Judging
from the trend of opinion in the media and the tenor of conversations
online, it seems that Nigerians have reached a rare consensus on the
object of their collective wrath. He is the Northerner, particularly the
Muslim “Hausa-Fulani” Northerner with the emphasis of the indictment
varying from the generic category of “Muslim” to that of “Northerner” or
“Hausa-Fulani” depending on who is doing the indicting and the
circumstances. From the barrage of anti-Northern invective online, it is
clear that the Northerner is considered the diabolical, greedy and
power-hungry embodiment of all that is wrong with Nigeria.
Nigerians
have consensually used these same adjectives before about another group
– the Igbos. At one point in our history, the Igbos were the national
scapegoats. As Chinua Achebe wrote in 1983, “Nigerians
of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve consensus on no other
matter than their common resentment of the Igbo.”
In a multiethnic and multi-religious society steeped in poverty, part of the competition for group advantage is the quest to
identify a common enemy, to dress it in readily identifiable sectarian
garments and crown it with thorns as the national scapegoat. In earlier
times, the toga of villainy was draped around the Igbo, stereotyped in
the national consciousness as grasping, greedy, arrogant and clannish.
From
the mid 1980s onwards, it became fashionable to speak of “northern
domination.” The designation of national scapegoat has to do with
perceptions of power and group advantage in the public realm. During the
pre-Independence period when Igbos were prominent actors in commerce,
politics and the civil service, they were vilified for plotting “Igbo
domination.” The sequence of northern-led military regimes from the
1970s to the late 1990s made a new narrative of northern domination
inevitable.
The
demonization of “the north” in the media mirrors the vilification of
the Igbo between the 1940s and 1960s. As with the Igbo, the depiction of
the north as the arch-villain of the Nigerian tragedy is fallacious.
Blaming all of Nigeria’s problems on one region or ethnic group and
defining ethnicities as political categories with predictable
socio-political habits is an untenable generalization and a prejudicial
simplification of the Nigerian situation. This is unfortunately the
dominant pattern of social and political analysis. It is one in which
public life is interpreted in terms of mutually hostile fractal
solidarities perpetually locked in a war for ascendancy.
The
practice of identifying national scapegoats is a Machiavellian dark
art. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Babangida regime
identified “radicals” as the enemy. It was the desire to destroy radical
academics that informed the military’s perception of the university as
enemy territory and its subsequent subversion of higher education.
Academics in the Ahmadu Bello University and the Obafemi Awolowo
University (OAU) in particular faced systematic persecution and
harassment. In later years, elements within the Babangida regime would
identify the OAU as the hub of a “Yoruba opposition.” Similarly, the
University of Nigeria in Nsukka was targeted during the civil war as the
“intellectual base” of the Biafran secession.
Following
the June 12, 1993 election crisis, the emergence of Sani Abacha, and
the incarceration of Moshood Abiola, the Yoruba were cast as the enemies
of Nigeria and the chief opponents of the regime. The regime’s
propagandists lost no time in dubbing the pro-democracy activists who
wanted the June 12 election actualized as Yoruba tribalists even though
Abiola’s mandate had been remarkably pan-Nigerian. The June 12 advocates
reciprocated, insisting that the “north” was against the emergence of a
Yoruba president, even though Abiola had won very handsomely in
northern states. Abiola,
himself a long time crony of military dictators, never attributed his
travails to the machinations of a “north” intent on denying him power
because he was a southerner but to what he called “a small clique in the
military determined to cling to power at all costs.” But facts pale in
the face of mythology.
Eskor
Toyo once lamented that ethnic chauvinists in the south would rather
refer to Sani Abacha as a northerner rather than as a fascist military
dictator. After the near assassination of The Guardian publisher
Alex Ibru in 1996, a group calling itself the Revolutionary Movement for
Hausa Fulani Interest, (REMHFI), claimed responsibility. Of course, the
attempted assassination was the work of the junta’s agents. It had
nothing to with Hausa or Fulani interest and everything to do with the
prolongation of a fascist dictatorship. But power mongers have long
learned how to manipulate popular bigotries to their own advantage.
By
1999, the scales of enemy definition were weighted firmly against “the
North.” Guerilla journalists had riveted Nigerians with tales of the
intrigues of the “Hausa-Fulani oligarchy” or the “Sokoto Caliphate” –
all metaphorical representations of the “northern enemy.” In his book, This House Has Fallen,
Karl Maier reports Bola Ige as disclosing that the real controllers of
Nigeria consisted of “not more than two hundred Fulani families.”
With
the emergence of Boko Haram, the North is being entrenched as an “enemy
other” in the national imagination, aided by the ignorance and malice
of a biased media, 90 percent of which is based in the southwest (the
so-called Lagos-Ibadan axis); and bigotry of pandemic proportions in our
public life. Jingoism as journalism is rendering public discourse
between Nigerians mutually unintelligible. It should have been fairly
easy to mobilize national opinion against Boko Haram, a terrorist group
that murders Muslims and Christians alike, and to cast it as a common
enemy – but the media’s insistence on the myth of the “northern enemy”
and its prejudicial coverage, which has prevented even sufficient
acknowledgement of the fact that as many (if not more) Muslims have been
killed by the group, – have negated this. This reportorial slant
corresponds with the narrative of a Muslim north ranged against a
Christian south – a popular fiction, yet possessed of such apocalyptic
sensationalism that it sells papers. Put simply, politicians and the
press both profit from demonizing groups and promoting prejudice.
