgamation brought together completely different nationalities with totally differentiated orientations, cultures and systems of social organizations all welded together to consolidate the grand exploitation of raw materials and mineral resources that fueled the British industrial revolution and economy.
However having served the British interest to their apparent satisfaction, the British in an attempt to maintain the status quo left behind this monstrous amalgam of different tribes and tongues and granted independence as a country, and installed a reactionary, subservient political and traditional elite to try and hold the bifurcated interests of the multi nationalities together and named the nascent country; Nigeria, for their convenient, continued colonial interests. Since then, attempts to hold this British creation together has been a herculean and almost impossible task.
There are so many atomistic interests and bifurcations in the multi-ethnic composition that finds expression from time to time in dissent and violence. These dissents, disagreements, and violence are as a consequence of the variegated community of diverse interests, pursued selfishly by all the components tribes and ethnicities; these intermittent strife are exacerbated by religion, tribalism, class differentiation and inequality and inequities.
However, the death knell of Nigeria as a nation was sounded when they started the massive politicization of social forces without regard to the multi-ethnic and religious configurations of the populace; thereby creating a political army, political police, political civil service, political non-combatant security organizations etc, consequently the economy; at the commanding heights is primarily governed not by sound economic principles but by heuristic, whimsical sentimentalizations.
Government and public offices became a melting ground for nepotistic ascriptions, not professional induction to the effect that those who break into these offices have as their primary qualifications; affiliations to tribal and ethnic loyalties and prebends. This is the reason why public office holders pay scant regards to altruism, nationalism, patriotism and loyalty to the state, but loyalty is to political prebends; emirs, Chiefs, Obas, Obi’s, Generals of the military, serving and retired. Heads of State and Presidents serving and retired etc. Loyalty is personalized and obedience is not to the state and the laws, but to tyrants, mini dictators and tribal chieftains.
The corollary is the rampant corruption you see in public spaces, nepotism, strife and insidious competition in governance, bigotry, irredentism and the emergence of supremacists trying to foist what is patently antithetical to the survival of the state and its overall stability.
Flash points develop in all sectors of life as variegated community interests’ wrestle to out manoeuvre each other. Those who hold the momentous advantage employ the use of state instruments of coercion to sustain the leverage of their community interests and parochial agendas. That is why the north of Nigeria which dominates the opportunistic, coercive instruments of state power seeks to Lord it over the other sections of Nigeria community interests.
That is why you see the Nigerian law school was dismembered and divided up in zones to pander to this reactionary tendencies and now that a sharia law graduate is the Chief Justice of Nigeria and the community of northern lawyers are agitating to have their own independent, Association of Nigeria lawyers of the north carved out of the National unified body of the Nigeria Bar Association and coupled with the fact that most of the core northern states run the Sharia law in supposedly complimentary siamisism to the secular laws of the country; it’ll be very easy to declare the northern parts of Nigeria and probably the middle belt as sharia-compliant Islamic states as a prelude to completely Islamize the entire country and subject it to Sharia laws.
Of course, any such move will be vehemently resisted by the predominantly Christian south and this will lead to a political and constitutional breakdown that might trigger an uncontrollable state of anomie that may consume the republic. The journey to balkanization and separation of the different ethnic groups to whit north and south is already in the making as fault lines are daily exacerbated by the deliberate ignoring of the ubiquitous agent provocateurs raising their heads everywhere and allowing them a field day in the society without any form of checking. If the north is allowed to form a parallel bar, then the Nunc Dimitri of our judicial system would have been sounded.
