Poverty in the North – A “Mayday” Call

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By Sa’adu A. Jijji
Now that the elections are over and our newly elected (?) leaders are getting ready to assume their new responsibilities, it is perhaps an opportune time to reflect on a critical aspect of governance. Chapter 11 of the 1999 Constitution under the heading “Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy’ avers that ‘…security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government….’. Consequently, the alleviation of extreme poverty across Nigeria is a major responsibility of government. This paper seeks to highlight, once more, the prevalent high level of poverty in Nigeria with particular emphasis on the pathetic situation in the North. The aim of this paper is to further draw the attention of political leaders, policy makers, economic actors and the general public to the ‘Poverty Crisis’ currently facing the North and the urgent need to tackle the issue before it explodes with consequences beyond the confines of the region.

The North East region has the highest level of poverty in Nigeria.

Wealth Poverty {NigeriaVillageSquare}

Starting with the UNDP “Human Development Index’ report 2006 released last year to a recent paper presented by Professor Chukwuma Soludo at a People Democratic Party (PDP) retreat for it’s nominated candidates, the issue of high levels of poverty in the North has suddenly being brought to the front burner of national discourse.
Summarily, the UNDP report and Professor Soludo’s paper titled “Preserving Stability and Accelerating Growth’ highlighted the well known fact that poverty is more prevalent in the Northern than in the Southern part of Nigeria. What many may not have known, and which seems to be the crux of Professor Soludo’s paper, is the magnitude of the disparity between the North and the South.
To put the issue in perspective, the UNDP report cited above ranks Nigeria number 159 out of a total of 177 countries measured on the aggregate index. Nigeria (with a score of 0.448) compares unfavorably to Norway (0.965) but better than Niger (0.311).  According to the report, Nigerians born today are, on the average, more likely to die before their 45^th birthday – Japanese born today are more likely to die around the same time with the children of their Nigerian age mates.
To measure poverty, the report uses a much more complex ‘Human Poverty Index’ in place of the simplified ‘less than $1 dollar a day’ measure. The index attempts to measure not just deprivation but the quality of life available to the citizens of the country. Using the Index, Nigeria (with a score of 40.6) ranks 76^th with the same points as Yemen, slightly better than Burundi (40.7) but well below Uruguay (3.3) which placed 1^st in the 155 country list.
In the paper presented to PDP nominees on January 16, 2007, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, the Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, presented in graphic terms what any traveler across Nigeria can attest to. According to his figures, although the average poverty incidence for Nigeria stands at 54% of the total population, the three regions in the North, account for a disproportionate share of that average.
With a poverty prevalence of 72.2%, the North East region has the highest level of poverty in Nigeria. The region is followed closely by North West (71.1%) and North Central (67.0%). On the contrary, South East (26.6%) has the lowest level of poverty of poverty in Nigeria followed by South/South (35.1%) and South West (43.05%).
However, compared to actual poverty prevalence, most Nigerians, irrespective of their regions, considered themselves much poorer than they actually are. In fact, more residents of the South East (77.6%) and South/South (74.85%) considered themselves poor compared to residents of the North/West (71.9%). This irony is best explained by other sociological factors as contentment and lack exposure to comparative levels of poverty – issues beyond the contemplation of this article. On a state by state basis, the picture is even gloomier for the North.
According to the professor’s paper, the 10 states with the highest level of poverty in Nigeria are all in the North. Jigawa (95.0%), Kebbi (89.7%) and Kogi (88.6%) top the list. Conversely, all the 10 states with the lowest level of poverty are in the South. Bayelsa (20.0%), Anambra (20.1%) and Abia (22.3%) top the list. These numbers are what led Professor Soludo to rightly conclude that “very high level of poverty is essentially a Northern Phenomenon”. Furthermore, the Professor informed his distinguished audience that the 3 zones in the North (excluding FCT) collectively have less bank deposit than the South/South zone alone.
In fact, the entire North accounts for a paltry 10.75% of bank deposits and a meager 8.5% of bank loans. If adjustments are made for state and local government bank deposits and loans, the picture in the North would be more frightening as the FCT alone accounts for more than 16% of all bank deposits.
Interestingly, Lagos still accounts for 48% of deposits and nearly 70% of all bank loans. Summarily, what these numbers tell us is that were the six geopolitical zones  distinct countries, the Northwest and Northeast ‘Countries’ would be in the same league with Niger Republic, Chad and Mali while the South East ‘Country’ will be nearer to China and Korea.
Infact, using the poverty index alone, Jigawa and Kebbi states, with 9 out of every 10 residents considered poor, are no better than Eritrea, Bangladesh or Somalia.

