REF: SGMJJ/HSCU/PR/3355 9th March, 2014 1914’s Nigeria: A Construct In Colonial Slavery By Satguru Maharaj Ji Fredrick Lugard came to the area known today as Nigeria in 1894. Four years after, he created the West Africa Frontier Force of 2,000 troops, 90% of which were from the North, mainly from the Middle-Belt. Between 1894 and 1914, Lugard routinely sent intelligence reports to London, a silent exercise that led to the conception of the amalgamation project that fused the colonial Southern and Northern Protectorates of Nigeria into one nation. A hundred after the British concluded this colonial task, the notorious incubus of villainous Buckingham Palace struggles to sustain its infernal torment of our Federal Republic. British authorities designed Nigeria to be functionally incapable of making real progress. They jinxed the country with the spirit of mutual distrust, mutual suspicion and conflict and, in 1960, handed-over it over to an elite gang of Eurocentrically educated Nigerian hoodlums and bands of near-illiterates to sit on! The actual story of European invasion and subsequent enslavement of Africa is a long tale of deceit, roguery and barbarity underpinned by heinous spiritual criminality! Today, emaciated Nigeria sweats profusely in tatters, gasping at the fringes to clear the mess defecated on its gleaming fabric of natural greatness by British colonial rascals and their post-1960 Nigerian proxies. Colonial rule in Africa, as widely known, was designed to accomplish Europe’s mission of establishing systems that favoured its determination to feed itself to prosperity at our continent’s expense. African realization of this secret agenda was not as naive or as ignorant as widely held. Indeed, there were highly conscious African rulers like late King Jaja of Opobo and late King Ibanichuka of Okrika who read deep into the uninvited presence of Europeans with bible, gun, gin and political draftsmen in their respective territories. Clearly, Euro-American accounts of Africa’s invasion by agents of the Papacy and European monarchs dominate the book-shelves of the contemporary global intellectual industry. The stubborn disposition of hardened criminals to hiding the facts of their crimes with lies, cover-ups and aggression is a common reality of life. Knowing the economic and other heavy implications of exposing the actual facts of their colonial subjugation of Africa, European powers prefer to feed the world with absolute falsehoods and quarter-truths about their colonial deeds in the continent. And in their concocted accounts of their choking grip on Africa, African rulers are callously identified as brutes, savages, collaborators, blood-suckers, traitors etc! Every society has its natural share of deviants. Irresponsibility by entire members of native ruling-classes in established African societies that Europeans approached with trouble on arrival is simply part of Europe’s anti-African whitewash and blackmail! Dysfunctional Nigeria is a naked testimony against British allusion to sincerity and decency in respect of its relationship with our country from the very first day British soldiers, politicians, Christian missionaries, businessmen (etc) set foot on our nation’s soil in the name of their God, Jesus and their monarch! Similarly, the shamefully destitute state of our besieged Federation speaks against the promises and assurances of most of its post-independence leaders. Emancipators and patriots do not lounge and merry when their country is caught in the web of bondage ad decay. In 1960, Nigerian masses celebrated their country’s redemption from colonial servitude. In their various feats of frenzy, they dreamt of a future of decent and meaningful existence, away from racist and brutal maltreatment in British hands. Today, those great expectations are as abstract as they were as at the time they were originally conceived over fifty years ago! The average Nigerian, despite being a citizen of an enormously endowed land, struggles everyday at the mercy of a tyrannical system that reaches out to Europe, North America and the Arab world with the bulk of the wealth it constantly extracts under supervision by self-serving Nigerian leaders and their manipulative foreign benefactors! In the face of this and other unwholesome situations spread across our nation’s landscape, most of the successive political regimes of independent Nigeria have maintained the culture of deceit and perfidy over the imperative of patriotic and liberationist action! In 1914, British colonial authorities created Nigeria from two colonially invented Protectorates. In Year 2014, Nigerians living at the 100th year anniversary of the invention are more confused than indifferent about the parlous state of their country given to immense wealth by benevolent nature! This compels us to assess the underpinning politics of 1914’s British project of amalgamation. Like the build-up to 1960’s declaration of independence for Nigeria, 1914’s amalgamation project was closely supervised by British authorities. Based on their actual colonial interest in Africa, Europeans ensured that only tribes, systems and structures that were favourable to their mission thrived in the continent. In Nigeria, the British rarely hid their economic focus. Profit was paramount in the colonial consciousness of the British. Originally an employee of East Indian Company, subsequently a staff the Royal East African Company and later an employee the Royal Niger Company, Lugard proved himself to be a diligent and result-oriented facilitator of British commercial interests in foreign territories seized by the British crown. This basically underscores the fact that commerce, not politics, brought the British to Nigeria. Lord Lugard’s brilliance as a colonial agent served this fact outstandingly well such that he became an ‘oracle’ to the British government on matters concerning Nigeria. Unlike what we have in present-day Nigeria (over a 100 years behind British nationalistic wisdom), British business-owners and the government of Britain sustain a fraternal bond in full understanding of the fact that part of the soul of nationhood is commerce and that the protection and promotion of British commercial interests should always be a core commitment of the British government if the latter must survive and succeed in the best interest of the people of Britain as an institution. The practice of this idea is also synonymous with the other prosperous nations of the world e.g. USA, Japan, China etc. In