However, ethnicity and religion possess limited explanatory capacity. According
to Obi Nwakanma, northern domination is one of “the most sustained
mythologies of post colonial Nigeria.” He argues that “the idea that the
north through the military ran Nigeria and underdeveloped it is false… The
closer truth is that a very complex alliance of business interests from
the North and the South, with their international banking and security
links ran Nigeria, and continues to run Nigeria. The ordinary northerner
– Hausa or Fulani or Berom or even Tiv – has not benefited in any
significant way from the so-called rule of Northerners. Individual
northerners and southerners have benefited in immense ways, from their
close associations and links with power, and we must pay heed to this
fact.” Tam David-West contends that, “Northern
Domination is a myth concocted and popularly peddled and perpetuated by
lazy politically emasculated Southern politicians and most
unfortunately also some Southern intellectuals; a grand alibi to cover
up or divert from their ineffectiveness, ineffectuality and even
political harlotry.” “Northern domination” is used in the same
way that some northern politicians use the bogey of “southern
domination” to mobilize support through fear of the other.
The
great radical historian Bala Usman interpreted the Nigerian condition
as a consequence of class machinations rather than contending
ethnicities. He argued that a comprador elite of impeccably national
character and transnational affiliations armed with hegemonic designs,
rather than any ethnic constituency, are the true enemies of the
Nigerian nation. Yet, their ascendancy lay in their ability to wear
ethnic and religious masks, and manipulate ethnic and religious
identities for personal gain.
In
1989, while addressing the Oxford-Cambridge Club, President Ibrahim
Babangida said, “By accident of birth and more by education and access
to opportunity, a few of us numbering only a few thousand, out of a
population of more than 100 million, find ourselves in positions of
leadership and influence in the professions and academics, the armed
forces, the bureaucracy, industry, agriculture and commerce, in the
media houses, in the courts and councils of our traditional and
political associations. We equate our ends with the ends of the groups
and communities to which we belong. We mobilize others to fight for our
individual causes, individual beliefs, and interests as if those were
their causes, beliefs and interests, etc.” Critics may justifiably see
Babangida’s thesis as a self-indictment but it is accurate nonetheless.
The
enduring lesson that political elites learned from the catastrophic
failure of the First Republic is that no one ethnic group or region can
“dominate” Nigeria. The key to political success since then has been to
build multi-ethnic coalitions to share the national cake – an equal
opportunity kleptocracy. This was the genius of the National Party of
Nigeria (NPN) during the Second Republic and has been carried on by the
Peoples’ Democratic Party. The tiresome “north-south” polemics only
serve to obscure the pan-Nigerian character of the reigning elites, by
provoking provincial passions and diversionary conflicts at the
grassroots – in which the poor are expendable.
Our
chances of mitigating such aggressions depend on how mature we become
intellectually and politically. The more mature we become, the less need
we will have to externalize our failures upon other ethnicities and
faiths, and the more discerning we shall be of who the real enemies
are. As the great political scientist Claude Ake once said, “There is
no north that is anybody’s enemy and there is no south that is anybody’s
redemption.”
In
the 2011 PDP convention, Atiku Abubakar sought the party’s presidential
nomination as the “official northern flag-bearer” and failed to muster a
complete following even among northern delegates. His failure was no
mystery. Political power obeys dynamics other than accident of birth.
Geography is not always destiny. As Chidi Amuta explained, “In a free market Nigeria, the brotherhood of the naira is fast overtaking the bonds of tribe and religion.”
Despite
Muhammadu Buhari’s popularity on the northern street, many northern
elites, being beneficiaries of the current order did not support his
presidential candidacy. Nor did they support the other two northern
contenders, Ibrahim Shekarau and Nuhu Ribadu. The media with its tunnel
vision fixation on a mythical northern solidarity failed to note that a
monolithic north no longer exists (If indeed it ever truly did). The
blame for our woes lies squarely with “the brotherhood of the naira” – a
national fraternity of politicians far more united by their appetites
than divided by ideology – and also with our own lack of discernment.
Ethnic and confessional allegiances matter but they are subject to the
supervening calculations of class interest and are nowhere as definitive
as believed when it comes to the intrigues of “high” politics.
In
fifty years, the actual enemies of Nigeria have not changed. As one
soldier declared on a fateful day in January 1966, “Our enemies are the
political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in high and low places that
seek bribes and demand ten percent; those that seek to keep the country
divided permanently so that they can remain in office as ministers or
VIPs at least, the tribalists, the nepotists, those that make the
country look big for nothing before international circles; those that
have corrupted our society and put the Nigerian political calendar back
by their words and deeds.” The righteous fury of this indictment was to
be lost in the series of tragic events that collapsed the First
Republic. But the truth of the diagnosis remains unimpeachable.
Thus,
while we slander and stereotype each other, our leaders continue in
their unregulated feasting, secure in the knowledge that we are too
distracted by petty bigotries to surveil their conduct. We must realize
that this season of turbulence is also a teachable moment – one in which
we should share perpectives, listen to and learn from each other while
building a front to salvage our common future. We must not squander it.
All images sourced Google Images.
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