Indian Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi‘s state visit to Nigeria from 17-18 November 17 – 18 to “strengthen the current India-Nigeria Strategic Partnership” was but a renewal of over six decades of bilateral relationship between India and Nigeria dating back to 1958 – two years before Nigeria secured her independence from Britain. While the two leaders spoke of the immense potential for collaboration in the fields of trade, investment, education, energy, health, culture, Prime Minister Modi also offered India’s experience in agriculture, transportation, affordable medicine, renewable energy, and digital transformation to Nigeria.

Nigeria has always benefitted from her close relationship with India. For instance, besides the support of India teachers and doctors which Nigeria enjoyed immediately after independence, it is on record that it was India that established the National Defence Academy in Kaduna and the Naval War College, Port Harcourt. Today there are about 60,000-strong Indian expatriate community in Nigeria and over 200 Indian companies with investment portfolio of over $27 billion.

As post-colonial nation-states created by Britain to satisfy her greed for continued exploitation of resources of conquered and colonized territories, India and Nigeria share some parallels. Both are heterogeneous and multicultural societies where groups at different levels of cultural development were forcibly merged together without consultation. While Nigeria with a population of over 200m has about 350 ethnic groups, India with a population of about 1.4 billion has over 2000 ethnic groups. Sowing the seeds of future instability by Britain was not by accident. British officials, after all, had earlier boasted that it was their presence alone that had prevented the newly created states of Africa and Asia ‘from disastrous descent into turmoil of warring sects’. Institutionalising a federal arrangement for strange bed-fellows as a strategy for exploiting ethnic consciousness of federating ethnic nationalities was not out of place.

 India is ethnically diverse with significant diversity within regions; almost every state and several districts have its own distinct mixture of ethnicities, traditions, and culture. But India, unlike Nigeria has been able to manage her diversity because India’s political elite saw their pluralism as strength and accepted the challenge of living together. They saw nothing wrong with tribes and made conscious effort to create states on basis of languages spoken by citizens such as Maharashtra, Punjab and West Bengal.

The federal system of India provides equality to all the citizens as well as freedom of expression and freedom to practice their religion, etc. In terms of financial relations, India follows a system of fiscal federalism, where financial resources are distributed between the central and state governments. The constitution provides for the sharing of taxes and grants-in-aid to ensure financial autonomy for the states.

Like India, our own 1957 constitution also laid down the framework for a federal system of government clearly defining the powers and responsibilities of the central and regional governments. The regional list includes subjects of local or regional importance, such as police, public health, and agriculture. The concurrent list includes subjects on which both the central and state governments can legislate. Fiscal federalism ensures or guarantees financial autonomy of federating regions.

Sadly,  unlike India’s elite, our deceitful political elite undermined our own federal arrangement by unconstitutionally interfering in the affairs of the regions, and assaulting the tribes, the building block for African societies, claiming, albeit falsely, that it is possible to love Nigeria more than your family or your tribe which will be like climbing the palm tree from the top.

 Despite the provision of the 1957 constitution, the feudal lords in the north did not allow freedom of religion. The 1963 republican constitution, the first to be wholly midwifed by Nigerian elite provided the coalition partners an opportunity to insert a clause that would allow them to arrest and detain people without court order for expressing their opinion. The first victim was Obafemi Awolowo who was detained for criticizing Anglo-Nigerian defence pact.

However, while India was busy setting up technology special schools (India Institute of Technology (IITS), the India Institute of Science (IISc) and National Institute of Technology (NITS) that attracted the best brains among India’s youths which has today resulted in Indian engineers heading most of the leading tech companies in the world, we were busy replicating federal government unity schools across Nigeria.

India started the arduous task by first taming the feudal lords, who had to be replaced by the capitalist class who know how to mobilise the people to secure power. India did this without underestimating the intrigues of the metropolitan powers. As President Bola Tinubu moves from France to Britain and to Germany, he must not forget the duplicitous role of Britain as foremost promoter of ethnic consciousness, secret supporter of Fulani claim of ownership of Nigeria, and betrayer of  Biafra that had expected her support  as chief promoter of ethnic consciousness.

India therefore emerged as a union of nationalist groups that respect the culture and values of federating members. Apart from Hindi, the official language spoken by about 40 percent, there are about 20 other recognized languages. They understand their challenges include taming the feudal lords who have to be replaced by the capitalist class. They did not underestimate the intrigues of the metropolitan powers in the guise of promoting ethnic consciousness. Or preventing the disintegration of areas amalgamated without consideration for their level of cultural development and favoured one group above the other.

Patriotism for Indians is not about loving India. That comes naturally from the union of nationalities. They don’t have to set up unity schools, institutionalize quota system of admission to tertiary institutions or into bureaucracy, discriminatory admission marks for JAMB or decree a National Youth Service in pursuit of elusive unity.

Instead, they set up competitive tech schools that attract the best of their youths. The result today is that most of the best tech companies in the world are headed by Indians.  Indian leaders don’t need to decree patriotism. The billions of dollars repatriated back to India yearly by their tech experts in high demand in Europe and North America speak louder than the voices of those turned their brainwaves to state policies.

India’s visionary leaders didn’t have to mouth unity or patriotism. All they did was to invest in the education of their youths. The product of such schools are today in charge of India’s economy, ranked fifth in the world by GDP and in fact projected to become the third largest economy by the end of the decade.

We institutionalized quota system of admission into the unity schools to accommodate those who as a result of lower scores could not compete with their counterparts. In the name of unity, we set up JAMB to accommodate those who have no business in the universities, and quota system of recruiting third class graduates at the expense of first class graduates into the bureaucracy.

We don’t need to search far as to why India has become choice destination for Nigeria’s medical tourism, why our best graduates are moving in droves to seek greener pastures in Europe, Canada and USA and why India’s elite has been able to stabilize their democracy, their economy, sent satellite to the moon and became a nuclear power while our own elite remain the scourge of our nation.