Category: Banji Akintoye

A week ago, hundreds of members of Arewa Youth Development Foundation went on a peaceful protest demonstration in Kano. They took their demonstration to a most eminent Nigerian leader–Alhaji Muhammadu Sanusi ll, Emir of Kano.  A couple of days later, they took it to  one of Nigeria’s most respected elderly statesmen, Alhaji Maitama Sule, former federal minister, former chairman of the National Antiquities Commission, former Nigerian Permanent Representative at the United Nations.

These young people are doing a good job of making Nigeria and the world hear their message. They are conducting themselves in the most respectable manner imaginable – in a manner calculated to make Nigeria and the world listen. According to all reports, they have been perfectly peaceful. They do not speak the language of violence, and they do not act in ways that can promote violence. Peaceful and self-respecting, they are nevertheless persistent in pushing their message. They do not look like ones who can be easily discouraged, or who may give up and quit. In this country in which violence is a common mode of venting group discontentment,  these youths of the Arewa Youths Development Foundation deserve to be rated as a model of sensible democratic youth action.

Finally, these youths are not children; they are not some bleary eyed school kids rioting against their teachers. No. They are responsible young adults. From even the little we can glean about them from the press reports, they are well educated people, university graduates and professionals. The president of their group is a legal practitioner. In short, these are voices that Nigeria and Nigerians must listen to with respect.

What then is their message? Principally, they demand that Nigeria should be dissolved. In their group’s prepared speech which they read during their demonstration, they urged all northerners to “rise and support agitation for peaceful dissolution of this union called Nigeria for every region to go its own way.”

And they want the dissolution to happen right now. To prepare the ground for the dissolution, they are urging all northerners resident in the South, and all southerners resident in the North, “all artisans, students, public and private sector servants, traders, business holders currently operating, residing or  intending to do so in any part of Nigeria” to return to their respective home regions within the next two weeks.

What reasons are they giving for their demand that Nigeria should be dissolved? They say that Nigeria is not working; that northerners need to terminate their relationship with Nigeria; that northerners have been suffering “continued intimidation” in the hands of the federal government; that northerners are being insultingly regarded by southerners as economic parasites in Nigeria; that northerners are generally discriminated against in Nigeria and treated like non-citizens in the South.  They say “Southerners are not welcome in the North”, and that “Southerners must go”.

What should the rest of us, Nigerians, make of all this? First and foremost, if I were a southerner living in the North or a northerner living in the South, I would start packing now.

Secondly, these youthful voices represent a very vital part of Northern Nigeria’s elite. They have the credentials to speak authoritatively for the Arewa North. Also, we need to note the kinds of responses they get when they speak directly to the older members of the Arewa elite. After listening to them, the Emir of Kano enjoined them “to imbibe the lesson of peace in their entire endeavour”. The elder statesman, Alhaji Maitama Sule, was more forthcoming. He said, “It is true that we have been suffering a lot in the northern part of the country, humiliation, discrimination and so forth – – – We believe that the best way out of this dilemma in which we have found ourselves is to have a dialogue.  – – – And that is why we have been trying to have a dialogue, we believe that we can bring to an end the ugly things that are happening in this country if all of us can come together and tell one another the truth. – – – The world can never be governed by force, never by fear and even, never by power”.

One clear picture emerges from both the complaints of the Arewa youth leaders and the responses of their elders. Northern leaders of all generations are seriously disturbed about the way that federal power is now impacting the North. This is something they have never experienced, something they cannot live with. Rather than continuing to live under these conditions in the country to which they belong, they would prefer that the country should be broken up – “for every region to go its own way”.

I am sure that most southerners would find this picture from the North very interesting indeed. All the years since 1962 (the year that the federal government launched an attack on the Western Region), the peoples of Southern Nigeria have suffered increasing “intimidation” and even subjugation by the Federal Government of Nigeria. Because the Northerners controlled the federal government until only recently, they did not see or appreciate our sufferings in those years. Because of the unjust impacts of the federal government on our lives in the South, we the youths of most of the South (Southwest, Southeast and South-south) became radicalized in various ways, most desiring that Nigeria should break up, and that we should have separate little countries of our own. The response of the North in all those years was to make the federal government more and more powerful, better and better equipped with coercive force, more and more ruthless in dealing with “dissidents”.

