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How To Save Nigeria’s Unity And Economy Using The Canadian Example Edit ADMINISTRATOR 18 APR 2016 CALL FOR CONFEDERATION Canada is a nation of people and ethnic nationalities from  diverse religious, social, cultural and political backgrounds, yet the country was able to overcome these diversities and became a great prosperous nation today. Nigeria too can become great if the critical stakeholders of the Nigerian project choose to toe the path of honour and courage as the past leaders of Canada and its people did.

Many Nigerian people and leaders would think that the beautiful, peaceful, powerful and economically prosperous Canada they see today is the summary of Canada and its people. It is not. Social analysts, Will Ferguson, captured the real story of Canada’s past succinctly in his account of the timelines of Canada’s journey from obscurity to global stardom; ” Canadian history is a lot of fun. There are heroes and villains, tragedies and triumphs, great battles and sudden betrayals, loyal refugees and long struggles for social justice”.

Canada’s case is also the case with Nigeria. The only difference is that while the Canadians can look back and thank their national heroes and past statesmen for taking courageous steps that pulled Canada out of its challenging past to a prosperous and peaceful present, Nigerians are facing the worst array of crises in all sectors of their national life simply because their own statesmen lack the courage to follow Canada’s example. But we still have a chance to make the best of the time we have before it is too late.

Canada shares a lot of striking similarities with Nigeria, making it a perfect example of how Africa’s largest nation can shed its faulty past and its turbulent or crisis-ridden present. Under this atmosphere the nation can build a better future where all the tribes and all segments  of the Nigerian society despite their diversities and differences can live in peace, have a more secure nation, built a prosperous economy and  stable socio-political systems like the case of Canada. Some of the striking semblances include the facts that both Canada and Nigeria where discovered by Christopher Columbus; both were colonized by the British; both had patchwork of diverse tribes and ethnicities who were forced by their colonizers to function as one single system.

Canada struggled economically with lots of domestic problems caused by the squabbles between the different regions of Upper and Lower Canada made up of diverse set of people. How to create social justice was an issue and how to equitably distribute national heritages and resources had its own consequences. The British would love to run a centralized system that would allow them greater control over the young nation. However, this failed to work out. Then came the idea of Confederation as alternative to an overly centralized government that was always breathing tensions and completely unable to engender the needed competition among the diverse components in a way that would make the economy of Canada prosperous.

It was amidst these challenges posed by the diversity of the different people that make up Canada that the idea of Confederation was proffered as a better alternative for such a scenario. Confederation was finally achieved with the help of three main conferences: the Charlottetown Conference of 1864, the Quebec Conference of 1864, and the London Conference of 1866. The proponents of a Confederated Canada felt that with confederation the local authorities would be more empowered and motivated to look inward and grow a competitive Canadian economy.

Today in Nigeria, everything is going down in the very eyes of the very people who ought to save the nation. The fault actually is not theirs. The fault is in the Nigerian system which needs to be redesigned or restructured to engender efficiency of the systems, healthy competition among the diverse components of the country to save the economy, and make the socio-political environment more stable and safe for greater prosperity and build confidence among international investors. Presidents after Presidents come to power and assert their political wills and economic policies, yet year after year no progress is made as nation. Everything is rather going in the opposite.

This is where the urgency of confederating the 36 states of Nigeria lies. The states are sitting on large deposits of natural resources, including the strength the draw from their peculiarities and socio-cultural ideologies, yet these states are financially bankrupt and need the help of the federal government to pay salaries and offset bills for essential services. But the complexity of the Nigerian problem is that the federal government which is expected to save these states is even in worst off condition. Is it not best to allow the states a little autonomy through confederation to take control of their individual destines while maintaining a weak central government to keep the one Nigeria project alive?

As a matter of fact, nobody takes the Nigerian project personal with conviction. Each segment of the Nigerian projects tends towards their own people, state or tribe. It is not wrong to say that every Nigerian is always at his or her best when it comes to tribal projects and interests, but at his or her weakest when it has to do with the generalized Nigerian project. This is the bane of Nigeria. This justifies why following the steps of the Canadian statesmen is the best option for Nigeria since both cases share striking similarities. Confederation will keep Nigeria as one but engager competition and sense of socio-economic justice among the components. The best way to save Nigerian’s threatened unity and crumbling economy is to treat the 36 states as confederating components held together by a weak central government.

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