Apart from the Super Eagles and Super Falcons, we need shared core values if Nigeria is to transmute from a state held together at gunpoint to a veritable nation. What then, apart from our national football teams, are the shared core values we need? I propose that we identify freedom and collaboration as two shared core values we need.

First, we need freedom. The freedom of which I speak is not the capacity to do what we want. It is, instead, the capacity to actualise the potential for good that is in us. A developed polity is an aggregate of citizens of actualised potential.

Without freedom, we cannot deploy our capacity to develop. The enormously intelligent and industrious Nigerian spirit is impeded when the freedom of the Nigerian is impeded. Give the Nigerian freedom and Nigeria will be counted among the world’s superpowers. But we need to identify factors that militate against our attainment of freedom, factors that hold us down individually and collectively.

The first obstacle to our freedom as Nigerians is our constitution. It is a constitution that has given us weak institutions and strongmen/women. It is a constitution that has kept us in a state held together at gunpoint by depriving the people of their sovereignty, their freedom to decide on matters that affect their lives.

It is a constitution that places the state above the citizen instead of making the state subservient to the citizen. We urgently need a constitution that inverts the order such that functionaries of state truly represent and are accountable to the citizen.

After imposing on us weak institutions manned by strongmen/women, the 1999 constitution has left us in the hands of a leadership that disables us and keeps us from actualising our potential. Thus, being the first obstacle to our freedom, the constitution is the first impediment to authentic development in Nigeria.

The second obstacle to our freedom, also made possible by the same constitution, is mismanagement of our diversity through ethnocentrism. Now, ethnocentrism is not to be confused with ethnicity. Ethnicity is a virtue. It is love of one’s ethnic community. Such love cannot be appropriately described as a vice.

Ethnocentrism, on the contrary, is a vice. It is the use of malicious solidarity of members of an ethnic community to the detriment of members of other ethnic communities. It is mismanagement of our ethnic diversity which goes hand-in-hand with mismanagement of our religious and regional diversity. It is exploitation of our diversity for the attainment of selfish political and economic objectives.

A multi-ethnic, multi-regional and multi-religious entity such as Nigeria needs a truly federal constitution, not a unitary constitution dressed in the robes of a federal constitution. Without a truly federal constitution, there will be a cut-throat competition for the Presidency among the diverse ethnic, regional and religious communities, and all manners of means will be deployed to win this competition.

That explains the repeatedly violated electoral process we have in Nigeria, an electoral process the political elite is unwilling to alter, and the season of incivility that every campaign season has become. Being in government is the most lucrative thing, and being in the federal government is even more than most lucrative. For the constitution places the land in the hands of government, and the oil wealth of Nigeria’s Niger Delta in the hands of the central government. The Presidency is the most lucrative job. Its occupant seats on Nigeria’s oil wealth.

When I said all manners of means are being used in the cut-throat competition for power at the centre, our ethnic, regional and religious communities are deployed and exploited such that the citizenship and humanity of the Nigerian are abbreviated once the Nigerian steps beyond the boundaries of his/her ethnic, regional or religious community. And this leads me to the second shared core value I believe we need in Nigeria.

If the first shared core value is freedom, the second is collaboration. We need to work together to make every square meter of Nigeria a habitable abode for all. This collaboration must be inter-ethnic, inter-regional and inter-religious. Given the deliberate and age-long mismanagement of our diversity, there is need for consensual and mutual recognition of our common humanity and common citizenship.

We need to agree on a robust constitutional arrangement predicated on freedom, on recognition of our common humanity and common citizenship, a constitution that makes it costly to violate the freedom of any Nigerian, and gives the incentive to collaborate in building Nigeria as a nation.

A good constitution will not just establish the rule of law. It will establish the rule of just laws. It will establish strong institutions. But, by way of a paradox, these strong institutions will need to be manned by strongmen/women. Their strength will not be in the sticks they wield, nor in the guns they brandish, nor in the Machiavellian tactics they deploy, but in the multiple competence they have acquired through education.

Our constitutionally established strong institutions will need men and women of intellectual, technical and ethical competence to man them. And such multiple competence is acquired through good education. Good education is not just about the formation of technocrats. This country needs technocrats with ethical competence.

The diverse peoples around the Niger—Nigerians—need to recognise the humanity of one another irrespective of tribe or religion or social status. I would propose, therefore, that the ideal we should share in common is freedom-in-collaboration—freedom for every Nigerian to actualise his or her potentials wherever the Nigerian chooses to live within the geographical area called Nigeria, freedom to collaborate with other Nigerians who desire to actualise their own potentials.

It is in fact the case that potentials can only be actualised in collaboration, that is, where each person works for his own good by working for the common good, and where each person works for the common good by working for his own good.

Since a developed polity is an association of citizens of potentials actualised in collaboration with other citizens, with freedom and collaboration, we shall form such an association in a land that is richly endowed by the Creator. We shall transmute from the Lugardian amalgam that we are into a true nation. We owe this to ourselves, and to generations yet unborn.

Fr. Akinwale, OP, is Deputy Vice Chancellor, Augustine University, Ilara-Epe, Lagos State.