Chris Ihidero Unedited: Is it Time for New Nigerians?

By Chris Ihidero

I was listening to Jimi Disu’s show on Classic FM 97.3 the other day and came across his interview with the mother of Afrobeat superstar Femi Kuti’s ex-wife, Funke Kuti. Funke’s mother, who has lived in Nigeria and held a Nigerian passport for over forty years, had been told at the passport office while trying to renew her passport that she wasn’t Nigerian. I found it laughable that anyone who could speak Yoruba as fluently as she did on the programme, coupled with her history with the country and knowledge of it, could be denied a Nigerian passport, seeing that the Nigerian passport is one of the easiest passports to acquire worldwide. You don’t even have to show up at the passport office to get one, if you know the right people.

For a while now, I have been thinking about Nigeria’s continued ethnic divisions and the constant conflicts that arise from ethnic clashes. While violent ethnic conflicts tend to get national attention, the more salient but equally debilitating conflicts and divisions attract little attention, such that in many cases, a shrug and dismissal is perhaps all that we give to these conflicts. Read through the comments section of any Nigerian newspaper online and the ethnical colouring of every single discourse is bewildering. Chinua Achebe writes a book, an excerpt is published and a battle ensues between Yoruba’s and Igbos. Soyinka grants an interview and talks about his frustrations with people asking him to put in a word for a posthumous Nobel Prize for Achebe and the comments become a tug of ethnic war arises. A Boko Haram article gets others calling northerners names and northerners defending themselves. A Yoruba actor marries and Igbo radio OAP and their marriage pictures appear on Linda Ikeji’s blog and her insipid readers turn a couple’s great moments into an excuse for ethnic verbal lynching.

I have since concluded that the problem with this country and our ethnic rivalries is that Nigeria is still largely made up of the same ethnic groups that were around in 1914 when the amalgamation happened. We don’t have ‘new Nigerians’, people who were not here then but have joined us and have a rightful claim to this country. I am particularly tired of all of us being Igbos, Yorubas, Hausas, Fulanis, Ibibios, Kanuris, Urhobos. Itsekiris and whatever else we are, or are not allowed to be. My father is an Edo man, my mother and Ijebu woman and I am a Lagos boy. Should I aspire to a political (and some economic) position tomorrow, someone will quickly remind me that I am from Edo State and cannot contest elections in Lagos State, irrespective of the fact that I have never been to my father’s village and I have lived all my life in and paid taxes to Lagos State. Many of our useless ethnic sentiments need to be discarded into the backwaters redundant history. They are not useful in a new and dynamic world.

As a child growing up in the 80s, my best teachers were either Indians or Ghanaians. This was at a time both countries were going through hard times. In our arrogance, we said Ghana Must Go, when we should have been saying ‘Ghana must Come’. What stopped us from making the smartest Ghanaians Nigerians? Why did we pursue those great teachers and artisans along with the prostitutes? There are Indian and Greek families who have been in Nigeria for generations, some as long as a 100 years. How come they are still Indians and Greeks…why aren’t they Nigerians?! I am not foolish enough to think that citizens of other countries will drop their citizenship to become Nigerians at a mere call, but I know that, especially in our glorious times, Nigeria was (still is) an attractive country to many. I’m sure we are all aware that the American Visa Lottery project is not a charity. A visionary immigration policy would have ensured that we attracted people from around the world, people who would have made worthy contributions to the development of our country; people who would form a differential block of citizenship which would remind us all when we get pigheaded about ethnicity that there are other Nigerians who don’t give a damn about being Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Kanuri, Edo or whatever else.

Perhaps it’s not too late…