When Unity Demands a Victim

When Unity Demands a Victim

Babayola M. Toungo

From the very inception of the Nigerian project, the North was quietly but firmly assigned a role it neither designed nor escaped: to suffer so the nation could remain whole. In the grand narrative of Nigerian unity, the North became the buffer zone – absorbing instability, violence, and deprivation in the name of an indivisible state. What makes this arrangement tragic is not merely that the North bore the brunt of national contradictions, but that it was ideologically conditioned to normalize this burden as duty, faith, and patriotism.

Nigeria likes to speak the language of shared sacrifice, but sacrifice in this country has never been evenly distributed. From colonial amalgamation to the present republic, the North has repeatedly been positioned as the stabilizing weight in a fragile national experiment. The 1914 amalgamation itself yoked together regions with unequal exposure to Western education, infrastructure, and economic systems. While the South benefited early from missionary education and coastal commerce, the North was governed through indirect rule that preserved traditional hierarchies but slowed modern institutional development. This asymmetry was not accidental – it was administrative convenience masquerading as cultural sensitivity. The long-term result was structural imbalance baked into the foundation of the state.

By the time independence arrived in 1960, these disparities had matured into political suspicion. The North, numerically dominant but educationally behind, was viewed as both kingmaker and constraint. Southern elites feared northern political control; northern elites feared southern bureaucratic and economic advantage. The tension was not simply ethnic – it was structural. Yet when crises erupted, it was the North that was expected to hold the center.

The first military coups of 1966 and the counter-coup that followed marked a turning point. The violence and reprisals that unfolded across northern cities, and the eventual descent into civil war, hardened the idea that the North was the last line of Nigerian unity. When secession threatened the federation, the North’s political and military establishment chose preservation of the union over fragmentation – even at enormous human cost. The civil war narrative has often been simplified into victors and vanquished, but one truth remains under-examined: the North committed itself to the idea of Nigeria’s indivisibility as a matter of doctrine, not convenience.

That doctrine endured through decades of military rule. Ironically, many of the military regimes associated with northern leadership presided over a centralized federation that weakened regional autonomy, including the North’s own. The creation of states and local governments, often justified as balancing power, also fragmented northern political cohesion. Yet the North continued to defend the union, even as centralization eroded its bargaining leverage.

Then came the democratic era after 1999. One might have expected a renegotiation of the federal compact. – a moment to recalibrate equity, security, and development. Instead, a new pattern emerged. As insurgency, banditry, and communal conflicts escalated across the northern belt, the crises were treated less as national emergencies and more as regional misfortunes. Entire communities were displaced, rural economies collapsed, and vast territories slipped in and out of state control. Still, the dominant message to the North was patience. Endure. Do not rock the boat. Do not threaten unity.

The question that must be asked is simple but uncomfortable: would Nigeria preach the same patience if this scale of violence were concentrated elsewhere? Would calls for restraint drown out calls for structural reform if other regions were burying their dead at similar rates for over a decade? The uneasy truth is that northern suffering has become politically affordable. It does not endanger the Nigerian idea – it subsidizes it.

Even more troubling is the cultural narrative layered atop this reality. The North is frequently portrayed as the architect of its own misfortune – its poverty attributed to culture, its insecurity to backwardness, its political struggles to anti-modern instincts. This framing absolves the federation of responsibility and converts structural neglect into moral judgment. It is easier to blame a region than to question a system.

Yet the deepest wound is internal. Over time, the North absorbed the ideology of its own sacrifice. Endurance was romanticized. Patience became a badge of maturity. Religious language sanctified hardship, and political elites weaponized the fear of national breakup to silence demands for equity. A generation grew up believing that to question the terms of the union was to betray it.

But history is unkind to political arrangements built on one-sided sacrifice. No federation survives indefinitely by asking one part to absorb disproportionate pain. The Soviet Union learned this. Yugoslavia learned this. Even older federations have had to renegotiate their compacts to survive. Stability without fairness is not stability – it is delayed crisis.

To question this moral economy is not to reject Nigeria. It is to insist that unity must be reciprocal. Loyalty must be matched by protection. Sacrifice must be honored with dignity and investment, not derision. The North does not need absolution from its internal failures – no region does – but neither should it be permanently cast as the shock absorber of the Nigerian state.

A nation that survives by sacrificing one part of itself is not preserving unity; it is rehearsing disintegration. And a people that mistake endurance for destiny may one day discover that they have endured their way into irrelevance.

The real challenge before the North is not rebellion, nor retreat, nor nostalgia for past dominance. It is intellectual and political clarity: to separate genuine patriotism from conditioned silence, and to recognize that a just union cannot be built on unequal suffering.

Only then can unity become a shared project rather than a northern burden.