In this context therefore, we must talk Nigeria if we must talk Igbo and the future of a people who must, along with others, take their destiny in their hands.

As chairman of the Conference of 17 Southern Governors (CSG), there are some compelling reasons to present a perspective, which has been sounded as the key to raising the desired interest in building a nation on the need of the true people and in line with the global principles of cohabitation, cohesion and group as well as individual actualization. Nigeria is a country of great promises but unfortunately it is reluctant in her strides, unwilling to take the desired leaps, sluggish in her move to affirm her nationhood and slumbering in the stupor of colonial contraption, administrative indigestion and socio-cultural amnesia.

I hope one will not be accused of being harsh to our beloved country. Don't, if you realize that our historical journey, unlike those of other modern nations had no conscious design for a true nation of people with a lasting destiny in mind. Economic empire builders started this project called Nigeria. They helped to quench the political/military conflagration in the West Coast of today's Nigeria and moved in with their version of economy. They netted in the East of today's Nigeria through religion, trade and commerce and had the North under their thumb with a subtle but deft power play, which I call diplomatic romanticism.

Our tragic experience in pursuit of national destiny and even identity does not entirely derive from the accident of our national profile and identity. It is rather the failure of our people to drop the dangerous acquiescence which was the bait applied to sustain the super-imposition of the colonial order on the wobbly aristocracy in the North, the crashing monarchy in the West and the confusing segmentary groupings in the East. These had made it easy for exploitative operations of colonial metropolitan business and later a new national power cabal, which has held say since independence.

Today, the opportunity of democracy, and the evidence that its two year life after a 15-year military rule has more to offer Nigerians, make it imperative that the true journey to nationhood can only commence with a more objective look at the whole business called Nigeria. This entails talking and talking. We can never have enough of it. We may even yell. Indeed, talking about the structure of Nigeria, we may not go too far to discover how we bungled our potentials. Granted that the imbalance, which resulted from the 1914 amalgamation, has persisted, the struggle for independence had achieved a measure of conscious structural equity which produced regions with profound economic autonomy, creative potentials and regenerative strides. That was the age of decency, which produced a true Nigeria with inherent equality of regions and confidence of participation by all.

The confusion in structure and the practice of robbing Peter to pay Paul, as it is today; started with the desperation of the Yakubu Gowon Military Government to win the war it started. It had hurriedly split Nigeria into 12 states to break the bone of resistance in the East and had since been imitated by other military governments, which sought credibility. At the end of the frenzy of balkanization in 1996, we had 36 states most of which are liabilities to themselves and burden to the nation.

Right from the beginning, the immediate post-First Republic states creation was designed to impede the Igbo and limit their potentials. The 1966 exercise gave them one state, the East Central State, while the old North was split into six states and the old West was broken into Lagos and Western States. The minorities in the old East earned two-state status. The Igbo outside East Central State only found themselves as minorities in Mid-Western, Rivers, South Eastern and Benue-Plateau States. Although the 1976 exercise gave the heartland Igbo a two state profile, they were still in minority in the comity of major ethnic Nigerians. Today, the mainland Igbo are chiseled into five states while their Yoruba and Hausa/Fulani have seven and 19-state muscles. In the disbursement of national resources, the Igbo shares pale into insignificance in comparison with the old West and the old North. This accounts for why the old Hausa/Fulani can produce over 30 appointees if taken two per state, the Yoruba about 18 appointees while the Igbo both from the heartland (South-East) and minorities (in Delta, Rivers, etc) can produce a maximum of 10 appointees.

By the local government distribution, the South-East has a mere 85 local council areas as against 138 for the South-West, 124 for the South-South, 112 for the North-East, 115 for the North-Central and 186 for the North-West. This is unfair. There is no justice in it. While I do not seek the obliteration of the state structure, or the existing local government areas, I think it is better to accord equality to such large nationalities capable of sustaining the kind of vast political structure already hinted in the merging geo-political scheme. The states will remain as centres of deeper and more meaningful administration but the geo-political zones should assume political equality, irrespective of the number of states or local government areas. This is not entirely strange as it bears some resemblance to the quota/federal character, which have been applied to beef up the contribution of some states to national human resource collective.

For long, Nigeria has pretended to be a federation but at each turn, this has been exploded but the rage of the unitarist state which has almost suffocated every federating unit for selfish interest of the centre. Today, the affairs of a local village are determined in far away Abuja. A potential ward councilor has to get clearance for election from an electoral agency in Abuja. The limestone in a remote valley in blighted Birom village is mined for the interest of a supra-national centre in Abuja.

On a larger scale, the multi-billion dollar petroleum resources are accumulated for the control of the centre. In turn, villages, local government areas and states whose soil produced these and whose ecology has been devastated, go cap-in-hand to get the crumbs falling off the great master's table in Abuja. Many have called this "internal imperialism" but I call it a fallout of a badly structured Nigeria. This is why the 17 Southern Governors hold the view that economic autonomy of federating units, through resource control is a task that must be done. At the moment, it seems that the demand for resource control is a Niger-Delta agenda. It looks convenient to call it a narrow drive but we know and strongly believe that the potentials of geo-political zones, and for that matter states, can only be realized with the commitment of states to building their own economic programmes based on available resources or what it can get by gainful political dealings.

