IT is hardly surprising that less than a month after Junaid Mohammed, a Kano-based politician, medical practitioner and conservative political activist, made incendiary remarks about the health status of President Muhammadu Buhari and his presidential mandate, a coalition of six northern youth groups came out with an even more portentous statement about Nigerian unity and the agitation by one or two Igbo groups for an independent homeland. According to the youths who met in Kaduna to draft the statement on Tuesday, the Igbo should quit the northern parts of Nigeria not later than three months.
Dr Junaid had in early May warned in an interview he gave The Punch that should anything untoward happen to President Buhari, such as dying from his sickness, the North would insist on a fresh two terms for the next president who must come from the North. Whether it occurred to him or not, the doctor was saying that the South must guarantee the health of the president, sustain him however they can, and willy-nilly give him a second term, regardless of his mental and physical competence. It is impossible to find a worse blackmail anywhere. For a region that knew nothing about the beginnings of the president’s health predicament, nor even its course, the South will doubtless find it strange, if not worrisome, that they are being called upon to play God with the president’s future and destiny.
The North’s six ad hoc youth groups — some say they are actually nine — are bold and provocative. When on Wednesday the Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, denounced the declaration of the Igbo as personae non gratae in the North, and called on security agencies to arrest and prosecute the youths for incitement, the groups came out defiantly to reiterate their call for the expulsion of the Igbo from the North. In addition, they announced, they were ready to be arrested. But on Thursday, the police tamely told the press that while the six group’s statement was indeed inciting, and the governor’s order to arrest them unambiguous, the youth leaders did not stay in one location to be arrested.
It is shocking that the police and other national security agencies needed to be prodded to arrest the youth leaders for their inciting statement. It is even more shocking that they claimed to be unable to find the leaders of the brash coalition. The police of course placed advertisements in the papers to declaim on the issues generated by the threatening youth coalition. But neither the advertisements nor the law enforcement agency’s lack of spontaneous response to the controversy has done the police image any good. It is possible that the youth leaders would be found in days to come, but their arrest will not dispel the nagging suspicion that the unprecedented statement by the conspiratorial youths is believed to resonate with some leaders in parts of the North, especially for its countervailing effect on the call by some Igbo groups for separation.
That nagging suspicion has subsisted in various forms, particularly in parts of the North-Central and the entire South. When Boko Haram began their murderous onslaught in 2009 and seemed to focus almost exclusively on Christians and southerners, the South and parts of the North-Central feared that the reticence of opinion moulders in the North on the raging genocide was an indirect endorsement of what seemed to be an ethnic and religious cleansing. Northern opinion leaders hid behind the mask of personal safety to justify their silence; but it was not until the terror group extended their brutal sanguinary campaigns to every section of the populace that loud voices were heard against the unmitigated bloodletting.
The South feels that same eerie silence in the love for red herrings by the North’s opinion leaders and even the security services. Rather than frontally confront the brutal and bloody reign of herdsmen, they muffle their voices or prevaricate. First was the argument that the offending herdsmen were not Nigerians. Then the argument morphed into the suggestion that no herdsman would abandon his cattle to embrace criminality. But after these arguments fell flat in the face of hard evidence, the refrain changed into what some northern leaders, including unfortunately Governor el-Rufai himself, indulgently regarded as nothing more than the usual and unavoidable clashes between herdsmen and farmers over grazing rights. The leaders were reluctant to respond to the dangerous dimensions the ‘clashes’ had taken, especially the arming of herdsmen and their campaign of terror, and seemed to acquiesce to the security agencies’ refusal to arrest herdsmen who openly and remorselessly claimed to be on vengeance missions.
It is certainly not inspiring that both the federal government and the security agencies have not responded smartly to the provocative statement of the six or nine Arewa youth groups. The federal government incredulously said it thought the matter a non-issue. And the police, the only responder, albeit a slow one, took refuge in newspaper advertisements and tough talk. But the youth coalition’s ultimatum is serious, deeply troubling, deliberate and potentially destabilising. It is a poor and thoughtless response to the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) campaigns. While these two groups, and perhaps more, are campaigning for self-determination based on a number of perceived injustices, they have not so far suggested the expulsion of other Nigerians from their region nor attempted to set a deadline or give an ultimatum both for their agitation and to any other non-Igbo people.
Regardless of the national opposition to the aims and objectives of IPOB and MASSOB, including the impatience many commentators have shown with the groups’ causes, not to say the contempt for their arguments and what many people felt amounted to their delusions, nothing justifies the government’s acrimonious approach, the lackadaisical and sometimes incriminating attitude of security agencies, and the unacceptable and inflammatory meddling by northern youth groups. Self-determination campaigns, as opposed to expulsions, are often an indication of disequilibrium in the polity, and sometimes a cry for justice and accommodation. The northern youth groups’ provocative response worsens rather than placates it.
Indeed, the foolishness of that ultimatum and call for expulsion is demonstrated in the fact that one expulsion, assuming it were possible or allowed, would inevitably and instantly bring down the house of cards that Nigeria has become. No matter how inelegant the fact is and how unsavoury to the senses, Nigeria remains a forced marriage which needs the patriotic intervention of brilliant and passionate leaders to address, particularly from the roots. So far, no such attempt has been made. Given the insensitivity, obstinacy, lack of imagination and inattention to details of the All Progressives Congress (APC), it is unlikely that desired attempt will be made in the life of the Buhari presidency.
Whether Nigerians like to hear it or not, the Boko Haram insurgency, despite its strident socio-economic and religious roots, was not inevitable. Nor is the long-lasting menace of herdsmen. Nor, still, the seemingly apocalyptic crisis of self-determination groups convulsing the South and elsewhere. What the challenges require are great leaders with the right intuition, knowledge and charisma; men and women detached from the primordial malaises laying the country waste; leaders whose first instinct is to go to the roots of the problems rather than stay riveted to the symptoms. Had these things been done, Boko Haram would not have been triggered nor would it continue to fester; the herdsmen problem would have been long resolved or reduced to a minimum; and self-determination campaigns in the Southeast would have been reduced to annual academic exercises in classrooms.
