Nigeria’s two main writers, Wole Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe, have contended that Nigeria is a far from realized collectivity. If some disaffected youth take to blowing up oil installations or insisting on divorcing the polity called Nigeria, it is because, all their lives, they have experienced Nigeria as an injurious, lacerating organism.
Mr. Buhari did not start this essential crisis, but he is part of the broad political and cultural elite that failed to rise to the task of building Nigeria into a meaningful community. That task must be undertaken, or the whole concept of Nigeria will continue to be hollow.
One hopes that President Buhari has some sense of history. If he does, then he must know how futile it is to wish to “crush” a nation out of Nigeria. Whatever armory the Nigerian state has at its disposal, that state cannot crush people into compliance with an unjust, inequitable order that serves the interests of a few—at the expense of millions.