Many have wondered why I had joined to magnify the resource control debate even above what they considered our only Igbo problem of marginalization. My answer to this is that marginalization has its one strong root in the absence of resource control by the federating units. Indeed, the usurpation of the natural resources of units up to very extreme level came with the desperation of the early military regimes after Aguiyi Ironsi, to conquer the old East.

Really, talking about the Igbo and their unfortunate disadvantaged position in the Nigeria of today, it may be helpful to raise questions on why, of the first one hundred Nigerian Armed Forces Officers to get commission, we had over 50 percent, but today, of the entire top echelons of the Nigerian military command, we have less than one percent.

Offhand, many of us will say we were defeated in a war. We can say that our own officers were killed in the Nigeria-Biafra War. But I tell you, it is not as simple as that. Indeed, it goes beyond that. We know that a diligent soldier or any other professional for that matter, can give a good account of himself in 30 years. In fact, in that number of years, the professional would be approaching the terminal stage of the career, having done the race, taken the laurels and returning to family with prestige. Mind you, so many Igbo officers joined the army since 1970 when the war ended. That was about the same time the current ruling hierarchy of the armed forces joined the forces after the war. Same for other top ranking military and paramilitary officers. I will like to ask our people to please cast their mind to the absence of any reasonable heavy industrial complex or for that matter any international airport or regional seaport in their part of the country.

While it may be right to scream marginalization, I invite you to have a peep at the structural inadequacies which engendered this exercise in marginalisation. Great as our people are, they had failed in the right political consciousness and vigilance which have given our other compatriots the leverage, and what we may call birthright in political leadership.

Isn't it curious that as early in the life of Nigeria, as it was, in 1909, a conscious Fulani political leader had demanded to know "who would be in charge if the protectorates of the North and South were amalgamated", while as recent as 1957, the Igbo were yelling that power sharing was not the issue before Nigerian independence was achieved. Even a few days ago, the Yoruba who felt thoroughly bruised by military rule and who had the requisite consciousness of power had driven hard to corner the Presidency after the military dictatorship.I do not know whether they got it in the presidency of Obasanjo but I am aware that other Nigerians feel they have only woken up to the reality of a people who want to be held responsible for the political action of Nigeria in the first four years after military rule.The laid-back attitude of our political leadership did not just start today. That it has persisted today does not mean that the Akpa Uche (Ndigbo's cot of reason) has fled the member of each person. It only appears that this has been strengthened by the situation of excessive individual effort to actualize the self with a total disregard to what the political future of Nigeria holds for the people. The feeling of marginalization is a part of a consciousness against the pervading retrogression of the Igbo but the hollering as we have done in the recent past depicts a fatal inability to grasp the holistic or structural inadequacy, which gives room to the anomaly.

Wrongly too, many have derided our position on the state police as one to favour the South-West. Strangely, the same fellows who strike to shoot down the argument without a convincing counterpoise have strongly promoted and praised the ideas of state and regional militia. Many of these had played out their roles as facilitators and initiators of the State Road Safety Corps of the Second Republic.

They had praised the peculiar regional police forces, Dansanda for the North, Court ma (court marshal) for the East and West and the neutral, compact, and effective Federal police which ought not to have been deployed in the regions. The imbalance which underlines the position of the Conference of Southern Governors (CSG) can only be rectified with the restructuring of Nigeria. But this can only come after a thorough discussion of Nigeria by Nigerians. In this case, the true discussion, not the pretenses of the military which had roots in the distortions of the old republic regimes. They never provided the deserving level-playing ground. Rather, they had impeded the rights of many parts of Nigeria including the Igbo areas. They had taken the confidence from the zones and left Nigerians without value.

But strangely, and against the greater evidence of our need to be creative about our Igbo and our Nigeria, we have pretenders to Cicero's oratory, dubious expansionists and faked confident speakers who like to be seen as the modern-day Caesar.

They ridicule their brethren to be seen to be manly by some acquaintances. Ndigbo, I say to you, never be deceived. They are mere wage earners who are not even sure they have made friends or enemies in their exercise in clowning. Your future in Nigeria does not lie in their hands. They have a tragic forebear in the making of our modern Nigeria. You remember Hughes Stanford who sought to appease the Christian mission which explored the Niger areas (later Nigeria). He poured invectives on the people of the dark, savage, continent only to be keenly avoided by the church leaders who rightly felt that they needed diplomats, committed missionaries and lovers of humanity, not a raving racist and hate-monger who would ignite African resistance to new values. He died without a job and without a penny anywhere in the world. But this as the time some more positive colonial agents were building their careers in the emerging colonies.

You need not be told that the end of such characters is never better than that of David Dion, the renegade Jew who thought he could buy a life-saving friendship into the Hitler-German power caste by betraying his people. "A traitor to his people will be a traitor forever," they told him when they shoved him into the gas chambers a few days before the end of the Second World War.

Back home, the late Mokwugo Okoye told such characters that "not to revere one's nationality, failing to share in its aspirations and appeasing the gods of other lands, is the worst form of cowardice".

Taa bu gboo; echi di ime. We can start today and achieve a lot for ourselves and fellow Nigerians. If the future begins now, we may have started out early in life. To God, therefore, be the glory.