But the most important myth that el-Rufai’s speech has revived is the notion that the north is a disadvantaged section of Nigeria.
We have the largest number of poor people in the world, most of them in northern Nigeria. Nigeria also has the largest number of out-of-school children, virtually all of them in Northern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria has become the centre of drug abuse, gender violence, banditry, kidnapping and terrorism. We have also been associated with high divorce rate and breakdown of families. These are the challenges that confront us. This is the naked truth that we have to tell ourselves.
We must, therefore, as leaders at all levels have a conversation about the way forward for our part of the country. Because increasingly, as many of you must have seen on social media, we are being considered as the parasite of the federal economy, even though, that is not entirely true. Because northern Nigeria still feeds the nation. The richest businessman in Nigeria is still Aliko Dangote, not someone from southern Nigeria, thank God for that.
So, we still have a lot to be proud of. We should be proud of our culture and tradition, as well as unity. You hardly can find someone from northern Nigeria convicted of 419 or being a Yahoo boy. That is something we should be proud of.
We are generally considered to be more honest and less corrupt than other Nigerians. That is something we should be proud of. In addition, our demographic superiority gives us a very powerful tool to negotiate in politics. And that is something we should be proud of, and we should preserve. So, we have every reason to unite and not be divided—Nasir el-Rufai at The Northern Youth Summit on ‘Awakening the Arewa Spirit.’
The copious quotes overleaf from Nasir el-Rufai’s speech that has in the last few days sparked a controversy especially in the social media are deliberate. Being able to go back and forth between what el-Rufai said and the author’s reading of the text and subtext of his speech will make for easy reading of what, for lack of a better formulation, I have read as re-naming of old myths. For those who are eager to apprehend the thesis of today’s piece on what has almost become an overgrazed speech by commentators, the thrust is that since independence, many of our political leaders have been recycling the same or similar theses vis-à-vis the nation’s diversity, unity, and development, an evidence that very little fresh thinking about a persistent problem with unity has become a national political hobby.
Identifying the various audiences for the speech in Kaduna is helpful to appreciating the layers of meaning in el-Rufai’s speech. The audiences include the old north (imagined by many in the past as a political monolith, otherwise seen as exemplar of the Arewa Spirit); the new north (as a region of formally defined states of diverse nationalities); the south (as Otherness to the North), El-Rufai’s fellow political elites; and the primary target of the speech (the youth identified by the governor as 80% of today’s population of the north). Correspondingly, the myths that el-Rufai has used the recent speech to re-name require identification early in this piece. They include the 60-year old theory of the disadvantaged north; the obsession with unity before and after the civil war in Nigeria; and the mantra of homogenisation of Nigeria through policies of ‘Even Development’ through revenue sharing and de-federalisation of the country, to mention a few. In other words, el-Rufai’s theory of Nigeria’s development borrows significantly from many of the slogans popularised by northern rulers since 1960.
The Spirit of Arewa, which el-Rufai has encouraged the youth to restore, seems to be the old myth of a monolithic north stimulated by a policy of gradual assimilation of minority nationalities into a distinct Hausa-Fulani ethos. It is not clear what type of renaissance el-Rufai has designed his speech to achieve for the north—the old monolithic north or the north of diverse nations living in harmony in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Regardless of whatever form the re-awakening in the north is designed to take, it is important for readers of el-Rufai to recognise that it will have implications for Nigeria as a federation. It is, therefore, not surprising that el-Rufai’s speech has received more attention than normal.
For example, if the goal of Arewa renaissance is to return to one Northern region of the era of Sir Ahmadu Bello versus two competing Southern regions (of the days of Awolowo and Azikiwe), Nigeria’s search for a unity in diversity or diversity in unity may add more miles to the country’s journey to a modern multi-ethnic federation. Those who say they have no concern about what happens to the north as a region may be too myopic to see the implications of a two-nation (north and south) structure in which emphasis is on geopolitics rather than on federal politics in the entire country.
But the most important myth that el-Rufai’s speech has revived is the notion that the north is a disadvantaged section of Nigeria. This construction returns the country to its past of series of affirmative action initiatives that seem to have failed. That capital-intensive affirmative actions have achieved providing Aliko Dangote with a state of origin address, and, arguably a region without a known record of 419ners and feeding of the country’s 190 million people, suggests why a re-awakening has become necessary in the 19 states of the north. If the north remains, despite producing Nigeria’s wealthiest man, the least educated and most impoverished region of the modern world, there is an urgent reason to revisit the ideology of even development in the country. Such re-visiting will include looking at the system of revenue allocation and concentration of powers and resources in the central government.
Many policies and projects that southern regions have accepted as vital to building a harmonious inter-regional existence, including decades of the south’s concessions to the northern region in respect of special quotas on admission, education and skill institutions; creation of Nomadic education, Almajiri education, aggressive irrigation of northern states to stem the effect of the Sahel on northern states, etc call for re-thinking. If despite all of these, the north after being in political control of Nigeria for two-thirds of the nation’s life is in 2019 similar to Afghanistan, then the fight against corruption has to be taken as far back as the years of many international loans taken by the country for development since 1960.
In fairness to el-Rufai, many of the things he has said may be exaggerated but many of them seem true. For example, the claim that the south is developed may pass for facile generalisation. If the south is as developed and educated as he has claimed, the impact would have shown, even on the north, because development begets development. From his brave comments about rulership in the north, El-Rufai seems to have seen the root of the problem of the north—lack of good governance by self-preoccupied rulers. What he has chosen not to see is the root of the problem of the south, whether, for example, the lack of development in the north has begotten lack of development in the south. Admittedly, his remit at the Arewa Youth Summit in Kaduna was to open a discussion for a new vision in the north. What he shouldn’t have done is professing to be an expert on development in or of the south, especially that he has shown little evidence of the kind of civilisation many states in the south prefer to bequeath to their children, having lost most of their own destiny to the last three decades of Nigeria.
But with his intervention, el-Rufai has created a new motif about geopolitical development discourse not only in the north but also in the south. But this intervention, as bold as it sounds, has ignored discussion of the root of underdevelopment or lack of development in the north and cosmetic character of the ‘development’ he has seen in the south. For example, since 1960 Nigeria has been embroiled in the crisis of managing its diversity in a way that can create conducive environment for concrete and ascertainable development of all parts of the country. If anything, el-Rufai’s call for re-awakening of the Arewa Spirit may be repeating the mistakes of past without realising it. Any call for re-awakening in the north calls for apprehension of why the Old Arewa of Ahmadu Bello era, once advertised as a regional model for the rest of Nigeria, seems to have evaporated.
Finally, many of el-Rufai’s critics, especially those from the south, have ignored an important aspect of his speech: his boldness and ambition. How many governors in southern Nigeria from all the parties – ruling or non-ruling – can speak openly about the presence or absence of progress in their individual states or cluster of states or region? How many of the southern governors can brainstorm with their youths on sources of underdevelopment in their areas of the country? How many southern governors can engage citizens in their jurisdictions on the likelihood of el-Rufai’s speech to be both a direct message to the youths of the north and a parable to the rest of the country? Many of el-Rufai’s critics ought to remember that this ‘activist governor’ is a fertile source of insight into the subtext of the governance of Nigeria.
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