Ken Saro-Wiwa concluded On A Darkling Plain, his master-work, thus "Know I should know.  I can only hope and pray that the succeeding regime will be guided by the past into policies which will lessen our collective pain and steer our beautiful country through the realms of peace to that progress and unity of which we dream".

I committed these words to heart when I first encountered them as a young man, just fresh out of graduate school in 1989.  I was editing the literary pages of the Nigerian Observer in Benin City at the time.  Ken Saro-Wiwa had sauntered into my cubicle and slapped a copy of the book down on the desk.  "Read and review this book, Mr Literary Editor and Nigerians will be wiser for it" he said in his usual jocularly fashion.  Then he blew aromatic smoke from his ever smouldering pipe into my face and hurried away for a late lunch appointment.

I have over the course of the passing years, and more so after he was murdered in cold blood in November 1995, pondered the import of the book and the man who wrote it.  For the book, as was the man, is a study in paradox.  On A Darkling Plain makes a passionate case for Nigeria’s ethnic minority groups and their right to self-determination, but also celebrates the beauty that is Nigerian unity.

It holds up General Ojukwu and his commanders as the quintessence of perfidy yet eulogies Igbo industry and ingenuity.  it holds up officers of the Nigerian army as the epitome of virtue but also blames them for the culture of corruption that was eventually to overtake the nation.

Saro-Wiwa’s politics was complex - tested and burnished by bitter experience but always relying on a fine and critical intelligence to find the way to right action.  He was not so much an Ogoni nationalist as a defender of the just rights of people wherever they might be.   This is why today everybody wants to embrace the man and his legacy - Ogoni, Nigerians, Africans, and indeed the world.   His was a politics born of the love for the oppressed of humankind.

I return to the subject of Ken Saro-Wiwa now because our nation (Nigeria) is yet again on a darkling plain.   I have always called for a national conference, untrammelled by the designs of sitting governments.   To the undiscerning, I am an advocate of a new constitution order based on "ancient" tribal boundaries, the sort beloved by Obafemi Awolowo.  This is a wrong reading of my politics.   I am a dyed in the wool Nigerian.  I was born in the northern part of the country, came of age in the death camps of Biafra, and began my working life in Lagos in the West.   My present pre-occupation, politically and scholarly, is the great injustice that has been visited on the diverse peoples of the Niger Delta by successive Nigerian governments and the oil companies in the form of ecological ruin and economic exploitation.   I shall be focusing on the current malformed politics of the Middle Belt and the wider north in the coming years.

For me "resource control" and devolution of power is not the same thing as forming a government along tribal lines for the sole purpose of exploiting a wasting resource.   There cannot be "resource control" where there are no lasting resources to control.  Real sources are those you are able to create with a mixture of brawn and intellect, using  raw material available to you in your immediate vicinity.  Crude oil, left in its crude form is a wasting resource.  It is not real wealth.  Those who build solely on it build on sand.

In my scheme "resource control" entails equipping the minds of the young in order for them to be able to meet the challenges nature and humans throw their way.  It means quality schools and libraries, uncommonly dedicated teachers and a clement domestic milieu that encourages the child to be curious about its surroundings, and to love the fact that reading and learning are their own just reward.  Thus, the community is deprived that lacks these elements, whether it is in Bayelsa or Zamfara state.

When I argue for devolution of power, it is not power to sit down with the oil companies and continue sharing the oil loot.   It is simply that my study of political order down the ages reveal that people are prosperous and content when they have a real say in the way their social affairs are ordered.  Devolved government is efficient government.  Devolved government is also humane government, to the extent that there is little distance between the governors and the governed thus reducing the potential for harsh and predatory policy.

Truly, it is a fortunate community whose members can rule and be ruled.  This is the essence of citizenship; the core constituent element of the civic community.  Note that I did not use the words "tribal community".  The phrase "ancient nationalities" is now been ceaselessly branded about as the journey to the long sought for national conference has commenced.  On the reading of some of my friends and political associates, such social groupings as ‘Yoruba’,'Igbo’,'Hausa-Fulani’, ‘Ijo’, ‘Tiv’,  ‘Urhobo’,  ‘etc are ancient nation’s rooted in time out of mind. 

This is patently false.  Not a single one of these "ancient nations was in existence at the turn of the 20th century when the British imposed imperial rule on Nigeria’s various peoples.  True, there were peoples, distinct cultures, and languages.  But the overwhelming majority of them were aggregated in city-states, village republics emirates, kingdoms and empires.

Not a single one of them was based on the principle of tribe ie you belonged to the political community only on account of ancient tribal blood.   I was reading the second volume of Margery Perham’s magisterial account of Frederick Lugard’s work in Nigeria, and I was riveted by a picture.  It was of Kano city just before Lugard conquered it in the first years of the 20th century.  People that spoke Tiv, Yoruba, Nupe - all were happily accommodated within Kano’s capacious and generous bowels.   

This was some hundred years ago, long before certain politicians who unfortunately had not read their history diligently, began to assert vociferously that Nigeria was a ‘mere geographical expression’.  They were wrong.  What we call ‘tribes’ and nationalities today were forged on the anvil of colonial exploitation,  as peoples began to compete against each other for the new but scarce shilling.

As the debate for a new constitutional compact is joined, let us pause awhile and remember the words of that great African historian, J. Ade-Ajaji:  "colonialism is an episode in African history’.  To argue for narrow tribal units as the basis of the new Nigeria is to argue for continuing colonialism.  Over the next few weeks I Will outline and defend a new thesis, arguing the case for a civic Nigeria informed by the pre-colonial political culture of her various peoples.

Ike Okonta.