Last week, in an interview, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, leader of the Northern Elders Council, came out full-blast in opposition to any restructuring of the Nigerian federation. He also came out full-blast in attack on the Yoruba nation of Southwestern Nigeria for being the foremost proponents of the idea of restructuring. In both, he left no doubt whatsoever that he was swinging as a champion of his Fulani nation, and of the Fulani nation’s agenda, in Nigeria.
Yakasai was quoted as saying that the agitation for restructuring is an agenda of the Yoruba people of the South-west; that it was started “in the South-west…in 1959” and has gone on “from Action Group to UPN to NADECO to PRONACO”; that it is driven by envy and hate for the northern geopolitical zone”; that the intention was “to deny the North the benefit of its population and land mass”; and that “it is not driven by patriotism”, but “by hate and envy”.
I am a member of the Yoruba nation of Southwestern Nigeria. Tanko Yakasai and I belong to the same generation, and we both served Nigeria during the Second Republic. I know that Yakasai knows the truth concerning the things he spoke about at that interview, and that he is knowingly and deliberately trying to distort the history of Nigeria – with the objective of confusing and frustrating the demands for the restructuring of the Nigerian federation.
I am sure he knows that in the late 1940s, after the Second World War (1939-45), when the British rulers of Nigeria first began to consider how to make this multi-nation Nigeria into one country, leaders of the Yoruba nation were the first to put forth the intellectually and politically sound proposal for a rational federation, based upon a decent respect for the nationalities that make up Nigeria, and aimed at ensuring varied and vibrant socio-economic development initiatives across Nigeria. Yakasai knows that a Northern or Eastern or Western Region did not yet exist then, that there was therefore no Northern Region to envy, and that the proposals by the Yoruba elite were a very patriotic contribution to the beginning of the search for one Nigeria.
I should add that the said Yoruba proposals originated from the fundamentals of Yoruba political philosophy – which is that a state and its government exist principally for the well-being of its people, that all individuals and nations are entitled to seek prosperity and to prosper in their own way.
I am sure Yakasai knows that from the moment our first federation (of three Regions – East, North and West), came into operation in 1951, the minority nationalities all over Nigeria began to clamour for, at least, one separate region of their own in each of the three regions. In the Northern Region where Yakasai was born and raised, the minority nationalities demanded such separate regions. These nationalities are not Yoruba. However, after the top Yoruba political group carefully examined their demands in the light of reason, and in the light of healthy growth for Nigeria and the peoples of Nigeria, it took the decision to support their demands.
I am sure too that Yakasai remembers that, for most of the 1950s, the leaders of his Northern Region, while opposing the demands of the minority nationalities, were the most insistent on a very loose federation for Nigeria – in order to ensure a strong measure of autonomy for the Northern Region over which they ruled. They even proposed at one point that Nigeria be broken into three separate countries related only through a customs union. And, to reinforce their demands, they threatened again and again to secede from Nigeria.
Of course, the northern leaders of the 1950s were not doing anything wrong by demanding autonomy for their region. Every nation on earth wants, above all else, to manage its own life and control its own destiny. The strange thing is that, after the northern political leaders came to power over Nigeria at independence in 1960 (as a result of British manipulations), they began to deny autonomy for all the peoples of Nigeria – they began to promote a concentration of power and resource-control in the federal centre which they controlled.
They took a major step in this centralization adventure in 1962, when they used the powers and influence of the federal government to engineer a crisis in the Western Region, and when they took advantage of the crisis to take over control of the Western Region.
The adventure soon generated revolts and a Nigeria-wide crisis, and ultimately a military coup – the beginning of military coups and military dictatorships in Nigeria. From the late 1960s, a series of military dictatorships led by northern military officers relentlessly pushed forward the Fulani agenda of centralization – and of weakening of other Nigerian peoples.
In 1999, the cumulative successes of the centralization agenda were finally enshrined by a northern military dictator in the constitution which he imposed on Nigeria – the constitution which now makes Nigeria essentially a unitary country in which an all-controlling federal government holds Nigeria in its corrupt, ignorant and incompetent grip, reduces the state and local governments into impotent attendants on federal authority – spewing corruption and shoddiness all over Nigeria, obstructing and even disrupting non-federal development initiatives, and enthroning poverty, hopelessness, desperation and moral banditry, over the lives of Nigerians. Every Nigerian knows (even the political adventurers who have created these horrible conditions know) that, in spite of decades of enormous revenues from oil, Nigeria is much poorer today, and the masses of Nigerians are much poorer, than in 1960.
The consequence is that most Nigerian nationalities are trenchantly demanding a restructuring of the federation today. We Yoruba are very prominent in the struggle, but we are not alone in it. Most Nigerian nationalities, representing over 70% of Nigerians, are in it. In fact, in the struggle, some Nigerian nations are already doing some things that are putting great stress on Nigeria. The number of Igbo citizens pushing for a separate country is now so large that it is impossible for the world to continue to ignore them. The peoples of the Niger Delta, whose homeland produces all the oil wealth, and whom federal policies have left in the deepest depth of underdevelopment in Nigeria, and who now belong to the most wretched of the wretched in Nigeria, have united to demand separation from Nigeria too – and they are fighting to withhold the oil wealth from the federal government.
Obviously, Tanko Yakasai knows all these, but he and his companions are not bothered about the escalating poverty, hopelessness, desperation, and moral collapse among the masses of Nigerians. Their sole interest and ambition is that their Fulani nation must forever control a federal government that controls all power and all resources in Nigeria – even though they must know that the concern of the rest of us is not who rules Nigeria but that Nigeria should be ruled in ways that advance the quality of life of Nigerians.
One of their men who identified himself as Aliyu Gwarzo in a statement or article that went viral on the social media in 2014, wrote: “Allah, through the British, gave us Nigeria to rule and to do with as we please. Since 1960 we have been doing that and we intend to continue”. He added that, to hold on to that position, his Hausa-Fulani people “will kill, maim, destroy, and turn this country into Africa’s biggest war zone and refugee camp”. “The Mujaheedin are ready,” he announced, “and by Allah we shall win”.
And who are the Mujaheedin? Masses of citizens armed, trained and indoctrinated to kill, maim and destroy those of us Nigerians who are not Hausa-Fulani. The kind of people that we are already seeing in the murderous Fulani herdsmen and their accompanying Libyan mercenary militiamen. Our country is heading towards becoming a dark, vicious, house of horrors.
Obviously, it is all fine with the Yakasais among us. But what does it call for from the rest of us? It calls for greatly heightened resolve and action among us to preserve the treasures and values that we cherish. We don’t have to be destroyed by our being parts of Nigeria. In spite of our rivalries, and our differences of the past, today’s situation calls for a surge of cooperation and collaboration among our various nations, in order to get this federation restructured, so that each zone of Nigeria may manage much of its own affairs, and promote its own development, in its own way and at its own pace, in the context of a true Nigerian federation. The day of the promised horrors is not yet here. But, if we keep delaying, it may come. We don’t have much time.
