ABSTRACT

The tears, fears and jeers within the Nigerian state seriously demand that Nigerians and the peoples of the world make an urgent and inevitable choice: to save the concept called "Nigeria" or the people called "Nigerians". With life, the most treasured aspect of human existence, becoming valueless in Nigeria, the country has become a metaphor of a gigantic human abattoir. This paper is a hermeneutic application of Heidegger’s concept of Polemos (a Greek word that originally means war but which he ontologically reinterpreted as confrontation) as well as the “openness of Being” to the ambivalence between the Nigerian State and the peoples within her geographical territory. Polemos as confrontation should have been necessarily significant as a tool of engagement by the peoples in Nigeria. However, the paper argues that the occupation of the open region by the Caliphate-driven Nigerian State has ensured that there is neither mutual engagement among the peoples nor is there harmony between the Nigerian State and the Nigerian peoples. Employing the expository, historical and hermeneutic methods, the paper argues that the annexation and the domination of the cultural, political, economic and religious spaces by the drivers of the state has resulted in a Polemos that has left Nigerians gasping for survival breathes. The paper argues further that the initial motive for this culture of domination was religion and then, with the discovery of crude oil, the motive was exacerbated by economics. The paper thus reopens the call for a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) as the most-viable and peaceful option open to Nigerians to rescue Nigeria and prevent further collateral damage. The paper, however, concludes by positing that a new type of Polemos is required to clear the open space dominated by the state so that the being of Nigerians would become meaningful. For why should Haruna, Oluwole, Attah, Okpara, Obot, Agbonifo, Eno, Ihua, etc be sacrificed to save a terminology called "Nigeria"?