in the early 1800s, the city known today as Lagos a modern-day Nigeria was one of
the major ports for the export of West African slaves to North and South America,
now while British traders had once been
major players in the slave trade mounting pressure from missionary groups
and a a spike in demand for palm oil as a machine lubricant following the
Industrial Revolution meant that the British government would now begin
battling other European powers to bring an end to the slave trade and gain
monopoly access to the region's palm oil and other industrial raw materials prior
to this change in policy the slave trade had been sustained by a triangular
system of exchange that had lasted for over 300 years. African slaves were
captured and sold by local Kings, Chiefs and military generals to European
traders who would then transport them to the Americas and the Caribbean islands
to work and plantations producing materials like sugar and cotton these
products would then be shipped over to European factories where they will be
made into finished goods like clothing, rum and brandy that would then be
shipped over to Africa, along with other items such as guns clocks and leather
goods to be exchanged for more slaves. Breaking the established order the new
British strategy will now be firmly focused on keeping African labor within
its shores as the continuing demand for slaves on the West African coastline was
causing a serious labor shortage on the mainland which was hampering his
agricultural productivity. The trade had also made the region generally more
dangerous and unstable a long-standing tribal wars that have been going on
years before the arrival of Europeans were now even more bloody thanks to the
introduction of guns and cannons acquired from European traders many
local kings and Chiefs were also now seeking to subdue neighbouring tribes
and expand their territories so the cities and villages surrounding the
coastlines were continually been raided by gun-wielding militias looking to
capture and sell slaves on the coasts in exchange for more weapons. If the British
government was to ensure safe and efficient access to the region's
resources the slave trade fuelled violence and instability would need to
be brought to an end Britain got to work bypassing anti-slavery laws and also
establishing an anti-slavery navy squadron which began intercepting slave
ships in the region and returning the captives to shore
however the slave trade showed no sign of slowing down as it was simply too
profitable for the locals and the mainly Portuguese slave traders
that now dominated the market Britain needed a more permanent solution and
luckily for them a long-standing rivalry between two Yoruba Kings
would present them with a perfect opportunity. in the 1840s, Oba Akitoye and
Oba Kosoko were involved in a bitter rivalry for the throne of Lagos.
Oba Akitoye had been crowned king of Lagos in 1841, but his rival, Oba Kosoko
believed that he should have a crown King
based on a true reading of the Lagos king-making traditions. in 1845, Kosoko
forcefully removed Akitoye from the throne and crown himself King, forcing
Akitoye and his supporters into exile. Although he previously had no moral
objections to slavery Akitoye contacted the British
government and promised to sign the treaty banning the slave trade in Lagos
and granting British missionaries and merchants exclusive access to the region
provided the British army would help him regain the throne. Following a battle
referred to by locals as "Ogun Agindingbi" which can be roughly translated as the
"Boiling Battle" the British Royal Navy inflicted a heavy defeat on Oba Kosoko
and his army of over five thousand men and reinstalled Akitoye as the king of
Lagos. As agreed, Akitoye passed a law banning slavery in Lagos and granted the
British government and its citizens significant privileges and influence in
the region. The rest as they say ,is history
Oba Akitoye died two years later and his son, Oba Dosunmu
was forced to sign a treaty turning Lagos into a British colony just seven
years after his father's death. With slavery abolished and Lagos now a full
British colony, Portuguese influence in the region dissipated and lagos became a
commercial hub for the exports of palm oil and other raw materials sourced from
the surrounding regions. Following the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884 the
map of modern Nigeria was outlined for further exploration and conquest and Sir
George Tubman Goldie's Royal Niger Company was authorised to secure the
territory. Recruiting and enlisting many local militias to its cause, the Royal
Niger company embarked on a campaign to conquer the territory and within just
over a decade it had forcefully secured over 400 treaties from various local
rulers pledging their allegiance and granting full legislative and judicial
authority to the company. After having established itself as the
De-facto government of a region encompassing over 250 ethnic groups and over 400
languages, the Royal Niger company officially transferred control of
Nigeria to the British government on the 1st of January 1900 receiving £865,000
as compensation. Just as a side note the Royal Niger company
still exists today, as part of Unilever PLC the company behind popular brands
like Ben & Jerry's, Lipton, dove and Vaseline. Recognizing the vast
differences between the people in the region, the British initially divided the
new territory into a southern Nigeria Protectorate which had become majority
Christian and a northern Nigeria Protectorate which had remained majority
Muslim however while Southern Nigeria was very
productive and ran at a budget surplus due to its abundant natural resources
and its peoples embrace of education and commerce, the North was a largely
loss-making enterprise that cost the British more to administer than they gained
in the trade of its raw materials. It has been suggested that the financial woes
of the northern Protectorate was due to a combination of its relatively fewer
natural resources and the strong Islamic culture in the region which was very
resistant to secular education. Needing an urgent solution to the northern
Nigerian budget deficit, British High Commissioner Frederick Lugard decided
that it would be a great idea to join the two vastly different regions
together into one United political entity and to the dismay of many
protesting southern Nigerians, the two protectorates were amalgamated in
1914 to form a single British colony of Nigeria which would ultimately become
