A former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Kingsely Moghalu has declared that Nigeria has no future.
Moghalu in a post on his verified X account said the only reason why Nigeria has not been able to come close to attaining its potential, let alone attaining it was not because of corruption but because Nigeria is not a nation.
He posted: “It’s a territorial state. It’s a country. Without nationhood, it has no future. It’s the absence of nationhood that feeds the corruption, the focus by the political class on power and primitive accumulation rather than governance and delivering public goods.
“It’s the absence of nationhood that creates the economic stasis, because there is no real vision.“The economy” and its “management” is, and has been for a long time, all about access to economic rents by contending, disparate, and vested interests.
“It’s not about wealth creation for the 220 million people, most of whom live in poverty.”
Moghalu emphasised that Nigeria cannot become a nation until it deals with two questions: “How to manage the fundamental problem of state formation in which disparate tribes with vastly different worldviews or none at all were lumped together and left to struggle for power in the territorial state.
“The causes and consequences of the Nigerian Civil War. Nigerian leaders have been cowards over this question, burying their heads in the sand like ostriches, instead of being statesmen and fashioning out a strategy for a healing and closure that has yet to happen.”
The former CBN deputy governor added that there are two paths to nationhood for Nigeria.
According to him, One is the possible emergence of a transformative leader in the nature of Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. A man or woman with a transcending vision beyond our disparate tribes, who leads in a manner that restores confidence in the idea of Nigeria among citizens who make “the nation” not just politicians who spout the word without even understanding its meaning.
“I believe it was the late President Samora Machel of Mozambique who said that “for the nation to be born and to live, the tribe must die”!
“The alternative is to recognise our tribes as a reality, and convene a constitutional framework that negotiates and agrees what Nigeria is, means, and guarantees to all Nigerians and ethnic nationalities that constitute it.
“In this context, only a true federalism can work, and secure a future for Nigeria. Either path calls for courage.”
Moghalu was of the opinion that after former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who with all his human frailties remained the only pan-Nigerian leader had since 1999, because he revised his views about nationhood in his older years rather than holding on to the false “nationhood” of “United, indivisible Nigeria”.
He stressed that he was yet to see a truly national leader for Nigeria.