Let’s Stay Together

How to build a Nigeria that works for everyone

This is the final part of my Managing Nigeria’s Diversity series. You can read parts I and II here

Human connection is an interesting topic to study and it’s one that people care about, no matter how much they claim they don’t. Everyone wants to feel included, respected and loved, which is why so many best-selling books, popular articles, trending tweets and viral videos keep circling back to the same three aspects of human connection: how to understand people, how to influence them, and how to navigate any kind of relationship. Most of these ideas apply to personal and professional relationships, but they also apply to broader social behaviour and even to entire countries. I believe some of these principles can help explain how we can make Nigeria work, but first, let me share three things I’ve learned about human connection that may help us frame a solution for our country.

First, there are no rules when it comes to connecting with people. Humans are social and complex, so it’s hard to model and predict our behaviour. That’s why for every piece of advice you read, hear or watch, there is another that says the exact opposite, and people will argue endlessly about which one is true. We hear that people become friends or partners because they share similarities; we call them two peas in a pod, yet we also hear that opposites attract. We’re told that people from similar backgrounds make better partners, but others swear they are drawn to someone because of how different the person and their background are. Some say long-distance relationships never work because proximity matters, while others insist long distance proves real love because it requires a deeper level of commitment to make it work. There are so many contradictions in both friendships and romantic relationships that anyone paying attention should realise that the key to any human connection is to do what works for you.

The next lesson is that nothing is pre-determined; it all comes down to choice. Two of our strengths as humans, which also double as flaws, are our need to simplify life through stories and our instinct to follow the crowd. We do the first because our minds struggle with randomness. It’s a lot easier to believe in fate, in stories and the lies we tell ourselves and in comforting sayings like “what will be will be,” than to accept that many events happen by chance. We also avoid mistakes and responsibility by following the crowd, as it’s easier to let others shape our beliefs and preferences than to think for ourselves. But this makes us act as if outcomes are fixed, when in reality our lives are shaped by our choices and by how we respond to the choices of others. In the context of connection, both these show up in how we choose our relationships and the meanings we assign to them. Many of us believe the people in our lives are there for a specific reason, or that certain friends or partners were “fated” to be our soulmates. But this isn’t true. We could have met, and many of us have met, different people who could have become our soulmates. The people in our lives are there because of the choices we made, the choices they made, and the choices made by countless others around us. So while our connections may feel meant to be, they are actually the result of choices and random circumstances.

Finally and most importantly, as any real lover will tell you, connections last only as long as people want them to last. So, for any connection to begin or survive, people must be willing to make it work. This requires a willingness to understand the other person, some patience, and accepting that, often, we may be misunderstood. The real question then becomes whether the connection is worth the effort. And if it is, we have to figure out what we can do to understand the other person and make it work.

We can apply these lessons to Nigeria.

• First, there are no fixed rules a country must follow to succeed: So, Nigeria has to do what works for her and her people.
• Second, nothing about Nigeria is pre-determined: We cannot fixate on what outsiders say or accept the idea that Nigeria is destined to fail because of our diversity. Our success or failure will come from the choices we make, especially the choices made by those in power.
• Finally, Nigeria will only work if we want it to work: We must be willing to put in the effort. That means understanding the concerns of every group and building a system that works for everyone.

So, how do we make Nigeria work?

Let’s put our therapy hat on and start by understanding the root issue with Nigeria. Its Diversity.

How can this work when we’re so different?

To understand why Nigeria (and the rest of the world) struggles with diversity, we need to step back and look at how societies form. Every society starts with a small group of elites trying to solve two basic problems: security and how to share resources. Once they secure their people, they set rules and build hierarchies to manage resources, and they create a founding “myth” to justify this system. That myth becomes the society’s identity, and this is how tribes and nations are formed.

In most places, these early elites come from the largest ethnic or social group since a bigger population typically meant more political or military power, and this made it easier to enforce rules and create a shared identity that everyone, willingly or not, had to live under.

Nigeria is struggling because we do not have this.

Specifically, there is no clear ethnic, religious, or regional majority in Nigeria, so no group is large enough to define the national identity or set the rules for everyone else. Instead, we have multiple groups, each strong enough to resist the others and push back on decisions they disagree with. This makes it hard for the country to move in one direction. The result is a permanent struggle over who gets to define “Nigeria”, what it means to be Nigerian and what rules everyone has to follow. This is the root of our diversity problem and why it has caused so much of our political and social tension.

So, if Nigeria had no natural majority, how did our leaders hold the country together?

Staying together for the kids

Nigeria’s military leaders built the current system to contain the ethnic tensions that led to the first coup and eventually the Civil War, and to speed up decision-making, which they believed was too slow and ineffective under the old civilian governments.

They did this by

• Centralising political power and resource control in the federal government,
• Creating new states to dilute the dominance of the three major ethnic groups, and
• Establishing an oil-based revenue system that keeps everyone dependent on the centre

And so far, it has “worked”. The country has stayed together because the states rely on the federal government for resources and elites benefit from a patronage system that keeps them invested in the “Nigeria project”. This entire arrangement rests on two pillars:

1. The demographic balance between North and South, and between Muslims and Christians, and
2. An abundance of resources, mainly oil (for patronage) and land (to pacify rural populations)

Both pillars are now cracking under the weight of Nigeria’s growing population, and they sit at the heart of our political and security crises.