Why is there such a level of poverty up North?

Having laid the background, I shall now return to the more important issues as to why the North has such levels of poverty, the possible reasons for the sustained disparity in poverty levels between the North and South and attempt to proffer suggestions on what can be done to alleviate the situation.
Unfortunately, Professor Soludo’s brilliant paper is short on diagnosis and completely absent on prescriptions. As the then ‘Acting Economic Adviser’ to the President, Professor Soludo could have taken the presentation beyond an academic level.
Considering the politician audience at the event, I wish the distinguished professor had gone ahead to explain to some of the Northern Governors (or would-be Governors) how some of their actions/inactions may have led to the present situation and what could be done improve the situation.
I strongly believe only a handful of the distinguished audience at the presentation still remember the crux of Professor Soludo’s presentation or even bother to keep copies of the paper (which by the way I got from CBN’s website). So why do we have such comparatively high levels of poverty in the North? Some commentators have attempted to explain this phenomenon citing historical, geographical and sociological factors.
For example, it is a known fact that most coastal areas of the world tend to be more affluent that their adjoining hinterland. Likewise, higher levels of atmospheric temperatures seem to correlate with high levels of poverty – with oil rich Arab countries as obvious exceptions.
Ironically, with the exception of Borno state, all the five states with the highest level of atmospheric temperature in Nigeria are in Professor Soludo’s Bottom 10. Some commentators have even gone ahead to cite as evidence to support the ‘Geography theory’ the fact that the ‘Equator’, the imaginary line that divides the earth into Southern and Northern hemispheres, passes through only poor countries from Gabon, Kenya to Ecuador. Could the reason for such high levels of poverty be historical?

Praying for Prosperity

Colonization, and subsequently modernization and westernization, came to Nigeria through the South. Politically (in the sense of organized societies) the North may have been ahead of the south at the end of the 19^th century but the impact of colonization at the turn of the 20^th century was to have a defining effect on the south.
Western education, trading opportunities, literacy and access to western technologies and innovations seem to have conspired to give the Southern Part of Nigeria a head start in economic and social development. The ‘Indirect rule’ policy Lord Lugard adopted in the North which, in part was in admiration of the advanced political system of the region, also meant that traditional institutions and practices that could also act to stifle economic growth and development were left to flourish.
The concomitant effect of this was that from the onset, the Northern region was simply on a ‘catching’ game with the south. Now in any race where one participant has an initial advantage over the other, there are only two ways that the other party can catch up. First, the lagging party accelerates his speed not only beyond his current level but also in excess of the speed of the leading party who presumably is not stationary. Second, the leading party slows down (or is made to slow down) to allow the lagging party to catch up with him.
In Nigeria’s economic development, it appears the neither the Northern states nor the Federal government seem to be pursuing either of these policies. In actual fact, the disparity in levels of economic development between the south and the North seems to be widening with time.
In a report compiled in 2000 by Ben E. Aigbokhan for the African Economic Research Consortium based in Nairobi Kenya, the author conclusively showed that even though poverty levels have been on the increase in Nigeria from 1985 (38%) to 1996 (47%), the growth in poverty was actually accounted for the deterioration in the North which actually wiped out the relative gains recorded in the South during the same period.
In that report, Bauchi, Jigawa and Yobe states accounted for the highest level of poverty in Nigeria. According Professor Soludo’s paper, by 1980, the difference, in percentage basis points, of the poverty prevalence rate between the richest region (South East) and the poorest region (North West) was 24 points. By 2004, the difference between the same regions has widened to 44 points.  What this translates to is that at current trends, the North has no real chance of bridging the gap talk less of catching up with the South.
Other commentators have attempted a sociological explanation to the high levels of poverty in the North. They contend that Northerners are generally laid back, less adventurous, less frugal, less educated, tend to be polygamous and generally mistake complacency for contentment. Proponents of this school contend that high level of poverty prevalent in the North is directly the result of this attitudinal problem. They cite the relatively low economic level of the average Northerners resident in the South (mostly petty traders, security men and beggars) and the relative affluence of the some southerners (mostly Igbos) resident in the North as justification that geography and history cannot fully explain this persistent disparity.
The major argument against this school is that compared to his counterpart that stays back in the North, the average Northerner that emigrates to the South (even as a beggar) is still better off simply because of the opportunities provided by the level of economic activities in his host region.
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Differential opportunities, not promoted

