By Prince Justice Faloye
A Structure is designed to achieve a predetermined purpose, and it will continue to produce the desired result no matter how defective or the operators, according to Social Reproduction Theories.
Regionalism was not designed by the British to bring good governance and accountability closer to the people, but to divide and rule, especially to the disadvantage of indigenous African peoples of South and Middlebelt.
This started with the skewed division of Nigeria into North and South regions which was based on Abrahamic imperialism, with European Christian colonists favoring the Northern Afro-Asiatic Islamic Caliphate.
North and South regions should either be based on Geographic equidistance that justifies the regional borders at Abuja, or based on Indigenous and Afro-Arabic civilizational traditional polities that divide in Zaria, Kaduna.
However, the Northern Afro-Asiatic civilization was allocated 75% of the land despite accounting for just 33% of Nigerian polities and population. The indigenous African civilization known as the Middlebelt was cut and added to the North.
To secure this administrative territorial hijack, it was made sure that the Middlebelt’s indigenous African family to the South were divided and set against each other to prevent a focus to demand civilizational reunification with them.
So, on April 1st 1939 they split the Southern region into East and West, which inspired bitter division when the Easterners were told to return to the East for representative democracy and governance. The political elites became prebendal whereby they only sought to share the Commonwealth, not develop it.
The formation of the regions didn’t only cause problems between the two regions, but within them. In the Western region, though majorly ‘Yoruba’ speaking, it brought about schisms between indigenous Africans of former Oyo and Edo empires.
Though the core of the Edo Empire pushed for a Midwest region, there remained slight schisms between Oyo Yorubas tied to the North and Yorubas tied to Edo in Ondo and Ekiti states. However, the civilizational leadership of the Ooni of Ife was able to keep both sides together.
Eastern Region had greater schisms due to a lack of a clear civilizational leadership in a region made up of more than ten different tribes of the indigenous African civilization.
Igbos had the demographic advantage, which with a universalist leadership, couldn’t overwhelm the coastal minorities like Ijaws, Ibibios, Efik etc, despite their regional spread since slavery.
Due to the translantic slave trade raids from River Niger on the Igbo heartland of Onitsha, Aguleri, Owerri, Okigwe, Igbos had spread towards the coast where they met Ijaws that had remained on the coast since evolution and Ibibios that had migrated thousands of years earlier down the Cross River, from where the Bantu languages evolved between Cross and Benue Rivers.
The slave raids from River Niger into the Igbo heartland led to the great migration towards the coast where they joined and took over Ibibio Arochukwu and Ijaw slave trade.
Following the end of slavery, instead of continuing the natural organic evolution from the Western region of social organization from theocracy to monarch, the Western region came with Samuel Ajayi Crowther to Christianize and decivilized them from the Indigenous African civilization.
Armed with the imperialistic Christianity, the political leadership of the Eastern Region devoid of civilizational leadership, propagated tribal republicanism that led to tribalism disguised as universalism instead of civilizationalism.
This was to be exploited by the British colonists when they were used to overthrow and kill the Afroasiatic civilizational…
