Nigeria’s Information and Culture Minister, Lai Mohammed has sternly warned those calling for the breakup of Nigeria that some of our Professors may work in bakeries in neighbouring Togo just to keep body and soul together.

He made this view known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday when he said:

“Our challenge is more with the elites, not with the common people. Go to the remotest part of Nigeria today, you will see Nigerians from different tribes, cultures, and religions living together peacefully.

Elites ought to take the lead in cementing the unity of the country, but when the elites start preaching tribal hatred, people believe them because they think they know better.

Nigeria accounts for 70 per cent of West Africa’s population and if Nigeria should disintegrate today, we are going to overrun Benin Republic, Togo, Niger, and other neighbouring countries.

The elites will suffer more because some professors could be working in bakeries in Togo just to survive. We saw it happened when the Liberians came here during their civil war. It is in their own enlightened interest that they should work to fix Nigeria. Many of them have more than one passport — American, British, Irish — and at the first crack of trouble, they are gone.”