By Andy Ezeani
It does appear that finally, cheeky Britain is coming to the end of a long eventful road, as far as the right it appropriated to define and code Nigeria goes.
It is not just that they gave Nigeria its name, the British left Nigeria with its imprimatur etched all over it, warts and all. Most of the struggles and contradictions of the Nigerian state, as it is, are traceable to the mark left on her by the British.
However, as things seem to have turned, 129 years after the British cobbled together the disparate people around the geographical location of the Niger and whimsically called the administrative entity Nigeria, a new Pharaoh is on the saddle in the former colony.
Either by himself or courtesy of his courtiers, the lord of the manor is manifestly determined to supplant the vestiges of the British and re-model the country in his own name. Goodbye Britain.
After over a century of Nigeria existing and swallowing such tendentious history that asserted that River Niger was discovered by Mungo Park, things are about to change. The time seems to have come to replace the old history and landmarks with realities of the moment.
The way things are shaping up, Nigerians, young and old, may soon learn that Mungo Park did not discover River Niger. From recent spirited efforts within the government to re-position history, the man who not only discovered River Niger but is also the founder of Nigeria and its landmarks is the genius called Bola Tinubu. Before him nothing was which was believed to have existed in Nigeria.
There have been sixteen heads of the Nigerian state since the country became a sovereign entity in 1960. Most of those were military dictators.
Instructively, even the military dictators obeyed basic rules of decency and administrative etiquette, which restrained political leaders from allowing public institutions and monuments to be named after them while they controlled the reins of power. It is an unwritten law but a moral imperative for leaders.
National political leaders always concede to future governments and generations the right to accord them any honour they may find them worthy of.
National monuments bearing the names of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa and Murtala Mohammed were mostly erected post humously. Aguiyi Ironsi got virtually none.
Yakubu Gowon has only got a university named after him recently. Even that was contested in some quarters on some grounds. Olusegun Obasanjo, in his two rounds of leadership of the country, has minimal public monuments named after him. Just one or two roads.
Ibrahim Babangida, who built quite some notable national infrastructure, also remains with one or two roads, named long after he left office. Abdulsalam Abubakar, Umaru Musa Yar’ Adua, and Goodluck Jonathan are yet to have due public monuments to their name,sans a road each. Ditto for Muhammadu Buhari, until the renaming of University of Maiduguri after him at his death, an honour so out of place for many cogent reasons. Protest trailed that poorly fitting honour.
Enter Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Barely three years after his emergence as president, certain truths hitherto accepted about Nigeria may soon be altered. New research inside the machinery of the Tinubu government appears to be on the verge of establishing that Bola Tinubu and not Fredrick Lugard’s consort, one Flora Shaw coined the name Nigeria. And that the same Tinubu and not the Scottish, Mungo Park “discovered” River Niger.
The realisation of these truth concerning Nigeria, its history and landmarks logically elicit an appropriate reaction. For one, Bola Tinubu, the maker of Nigeria, urgently needs to be elevated to sit among the pantheons.
This, from all indications, is afoot with alacrity in the Tinubu government. Of course, it it takes courage to do these things. Thank God, courage is currently found in its excess in the Tinubu government. Men who are not restrained by such trivia as simple etiquette and public morality abound at the corridors of power at the moment. These men are clearly in a hurry to give honour to whom honour is due.
Strategically and in order not to make the restoration of the country too disruptive, the project of naming or renaming public institutions after Bola Tinubu is being executed gradually.
Such national monuments as the International Conference Center in Abuja, built by Babangida, had been fittingly renamed after Tinubu. So also a military barrack and an Immigration facility in Abuja, as well as an airport somewhere.
Fortunately, Nigeria has a more patriotic judiciary than they do in the United States of America, where a court was so disrespectful as to order that President Donald Trump’s name which he attached to the Kennedy Centre in Washington D.C be dismantled.
Trump, through his acolytes, had got the historic Kennedy Center panel-beaten to read Trump & Kennedy Centre. It was one of those pitiable hankering for honour.
The matter was challenged in court, and the judge literally put Mr. Trump where he belongs. Of course, that was in USA. In Nigeria, there is no room for any citizen to challenge any such fitting honour done to the president and commander-in-chief.
Even if any activist lawyer tries it, the court, after reserving judgment on the matter for many months, will eventually deliver a split decision, dismissing the unpatriotic case for lack of locus standi, etc., etc.
Renaming Nigeria after her reform-eating President Tinubu, does not only seem the right thing to do for his government,it is obviously a patriotic project for them to accomplish within the 1460 days of the Tinubu presidency.
With a patriotic National Assembly on standby, alongside an equally patriotic judiciary, what or who can stop Nigeria from being re-named Tinubu?
Thus it was that in the midst of a monumental personal mess last week, Minister of Works, Dave Umahi proclaimed that with the powers conferred on him as minister, that he had conferred with his permanent secretary and had renamed the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway to now answer Bola Tinubu Coastal Highway. The re-naming of the yet-to be scratched 700-kilometre highway after President Bola Tinubu is very understandable in the light of the haste to properly situate the history of Nigeria. It is Tinubu country, anyway, so the highway is his.
Those who interpret the renaming of the coastal highway at the time it was done as a strategic move by a man in trouble to pledge his loyalty anew and to seek protection from the law, may be getting it wrong. What has the death of a young lady at the minister’s house got to do with honouring a deserving president? A huge historical exercise to name a legacy project after the maker of Nigeria couldn’t have been initiated to curry favour and divert attention from a scandal? Or could it?
