Nigeria, March 24 -- In Nigeria, history tends to repeat itself with unerring accuracy and in tiresome syntax. When he wrote his Report on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria and Administration in 1919, Frederick Lugard described Nigeria as an "anomaly.. of a country with aggregate revenue practically equal to its needs, but divided into two by an arbitrary line of latitude." While one portion was fiscally viable, he suggested, the other "was dependent on a grant paid by the British taxpayer." Through the Amalgamation in 1914, Lugard created a Customs Union in which extraction could be sustained by administering mechanisms of fiscal compensation to smooth over these disparities.

From the get-go, the invention of Nigeria was...