There is a kind of fatalism in our public conversation nowadays. It resurfaces in group discussions, on panels; you hear it in the weary asides of professionals who have done their best to the point of giving up: "Nigeria", they say, "is not working and cannot work as presently constituted".
In this landscape, the argument that "Nigeria as presently constituted cannot work" sounds more like a clear-eyed description. But if we allow historical records to help interrogate these convenient analogies and claims, the "Balkanise Nigeria" slogan begins to falter, and the "all forged nations fail" becomes very hard to sustain
We forget that the precolonial space we now call Nigeria was not a gallery of neat proto-nations waiting for Lord Lugard to glue them together against their will. It was a crowded canvas of overlapping and warring polities from the raiding bands of Hausa city-states and Borno in the north to the acephalous Igbo and Ibibio communities in the South. Each of the formations had its own internal logic, quarrels, and accommodations.
The old Yoruba world, often treated as if a pre-packaged "nation", was a lattice of warring kingdoms. Oyo exercised hegemony, Ife commanded spiritual reverence, but no single "Yoruba state" governed all. Likewise, Hausaland was a constellation of city-states before Sokoto jihad folded them into a caliphal frame. The anomalous "tribe" we now call "Hausa-Fulani" is the product of that 19th century political construct.
The vision of precolonial Nigeria as finished ethnic nation-states rudely forced into one container by colonialism is false. Those who make incorrect comparative analysis in the old Soviet Union and Yugoslavia know that their disintegrations were not decreed by some law of political physics about forced "artificial" states. They broke because of specific institutional designs and choices by elites who weaponised grievances.
Even the now romanticise Europe's "old nations" are recent constructs, held by contested stories, schools, armies, bargains, not ethnic purity. Fair treatment demands that we also acknowledge counterexamples. India, like Nigeria, is a messy, multilingual, multi-religious federation with a British colonial birth certificate and vast internal inequalities. Singapore is a post-colonial city state built from Chinese, Malay, Indian and other communities who do not share a single ancestral homeland or faith. Both nations had every excuse to fail. Yet each, in its own way, found leaders and institutions able to make diversity a workable political project rather than flee from it.
The real argument is not "structure versus leadership", as if nations are either saved by a great man or doomed by patched geo-political arrangement. Structure is the way power, resources and recognition are organised. Leadership decides whether those arrangements are continually renegotiated or allowed to rot and become a burden.
Nigeria's structural woes are neither mystical nor fated. Hyper-centralised power, upward revenue flows, politicised security, and ethnic patronage politics are design choices. They are accumulated and sustained by vested interests, not precolonial history. Nations are built by visionary leaders who dare to bend the cause of history, not saviours on horseback.
These are political actors, including civic leaders willing to risk re-negotiation of the union. They broaden identity without flattening it, making every ethnic group feel secure in a Nigerian "we" and "us". They choose to devolve power, rethink security, and reward coalitions. They deliver justice by protecting minorities, acknowledging wounds and ensuring safety everywhere.
Chanting "to your tents, O Israel" is a seductive but lazy cop-out for those not prepared to do the heavy lifting of true nation building. It builds on the frustration and much of the anger that fuels separatist sentiment. But it fails to ask whether the new tents we are offered actually solve the fundamental problems we think they solve.
Would the Arewa, Biafra, Oduduwa or a Middle Belt republic have fewer internal fractures than the Nigeria it leaves? Would an ethnically branded state automatically be kinder to its internal minorities than our current federation is? Somalia's fragmentation and Sudan's serial partitions suggest that homogeneity on paper is a poor insurance policy against fractious violence.
Nothing guarantees that Nigeria will make it. We may still fail, through cowardice, exhaustion or bad luck. But if we take history seriously, we lose the right to say that failure is our destiny. Nigeria is not uniquely artificial. It is just unfinished. It can become a political community worthy of its people.
For that to happen, enough leaders (and enough citizens) must be willing to bend the course of history and the institutions we have created toward a more just rational order. This is a harder hope to live with than the cold comfort of inevitable collapse. It puts the responsibility back in our hands; it is the more honest place to stand rather than the doomed fatalism of "it cannot work".
About the Author
Dr. Richard Ikiebe is a scholar specialising in Contemporary Media Leadership and History. With extensive experience as a media practitioner across both public and private sectors, he teaches as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos. Beyond academia, he holds other leadership positions, including President of iNSDEC, Chairman of the BusinessDay Board of Directors, and Co-convener of the YSOT.
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