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The conductor...laughed  loud, pitying country...and swore: “God punish you, Lord Lugard...
...a wild fury of horns startled it past ferrying us beyond claims of charity and of Lugard’s shadow in the black smoke
-Ogaga Ifowodo (“God Punish You, Lord Lugard”) Nigerians seems to have forgotten about the prediction contained in the US National Intelligence Council Report on Sub-Saharan Africa, 2005. The NIC had predicted that Nigeria will “collapse as a nation-state within the next 15 years”. With a “leadership”, sluggardized either by ill-health or inherent incapacity, which presses the country inexorably towards unprecedented socio-economic and political collapse, we might need to remind ourselves of how many years are left for Nigeria.
Given our national proclivity for superficial debates, the media picked up the US NIC report and, for the most account, asked a few perfunctory questions from the deep and the shallow. Public intellectuals, politicians, government officials, activists and commentators of all hues, betted against one another on the veracity of the conclusions of the United States intelligence community. For the most account, the puerile and superficial voices drowned the profound and contemplative minds. Official megaphones dismissed the conclusions and invented invisible solidity for the colonial edifice. 
Were the ruling class a differently inclined rank, in their various closets, they would have asked themselves this question: After all the attempts to move Nigeria from a mere geographical expression to a strong and united polity, including a civil war, why is she still susceptible to extinction? This question would then be followed by a task: What is to be done to ensure that Nigeria does not go the way of two former countries, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia? 
Incidentally, the two countries which are often cited as examples of Nigeria’s possible extinction, one taking the violent route, the other opting for a peaceful divorce, were four years younger than Nigeria before their political death. Yugoslavia was established on December 1, 1918 by the union of State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs and the Kingdom of Serbia. Czechoslovakia, a union of the Czech and Slovak people, also became an independent republic in 1918. The Slovenes and the Czechs mutually decided to part ways on January 1, 1993.
The moral: States are born and states die. The imperial conglomeration that Lord Frederick Lugard constructed on behalf of the British Empire in the heart of Africa took off in 1914. Since then, that dispiriting amalgam has suffered many concussions but survived. However, the Americans are insisting that a terminal heart-attack is only about a decade away. 
Unfortunately for Nigeria, since independence, the country has gathered its worst and/or its least capable elements into either a political or a martial cabal that would rule the country in succession. But it is not only a question of a narrow political leadership, as we are often eager to assert. It is also a question of the totality of the elite - and the people. Take the case of our industrial-business elite who are only a reflection, and even a caricature, of the political elite. A different industrial-business elite would have been deeply and genuinely troubled by the prediction of Nigeria’s demise, because, for crying out loud, it is their honey-pot which may dry up. They would have funded research and reflection to deeply examine the implications of this report and propose ways to ensure that this “dearly beloved country” is not dissolved. They would then have taken the recommendations from the research and reflection and push the agenda with particular political parties and civil society organizations so as to ensure “a more perfect union”.
While the Niger Delta continues to circumscribe the territorial space and integrity of the Lugardian contraption in the wake of the ascension to power of a derelict and deleterious, even infirm, cabal, the eastern heartland, through MASSOB, answers to the stirring lyrics of what ought to have been the expired Biafran anthem; the West may be less vocal about it, but that progressive enclave continues to explore ways to free herself from what is assumed to be “internal colonialism”, even as the Middle-Belt occasionally scrutinizes, through homicidal rage, her inherent right to political and religious freedom in relation to the core north. 
In the wake of all these, the Economist of London announces Mr. Jacob Zuma, who may soon become the president of South Africa, as “Africa Next Big Man”. The influential weekly tells its readers that “Africans across the continent and oppressed peoples elsewhere still look to South Africa’s leader as a beacon of hope.” Whatever happened to Nigeria’s “manifest destiny”? 
Our president is left to attend to his ostensible infirmities, personal and political - with his ascendant rustic Katsinate ruining, rather than running, the country - while the current South African president is invited to join the G-20. In Washington D.C. and London, in Berlin and Paris, even in Johannesburg and Cairo, the world is closing its mind against a country that seems permanently rigged against reason – and may soon expire. 
For a ruling elite that is imaginative and civilized, all these can still be converted to challenges that ought to galvanize a dejected populace into action. But first, we need to address fundamental questions and put capable hands in charge of our commonwealth. Nigeria might appear to be comatose now under an exhausted but exhausting leadership, but something is brewing. To think that the consolidated ineptitude and violent theft of the common weal that Nigerians have suffered in the last few years is already planning towards extending itself in time.... 
Patriotic forces have a duty to come together quickly under workable political platforms to stop this ignominy and perhaps also save Nigeria from imminent dissolution. Whether the Americans are right or not, by the middle of this century, Lugard will either burn in effigy in the disjointed parts of the federation, or have his statue gratefully erected at the centre of an emergent nation.