In my view, several factors have conspired to lead to the present situation. According to the ‘Global Poverty Report’ submitted to members of the G8 group of industrialized countries at their meeting in Okinawa in July, 2000, ‘……The main causes of poverty in Africa are the low levels of productivity and production technology, especially in the agricultural sector which provides most of the employment and a large share of the GDP………”. By its agrarian and landlocked nature, the North has competitive advantage in basically three economic activities.
Agriculture, Agro-Allied Industries and Extractive based industries. It is difficult to see any coherent and consistent plan for boosting agricultural production in the Northern region. A plan aimed at, for instance, doubling the production of Maize, Beans, Groundnut, Wheat or Cotton in the short / medium term. While states like Kwara and Kebbi see the need to bring in foreign large scale farmers from Zimbabwe and China, other states like Kano think fertilizer is the major issue with farming in the state. Jigawa state even has this ingenious idea of promoting the farming of snakes and frogs for export to Asia in addition to cultivating sugar cane for the production of ethanol. Other states like Bauchi, Niger and Yobe simply appear at a loss on what policy to pursue.
The net effect is that whatever gains are achieved in a particular state are difficult to sustain beyond a particular administration or is consumed by the inertia of the neighboring states.  Certainly this state of affairs is not helped by the seeming lack of direction from the Federal Government. Considering the major role of agriculture in the economy of Northern Nigeria and its potential for alleviating poverty in the region, you sometimes wonder why lip service is still paid to this sector in the North.

Nigeria's Northern Beggars {pmnews}

The inability of the Northern region to develop or sustain any competitive advantage in the region based on Agro- Allied industries is best exemplified by the current situation in the textile industry.
Most of the textile industries in the North which provide direct employment to thousands of Northerners and indirect employment to millions through cotton farming have simply closed down. Either because of a cloudy policy direction or insufficient political will, political leaders in the North have been unable to bring any pressure to bear on the Federal Government to enforce its ban on textile imports into Nigeria and grant other concessions to textile manufacturers. In fact, more textile firms have closed since the president launched his “Cotton Farming Initiative’ in Kaduna in 2005.
Ironically, many of the Northern governors attend the “Northern Governors Forum’ clad in attires made from these banned textile materials to discuss the state of textile industries in the region. In the 70s/80s, Funtua, Gombe and Gusau were centres of cotton activities with many flourishing ginneries. Today, most of these ginneries have closed down rendering thousands without any income and exacerbating the poverty situation in the region.
In Borno State, the shoe factory commissioned in the 80s to take advantage of the abundant hide and skin in the area is no longer in operation. The Savannah Sugar Factory in Adamawa and the Bacita Sugar Factory in Kwara were comatose for several years rendering thousands without any income until the federal government decided to sell these factories. When you add all these to the several factories that have closed shop in Sharada, Bompai and Kawaji industrial areas in Kano mainly due to power supply issues, it is easy to understand why the North has the highest unemployment rate in the country. Unemployment, in the absence of social welfare, equates poverty. In this light, the multi billion naira ‘Textile Industry Support Initiative’ launched by the past administration is viewed with cautionary optimism.
Furthermore, the other area that the region could have developed a competitive advantage is in developing industries based on extractive materials. Because of the abundant lime stone deposits in the region, the North has the capacity to produce cement to meet the entire national demand and for export. Yet, but for the recent Dangote’s Obajana Factory (in Kogi), there were only three cement industries in the region. Of the three, Benue Cement, until recently was down for more than 4 years, CCNN in Sokoto was so badly managed that it took the intervention of privatization to restore it to its current state. Ashaka Cement was perhaps the major exception to this. The company has performed exceptionally well over the years (under the watchful eyes of Blue Cycle UK and later Lafarge France- the technical partners) and contributed in no small measure to improving the economic lot of its host state, Gombe. To buttress the poverty reduction impact of employment generating companies, none of the bottom 7 states in Prof. Soludo’s presentation has any particular company that provides direct employment to up to 500 people. Other extractive based industries that the region has failed to develop include solid minerals, gypsum, and kaolin.

