Elder
statesman and nationalist, Dr. Paul Unongo, is one of the few surviving
politicians who played key roles in all democratic dispensations and in the
struggle for
Nigeria’s independence. In this interview, he speaks on the state
of the nation, pin-pointing where we started losing our way and the path
forward.
Excerpts: By
Omeiza Ajayi
On where the
problem started
The problem
is that after Azikiwe scored a fantastic victory in the Western House as a
member of the House and his party was to form the government, the man who
brought federalism as a form of governance reverted to the game we are playing
in Nigeria today, which is tribalism,quite different from federalism. I just
want people not to be too angry with themselves. Awolowo felt, as the strongman
of the Yoruba, Azikiwe should not have won the election in his place, and he
could not countenance an Igbo man coming to be the premier or the first
minister or prime minister of a predominantly Yoruba place. Night came, and
when day broke, Zik discovered his majority had collapsed.
The Yoruba
abandoned him and went to a strange person they did not know ideologically,
that is Awolowo, on the basis of tribe. So, Zik was forced to rethink as an
intelligent person, to relocate. He went back to his own part of the country to
become the first Premier of Eastern Region. Some of us sprang up too, in going
with Awolowo’s federalism, that the notion that there are only three tribes or
sections in the country was so fundamentally defective that we called on the
metropolitan power, Britain, to correct this before they would leave.
So, we in
the Middle Belt of Nigeria came together and decided that we would call
ourselves ‘people in the middle’ and that we were not Hausa, we were not
Fulani.
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