Why Unitary Nigeria Is Bleeding Profusely and Why There Is No Other Viable Remedy Than to Terminate Nigeria’s Untenable Unitary Constitutional Basis

Tony Nnadi, NINAS

03 August 2025

Responding to a flurry of lamentations across Nigeria about the inability and unwillingness of the rest of Nigeria to “forgive” the Igbo and about what seems the reciprocal unwillingness of the Igbo to forget the past and move on, Tony Nnadi wrote as follows:

The unitary constitutional order that was imposed by the wartime Dot-in-Circle alliance of 1967, is what made the Igbo situation in Nigeria one of permanent exclusion, slave-status since 1970, worsening as the years go by.

Unfortunately for the non-Caliphate rest of Nigeria, the British-inspired Fulani who assembled that 1967 Igbo-exclusion and Igbo extermination alliance also targeted them (the rest of Nigeria), for subjugation, expropriation, and extermination.

That is what has brought the Middle Belt to where it is now.

That is what swallowed Moshood Abiola and his 1983 mandate and brought the Yoruba to where it became necessary for OPC to be birthed to extricate Yorubaland from the stranglehold of the Fulani as we now know from the recent confession of Buba Galadima, upon the passage of the Fulani champion, Muhammadu Buhari.

That is what brought Nigeria to where it is now; the global capital for poverty and misery; at the bottom of every positive index on the global stage.

The Nigerian union, Nigerian democracy and Nigerian economy that is being constructed on such a foundation of hatred, suspicion and vicious wickedness is not our project in the sense that could sustain that construction to any meaningful success.

There was a federation of Nigeria that was our project but that federation died between July 29 of 1966 when the revenge coup that heralded the Igbo massacres (pogroms) began and May 27, 1967 when the four-region federation of Nigeria was fractured into a unitary 12 states structure by Gowon’s Decree No. 14 of 1967 which isolated the Dot-in-Circle Igbo-East for the genocide that followed, with an air, land and sea blockade that is still in place to date in 2025, masquerading as “six geopolitical zones” but effectively shuttering the Eastern Economic Corridor.

The resultant unitary Nigeria is not our project.

The war against the Igbo has not only continued, but it has been intensified on the economic, political, and other fronts as we see in Lagos, Abuja, and elsewhere. Untrained eyes may dismiss the recent Benue and Edo governors’ visitation altercations with Peter Obi as mere partisan political bickering that will blow past, but the discerning amongst us will see the existential threat it is for the Igbo to whom so much vitriol, hatred and hostility are directed from all sides including the so-called “federal government” since Nigeria long ceased to be a federation.

What we call “the federal government of Nigeria” today is merely a union governance arrangement that excludes the Igbo in all ramifications including infrastructure, security architecture and representation in places of decision-making across the three arms of government; not to talk about the pernicious quota system that wears the constitutional garment of federal character, nor the federal exclusive legislative list of the 1999 Constitution operated selectively by the Igbo-excluding “federal government” in the most lopsided manner conceivable.

We may in our practiced mischief, choose to attribute the reckless and Igbo-debilitating actions of one Nnamdi Kanu and his handmaid called Simon Ekpa in the phantom “Biafra restoration” enterprise, to the Igbo collective, just as we did with the January 15, 1966 “Igbo coup” deliberate false narrative that triggered the genocide of 1966–1970. We may even for political expediency, claim that Peter Obi who to the chagrin of the Igbo collective, made the sacrilegious declaration at the start of his 2023 presidential bid that the Constitution of Nigeria is not the problem with Nigeria is speaking for, and acting on behalf the Igbo in everything he does in the pursuit of his presidential ambition.

We may pretend all we like that the unitary Nigeria of now is our project but we will continue to see the constituent peoples of Nigeria taking practical and decisive steps to extricate themselves from the union of death that the unitary Nigeria, defined by the 1999 Constitution, has become for them.

With the revelations and confessions that have come forth so far concerning the false claims of an “Igbo coup” in January 1966, (particularly Ibrahim Babangida’s recent book), it should be clear to all by now that the war that was launched July 6, 1967 at Gakem, on the Igbo-East, by that alliance of the rest of Nigeria, masquerading as the “federal government of Nigeria” was a war that Nigeria launched against itself and from which it is still bleeding profusely in all parts to date, dying, and dragging the rest of Africa down with it even as the rest of world continues to strategize openly on how to recolonize Africa.

For as long as the unitary constitution imposed on the defunct federation of Nigeria, as a victory charter from the war of 1967–1970 by the Murtala Mohammed–Olusegun Obasanjo military junta remains in operation, Nigeria remains at war with itself and is dying from a combination of bleeding and the festering self-inflicted wounds of unitarism.

The solution to the Nigeria that is now writhing in what seems the throes of its demise, is to end that war by the wholesale decommissioning of the imposed, anti-union, anti-people, anti-development, and anti-progress unitary constitution of Nigeria (1999) and to renegotiate and rework the constitutional arrangements for the union of Nigeria within the framework of the self-determination imperative for the constituent peoples of Nigeria.

The mechanism for initiating that fundamental union renegotiation and reconfiguration (which has acquired the loose description of “restructuring” in the public space), is to suspend preparations for another round of national elections in 2027 under the rejected and now distressed 1999 Constitution and initiate instead, an immediate transitioning process to undertake the union reconstruction, as South Africa had to do in 1990 to ease itself out of the bind of its apartheid constitutional order.

May I state unequivocally on behalf of NINAS that the five-point union reconstruction proposition of the NINAS Constitutional Force Majeure offers Nigeria and Nigerians the most viable, most immediate, and most orderly mechanism, template, and framework for undertaking the inevitable reworking of the damaged constitutional foundation of the Nigerian union.

May I also warn on behalf of NINAS that the default alternative to the immediate constitutional reconstruction of Nigeria is a disorderly collapse of the distressed union into chaos or the overrunning of the space by the invading Fulani.

Preparing forthe 2027 national elections is the worst distraction and exacerbation that can be thrown into the arena at this time.

Let it be known to all that in the face of the urgency imposed on the Nigerian situation by the Fulani conquest onslaught, the state-capture and the deliberate economic strangulation of the masses by the Tinubu government, neither the endless charade of constitution amendments by Nigeria’s National Assembly nor the continuing pretense at union and democracy by the rest of us or the hollow but heavily-hyped economic reforms of the present interregnum, will address the dangerous situation into which Nigeria has pushed itself. (If anyone is in doubt about the futility of the so-called reforms, the recent tweet (X post) by the US Mission in Nigeria about how the helmsmen of the government are so detached and disconnected from reality that they continue to extract sacrifices from the people while splashing billions of naira on their own luxury, thereby fueling crisis-level discontent amongst the people.)

The growing number of stakeholders across Nigeria including members of the political elite, religious leaders, spokespersons of ethnic socio-political organizations, lawyers, women, the youth, organized business, labour, civil society and other concerned segments of society, who now acknowledge that the unitary constitution of Nigeria is the problem with Nigeria, must also now back up that acknowledgment with loud demands for the suspension of plans towards 2027 elections and for the initiation of an immediate transitioning process guided by the NINAS union reconstruction template.

1) Click the link below for a support video:

Nigeria-In-Freefall: The Fraud of 1999, the Voyage To 2027, and NINAS Pathway To Redemption:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__0lk_Metfg