consonance with the mercantilist drive of their colonial presence in Nigeria, the British needed a railway-line linking its Northern half and to its Southern coast, the same way they needed electricity to serve their business interests. Recurrent controversies between the separate British colonial governments of the Northern and Southern Protectorates were very common, especially on boundary matters and railway policy. Nigerian traders also got into conflict on matters that centred on levies and duties payable particularly by Southern traders to Northern colonial authorities. These intense controversies along with the attendant financial costs and the administrative complications of running two separate colonial economies largely gave birth to the imperative of amalgamating the Protectorates. However, beyond the mild heat of these and other controversies was the over-ridding task of protecting and enhancing British commercial interests which Nigerians of both Northern and Southern extraction served in their various socio-economic classes under separate British divide-and-rule indoctrinations. The Northern Protectorate was created by Fredrick Lugard with permission from his monarch after Sokoto was conquered in 1903. The North proved to be less economically viable than the South. In one of the intelligence notes he sent to London, Lugard highlighted the economic weakness of the North and emphasized the need to avail the region access to the South’s opportunities, especially its sea-coast – a logical prelude to amalgamation! It is a known fact that Africans located in areas identified as Northern and Southern Nigeria under British colonial authority had thriving relations among themselves prior to the advent British colonial adventurism. This follows that the question of Northern access to Southern opportunities and natural assets such as its coast was far more colonially British than indigenously Nigerian! Pre-colonial inter-relationship and inter-dependence between the African peoples of Northern and Southern Nigeria were deliberately ruptured and replaced with mutual suspicion by British colonial authorities. Amalgamation actually proceeded on the premise of an already divided Nigeria by British manipulation! After amalgamation, British authorities, knowing the high potential of a united Nigeria against their colonial domination of the country, made it impossible for traditionally egalitarian and more enlightened Southern Nigeria to influence the North. They basically isolated the North from the South of Nigeria, allowing just minimal post-amalgamation interaction between their peoples for 46 years (1914 to 1960)! Many contemporary Nigerians are wont to flare intense emotions when the amalgamation question is raised in almost any deliberation on Nigeria’s corporate existence. In absolute ignorance, some have gone as far as calling for the break-up of the country and also for the return of British administrators to preside over its affairs! The psychological consequences of being clueless about the origin and evolutionary patterns of Nigeria’s traumatizing problems are obviously extreme on the Nigerian psyche! Consider this truth within the context of a predominantly uneducated and a highly un-informed society, and it will be clearly understood why some Nigerians can, based on frustration, afford any logic that calls for the return of direct colonial bondage! Away from this pathological mental worldview of reality, we find that British sensitivity to traditional Southern egalitarianism and higher Southern enlightenment inspired the colonial exploitation of the North’s traditional feudal system against any viable prospect of unity between the peoples of Northern and Southern Nigeria. In other words, amalgamation did not unite people. It simply fused territories together for British operational convenience! Extending from this situation was the more covert than overt exercise of ensuring that only wayward, crooked and self-serving Nigerians rose to high positions of authority. It was this quality of Nigerians who ultimately succeeded the administrative agents of the British monarchy in Nigeria as the country’s indigenous leaders! Nigerians of contrary morality and higher principles were considered dangerous to the colonial project of bare-faced robbery and crass exploitation. In his book titled: “Blue Collar Lawman”, Harold Smith, a former British colonial administrator in Nigeria, stated that ‘the British needed people they could control. They ... selected crooks whom they knew they could control after independence’. This kind of scenario also formed part of the pre-amalgamation machinations of British colonial authorities that fused landmasses but kept their peoples apart! The crooks and their descendants selected by the British to preside over self-ruling Nigeria are the leaders responsible for Nigeria’s backwardness! One could easily emphasize the fact that this gang of leaders are predominantly from the North. Indeed, they have been, but not because the North is naturally averse to progress but due to the fact that British colonial authorities favoured the oppressively and suppressively feudal leadership system of its minority Hausa/Fulani population to reign over the region’s other constituent ethnic-nationalities and over the rest of Nigeria! Writing in his book titled: “The Biafra Story”, Fredrick Forsyth describes the pro-Fulani disposition of British authorities as Anglo-Fulani alliance. Speaking further about this coalition, Forsyth describes the traditionally feudal political culture of the Fulani as a heritage that is characterized by ‘repression by privileged Emirs and their appointees, a practice which consequently prolonged the inability of the North to graduate into the modern world’. Amalgamation neither questioned nor confronted any lifestyle or set of values that ran contrary to the purpose of British colonial presence in Nigeria. Amalgamation was meant to enhance the financial and logistical efficiency of administering Nigeria as a colonial franchise of Buckingham Palace! ... To Be Continued! Long Live The People of Ibadan, Long Live The Yoruba Race, Long Live Federal Republic of Nigeria, Long Live Africa, Long Live United World. Until I Come your way again it’s Me The Father Of Creation. Yours Ever Sincerely My Love and Blessings Prof. (M.S.A. A. Akinbami Dan Ibrahim) The Living Perfect Master.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 05:59:23 +0000
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