We must think about this. In 1910, the whole of Southern Nigeria was ruled by one single governor, Mr. Walter Egerton. The governor and his wife are the ones wearing caps, standing far right and far left.Today, the same territory is being ruled by about 18 governors and wasting Nigerian resources on recurrent expenditure and greed.
Credits: National Archives, United Kingdom.
A relevant correlation. However, let’s think de-centralisation and redistributions in the face of geo-political, demographic,ethnic and tribal diversity.
It is not the efficiency of colonial rule but its dominance and preponderance on an unenlightened, anomalous, gullible and even vulnerable populace. An extension of this is applicable to current trend in socio-political subservience, whereby various groups feel at a loss for assertiveness and capacity to challenge impunity. Nigerian leaders such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Herbert Macauley, Obafemi Awolowo, Tafawa Balewa, Sadauna of Sokoto, were all but newborns or youths at this period: when Nigeria’s history started socio-politically.
The current trend still shacks from modern thinking as the classist system of capitalism and marxist ideologies are not essentially understood by the masses to distinguish rights from priviledges. For instance, where individual tax payers are conscious of a misuse of their monetary contributions to national growth and development, but fail to assert corrective statements to the effect only reflects a suppression of individual responsibility, thus, an offer of resignation on a ‘silver platter’.
Neo-colonialism is what current state of affairs in Nigeria as a whole imbibes, howbeit, an indigenous, internally-developed colonialisation by the people-for-the-people. When we continue to play the power game against each other, we are consistently offering our internal systems to be either re-acquired or exploited by external interests, with resultant socio-economic and political resumption in various societal structures: This is where we are at in Nigeria of today, and indeed, in Africa, and many other developing nations around the globe.
A solution: coming down very hard on undue priviledges and acts of socio-economic and political impunity.