Sometimes, even an adversity is not without an advantage. One painful lesson from June 9 National Assembly (NASS) disgrace and APC disaster is that we are once again reminded that we are a nation of many nationalities with different world views. What the Fulani see looking at June 9 from their own cultural prism is different from what the Igbo see. What the Yoruba see is different from both. Where the Fulani see pragmatic politics in action and the Igbo, business deals, what the Yoruba see is treachery and outright theft. The fault is not in their stars but in their cultures.
Bukola Saraki’s father claimed he was a descendant of a powerful Fulani hegemonic ruling class that migrated from Mali some 150 years ago. And for the Fulani, struggle for power is an obsession. And for its pursuit, as in war, all is fair and foul. This perhaps explains why Saraki does not see trading off the victory of his party to satisfy his ambition as a national disgrace and personal tragedy for a politician with eyes on the future. He does not believe he owes the nation an apology, or his party an explanation. He has in fact moved on to consolidate his hold on power by ignoring the directives of his party on the composition of National Assembly (NASS) principal officers. In this regard, not even the fact that his father became senate leader in a house where his father’s NPN had only 35 of 95 senators in the Second Republic counted for much. Saraki shares a common bond with Abubakar Atiku, another Fulani whose pursuit of power makes him move with the winds behaving like a woman with five husbands with loyalty to none. As a pragmatic Fulani trader of power and influence, Atiku has already reminded his APC colleagues that politics, as war, may not always produce the expected result. Despite strident denials by his aides, his eyes are already set on 2019.
For the Igbo for whom everything is business, June 9 fiasco is an opportunity to do business which allows for reaping from the sweat of others. Ekweremadu was in all his elements telling Nigerians how the deal to usurp what rightly belongs to others was negotiated in the dead of the night by well known PDP dealers and wheelers. For him and his Igbo nation, immorally snatching the deputy senate presidency was just another successful business deal which called for celebration. And indeed, drums were rolled out while Enugu was shut down to celebrate what they described as ‘snatching victory from the jaw of defeat’. Neither the Ohaneze nor any notable Igbo man has publicly condemned Ekwerenmadu’s opportunism. If anything, the rank and file of Igbo people who have nothing to show for Ekwerenmadu’s eight years as deputy senate president have declared anyone that asks him to drop what he has immorally taken, an enemy of the Igbo nation.
For instance, the South-east caucus (55 federal lawmakers, including all the Senators and members of the House of Representatives,) after rising from ‘a crucial meeting ‘noted with a deep sense of concern the orchestrated attempts to malign and undermine the highly esteemed person and office of the Deputy President of the Senate, Ike Ekweremadu”. They accused his critics of pursuing ‘narrow political interests over and above the larger interest of peace and equity in the country’.
The youths are not left out. From Umuahia, the national president of Ohanaeze Youth Council (OYC), the youth wing of the apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Mazi Okechukwu Isiguzoro has issued a statement asking the All Progressives Congress National Leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, and other “anti- Igbo forces in APC” behind the plot to remove Ike Ekweremadu as the deputy senate president to retrace their steps or face the wrath of Igbo youths. Similarly Comrade Patrick Afuberah, Secretary General, Ndigbo Youths Organization (NYO), a pan-Igbo youth group has in a statement said “The calls from some APC Senators and leaders for the resignation of Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate President is unacceptable to us and in fact an insult to the Igbo race.”
From far away Jos came a statement signed by Dr. Ugo Ihekuna and Chief Elvis Chukwu, President and, Secretary General of another Igbo socio-cultural organition – Izu-Umunna Cultural Association, and a think-thank of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, saying ‘it will hold President Mohammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress responsible should anything happen to the Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu’.
But as against what the Fulani north and the Igbo east saw, looking at June 9 from their own cultural prism, what the Yoruba west saw was markedly different. Where the Fulani saw real politics, the Yoruba saw treachery. Where the Igbo saw business deals, they saw outright theft. The wages for the former is banishment and the later contempt. Were Saraki to be Yoruba, he and his off springs face the prospects of sharing the fate of Afonja, who driven by his ambition sold out to Alimi who later upstaged him leading to the loss of Ilorin to the caliphate. But as indicated above, the fault is not in their stars but in their different cultures.
WE are back to where we were 85 years ago when the white man first asked us to look at ourselves in the mirror. We claimed our cultural differences had been exaggerated by accident of colonial rule. We chose to live in denial. It was the white man who reminded us that ‘Just like the Scandinavian of the Baltic, the Slavs of Bulgaria are different from the Semitic people of Egypt and Morocco, the Hausa of Zaria are different from the Bantus people of the Benue Valley,’ the 200,000 Ogonis who escaped from the tyranny of South Africa Chaka the Zulu, the Effiks, Ibibios, the Igbos, and the Yorubas, all of who were at different levels of cultural developments. They spoke of ‘the cannibals of the mama hill, the unsocial Mumuyes of Muri Province and of naked warriors” of the inner eastern tropics. They even at the period dismissed the idea of one Nigerian nation as dangerous.
In an address to the Nigerian Council on December 29 1920, Hugh Clifford, the then Governor General of Nigeria asserted that the British policy was to support ‘the local tribal institutions and the indigenous forms of government based on the ‘social institutions which have been evolved for it by wisdom and by the accumulated experiences of generations of its forbearers’. As if Clifford saw our today in 1920, he added “if suddenly the impossible were feasible’, that those separated by difference of history, traditions, social, political and religious barriers were indeed capable of being welded into a single homogenous nation’, it would be a disservice to the concept of national government which secures to each separate people the right to maintain its identity, its individuality and its nationality Today, eighty five years after this warning, and forty three years after our selfish and greedy new inheritors of power derailed the workable federal arrangement that held so much promise for our nation at independence, we are confronted by clash of cultures which Clifford predicted would become a threat to the concept of national government if not well managed.
It is a shame that without the towering figure of the white man, we have been unable to manage our affairs since 1962. Our parasitic ruling class who shared among themselves and their family members the conglomerates set up by regional governments in the 50s and the federal governments since independence have continued to promote the current unworkable system that produced a Bukola Saraki as Senate President. With the experiences of Canada, India and even Europe to copy from, it is time we face our own demon.
