Northern agenda in Nigerian politics.

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By ABIA ONYIKE
One of the major obstacles to genuine development and modernization in Nigeria is what some scholars have come to identify as the “Northern Project” or the “Northern Agenda” in Nigerian politics. The concept deals with the activities and ideas of elites of Northern extraction, who have been socialized to see Nigeria from a separatist and sometimes sectarian perspective. This mentality assumes ab initio that Pan-Nigerianism is an illusion, unattainable and therefore unrealistic.
Therefore, that the North must develop separately as a domineering force in Nigeria. However, the Northern project is not an invention of the incumbent or contemporary power elites in the North. It is an inherited world-view handed down to its current adherents by their forebears, most of who incidentally operated as founding fathers of the Nigeria nation. In the run-up to independence, such founding fathers like Alhaji Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa, among others, were more interested in the evolution of a Northern platform within the Nigerian federation.
To an extent, Chief Obafemi Awolowo – leader of the Yoruba West – entered Nigerian politics on the same premise, but was compelled by circumstances to strive to reconstruct his world-outlook. So, Nigeria became a strange place where elements who entered the political fray as sectional leaders at the same time masqueraded as nationalists. For instance, the history of India tells us about the undiluted patriotism of Mahatma Ghandi as the leader of modern India; same with Ghana (Kwawe Nkrumah),
Tanzania (Julius Nyerere), Cameroon (Ahmadu Ahidjo), Democratic Republic of Congo (Patrice Lumumba), Senegal (Leopold Senghor), post-apartheid South Africa (Nelson Mandela), Angola (Augustinho Neto), etc. I have never read nor heard that these venerated leaders of their various nations were too preoccupied with their own sections of the country and how to position those sections to gain some untoward advantage over others. Rather, they always saw the entire nation as their constituency, to the extent that their names became synonymous with their countries,
But in the Nigerian situation, the scenario was different. Northern leaders who remained tentative about the Pan-Nigeria experiment, were busy talking about their own section of the country and how to prop it to dominate the rest of the country. This mental state exposes a fundamental flaw of the Northern elite, which is that they had already surrendered the task of nation building. They may have felt inferior and incapable of leading the entire nation, hence their avowed commitment to leading only a part of it.
That feeling of inferiority led to a persecution complex – an attitude that complicated the process of nation-building in the first republic and led to its eventual collapse. Nation-building, especially in the case of a post-colonial state, requires an energetic and visionary leadership that must subscribe to the libertarian ethos of equity, justice, fair-play and unity of purpose.
The Northern leaders never hid their aversion for such important ingredients of development. From hindsight, we can now deduce that the conservative first-generation Northern elites were only interested in the preservation of the status ante. Part of this process involved the super-imposition of their will not only against other parts of Nigeria but also on the enclaves/vassal communities inside their region. Like I have argued elsewhere, it was this initial inordinate ambition that collapsed the first republic and set the stage for the civil war (1967 to 1970). Having failed to impose their will on the entire nation under a democratic dispensation, the Northern project opted for the use of military dictatorship.
This dubious and crude resort to militarism was then justified by them and their collaborators on account of the role the military played in crushing the struggle for self-determination embarked upon by the Eastern region of Nigeria. There are certainly some others who may argue that just as we have a Northern project, there are also the Western (Yoruba) project, and the Eastern (Igbo) project, which also imply that there is no Nigerian project after all. My answer to such a thesis would be that the Eastern or Igbo project was not a product of the original volition of the Igbo.
They were compelled to develop the agenda following their experience in the early 1950s and the civil war period. They had to adopt it in order to survive since other contending groups or forces in the Nigerian nation had proved to be more committed in their narrow-mindedness. As for the Western project, I believe the Yoruba elite had been amphibious and vacillated from one point of the pendulum to the other, depending on what they perceive to be their immediate objectives.
Awolowo enunciated what looked like a Yoruba project in the early 1950s and four years later adopted a Democratic Socialist platform, which ought to have buried the tribal and ethnic foundations of nascent Yoruba politics after independence in 1960. But the North made a major in-road into the West, co-opting Awo’s lieutenants (such as Akintola) in the process.
An attempt to resist the incursion created a national crises and the temporary subjugation of Awoism as a purely Pan-Yoruba or even Western force. Eventually, events unfolded which led to the supremacy of the Northern project assimilating the Yoruba project to form an alliance necessary to countervail the Igbo/Eastern project. So, the defeat of the Igbo attempt for self-determination coupled with the assimilation of the Yoruba into the mainstream Northern project marked a turning point in the reconstruction of post-war Nigerian politics. So, the period of 1970 to 1999 was dominated by the military-bureaucratic oligarchy.
The North dominated the military apparatus of power, while the bureaucratic apparatus was handed over to the Oxford-trained Western Nigeria administrators, who enjoyed the appellation of “Super” permanent secretaries, their main function having been to supplant the 1967 Aburi Accord. The assimilation of the West into the Northern project did not come by accident. It was the product of historical, territorial, cultural and religious ties between the two regions.
So, the Yoruba did not have any major problem playing a second fiddle in that alliance. At least, if for no other thing, Awo was Vice Chairman of the Federal Executive Council during the war; Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo was allowed to hold the reigns of power from 1976-1979, following the death of Gen. Murtala Mohammed after the abortive coup by Col. Buka Suka Dimka. What then has been the position of the minority groups in the country as far as the question of regional projects are concerned?
The ethnic minorities and their elite formations have always pandered to the dominant groups at every historical conjuncture. Even when they were entrusted with power such as in the case of Gen. Yakubu Gowon (1966 -1975); Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (1985-1993) and Gen. Abdusalami Abubakar (1998 -1999), they never developed an independent line of action; neither did they pursue a manifest Pan-Nigeria agenda. They operated as surrogates or figure-heads of the Northern power block. So, their dispensations never differed fundamentally from those of the others from the major blocks.
The overall outcome of the domination of power by the Northern project, include the implementation of policies, which favoured the North to the exclusion of other regions. A case in point was the creation of 19 states from the old Northern regions, while the Eastern and Western regions had 17 states split between them. Out of the 774 local governments in Nigeria, the Northern region alone has 414, while others have 360 split between them. During the Abacha-led 1994/95 Constitutional Conference, the old Northern region was allotted three geo-political zones, while the East and West had three zones.
Even in the analysis of Nigerian politics, a lot of terminologies are distorted to hoodwink the people. There is this resort to North-South dichotomy, as a basis for rotation of the Presidency, forgetting that three main regions came together in 1960 to form an independent union called Nigeria. The Northern region was not bigger than the others in such a way that it can brazenly appropriate all the resources of the nation to itself, willy-nilly. Next week, we shall try to unravel how the June 12, 1993, imbroglio, the greed for power and the on-going insurgency, have combined to set the Northern block on the path of gradual disintegration and inevitable dispersal.