Thread by @Chxta

In the light of the new #coronavirus cases in #Osun, let's very briefly talk about #Nigeria's (or Africa's borders). It was sometime last year that I found that probably the 4th largest concentration of Ogbomoso indigenes after Ogbomoso itself, Ibadan and Kano, is in Abidjan.

Basically, this Nigerian community has links with that part of #IvoryCoast because of trade routes that predate the British and the French, and apparently, those trade routes are still in use, which is how people made it through #Nigeria's ostensibly closed borders.

Internet service provider went down, so the thread will continue shortly.

I've seen replies that saying Ogbomoso people are also strong in #Jos and #Ghana, but for the purposes of this, I'll stick with what Mr Akin Akinbola, a much older man from Ogbomoso, told me in Paris.

The thread continues now...

Most of the thread is culled directly from my column in @BusinessDayNg three weeks ago. You can read the complete thing here - bit.ly/3bN84gG - as what is in this thread is but a summary.

There is a theory in geopolitics that holds that the most stable, natural countries, are formed along longitudes, not latitudes, and the reason is climate.

Before technology changed the way that people worked and lived, moving within the same lines of longitudes made sense.

The climate was broadly the same, so the adjustment was easier. This aided the formation of states along those similar climatic zones, and this applied in #Africa as well.

The great empires of the ancient world (including those on the continent) tended to follow climatic zones.

The Roman Empire was largely a Mediterranean empire, the Islamic Caliphate was largely a desert empire, the Mongol Empire was strongest on the Steppes.

In #Africa, the great empires of Mali, Shongai, Sokoto and Benin, didn't have major climatic variations within their borders.

When the Europeans colonised #Africa, they cared only about one thing, profit.

The goal was to extract resources from the hinterlands and send them back home, so they drew borders in Africa that discarded this natural law and ran along latitudes.

This resulted in cohesive nations such as the Masai of East Africa, being divided between British #Kenya and German East Africa, an area which later became known as #Tanzania.

The bigger the nation was, the more divided it often became, so the Yoruba nation today, straddles English #Nigeria, French West Africa (#Benin) and German Togoland (now French #Togo).

The Hausas are found as far as #Ghana.

Young @William_Ukpe from today’s #AkwaIbom has mentioned cousins in South-West #Cameroun, which is today rebelling against the government in Yaounde.

@DavidHundeyin has mentioned his relatives having their bedrooms in #Benin and their kitchens in #Nigeria.

Imagine someone coming into pre-EU Europe and creating a country that is half of #Spain, half of #France and throws in a bit of #Belgium and #Netherlands.

That is a simplified version of what #Nigeria and most other African countries are.

In the worst cases, some these artificial borders created a mess of civil wars within many African countries as the people tried to better align their countries to their nations.

In other cases, supremacy battles between incompatible peoples caused civil wars.

Following artificial border designs, African communities have not moved freely in their daily activities, which has inflicted economic hardship and social inconvenience.

This is why #AfCFTA is so important.

The problems these artificial borders created, often expressed in resource conflict and elaborate smuggling operations, still exist as reminders of just how impactful lines on a map can be.

Or cannot be.

#Nigeria’s borders have been closed since August 2019.

But the evidence shows that the border closure is really just an annoyance for formal businesses in headline border crossings like Seme and Idiroko where the Nigerian state can muster control of the levers of coercion.

As the ease of the #Osun thing shows, in places such as Dorofi, Ekok and Jibiya, it is (almost) business as usual, and goods and people are still moving through.

The ancient nations are still very much alive, while the artificial countries are suffering from internal stress.

The thing about borders, and what these disasters prove is that borders are just that. Lines on a map that can be changed.

So, if we now know that the present borders don’t work for #Africa, we should ask ourselves a truly searching question, can the borders of Africa be fixed?