"These issues of identity, ethnicity, religion and a mixture of a lot of these things are too often in the hands of the elites that compete for power and the benefits that power often bring. So, it is not as real as it is often made up. Yes, people are conscious of their identity but if you go to the market, any market, you will find people of different ethnic groups, sitting together, transacting business together. They don’t fight or quarrel. Some of them are the best of friends. So on the whole, it is the elite that often magnify and use the issues of identity especially ethnic and religion to get access to power. So, I appreciate that there are identity problems which only a gradual process of nation-building where policies are put in place to bring about cohesion and national sense of belonging to the nation which comes up gradually in all nations of the world. But here, we have not done it with the same consistency as many nations had done and too often we have allowed the elites to hijack that process to their own benefits and too often they slowed down the process of national cohesion and nation building. These issues that you hear about the West, the North and the East have a touch of reality but on the whole they are magnified by and often appropriated by the elites who use it to gain access to power. But we realize that even for the elites, it may give them a very short term gain because what it does is to delay development and take the attention that the nation should focus on those real issues of economic development into self-serving elites’ interests and that tends to slow down development and of course, when you slow down development, you create conflicts and a lot of the conflicts you see today in Nigeria are conflicts arising from those kinds of games of exclusion that the elites play, that one group grabs power and excludes the other. You discover that every conflict in the world today, you discover one form of exclusion or another.".......xxxxxxxxx
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 09:42:12 +0000
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