By Idowu Akinlotan
THE shape and character of the Muhammadu Buhari presidency unhappily demonstrates how the core North has been unable to resolve the dilemma of whether to be unreservedly pro-unity, with all the attendant sacrifices, or to insist on positions and conditions that promote their domination of the republic as a tool of safeguarding the interests of their region. It is not certain that they can resolve that dilemma soon, or that their approach to that peculiar predicament has in the past few decades been sensible, realistic, proportionate, inspiring and capable of guaranteeing the desired goal without endangering the whole country on a scale far worse and bloodier than the anomie sweeping through the North.
In the past two weeks, some top northern (read core North) politicians, faced with increasingly assertive southerners and their militias, have exhibited that ambivalence in their politics, definitions and views of Nigeria and its people. The balance of opinion suggests that they in fact lean more to a definition of Nigeria that confers on the core North supervening privileges unknown to or assumed from the constitution, and a dominant and domineering worldview held together by poorly defined political and theocratic underpinnings. This is an extreme position that leaves no middle ground for consensus or conciliation. It is a question of time before something gives – not if, but when.
Three examples illustrate this dilemma, and provide very troubling foreboding of what is to come. Unfortunately, because of the disconnection of the Buhari presidency from reality and shared experience, and the inept and self-serving coterie that advises, influences and propels the government, no one is sure whether the core North appreciates the precariousness of the situation or understands the factors that drive the crisis, and how those factors transcend their misgivings about the objectives and intentions of the South. The core North is of course more generally used interchangeably with the Northwest or Hausa/Fulani, not the Northeast or North Central which have sometimes been expediently included in long-running alliances. Definitionally too, the core North nearly always uses the Southeast interchangeably with the South, generalizing what it describes and suspects – in line with former Northern Region premier Ahmadu Bello’s opinion – is the Southeast’s aggressive and domineering spirit to be equal to the South’s assumed goal of disempowering and ridiculing the North. The Goodluck Jonathan presidency seemed to have awakened the fears of the core North to what they describe as the Igbo plot to dominate everywhere, as a leaked phone call between a northern ex-governor and Southwest ex-governor disturbingly explicated not too long ago.
If there is, therefore, going to be a resolution of the Nigerian national question, one in which all sides to the ongoing national conflict will honestly and dispassionately attempt to resolve their differences and forge a national identity, ideology and consensus, the predilections of the various peoples of Nigeria must be understood and managed expertly by nation builders. President Buhari’s administration has of course disqualified itself from playing that altruistic role, having taking sides in an appalling fashion, but northern and southern leaders must find common grounds and inspiration, not to say examples and a driving force, to weld a disparate country together to produce a common identity, ideology and goals. Given the ossification of prejudices and worldviews on all sides, that task will not be easy; but it is not impossible. If left unattended, however, the problematic issues, warped ideas and parochial policies that divide the country, from which many megalomaniacal governors and political leaders have profited and built a career, will eventually plunge the country into chaos, if not war. All signs at the moment point frighteningly to a cataclysmic denouement simply because the present administration does not appreciate all that is at stake.
In the following three examples can be found not only an indication of the dilemma confronting Nigeria, but also a demonstration of the befuddlement of the politicians in whose nervous and feeble hands have been committed the fate and destiny of Nigeria. Governor Bello Muhammad (Matawallen Maradun) of Zamfara State is the archetype of Nigeria’s overrated governors. Two Thursdays ago, he warned in a statement he issued that the North could be forced to retaliate attacks on northerners in the South. The lives of northerners and their dignity and possessions had become unsafe in the increasingly hostile South, and it was reaching boiling point where the safety of southerners in the North might be jeopardized, he bellowed. The statement probably refers to southern attacks on herdsmen and some other northerners in retaliation for their criminal activities, including kidnapping and killing of farmers. Southern leaders were enraged by Gov Muhammad’s abysmal equivalence, even as many northern leaders decried the governor’s intemperate language. The governor has not shown that he is better than his predecessor, Abdulaziz Yari, whose governance model was also festooned with dangerous and retrogressive theocratic underpinnings.
Gov Muhammad reinforced his parochialism with a counterintuitive statement on the protests against President Muhammadu Buhari in London during his last medicals. How he saw the protests as demonstrating prejudice against the North is hard to say. But according to his strange logic, the protesters would not have embarked on the protest had the president been a southerner. The governor, a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) member, was defending a president who is a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC). It is no surprise that another kindred spirit, the hugely controversial and cocksure Communications and Digital Economy minister, Isa Pantami, is also in the eye of the storm for reasons not dissimilar to Gov Muhammad’s unstatesmanlike reactions to complex socio-economic and cultural issues. The Communications minister has been accused, with unassailable evidence, of religious bigotry in his past statements and dealings, an unenviable and unflattering past his sympathizers have tried to lessen its import and coat in saccharine, but which his accusers say may be colouring his public assignment, including his controversial and insensitive approach to national identity card registration and SIM card registration. Worse, Dr Pantami’s appointment has made some critics to wonder whether there is no sinister deliberateness to President Buhari’s public policy and composition of government.
It is also in these contexts that some analysts have weighed the statement of Bauchi State governor, Bala Mohammed, when he lent support to herdsmen wielding sophisticated arms in their cattle herding business. He not only defended his unusual statement as an elected governor, he shocked the country when he described the Fulani, irrespective of background, as a Nigerian entitled by nature of his universality to free movement and citizenship. Their nationality, he quipped in answer to a reporter’s question, transcended borders, including Nigerian border. Herdsmen have probably in consequence tried flagrantly to enforce those rights ascribed to them unilaterally by politicians like Gov Mohammed, insisting on colonizing forests everywhere, and grazing their cattle wherever their hunches take them. That this is a recipe for conflict and disaster does not occur to Gov Mohammed nor discomfit him. Even the president’s guarded statement to shoot on sight anyone wielding sophisticated assault rifles have been interpreted more as a targeted response to the stirrings of southern ethnic militias than herdsmen. As Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister between 2010 and 2015, what else did he do, and what private illicit thoughts did he harbour in favour of his ethnic group and against others?
More damning, especially for a governor who endorses the constitutional demolition of internal borders in favour of herdsmen, Gov Mohammed announced late last week that his government, through the Hisbah agency, would profile sex workers in Bauchi State preparatory to repatriating them to their home states. He would keep his indigenous sex workers and marry them off, he chuckled. What happened to the demolition of borders he advocated just a few weeks ago? If herdsmen could live and work anywhere, often unlawfully armed with guns, why could sex workers not live and work anywhere? He is of course free to draw a religious line against prostitution, considering how precariously he and other governors around him flirt with religion and theocracy, but he has no legitimate constitutional backing to discriminate on political and spatial grounds against sex workers from neighbouring states. The fact is that Gov Mohammed is unrepentantly irredentist, and for many overrated governors like him, their ideas and public policies are superficial and provocative. They have little understanding of the constitution, modern government, secularism and human rights. Indeed, they have an even poorer understanding of the policies that would energise their states, make them self-sufficient rather than dependent on federal allocations, and position them for the future.
To be continued