Growing Apart

Multiple sources estimate that Nigeria’s population is projected to grow from around 230 million today to between 350 and 400 million by 2050. Much has been said about how we will feed, educate, and employ all these new people, but far less attention is paid to the demographic split within that growth. Recent fertility trends show a widening gap: women in Northern Nigeria average around 5–7 births, compared to about 3–4 in the South. At the very least, this means Northern Nigerians will outnumber Southerners by 2050 and beyond and that Muslims will likely outnumber Christians as well. At the same time, explosive population growth since independence has intensified demand for the two resources holding the system together: oil revenue and land, the former reduced by falling global oil prices, and the latter shrinking as desertification pushes farmers and herders into the same spaces.

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These demographic shifts, along with external pressures, are now threatening the fragile balance that has held Nigeria together. As the system weakens, long-standing unresolved tensions are resurfacing in the form of terrorist attacks, “farmer–herder clashes”, renewed independence movements, rising tribalism, and louder ethnic and religious jingoism in public discourse. Some of these issues are often explained away as caused by purely natural phenomena like climate change or as the result of rising poverty, but none of what is happening in Nigeria today is random.

Behind every crisis is an interest group, openly or covertly, fighting to change the rules of a system that no longer fits Nigeria’s demographic reality, one side pushing to rewrite the rules in its favour, and the other pushing back to protect what it fears it may lose. So really, what we’re seeing now is a return to the unresolved struggle Nigeria faced at independence: which group gets to define Nigeria, what it means to be Nigerian, and the rules everyone else must live under.

So right now we’re at a breaking point, and just like any relationship at this stage, once you understand the root of the conflict, the next step is figuring out what it would take to make things work.

So…how can we make this work?

Simple. If the current system survives by centralising power and keeping everyone dependent on Abuja, then the solution is to build a system that does the opposite.

This means we need to carry out political reforms that:

• Decentralise political power and return resource control to the states,
• Create regional councils to drive integration among states in each geopolitical zone by cooperating on shared infrastructure, economic planning, security coordination and taking up issues concerning their people at the national level
• Rewrite our fiscal rules so states have more control over certain taxes and are incentivised to build their own economies and grow their internal revenue

Basically, Nigeria needs to sharply limit the power of the Federal Government, expand the power of states and encourage regional cooperation.

In this new system, the Federal Government would focus only on the big stuff like national security, currency, foreign affairs, trade, major cross-national infrastructure, national standards and serving as arbitrator between states or between regions. This avoids the problems we faced at independence when regionalism collapsed under intense ethnic competition because now the federal government can work on holding the country together.

So, instead of fighting for control of Nigeria, as regional governments did in the 60s, States and regions today can focus on themselves. As more of the real governance happens at the state and regional levels, that brings democracy closer to the people and reduces the zero-sum fight over federal power, and this, I would believe, would get more Nigerians to buy into the system.

This, to me, is the ideal way to govern Nigeria, given our size and diversity. When you step back and look at the country from a high level, each state is as big as a small country, and each region is as big as a big one. Trying to run all of this from one centre has never made sense, and it’s even less realistic as our population grows.

This is why, when you take into account our size, our growing population, and our differences, including the gaps in regional development, there shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach to governing Nigeria. We need political solutions that give states and regions greater autonomy to run the kinds of societies they want, within a tolerant, secular, and fair Nigeria.

So what exactly does that look like? Let’s ask Switzerland.

To become closer, you need to give each other some space

Switzerland is a stable and well-run country with a very unique political system. It is held together by a loose constitutional arrangement that gives its regions, called cantons, significant autonomy. The country runs a confederation-style federation where the federal government is intentionally weak and handles only the big national tasks, similar to the ones I outlined that Nigeria’s federal government should focus on earlier, while the cantons have significant say over their own affairs in areas such as education, policing, local taxes, and many other aspects of daily life. This model works because it gives each region the flexibility to run the kind of society it wants and preserve its identity while being part of a larger union.

And it’s a model that I believe, with the right adjustments to fit our realities, could work well for Nigeria. It’s a system that lets our states grow at their own pace, encourages local elites to innovate and shape their regional economies, and gives people the ability to organise their societies in whichever way they choose, without imposing those choices on everyone else in the country.

Of course, this is not a one-size-fits-all solution. There are other issues we would need to address. For example, we could enshrine some form of power rotation of the presidency and vice presidency in the constitution between North and South, Christians and Muslims, and even within geopolitical zones. We can even get more creative. Why not consider a fully technocratic federal government appointed by the regions and states instead of electing a president, the same way we appoint technocratic ministers or choose a Central Bank governor? Our only limitation is our imagination.

However, the first step is recognising that the current system no longer fits the country we have today.

We need to restructure and devolve power. We need a new constitutional arrangement that reflects our demographic reality and helps us build the kind of country we want our children and grandchildren to inherit.

Let’s stay together

In every long-term relationship, there comes a moment when both people need to sit down and be honest about where things stand. Nigeria right now is at that stage. Things are just not working out and we can’t keep pretending that it can go on like this. We’ve been running on a system that “worked” well enough for the country we used to be, but it hasn’t kept up with the country we’ve become.

This is the point where I’m guessing any therapist would say it’s time to redefine the terms of the relationship. My hope is that the constitutional amendment discussions in the Senate are the first sign that we’re finally moving in the right direction.

Let’s just keep our fingers crossed.

Thanks for reading. I would love to hear your thoughts, so drop them in the comments.

I’ve been learning how to code and working on a few mini projects. If you’ve been thinking about learning something new, you can use my Codecademy referral link to get 50% off a membership. Also, here’s an old article written by a former presidential candidate on restructuring back when that was a thing.