Poorer leadership

Another issue that has contributed to the rapidly declining fortunes of the average Northerner is the quality of leadership at the state level in the North. Although leadership challenge is across Nigeria, but because of the pervasive nature of government influence on the Northern economy, the impact of leadership is felt more in the North than in the South. Former Togolese leader Eyadema’s theory that ‘one year of bad governance retards development for 10 years’ finds true expression in the region. In a state like Lagos, touted to be the fourth largest economy in Africa, the misrule of a bad governor will not be felt as it would in a state like Taraba where the fortunes of every resident seems to be related to the government directly or remotely. Critical as leadership is to the North, the region has not been fortunate. Many governors in the regions simply have little or no idea about how to alleviate poverty or foster economic development in their states.
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In the North, when a governor is said to be ‘performing’, what it means is that his administration has succeeded in building roads, hospitals and even Airports. Nobody talks about job creation as if roads, by themselves, provide income to the citizenry or hospitals can prevent poverty induced ailments. Take the construction of a dual carriage way in a Northern state capital for instance; more than 80% of the expenditure of that contract is expended outside the economy of the state and the region. Apart from the wages expended on temporary laborers and the amount expended on sand and gravel, little of the contract sum has any impact on the economy of the state. After the road is completed, somebody needs to ask the important question; what are the real economic benefits of the road to the state?
Could another more economically impacting activity have been done with the money? In the last four years, two of the states listed in Professor Soludo’s bottom 10 have committed more than =N=3 billion naira each to building an airport in their respective state capitals. Apart from the occasional ‘VIP Movements’ experienced at these airports, these projects have only an emotional value to the populace of these states. It is difficult to imagine that the huge sums expended on these projects could not have been better utilized in purchasing tractors or enhanced seedlings or as ‘micro credit’ to rural farmers.
Take the case of another two states in Soludo’s bottom 10-Sokoto and Bauchi states. Now, any visitor to these states cannot but be impressed with the level of infrastructural development achieved in the last 8 years – and the Governors have several awards to show for that. It is difficult to compare what has been achieved in these two states with the ‘little’ achieved in states like Abia and Anambra which ironically are in the top 3. This begs the question, are these northern states pursuing the wrong ‘development’? My view is that unless we begin to measure government programs and activities in the North through the prism of real economic indicators like ‘Impact on state GDP’ and ‘Job Creation’, we may never have a proper view of our economic development.
In addition to all these, politics and politicians have also played a negative part in the economic development of the region by misdirecting productive effort in the North from economic activities to politics. Northerners, of all ages, spent a disproportionate amount of time and energy either discussing or participating in politics compared to their colleagues in other regions of the country. Furthermore, because there is no middle class in the region; the only role models that Northern youths look up to are the many corrupt government officials or contractors in the region. Youths in the North, are lured away from school and work to serve as political hangers-on or as thugs while their colleagues in the west are in school and the ones in the east are in their shops.

