In 1990, a political scientist named Walker Connor asked a simple question that most people never stop to answer: when is a nation?

Not when is a country. Not when is a state. Not when is a government. A nation. Connor wanted to know what makes a group of people feel that they are one people — that they belong to each other across distance, across class, across the accidents of birth.

His answer was uncomfortable for people who like clean definitions. A nation, he wrote, is a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related. Not necessarily that they actually are. That they believe they are. The nation is a sentiment. A we-feeling. A sense of shared blood and history that makes a stranger feel like kin and a neighbor feel like a foreigner.

This is why Nigeria is so difficult to understand. We call it a nation. We sing about it in anthems. We pledge to it in classrooms. But Connor would say: Nigeria is a state. It has borders, a constitution, an army, a flag. What it has not reliably had is the sentiment of nationhood — the feeling that a fisherman in Bayelsa and a herder in Katsina are part of the same "we."

The British created Nigeria in 1914. Frederick Lugard stood in Lagos and announced the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates. He gave the new entity a name, a governor, a railway policy. What he did not give it was a nation. You cannot declare a nation into existence. Nations grow in memory, in language, in shared suffering and shared triumph, in stories passed down through generations. You cannot draw one on a map and expect people to feel it.

This is the root of so much Nigerian politics. The census is never just a census. It is an ethnic census. The federal character principle is not just a policy. It is an admission that no Nigerian identity has yet become strong enough to make ethnic quotas unnecessary. Elections are not just contests of ideas. They are contests of ethnic arithmetic — who can mobilize their own and buy or intimidate enough of the others.

Connor's work helps us see that this is not a failure of Nigerian morality. It is a mismatch between a state and a nation. The state was built from above. The nation, if it ever comes, must be built from below.

Biafra was the most dramatic expression of this mismatch. The Igbo who fought for it did not stop being Nigerian in some legal sense. They stopped feeling Nigerian. The pogroms in the North, the massacres, the failure of the federal government to protect them — these destroyed the sentiment. Once the we-feeling is gone, the state becomes an occupying force. The flag becomes a flag over someone else's house.

The military understood this in the crudest way. After the civil war, they tried to build nationhood by force. National unity became a command. Federal character became a formula. Unity schools, national youth service, the rotation of power between North and South — all attempts to manufacture what had not grown organically. Some of these policies helped. Some created resentment. None of them solved the original problem.

Connor was careful not to say that multi-ethnic states are impossible. He said they are rare as true nation-states. Most states contain many nations. The question is whether a civic nationhood can be built — a loyalty not to blood but to institutions, not to ancestry but to a shared project. Switzerland has done it. India struggles with it daily but has held. Nigeria is still trying.

The problem is that the Nigerian state has not given its people enough to love. The roads fail. The schools fail. The police steal. The hospitals kill. Politicians speak of patriotism while shipping their children abroad. In such conditions, what is there to feel national about? Why would a Yoruba trader in Lagos feel kinship with a Hausa farmer in Sokoto when both of them are victims of the same predatory state?

Nationhood requires a state that people can trust. Not a perfect state. Not a generous state. But a state that at least tries to be fair, that does not openly serve one region or one religion or one class, that does not treat citizenship as a gift to be withdrawn. The Nigerian state has too often been the opposite — a prize for the winners, a burden for the losers.

This is what makes Connor's question so urgent for Nigeria. We have spent decades arguing about structure — federalism, restructuring, resource control, state police — as if the right structure will solve everything. Structure matters. But structure cannot create love. It cannot create the feeling that we are in this together.

That feeling is built in smaller rooms. In the market where a Hausa woman and an Igbo woman argue over price and laugh about it later. In the university where students from every state share a room and discover that their parents' prejudices do not fit. In the protest where a Yoruba and a Tiv and an Ijaw decide, for a moment, that they have a common enemy. In the music that travels across languages and makes people dance the same way.

Nigerian culture has done more nation-building than Nigerian politics. Afrobeats belongs to no single ethnicity. Nollywood films are watched in every region. Pidgin English cuts across the middle. The cultural nation is further along than the political nation. But culture alone cannot protect people from a state that treats them as subjects.

Connor died in 2017. He never wrote specifically about Nigeria. But his question walks through every Nigerian street. When is a nation? Is it when the constitution says so? When the army enforces it? When the census finally works? Or is it when enough people decide that the stranger's child is also their child, that the distant river is also their river, that the flag is not just a piece of cloth but a promise?

Nigeria is still waiting for that decision. The state exists. The flag flies. The anthem plays. But the nation — the felt nation, the lived nation, the nation that survives when institutions collapse — that is still being made. Or unmade. Every day, by every act of fairness or cruelty, every policy that includes or excludes, every politician who speaks one language in the village and another in Abuja.

The question is not whether Nigeria can become a nation. The question is whether Nigerians will keep trying to feel like one, despite everything the state has done to make that feeling impossible.

Connor does not answer that question. He only makes it harder to avoid.