the Federal Republic of Nigeria we know today. As another side note many scholars
believe that it was the Lugard's wife Flora Shaw who named the country Nigeria after
the River Niger that runs across the territory. So in more ways than one,
Nigeria was never a very Nigerian idea to begin with
rather than being some kind of mythical homeland of the Nigerian people, a more
accurate description, based solely on its origin story, would be to describe it as
a corporate entity that was formed to ensure the profitable exploitation of
the natural resources in the geographical areas that surround the
Niger River and nearly 60 years after gaining
independence from British rule in 1960, my country Nigeria, still seems to
conform to the original purpose for which it was formed, the only difference
now is that rather than lining the pockets of the shareholders of the Royal
Niger company, its resources now line the pockets of the Nigerian elite. Having
discovered over 37 billion barrels of oil reserves under its soil, modern-day
Nigeria may have ditched palm oil for the more profitable crude oil but the
status quo remains very much the same the only Nigerians that seem to benefit
from the country's natural wealth are the elites that own oil wells and the
government officials tasked with managing the resource. Despite a failing
education system, poor infrastructure, insecurity and mass unemployment
Nigerian politicians are arguably some of the best paid politicians in the
world. A recent report by Nigerian news station channels TV estimated the
Nigerian Senators earn as much as eighty thousand dollars a month in wages and
allowances meaning that they are paid over ten thousand times more than the
Nigerian minimum wage, and over 200 times more than its GDP per capita. All this in
a country where nearly 87 million people live on less than a dollar a day. Indeed,
life for the average Nigerian has become so hard that the goal for many is to
live anywhere else but Nigeria. To draw a shocking comparison, while an estimated
10.5 million African slaves were involuntarily taken out of Africa over
the 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade, some estimates suggest that the
number of Nigerians voluntarily living outside of Nigeria has grown to over 15
million since its independence in 1960 from popular destinations like the US, UK
and Canada to places like Russia, Ukraine and Malaysia, Nigerians are choosing to
endure all kinds of prejudice, climates and harsh treatments just to make a
better life for themselves and their families. Just like the Royal Niger
company and his pre-independence colonial administrators ran Nigeria
primarily for the benefit of themselves in the British Empire, in many ways the
current generation of Nigerian elites do exactly the same, but perhaps to a much
more extreme degree as they now work not just for the benefit of Britain but for
the rest of the Western world as well. How exactly you might ask? well first and
foremost by looting and sending billions and billions of dollars worth of oil
revenues that should be kept and reinvested in
to the local economy to European banks to just sit and accumulate interest. By
stimulating the London property market with their endless acquisitions of rows
and rows of expensive London properties. By paying eye watering amounts in tuition
fees for the children to study abroad while their local institutions rot away
and by championing European industry and exports with their insatiable appetite
for imported luxury cars, clothing and perishable goods. So while they might hold
Nigerian passports and outwardly claim to be proud Nigerians their actions show
that they do not feel any true sense of solidarity with their fellow Nigerians
and oddly enough their way of thinking is actually not that surprising when you
understand where they're coming from. Uou see it's very hard to feel any real
sense of duty to a country that you have no real attachment to raised by parents
and grandparents who saw nothing in common with the hundreds of neighboring
tribes that were involuntarily bound together in the artificially constructed
profit-making machine called Nigeria, the current generation of Nigerian elites
were never going to suddenly put down their ethnic prejudices and embrace a
bright vision of one Nigeria simply because it now had a new flag, a new
anthem, and a new team of black administrators. One question that is often
asked is why nearly 60 years after gaining independence, the Nigerian elite
have not simply opted to undo the colonial structures and divide the
country along its pre-colonial ethnic lines. this is a very complicated
question but the simple answer is that a breakup of Nigeria would cause a lot of
wealthy and powerful people to lose a lot of wealth and power and the millions
of lives that were lost during the 1967 to 1970 by a Biafran war shows just how far
those who benefit from Nigeria's existence would be willing to go to keep
Nigeria going. But here's the thing, regardless of how it came to be or why
it still exists in its original colonial form the reality is that the hopes and
dreams of over 200 million people now depend on the success or failure of
Nigeria and moreover there is now an ever growing number of young people for
whom Nigeria is their mythical homeland unlike their parents and grandparents
they really do see themselves as Nigerians as opposed to Igbo Yoruba or
Hausa. They speak Niger in English as a first and in some cases only language
they hardly understand nor revere the historic traditions of
their parents and instead identify more closely with the emergent contemporary
Nigerian culture. A culture that is being built around the growing music fashion
and movie industry, an ever-evolving shared language and a shared struggle to
succeed in the midst of adversity. For these Nigerians, Nigeria is far from just
a money-making venture, it is their one and only homeland and they continually
hope and dream of a day when it will be led by visionary and just leaders. But
with minds deeply molded by their ethnocentric upbringings and their
many years at the forefront of the neo-colonial exploitation of their
country, perhaps it is unrealistic to expect any serious change under the
leadership of the current generation of Nigerian elites. The question that
remains to be answered is whether the next generation of Nigerian leaders will
be any different. Once again it's KB Taiwo for NewAfrica please like share and
subscribe and until next time.