Suggestions

The ‘Millennium Project (2005)’ has identified a four step strategy for achieving the No 1 MDG goal of halving poverty by 2015. This four step strategy involves distilling the root causes of and dimensioning poverty prevalence across region and gender, conducting a needs assessment of the public investments required, developing a 10 year framework for action and elaborating a 3-5 year poverty reduction strategy within the context of the 10 year plan. My humble suggestions revolve around a 3-5 strategy with particular emphasis on food production and job creation. Other important issues like access to health care and education will be greatly impacted by improved nutrition (disease prevention) and wealth creation (improved school enrollment due to reduced child labor).
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First, the 19 Northern states, under the guidance of the federal government, need to urgently develop a collective agricultural plan. This holistic plan should be based on the competitive advantage in the North. Each state should have one or two particular crops, the production of which it shall aggressively pursue. Concerted efforts will then be made to support the production of these crops through improved seedlings, advanced farming techniques, provision of adequate fertilizer, agricultural soft loans and other incentives.
This plan can be better achieved by encouraging large scale farming as opposed to the current subsistence farming. In each state, farmers with the capacity to cultivate above 100 hectares should be identified, developed, trained and supported.
This approach will inevitably lead to better management of resources and sustainable employment. ‘Importing’ commercial farmers from abroad is not a bad idea, it should be encouraged, but more importantly is to develop indigenous large scale farmers who are better placed to provide sustainable growth and impact.
To avoid a situation of depressed prices during periods of bumper harvest, states need to intervene in guaranteeing prices for farm products. This can be achieved through direct intervention in the market or through increased participation in the upcoming commodity exchange. For the subsistence farmers, a robust ‘micro credit’ similar to Mohammed Yunus’s Grameen Bank scheme in Bangladesh needs to be developed. The current =N=50 billion federal government initiative will be a good starting point.
Second, there is an urgent need to quickly articulate an industrialization policy for the region. In which industry does the region have a competitive advantage? How can entrepreneurs be developed and supported in the region? How can we stem religious and ethnic strife that discourages investments in the region? What will be the short, medium and long-term milestones to be achieved? Which industries will have the most multiplier effect on the Northern economy? How will the issue of power and fuel supply be handled within the national framework? How can small and medium scale industries be developed in the region? How can we cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in the average northerner?
In pursuing these objectives, the role of the New Nigerian Development Company (NNDC) as the investment arm of the northern sates will have to be properly articulated. For a start, NNDC has to be recapitalized and staffed with technocrats. The company’s current bureaucratic, top heavy structure needs to give way to a more focused and dynamic structure. To develop businesses and improve the managerial skills of upcoming entrepreneurs, NNDC needs to incorporate a Venture Capital Company. The envisaged company will not only provide equity participation in entrepreneurial start-ups but will also avail budding entrepreneurs with management best practices in the conception and weaning of these enterprises. Even the investment decisions of NNDC will have to be streamlined to achieve the predetermined objective of economic development of the region. What sense does it make sense for NNDC to invest billions in Nestle Plc when that investment cannot influence Nestle to locate one of its plants in the region? How come the substantial investment of NNDC and the states governments in banks translate to only ‘8.5% of total bank loans’ to the region?
Third, political leadership in the region have to reassess their developmental priorities. Critical questions should be asked before any project is embarked by states in the region? Questions like what is the economic value of this project to the state? Does it have any multiplier effect on the economy? Is the project sustainable? What other alternatives are there for this expenditure? In addition, states should strive to ensure that whatever allocation comes to them from the federal government, or is generated locally, is as much as possible retained within the state economy. Whenever any contract is awarded by a state government, care should be taken to ensure that as much as possible the contractor uses as much local content as possible. This should not be confused with awarding contracts to state indigenes which may not necessarily achieve the intended objective. ‘White elephant’ projects like airports and trade fair complexes should as much as possible be curtailed. These projects in reality do very little to aid the economy of the state even though they consume huge sums of money. Any state that ignores this simple idea will end up being like Bauchi. A beautiful state with good roads and other infrastructure but whose citizens continue to live in penury.
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Lastly, northerners have to collectively take their destiny in their own hands by electing and promoting good leaders. Some will argue that ultimately, a society gets the kinds of leaders it deserves as leaders are embodiments of their society’s virtues and vices, capacities and constraints. However, I still firmly believe that upcoming generations of northerners need to take the charge in leading this crusade for change.
The North needs to develop leaders that posses characteristic that transcend its people’s present level of consciousness. We cannot rely on luck or chance for these leaders to emerge like a ‘Flash in the Pan’. As far as I know, there are only two special reasons why Sir Ahmadu Bello, the former premier of the Northern Region is still celebrated in the region. First, he had the foresight and vision to institutionalize some policies that continue to bear fruit for the region. Second, successive generations of leaders in the region have been unable to match or surpass his achievements in their smaller domains.
This indictment on the collective abilities of northerners need not be so. And can be changed. I strongly urge northerners who have been privileged in one way or the other to reflect back on the state of their communities and see what they can do individually or collectively to improve the fortunes of their society. Either as political or business leaders, Northerners have to invest in the North and draw investments to the North before this level of deprivation can be reduced.
Northerners should always remember that whatever may be their personal achievement in life, the larger society will always view them through the prism of economic and social status of their community. Today, the average northerner is viewed as more closely related to the economic and social status of the alms beggar on Borno Street in Ebute Metta, Lagos than to the fortunes of Aliko Dangote who is generally viewed as an aberration.
In conclusion, the level of economic deprivation in the north is not a local issue. The situation portends a grave danger to the fortunes of the entire nation. Like a chain, Nigeria is only as strong as its weakest link. The federal government and indeed all Nigerians must seek ways of assisting the region improve its economic lot. With arguably the largest population of Nigerians residing in the North, there is no way the collective fortune of Nigeria can be improved without immediately addressing the issue of acute poverty in the region.
I call on the Federal Government to immediately declare an economic emergency in the Northern region and put in place measures to assist northerners uplift their economic status. Unless this is done, Nigeria faces the risk of entrenching economic inequalities not only across social classes but also across geographical lines. This will certainly hinder national unity and development.

