One Nigeria: beyond the slogan, toward the soul
By Dr Donald Peterson Someone said on Facebook… “One Nigeria is an illusion…Nigeria is merely an SPV for the hegemonists” Chai! The APC federal government has a lot of mindset
By Dr Donald Peterson
Someone said on Facebook...
“One Nigeria is an illusion...Nigeria is merely an SPV for the hegemonists”
Chai!
The APC federal government has a lot of mindset re-engineering to do to help elvolve the perception of the average Nigerian...
Let me be honest with you. That Facebook post stings a little, not because it’s entirely wrong, but because it’s the kind of raw frustration that carries real lived experience inside it. When someone says Nigeria is “an SPV for hegemonists,” they’re not just venting. They’re describing decades of exclusion, resource allocation patterns, appointments, and a recurring sense that the federation only works well for a particular group of people at any given time.
That feeling is data. It deserves a serious response, not a flag-waving rebuttal.
First, Let’s Name the Problem Honestly:
Nigeria’s unity has always been more constitutional than emotional. We wrote a country into existence before we wrote a people into existence. And maybe that’s okay as a starting point. But 65 years in, we’re still arguing about whether the starting point was rigged. The North feels its political relevance is perpetually under threat. The South feels its economic contribution is perpetually undervalued. The Middle Belt feels invisible to both. And then you have the Southeast, where the wounds from 1967 to 1970 are still very much unhealed, regardless of how quietly we’ve agreed not to talk about it in formal settings.
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APC, as the party in power, carries a particular burden here. Because the perception, fair or not, is that the party structure itself has sometimes amplifies ethno-regional politics rather than transcended it. Mindset re-engineering, as rightly said, starts from within.
What Reconciliation Actually Requires:
I think we tend to rush to cohesion without doing the reconciliation work first. And that’s where things fall apart every time.
Real reconciliation requires a few uncomfortable things.
Acknowledgment before advancement. You cannot build unity on unacknowledged grievances. The civil war, the MOSOP crisis, ENDSARS, the consistent marginalisation of certain communities in federal appointments and infrastructure, these things need to be named and addressed, not just managed politically. A formal national truth and reconciliation conversation, not a presidential committee that produces a report nobody reads, but an actual structured national dialogue, would be a meaningful start.
Restructuring the conversation, if not the structure itself. Many Nigerians don’t want to break the country. They want to feel that the country works for them. So resource control, State policing, derivation formula reviews, genuine fiscal federalism, these are not separatist demands. They’re basically requests for a more honest operating agreement. The Tinubu government would do well to treat them that way.
Healing through equity, not just rhetoric. Appointments matter. Infrastructure spread matters. Loan disbursements, federal scholarships, security deployment patterns, they all send quiet messages about who belongs to the Nigeria project and who is just tolerated in it. People are watching. They always are.
What the Tinubu Administration Is Actually Doing:
To be fair, and I think fairness is required here even when it’s inconvenient, the Tinubu-led government has taken some steps worth acknowledging.
The cabinet, whatever criticisms one might level at its size or composition, is arguably one of the more geographically distributed in recent memory. There are visible attempts to include voices from regions that often feel peripheral. Whether those appointments translate into actual policy influence is a different conversation, but the optics at least gesture toward inclusion.
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The economic reforms, painful as they are, carry a certain brutal equity in them. Fuel subsidy removal affected everyone. The naira floatation hit every wallet. There’s something almost accidentally egalitarian about a reform that makes rich and poor alike feel the squeeze simultaneously. I’m not saying that’s the intention, but it does collapse certain illusions about who the government protects.
The infrastructure push, particularly the attention to road and rail connectivity between regions, matters enormously for cohesion. When you can move easily between Lagos and Abuja, between Port Harcourt and Kano, something psychological shifts. Proximity breeds familiarity. Familiarity, over time, breeds something closer to solidarity.
The Renewed Hope agenda, to its credit, does include language around inclusion, youth empowerment, and regional equity. The question is always implementation. Language in a manifesto and money in a budget are two very different things.
The Steps Forward, Practically Speaking:
So what should actually happen? A few things I think are genuinely worth pushing for.
One is a structured national dialogue process. Not a one-off summit, but something sustained, with representation from traditional rulers, civil society, youth organisations, professional bodies, and diaspora voices. Something that produces binding recommendations, not just goodwill communiqués.
Two is deliberate investment in shared cultural infrastructure. National television that actually tells all our stories. Educational curricula that teach Igbo children about Bayajidda and Hausa children about the Benin Kingdom, not as foreign histories, but as chapters in their own story.
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Three is security sector reform with a regional sensitivity lens. State policing, or at minimum a more community-anchored security architecture, would go a long way toward making people feel protected by the state rather than threatened by it.
Four is an honest conversation within APC about its own internal power dynamics. The party cannot preach national unity while operating on ethnic political calculations internally. That contradiction is visible to ordinary Nigerians, and it erodes trust faster than any opposition messaging could.
The Longer View:
Nigeria has held together through things that should have broken it. That’s not nothing. There is, underneath all the frustration, a genuine attachment to this idea of a large, powerful, consequential African nation. People don’t really want it to fail. They want it to work, and they’re angry because they believe it could.
The Facebook post is a cry from someone who wants to belong to something real. The job of leadership, whether in government, in party structures, or in civil society, is to build the kind of Nigeria that makes that cry unnecessary.
We’re not there yet. But to be honest, I don’t think we’re as far as the frustration makes it feel either.
