In a recent editorial for Vanguard (which also flashed up on AllAfrica News), Nigeria is called “A country of settlers”:

The arguments are not about who settlers are and who are the indigenes, they are about the fact that Nigerians are now grappling with issues of citizenship. It is an issue that deserves handling with uttermost sensibility and sensitivity.

How are citizens of a 50-year-old country unable to identify themselves? Why are we not able to learn from other countries?

Each time there is a conflagration in any part of the country, most of those who claim they are seeking solutions to the crisis are behind it. How can we peg all crises on tribe and religion? The issues are deeper and we have to confront them with sincerity instead of exploring poverty, unemployment, and religion to create troubles throughout the country.

[…]

We have to look beyond legislation to free ourselves from the shackles of being settlers in our own country. The time is now.

Nigeria finds itself in a postcolonial predicament – embattled with ‘settler’ and ‘native’ as constitutive ideas – and processes there seem to reflect some of the state-building dilemmas identified by Mahmood Mamdani a decade ago in Citizen and Subject and other works. (See also this post from last week.)