Read more: http://www.newsrescue.com/2008/10/poverty-in-the-north-a-mayday-call/#ixzz1z2M6lPbY

Who are the Real Enemies of Nigeria?

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. 

Posted by Chris Ngwodo at 5:06 AM

Understanding Boko Haram: A Theology of Chaos

A kingdom can endure with unbelief, but it cannot endure with injustice.

                                                                            Uthman Dan Fodio 

Three weeks ago, Boko Haram, the ultraviolent Islamic militant group rose like a phoenix from hell from the ashes of its defeat last year by the Nigerian military. In Maiduguri, Borno State, they carried out motorcycle-borne ride-by shootings targeted at police officers and other law enforcement agents. In Bauchi, they stormed a federal prison and set free hundreds of their members as well as other inmates and threatened reprisals against those they accused of persecuting their members. Obviously, the military did not defeat Boko Haram last year when a five-day long clash ended with the extrajudicial execution in police custody of Mohammed Yusuf, the group’s leader. Although scores of the militants were killed or rounded up, several also escaped, simply melting into surrounding environs. According to the State Security Service, Boko Haram has 540,000 members. A group with that numerical strength cannot be wiped out by the strategy of decapitation traditionally used by states to cripple dissident groups. Decapitation as a strategy is simply targeting dissident leaders for elimination as a means of exterminating their rebellion from the very top. The resurgence of Boko Haram makes clear that the military operation against it was only moderately successful.

The emergence of Boko Haram signifies the maturation of long festering extremist impulses that run deep in the social reality of Northern Nigeria. But the group itself is an effect and not a cause; it is a symptom of decades of failed government and elite delinquency finally ripening into social chaos. Think of Boko Haram and other extremist groups of its kind as bacterial cultures. We must understand the Petri dish in which they have been cultivated. In order to appreciate the peculiar resilience of such groups, we must grasp the socio-political and economic conditions of the north. Northern Nigeria is a seething mass of illiteracy, misery, poverty and beggary. While Nigeria generally scores very poorly on every index of human development, Northern Nigeria sinks below the abysmal national average to the extent that a child born in the northwest or in the northeast is likely to have a lower quality of life than a compatriot born in the southwest or southeast. 

