It will not be out of place to say that Nigerians are creatures of expediency. The people are not interested in enduring arrangements. They rush at situations but they do not have the discipline to take them to their logical conclusions. This is borne out of their belief in nothing. Nigerians have no abiding standards. Every situation comes to them like a fashion. It changes arbitrarily.

Their situation is not helped by the fact that their country is managed by a flippant leadership that also believes in nothing. They know that the people will not hold them to account. For this reason, they live for the moment. Tomorrow can take care of itself. That is why a serious-minded pursuit of programmes or policies has always been the will-o’-the-wisp that Nigerians have been chasing without end. The country never gets to the Promised Land because its drivers have no sense of direction.

Nigerians have exhibited all of these tendencies in their national life. They love to howl and fret over issues. A few scenarios come handy here. Less than a year ago, the issue that dominated national discourse was restructuring. Nigerians said they wanted their country to be restructured. They believed that the present political and economic structure of the country was not working. They wanted a radical displacement of the existing order. The debate gained currency. It meant so much to Nigerians. There were as many perspectives as there were groups of Nigerians.

However, there were pockets of naysayers. This constituted mainly of those who were benefiting unduly from the present order. They sneered at the idea of restructuring. They said they did not know what restructuring meant. They slanted the idea in order to foist maximum confusion on it. This group, though tiny, was powerful. They had the ears of President Muhammadu Buhari. They told him to shun all the talk about restructuring. And he did. When the President finally spoke, he was emphatic. He said he would not restructure the country. That marked the end of the discussion. Nigerians gave up on the matter, thus creating the impression that the country belonged to one man: the President.

Since then, the issue has gone under. It is no longer being talked about. The only group that makes occasional references to it is the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural group, Afenifere. Every other person or group is focused right now on which segment of Nigeria should produce the President of the country in the 2023 general election.

That brings us to the rancour called zoning. It has assumed the centre stage over and above restructuring. But, if Nigerians were to be a people who followed through issues, they would have taken the agitation over restructuring to a promising end. Something concrete would have come out of it. But as ad hoc operators that they are, they allowed the matter to fizzle out. Zoning is now the brand new headache that we are yet to come to terms with. But, like restructuring, we are likely to abandon it midstream in search of other dream solutions to our national fault lines.

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The problem here is the complete absence of national consensus in whatever we do as a country. Today, Nigerians are sharply divided over the zoning of the presidency. No part of the country wants to make any concession to the other. The frenzy has reached fever-pitch levels. Yet, there has been no point of convergence over the matter. In the end, the more powerful group will seize the day, leaving the others forlorn. This type of situation has not made national cohesion possible.

As a matter of fact, the ongoing zoning debate is presenting Nigeria in its elemental worst. Facts are being stood on their head in order to win the argument. Ultimately, nobody will impress anybody. The whole argument sounds like a monologue. You listen only to yourself. At the end of the day, it is not reason that will win the argument. What will win is imposition. The losers, as in all matters Nigerian, will lick their wounds. But they will, at some point, regroup to start a fresh agitation. This keeps the country in a state of infinite regress. No issue is ever settled.

The underlying problem in all of this is distrust for one another. No segment of Nigeria trusts the other. The overriding suspicion is that of possible domination by one section of the country over the others. The fear is latent. The possibility is being avoided like a plague. That explains the clamour for restructuring. That is also at the root of the ongoing debate over zoning. Everyone wants to have a chunk of the national cake as of right. What will guarantee this is not necessarily individual merit but the entitlement mentality of groups or sections of the country. But the clamour and debate will have no end, if Nigerians continue to run their races halfway. A serious-minded people takes up issues and ensures that they conclude them, one way or the other. In our own case, issues merely fizzle out because we do not bother about seeing them through the rigours and crucibles of national consensus. That is why we abandoned the agitation for restructuring midstream. That is why the few who are opposed to it will continue to have their way. They know that the strident voices calling for restructuring will always go shrill.

Regardless of the self-imposed hangups that we suffer, the time has come for Nigerians to recognize the fact that restructuring the country is more urgent than any other national issue we are pursuing. A restructured Nigeria will be more enduring because it will be less fractious. Nigerians should apply their minds to it. Restructuring will also help the country to deal decisively with the vexed issue of zoning. A restructured Nigeria will not only make the zoning debate redundant, it will make it unnecessary. Can Nigerians, for once, take any national issue to its logical conclusion? Restructuring the country will be a good test case.

The way to make this issue worth the while is to make restructuring a campaign issue. After all the hue and cry over zoning, candidates will eventually emerge for the forthcoming presidential election. Nigerians should seize the opportunity presented by the electoral contest to test the commitment, or lack of it, of the candidates to restructuring. It will help to bring the candidate who eventually becomes the President to account.