When, at long last, a Southerner (Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo) somehow found his way to the presidency, we thought that change would follow. But we soon found that we were deceiving ourselves – that the builders of the federal behemoth had built it so perfectly (on roots of human frailties) that it would always operate as designed, no matter what part of Nigeria the president comes from. In fact, the presidencies of Obasanjo and Jonathan are final proof that the character of the Nigerian federal establishment is unchangeable. As the system is, anybody who is president will always presume that it is part of his prerogative to handle Nigeria’s vast revenues as personal estate, to rig elections in any part of Nigeria, to discriminate against any region or people, and to bully and subdue the government of any state.

Even now that the northern elite have discovered the oppressive side of federal power, they still, strangely, out of habit, want to preserve it – while complaining against it! In the ongoing National Conference, they are still fighting might and mane to preserve the federal status quo.

Therefore, there is no other option than to do what the Arewa youth leaders demand – namely, to dissolve Nigeria, “for every region to go its own way”. Alhaji Maitama Sule wants dialogue. Hopefully, the dialogue will be to pave way for our new countries – the Republics of Delta, Biafra, Oduduwa, Arewa, Niger-Benue, and Kanem.The Arewa youths speak for most Nigerians.

Alhaji Maitama Sule is right: The world can never be governed by force or by fear.

Some statements which I made in this column last week now make it necessary for me to explain certain things more fully. I refer to the followings statements:  “We cannot be producing streams of educated citizens from year to year without putting forth the kinds of programmes that can create opportunities for their education and skills… After turning ourselves into a very educated people, what we have needed for decades and have not been doing is to consciously turn ourselves into modern business folks”.

We Yoruba have succeeded greatly in educating ourselves. We are universally recognized as Africa’s most literate people. We owe the success to our national tendency to seek education and enlightenment, and the very heroic efforts of our leaders in the 1950s to make education available to all our children. Today, most Yoruba families can boast of university graduates.

But the intention of our leaders of the 1950s was not to stop with educational development, but to use education as the foundation for wider fields of development. In this regard, I remember some things that Chief Awolowo said in a conversation with a small group, including me, in December 1978. He said that, after providing access to education for all our children in the 1950s, the next step intended by our leaders was to provide opportunities for our increasingly educated people to use their education to serve themselves, their families and their society. That, he said, meant that the government of the Western Region needed to embark on programmes that could turn our educated people into modern skilled workers, modern entrepreneurs, modern businesspeople, modern farmers, etc. Unfortunately, the Western Region crisis started at that point in 1962, and it stopped our progress. As a result, in the years that followed, even the most patriotic of our leaders have tended to concentrate only on education – leaving the wider fields of development unattended to.  It is this failure that is responsible today for the very high rate of unemployment among our educated youths, and for terrible poverty in our South-west.

The governments of our states must return to the things we have not been doing – or that we have been doing sufficiently. We must consciously nurture a modern business culture among our people. The way to do that is very well known in the world today. Many countries in East Asia have done it successfully and in short periods of time. Japan started it all. Then some other countries of the region – like Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and others – followed Japan’s example. China is doing it. Israel is doing it very successfully in the Middle East. The basic ways to do it are as follows:

First, emphasize a culture of work among our people. For us the Yoruba nation, with our great history of work, enterprise and achievements, and with our well-known love of the beautiful life, this ought not to be difficult at all. Our state governments must find ways to do it, and to discourage the typical Nigerian dependence on hand-outs, hustling and begging.

Second, improve the work skills of our people – through emphasis on technical skills in our whole educational system, through well-established apprenticeship systems, and through technical schools and colleges of technology. Some of our existing schools and universities can, with the help of our state authorities, be easily modified for these purposes. We must also nurture good work ethics among our workers. For modern farming skills, we will need to have farm centres and institutes.

Third, establish various kinds of institutions (schools, institutes and colleges, university programmes, short-term training centres, etc) for developing entrepreneurship, business management, etc.

