Each time serious political discourse brews, cynics and extremists, North and South, East and West, mount a booming concert of political lunacy: barking mutual threats, belching mutual fires.
So, after much din, far less is done — except a polity already quaking with great unease, is sent roiling with a heightened fear of threatened Armageddon!
With such rows, Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed’s arrogant posturing over the North and the rest of Nigeria, en route to the 2027 electoral sweepstakes, must take the cake.
Swallowed by conceit, battered by hubris, Baba-Ahmed claimed that in six months, the “North” would take its stand on 2027; and the rest of Nigeria would have to decide whether they wanted to follow or not. What insufferable arrogance!
Now, arch-Snooper Tatalo Alamu, “Snooping Around”, in The Nation Sunday (April 27), did quite a number on Dr. Baba-Ahmed.
Tatalo suggested Baba-Ahmed was a technocrat at the ready for sinecures, many of them opportunistic, which might have helped to under-develop the North — this same “North” — over which he now postures, as emergency champion.
He traced back Baba-Ahmed’s days as the secretary to the best-forgotten Maurice Iwu INEC, which cooked the blood-curdling heist that was the 2007 election, which nevertheless signalled the beginning of the end for the now crumbling PDP.
He fingered the rank opportunism of Baba-Ahmed joining the Bola Tinubu Presidency. Not only was he no APC partisan, he raised no finger when his brother Datti, a sore loser as Peter Obi’s running mate, mouthed near-treasonable nonsense to de-market Tinubu’s win.
Which makes it very rich — indeed, morally disgusting — for Baba-Ahmed to jump off that same government and start attacking it, on behalf of his phantom “North”!
But not even Snooper captured Baba-Ahmed’s activism in the Northern Elders Forum (NEF). The arch-conservative NEF plays catch-up to the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) as the authentic voice of the North.
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But NEF — at least to the perceptive — comes with an additional baggage: Prof. Ango Abdullahi, the soul of its activism, never hides his PDP sympathies, though he’s unfazed in his northern nativism, which is no crime in a federation, where different ethnics compete for power and influence.
Still, Abdullahi’s partisan bent has made not a few to wonder if NEF activism is no more than closet PDP campaigns, carefully hidden behind rogue northern supremacism.
Indeed, while the bully southern media were blighting President Muhammadu Buhari — just because they could — on alleged northern nativism of the crudest hue, Baba-Ahmed and his NEF kept a loud silence — the voice of NEF, the hand of PDP?
Yet, in Nigerian history, PMB was the first honest northerner to gain elective power on own terms. While his fellow northern elites had thoroughly compromised selves, it was Mai Gaskiya (the Honest One) that the northern Talakawas could trust with power, backed, of course, by the Tinubu South West political army.
He made his own mistakes, no doubt. But if President Olusegun Obasanjo had been half as committed as PMB was to his job — less to personal imperial glory — the collapse and mess of 2015 would have been averted.
But even from that Jonathanian collapse of 2015, a logical follow-up to Obasanjo’s mirage from 1999-2007, PMB made solid marks which though largely unsung by a bias-smitten, hypocritical media, can’t be denied by any fair-minded soul.
Which brings these troubling questions: can any northerner honestly flaunt the North as it stands — a developmental laggard — as Baba-Ahmed just did, with all his pious pomposity?
Or was it just bluff-and-bluster that his lobby could always ghost the Arewa plebs to vote according to cynical whims, by a manipulative elite?
By the way, which “North” are these blokes even yammering about? Baba-Ahmed’s native North West, which has bathed in the sweet sun rays of power more than any other region, yet grills in mass poverty, only next to the North East?
The North East, as filthy poor as the famed wealth of one of its illustrious sons, Atiku Abubakar; and plunged into the existential crisis of Boko Haram terrorism, a logical extension of mass poverty and unfazed ignorance that criminalizes knowledge?
Or the long-suffering North Central, now and then, wracked with senseless killings, which root causes these glamorous champions of the “North” have not figured out? Or if they have, wilfully condoned, as not a few allege, for narrow ethnic reasons?
Maybe, Baba-Ahmed’s “North” is indeed the North West? Its thunderous voting bloc, when pacted with the South West’s, could on paper deliver the Presidency, as it did for PMB and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT), both APC presidents.
Even so, what hold do Baba-Ahmed and his kind have on the North West, beyond over-projected influence as media paper tigers?
Now, if they are no PMB — in or out of power, he retains the Talakawa trust — how can they walk their talk that when they snap their fingers, the northern masses jump?
O, did that explain the scramble by Atiku and the mercurial Nasir el-Rufai, to add PMB to their coalition bluff? Atiku, of course, knows too well PMB and fickleness are two parallel lines. They never meet.
As for El-Rufai, he’s as razor-sharp as they come in intellect. But alas! A stunted emotional intelligence almost, always lets him down. That was why he felt he could sell a PMB/wholesale CPC anti-APC coalition dummy. PMB poured cold water on such.
Besides, wasn’t the hubris of the North as Nigeria’s insufferable power Leviathan, the type Baba-Ahmed painted, dead and buried with the June 12 debacle, after which IBB burnt his fingers, and the rapacious Sani Abacha lost his life?
Still, let no one assume only the North is guilty of political arrogance. As the northern elite often weaponize their voting numbers to game some concessions, the southern elite too wield their powerful media to browbeat any northern order. But it’s mutual hypocrisy that always back-fires.
Under PMB, the South, and bullying media in tow, thundered “nepotism” and screamed “Fulanization”. These same southern hypocrites — among them top columnists, with dashing, cutting brilliance but little gumption, now rally to defend PBAT’s alleged “Yorubanization” of offices!
Yet, neither did — or is doing — any wrong, beyond the media’s galloping bias — and Ripples is proud to say he slammed those idiotic campaigns back then — and thus can stand by PBAT now!
Pray, how can putting folks you trust, to deliver on your policies and programmes, equate “nepotism”, “Fulanization” or “Yorubanization” — even if the uppity South tarred PMB as some cave nativist from Daura; and PBAT, the “city boy” from Lagos, so cosmopolitan he would import, from Mars, those who would work for him!
Enough of this sterile politics of mutual blackmail! What we need is the rich politics of mutual development.
As for Baba-Ahmed and co, they labour under the delusion of pre-June 12 Nigeria. That era is gone — and forever buried.
