Nigeria…still struggles to imagine itself above the appetites of its constituent publics. That is why our institutions remain thin and easily compromised, weakened by seasonal rent-seekers who arrive in batches, one election after another, do what they must on the national stage, and then retreat to their more intimate allegiances. Even in the search for global partnership to confront our security crises, the language of our appeals is too often framed through the categorisation of victims by loyalties, other than the national.
This reflection grew out of a question that a friend sent me on WhatsApp. My first instinct was simply to reply to him there, in private, but the recurrence of the same question across social media conversations, especially in the midst of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s demonstration of its capabilities in the ongoing war involving Israel and the United States, persuaded me that the thought belonged on a wider platform. What began as a personal response to a WhatsApp message has therefore become an attempt to address a broader curiosity about nationhood, resilience, and why some states are able to convert external pressure into internal resolve, while others merely deepen their fractures.
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Aside from the obvious fact that Iran is not just an old country but one of the world’s oldest continuous civilisational states, with a deep cultural memory and a durable sense of historical self, the real difference may be simpler: When pressure comes, Iran can still fall back on an idea of itself as a nation, while Nigeria too often falls back on its fragments. Iran itself is ethnically diverse, but it has preserved a rich political and cultural continuity stretching back to the Achaemenian period, and modern sanctions against it have been layered on for decades, from the post-1979 rupture with the United States to the far tighter multilateral restrictions of the nuclear era.
Nigeria, by contrast, has still not fully agreed to be a nation in the emotional sense. What we have often done instead is to elevate a hierarchy of competing loyalties: place of origin, ethnic group, faith, and only then the republic. We magnify these attachments when convenient and weaponise them when useful. Even the language of national belonging is frequently conditional, activated less by shared civic purpose than by the proximity of one’s own section of the country to power.
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A few years ago, I was in London with friends from different Nigerian ethnic backgrounds, when the subject of patriotism came up. A British friend asked what Nigeria meant to us, and the answers around the table were tellingly different. I told him then that loyalty to the Nigerian state is, for many people, rarely a first instinct. For many, it comes after loyalty to community, religion, or ethnicity. That may sound harsh, but it is not wholly detached from what the survey evidence has found: Nigerians often express tolerance for diversity and many say there is more that unites than divides them, yet the experiences of ethnic discrimination weaken national belonging, and groups that feel excluded from central power are more likely to prioritise ethnic identity over national identity.
True to that sentiment, the most vocal patriot at that table that day happened to share an ethnic, religious, and regional affinity with the president of the day. So we teased him that his nationalism was animated by the feeling that the Nigerian state had become legible to him through the man in charge. He was patriotic, yes, but in the way many of us are patriotic: when the centre feels familiar, when power sounds like our language, prays like us, or comes from our own corner of the map.
Nigeria’s short-lived experience of sanctions was under General Sani Abacha, and that was survived because the unitary character of the military government did not create room for these divisions, as democracy does, while the coerced nationalism was not a sustainable strategy, and definitely not enough to demolish the fences we have built around ourselves, all while pointing fingers at the ghost of colonialism that left us more than a century ago.
We singled out another friend at the table as almost constitutionally incapable of that kind of patriotism, not because he was deficient in civic sense, but because he came from a bloc whose relationship with the Nigerian centre had long been defined by frustration, ambition, and failed bids for national power. For such a person, national identity can feel less like a common inheritance than a waiting room for other people’s victories. That, too, is part of our problem: too many of us experience Nigeria not as a shared home, but as an arena in which our “public” must capture the state before the state becomes ours.
That is why sanctions do not produce the same political psychology everywhere. In countries with a strong civic core, external pressure can trigger a rally-round-the-flag effect, however temporary. This is because the people recognise the flag as theirs. In a country where national identity is thin, pressure does not necessarily produce cohesion; it can intensify competition among internal factions, each of them calculating survival and advantage through narrower loyalties.
Iran’s response to sanctions was not miraculous, and it came at enormous social cost, including inflation, unemployment, and hardship. But it did produce adaptation: import substitution, indigenisation of technology, rerouting of trade, expansion of regional partnerships, and the preservation of enough state capacity to keep parts of industry and manufacturing moving. Even the World Bank’s “Iran Economic Monitor” noted growth in manufacturing and services, despite sanctions.
Nigeria’s short-lived experience of sanctions was under General Sani Abacha, and that was survived because the unitary character of the military government did not create room for these divisions, as democracy does, while the coerced nationalism was not a sustainable strategy, and definitely not enough to demolish the fences we have built around ourselves, all while pointing fingers at the ghost of colonialism that left us more than a century ago.
Yes, colonialism did violence to pre-existing histories and bundled incompatible peoples into artificial states. But Nigeria is hardly the only country born from awkward borders, plural societies, or colonial inheritance. Indonesia is an immense archipelago of vast ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, yet its nation-building project drew strength from deliberate statecraft, including its language policy, education, and an enduring civic narrative of unity in diversity. Tanzania, with more than 120 ethnic groups, leaned heavily on Kiswahili as a national language and integrative instrument. Switzerland, with its multiple linguistic communities, built a political nation out of shared institutions, rather than ethnic sameness. Diversity, instead of disappearing in any of these places, was organised into a civic bargain.
What Iran’s history teaches is not that hardship is noble, nor that sanctions are desirable, but that a people with a cultivated sense of civilisational memory and national purpose can endure pressures that might otherwise splinter a less coherent society. A state does not improvise resilience in the middle of a siege. It draws from habits of continuity, from institutions that, however imperfect, are not treated as temporary camps for passing opportunists…
What makes such countries suffer less from diversity is not magic and certainly not homogeneity. It is the hard work of building institutions that people trust, creating national myths that do not exclude too many citizens, broadening access to power, teaching a civic language, and making the state visible as something more than a warehouse for spoils. Where that bargain exists, citizens may quarrel bitterly and still defend the republic. Where it does not, we have a Nigeria where every census is a battle, every appointment a grievance, every election a siege.
Nigeria’s tragedy is not simply that our national identity is weak. It is that this weakness reproduces itself in public life. We come into office carrying ethnic, religious, and regional anxieties as our real briefs. We have turned public service into a theatre for sectional reassurance. Government in, government out, too many actors treat the state not as a sacred trust but as a temporary concession to be mined before they return to their preferred allegiances, enriched and vindicated. What ought to be citizenship becomes brokerage. What ought to be stewardship becomes extraction.
What Iran’s history teaches is not that hardship is noble, nor that sanctions are desirable, but that a people with a cultivated sense of civilisational memory and national purpose can endure pressures that might otherwise splinter a less coherent society. A state does not improvise resilience in the middle of a siege. It draws from habits of continuity, from institutions that, however imperfect, are not treated as temporary camps for passing opportunists, and from a political imagination in which the nation is understood as something larger than the factions competing to inherit it.
Nigeria, by contrast, still struggles to imagine itself above the appetites of its constituent publics. That is why our institutions remain thin and easily compromised, weakened by seasonal rent-seekers who arrive in batches, one election after another, do what they must on the national stage, and then retreat to their more intimate allegiances. Even in the search for global partnership to confront our security crises, the language of our appeals is too often framed through the categorisation of victims by loyalties, other than the national. Until Nigeria becomes, in the imagination of its elites and citizens alike, something greater than a corridor to ethnic comfort, regional compensation, or religious triumph, we will continue to move in this cycle that heads nowhere. A country cannot be built by people who only visit it on their way back to themselves.
Gimba Kakanda is a writer and public servant based in Abuja.
