Decolonising Nigeria: Reflections on the idea of home for Nigerians
BY TADESE FAFORIJI
In 2024, I was posted to Cross River to serve as a corps member for the National Youth Service Corps. I had never been to the southern part of the country, and I was eager to see what life would be like there, especially in Calabar, whose attractions, like the Obudu Mountain Resort, I had watched in dozens of short-form videos online. I had also planned to learn Igbo; this felt like a rare opportunity to finally make that happen. It didn’t go as planned.
The journey itself was ordinary by Nigerian standards, which is to say it was hard: sleeping at the park, waiting out stretches of road known for armed robbery, all the small endurances that come with a long trip from Osogbo, Osun state, to Obubra, Cross River. What surprised me more than the journey was what came after — the calls. Friends and family, worried about my “safety in Igboland,” told me to relocate, to “come back home.” Every time, I asked what they meant by home, as if I wasn’t in my own country. I was the delusional one, apparently, for assuming that a shared sense of belonging to one Nigeria was something educated people around me still held. Conversations on camp proved otherwise. Corps members from every region wanted to serve close to home. “I just wanted to serve in the west, I can’t survive here,” a friend from Ogun state told me more than once. In time, I felt it too. I wanted to go home.
I applied for relocation, and it was approved. I was happy — I would see my girlfriend again — and quietly grieving, because my plan to learn Igbo would never happen now. When I went back home, the relief on my family’s part was almost theatrical, because I had left “Igboland” (to the average Nigerian, the entire south is Igboland, south-south or south-east, no distinction made, a flattening that is itself a political inheritance). Nigeria is, I’ve come to believe, one large and unresolved political arrangement, a country that insists it is better together while doing very little to earn that claim.
The idea of “One Nigeria” is largely a fiction — though its early architects meant something more sincere by it: national solidarity, however aspirational. Nigeria’s independence in 1960 was political, not total (the country’s first generation of leaders were, after all, groomed by and answerable to Western interests), and what followed shaped the Nigeria we live in now: ethnic tension, corruption, favouritism, insecurity, economic instability. These are not accidents. They are legacies of colonial administration.
It would be dishonest, though, to claim colonialism invented ethnic difference in Nigeria out of nothing. Pre-colonial history was not a blank, harmonious page — the Sokoto jihads, Yoruba civil wars, and Aro slave-trading networks all speak to real, sometimes violent, inter-group rivalry that predates the British. What colonial rule did was harden that difference into administrative fact. Indirect rule required legible, bounded ethnic categories to govern through, and the regional structure imposed in the 1950s — Western, Eastern, and Northern — took what had been fluid, overlapping identities and fixed them into competing political blocs. The tension didn’t begin there. But it calcified there.
Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country captures what that calcification cost. He narrates the ordeal of Igbos across the country after the January 15, 1966, coup led by Major Kaduna Nzeogwu — a coup that killed several of Nigeria’s leaders, among them Sir Ahmadu Bello, Tafawa Balewa, and Ladoke Akintola, most of them non-Igbo. It was dubbed the “Igbo coup,” and the label alone triggered organised reprisals against Igbos nationwide. Achebe, living in Lagos at the time, describes the impossible calculation he faced: keep his broadcasting job and risk his life, or send his wife and children east and follow when he could. Colleagues eventually urged him to leave, too. He battled this conundrum until he almost got killed, then he finally left for home!
Nigeria is not a “home” for Nigerians, and that is a legacy of colonial rule. We shouldn’t dwell on the past to write about decolonisation if there was not a brutal phase of our existence. Nigeria must strip itself of the chains of colonial rule by embracing unity and solidarity in its full form. Politicians ruin, and it is the work of politicians to ruin. During the 2023 general election that led to the victory of the current presidency of president Bola Tinubu, the western region was marred by open violence against a certain group of people who were told to leave Lagos and “go home” Many instances prove we are divided; even we exude the remnants of division over social media posts.
Recently, a Nigerian social media influencer named Dickson posted about his love for Lagos — childhood memories, the affection of someone who considers it home. Dickson is Delta by origin, but he was born and raised in Lagos; I only learned his origin state by searching for it on Google through the post’s comments, because I was fairly certain someone in the comments would bring it up as a disqualification. I was right. The replies did exactly that: reminded him, in effect, that Lagos is not his to claim, albeit they do this in a subtle manner that made their comments seem inquisitive. This is someone who has no other home except Lagos, and he would almost certainly be barred from contesting anything beyond a minor local appointment there. Reading that thread, I understood how far we still are from resolving this. The “indigene” framework — deciding who belongs where based on ancestral origin rather than lived residence — is a colonial-era administrative tool, still fully operative, still deciding who gets to govern and who doesn’t.
Why shouldn’t a Nigerian raised entirely outside his region of origin have the right to contest any political position there, including governorship, in the place that actually raised him? If a child born to Osun parents grows up in Zamfara or Enugu, speaking the local language, shaped by local custom, indistinguishable in every practical sense from his neighbours, why is he sent “back home” the moment he seeks to lead the place that made him? Nigerians who emigrate to Europe or the US can naturalise, contest elections, and hold office within years. Why does the same courtesy not extend to a Nigerian moving between Nigerian states?
Until Nigeria answers that question in law, “One Nigeria” will remain what it has mostly been since 1914: an administrative convenience wearing the language of unity.