Having observed the ethnicisation of the struggle for the soul of Nigeria to their chagrin, veterans of the radical tradition seem sufficiently angry to enter the arena. While some are massing up to come up with their own meaning of Restructuring, others are taking to conceptual warfare as Richard Umaru did on his Facebook a day ago. Umaru was a veteran of the PRP intellectual squad and a technocratic pillar of the Balarabe Musa Revolution in Kaduna State from 1979-1981. Here, he wrote a short meditation titled “Marginalisation, Restructuring, et al” – Editor
By Richard Umaru
“The buzz word in contemporary political parlance in Nigeria is ‘marginalisation’. Every group in the country is complaining of being marginalised. The Hausa/Fulani are complaining. The Yoruba are complaining. The Igbo are complaining. The myriads of the so-called minority ethnic groups are also complaining. But pray, who in Nigeria is really being marginalized? Of all the years in which the Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo and Minority political elite have held political power, what values, materially or otherwise, have they added to ordinary citizens in their respective regions? My friends, yes there is marginalization in Nigeria. But it is not what many of these elites are talking about. The true marginalisation in Nigeria today is the marginalisation of the mass of the ordinary citizens from all parts of Nigeria by a tiny and privileged political and economic elite. And this marginalisation can only end when the ordinary citizens organize and empower themselves, not as individuals but as groups and take control of their destinies.”