Fourth, and very importantly, a rich variety of ways to provide financial helping hands to businesses – well-managed micro-credit loans systems, business loans guarantee systems, etc, for business starters, capital interventions. These must be professionally structured and managed and must be free from the influence of partisan politics. In short, our states must invest in our people.

Fifth, we must set up a conscious programme for encouraging and assisting exports. This will include encouraging all our producers to emphasize high quality in their products, so that the products may be acceptable in markets worldwide. Achieving a great and growing amount of exports must be central to our whole economic objectives.

Sixth, we must encourage a culture of research and development – through financial assistance to research, inventions and product development; and through laws that protect inventors.

Seventh, we must create various means of attracting investments to our region from the outside world. The volume of investment capital seeking places to invest in the world is very large and is constantly growing. We must set out consciously to attract much of it to our region. Being part of Nigeria, we are not totally free to do all we might want to do in this matter, but we must find creative ways to achieve our purpose.

Above all, we must ensure political peace and stability in our region. Investors want predictable peace, stability, protection, etc, for their investments – and they want these to be so for long in the future. Without this, we cannot achieve much. The Eastern Asian countries recognized this early and seriously controlled the nature of their politics, and their political stability is one of the principal reasons why they are able to attract most of the investments coming from the developed world to the developing world. Unfortunately, Nigeria is already too notorious worldwide as a country forever disturbed by rigged elections, violent electoral and political conflicts, ethnic and religious conflicts and terrorism, etc. In spite of this, we can still get most of what we want if we control the quality of politics in our region.

We will have to nurture a culture of political discipline in our region – including cautious politicking, free, fair and peaceful elections, and respectful surrender to the will and voice of the people as expressed through their votes. Since our six states are likely to be controlled by different political parties, we must establish institutions that bring our governors together responsibly for the good of our whole region. In recent times, some of our governors have promoted the idea of integrated regional development for our region. We must now try and develop this – or even better still, we might unite as one region (plus, of course the Yoruba in Kwara, Kogi, and our Itsekiri people).   In our elections, we must reject the cantankerous and overly noisy kind of politician – because our prosperity depends on our political peace and stability.

In summary, I write all this on the assumption, and the faith, that we Yoruba can develop and become as prosperous as we wish even in the context of Nigeria – and that any other Nigerian nationality can do the same. Of course, our having a separate country of our own  would be much better; but, while we are still in Nigeria, it is wrong for us Yoruba as a nation to continue to operate on the debilitating belief that Nigeria necessarily limits out progress and prosperity. It does not. Everything depends on our own choices, our discipline, and our seriousness.

There is only one way to preserve Nigeria. If we follow that one way, we succeed. If we do not, we fail, sooner or later. And that one way is to be realistic – to accept the FACT of things as they are, and to make our nation-building steps strictly follow that fact.  Otherwise, we are just messing around. We have been messing around since independence in 1960 – and we have brought Nigeria not nearer to unity but very much farther away from unity. In fact we have brought Nigeria to the verge of breaking up.

The fact, the indubitable fact, is that we Nigerians are not one people or one nation. We are many nations. We are many different nations – in most cases, very different nations. For thousands of years our different nations lived in their own separate homelands in this area of Africa before the British came, threw a boundary around us together and called us Nigeria.  Each had its own language and its own defining culture. Each organized and ruled its people in its own way. Each responded in its own way to external influences – such as long-distance trade, and contacts with foreign peoples and foreign religions. Each has its own way of responding to the many changes and influences of the modern world – such as Western education, science, technology, industrialization, etc. Each has its own way of responding to close relationships with other nations in the same country. Even though we have all lived in one country of Nigeria for a century, each of our nations has its own kind of desires, ambitions and expectations in that country. And each cherishes its own image of itself and its own pride. All these are true of every one of our nations, even though some nations are large and some are small. This is THE FACT OF THINGS AS THEY ARE in, and for, our country Nigeria.

