Abstract
The principles of Good Governance presume peoples, nations, systems, corporations, cultures and so forth. These entities are what must be found at the backdrop of a possible Good Governance in Nigeria. Meanwhile the collapse of any civilization; the decay of any society; the death of the human spirit in any epoch is often heralded by the deterioration of culture. In other words anarchy in and disintegration of any society are consequent upon a decline, decadence, misconstrue or neglect in the culture of that society. Identifying the veritable Nigerian culture is a task outside whose accomplishment Good Governance in the country remains a farce, because it is a people who generate culture and a culture which grounds Good Governance. The quest for Good Governance in Nigeria is a pipe dream; a flight of fancy in as much as the Nigerian people is phantom and their culture inanity. Meanwhile it is more convenient to talk about the people, culture, language and religion of Nigeria in plural terms. Therefore we can only say Nigerian cultures, languages and religions. It was John S. Mbiti [1] and Emefie I. Metuh [2] who had agreed on this plurality only in terms of African Religions. Plurality as diversity is the essential character of Nigeria. We may conveniently talk about the Igbo (Likewise Yoruba, Hausa, Kalabari, Ogoni, Ibibio, Tiv and so on) culture, language, religion, people and so forth. Yet even at that, what we mean can easily identify with the past and dying ways of the people which the present recalls according to the strength of their hindsight, but which has no relevance at all on the life of those who commemorate them. This article from a phenomenological perspective understands culture as a unified way of life that binds a people together and identifies its absent presence in Nigeria with the inevitable consequence of the illusiveness of Good Governance. It then opens the vistas of another possibility of building Good Governance on the same diversity.
Highlights
The state of affairs of the Nigerian nation since independence had been characterized by instability, insecurity, suspicion, violence and crisis at every stage of its national development
The position of this article that Nigeria has no culture is sustained by the truth that culture in Nigeria most times belongs to the ethnic groups; they are celebrations and reminiscence of the past of our various tribes
Culture most often is not an attribute that is given to Nigeria as a nation except in cases where a couple of the tribal cultures are referred to as Nigerian cultures
Summary
The state of affairs of the Nigerian nation since independence had been characterized by instability, insecurity, suspicion, violence and crisis at every stage of its national development. It is present in a sense that there is a consistent Nigerian way of doing things which could be seen in everything Nigerian and absent in a sense that a Nigerian culture cannot begin to emerge when Nigeria itself is a wishful thinking; when the component parts of the country still exist as if Nigeria is one common enemy faced by each in its regional consciousness. This writer locates the Nigerian problem as foundational; lying beneath the composition of a state destined to fail It was an Act of the British Parliament that composed the Nigerian state and beyond that declaration, the various parties that constitute the entity have not come together to state their common interest, struggle and destiny upon which they freely decide to submit their individual wills to a collective will of the Nigerian state. It is this people and culture that will produce good Nigerian leaders assessed by the standards of the nation’s collective interest
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