It is only by seriously accepting these facts as sovereign, by respecting them, and by working sincerely with them, by structuring Nigeria into a true federation, that we can build a stable and lasting Nigeria. In the last years of British rule, the British helped us to start correctly along these lines. The structure they helped us to create was rough and imperfect, no doubt. Unable and unwilling to do the detailed structuring that they knew we needed, they helped us to create three broad regions – each region appearing somewhat plausible. In spite of the anger and agitations of many of the nations in each region, the three regions succeeded quite well, and they brought considerable socio-economic progress into the lives of their citizens. Of course, there was no doubt that we needed to carry the system further, and the British left with the hope that we ourselves would do that.

As we celebrated independence, there was a lot of hope among us that we would do it and make a success of it. It was fortunate, most observers thought, that the politicians – the Hausa-Fulani political leaders – who were dominant in the independence federal government, were known to be strong defenders of regional and local autonomy. In the years before independence, they had stood very stoutly for such principles; in fact, at some point, they had suggested that Nigeria should be constituted into three separate countries joined together by only a customs union. Now that our country was independent and they were in control, what doubt could there be that the federal principle, with strong regions managing most of their own affairs,  would go on to triumph?

But it did not happen. Someday, some bright historian will reveal to the world the causes and details of this most unfortunate turn in Hausa-Fulani attitudes to the political development of Nigeria. Much of what we know is encapsulated in the statement credited to Sir Ahmadu Bello, the leader of the Hausa-Fulani political elite, only 11 days after the day of independence. “This new country called Nigeria,” he was reported to have said, “should be an extension of the empire of our great-grandfather Othman dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of government. We use the peoples of the Middle Belt as willing tools and the peoples of the South as conquered territory, and never let them rule over us, and never let them control their own future”.

That is the path that Hausa-Fulani politics has pursued ruthlessly since then. The central piece of it is to hold the power of the federal government by all means, and to use it to subdue the other peoples of Nigeria, in order to mould Nigeria into a de facto Fulani empire – what some now call a “Sultanate”.

The Hausa-Fulani agenda has succeeded wonderfully. But, unhappily, that success has brought a whole lot of disasters with it. Thirty-six small and essentially impotent states, created to ensure unrestrained federal power and control, sit over the progressive impoverishment of Nigerians.  At the fond wish of the controllers of federal power, all sections of Nigeria depend more and more on the revenue from oil, and abandon all efforts at developing local resources. Corruption becomes the soul of Nigeria’s public management and public life, and every election, because of crookedness and criminalities, becomes almost a war of all against all. The spirit of enterprise plunges everywhere, as most ambitious citizens become hustlers for some share of the oil money. Poverty escalates relentlessly, until the federal government itself acknowledges that 62% of Nigerians now live in “absolute poverty” – that is, subsisting on about one US dollar per day.

Unemployment among Nigerian young adults is estimated at over 70%. Crimes, conflicts and insecurity grow exponentially, making Nigeria one of the most unsafe places in peace time in the world. Terrorism, veiled with cloaks of religion, subdues a whole region of Nigeria. Nigeria’s military and security establishments, heavily riddled with corruption, are in a shambles. Almost visibly daily, Nigeria stumbles towards disintegration or implosion.

But this dubious success is not slowing down by any means. The news from the National Conference in Abuja is that the Hausa-Fulani leaders, greatly empowered by nearly 50 years of control of Nigeria, are succeeding yet again in defeating every attempt at change. The South-west, South-east and South-south delegations all went to the National Conference with proposals strongly demanding the restructuring of the Nigerian federation. But, talk with these delegates now, and you will find that very many have become ambivalent at best. Close observers believe that many delegates have been “settled”. South-east and South-south delegates are now commonly saying that their chief concern is that President Jonathan should win re-election in 2015 for a second term, or that the South-east should have one more state!

In short, returning Nigeria to a true federal structure is not going to happen. But this can only be a pyrrhic victory for the champions of total federal power and control. When the National Conference has finished compiling its unrealistic and foolish decisions, the masses of Nigerians will still be faced with the awful and hopeless conditions that they have been living with. Then, the world will see what happens. It is becoming more and more unlikely that Nigeria will remain on the map.