The news headlines in recent months portray only a part of the north’s mosaic of human suffering. Since the beginning of the year, lead poisoning has steadily decimated children in villages in Zamfara State, where they have been forced by poverty to engage in illegal mining. Cholera, a water-borne plague eradicated by the early 20^th century has reached epidemic proportions in the north where it has killed hundreds. The recent outbreak has been called the worst in twenty years and according to the Federal Ministry of Health now poses a threat to the rest of the country. Cholera is rife in the north because of the lack of potable water and flooding. In addition, the southward surge of the Sahara is claiming many natural water bodies forcing rural folk to resort increasingly to contaminated water sources.      

In 2006, Borno State Governor Ali Modu Sheriff told broadcasters that he was not bothered by criticisms of his administration in the print media because 95 percent of the people in the state cannot read and write. In any case, he added, less than 2 percent of Borno residents have access to newspapers. The governor’s press people later clarified that what he had meant to say was that radio and television were the dominant media in the state. To discerning ears impervious to spin-doctoring, it sounded as if Governor Sheriff had been glorying in the illiteracy level of his people and boasting of its utility as a political weapon. Mahmud Shinkafi, the current governor of Zamfara achieved infamy in 2002 when as Deputy Governor he pronounced a fatwa urging Muslims to kill Isioma Daniel, a Thisday reporter, for alleged blasphemy. Despite the acute humanitarian crisis of the north, its leading politicians have been preoccupied in recent months with how to clinch presidential power in 2011 and how to negotiate favourable niches in a post-2011 political reality.  Clearly the priorities of the so-called northern political elites are not in consonance with the realities of their people.

These facts are necessary to provide an insight into the prevailing political psychology in the north. Boko Haram is the consequence incarnate of misrule by delinquent political elites. It is a creature of state failure demonstrating the decline of our institutions in all its unvarnished ugliness. Despite the fact that the sect sent a widely publicized letter warning of its militant intentions, its attacks still surprised law enforcement agencies. The diminished intelligence capabilities of the government, the ease with which the militants struck at the federal prison and the group’s boldness in attacking federal agents since 2005 all indicate the waning strength of the Nigerian state. Elsewhere in the federation a range of embryonic insurgencies exist in the form of militant groups in the Niger Delta and kidnap gangs in the south east, and they intimate us of the fact that the Nigerian state no longer has the means to impose its will on this country; it no longer has a monopoly over the coercive instruments that underwrite the state’s rule and indemnify it against sedition or dissidence. Boko Haram is the terrifying face of this reality in northern Nigeria. It is the harbinger of incipient chaos.      

Boko Haram is an extremist group but it transcends the traditional extremist victimization of Christians in pursuit of grander anarchic ambitions. Its war is with the Nigerian state and western education which it perceives as a vector of the corrupting influence of modernity. Its ultimate objective is some version of an Islamic state, preferably of 7^th century vintage. In this, it closely resembles Maitatsine, the violent extremist cult that inaugurated the bloody era of religious terrorism in the north in the early 1980s. But Boko Haram is itself only a part of the picture. The social conditions that permit its existence are rife across the country. Millions of unschooled and unskilled able-bodied young men reside in our cities and towns and provide a ready pool of malcontents for extremist recruitment. Even among the educated unemployed, the crisis of unemployment in Nigeria where 40 million youths are jobless makes them vulnerable to sectarian preachments. Into this breach, groups like Boko Haram enter offering a theological framework of social analysis: rampant poverty and existential meaninglessness emanate from the Nigerian state and its unislamic provenance; from the presence of western education and the intrusion of modernity into an Islamic society. Boko Haram imparts to its members a sense of purpose and mission as warriors for the cause of God ordained to cleanse the society of moral impurities and establish an alternate order.

In a failed or failing state, religion is particularly prone to perversion. The role of the state is to protect humanity from assault by the elemental forces of nature through the institution of law and order. Where the state is derelict, religion is often the likeliest agency people turn to for interpreting the vagaries of their existence. This is what has happened in Nigeria. The explosion of sectarian violence in northern Nigeria coincided with four developments in the eighties – the collapse of the Second Republic which signaled the failure of politics and a popular loss of faith in politicians; Babangida’s imposition of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) which eliminated state subsidies, and through untrammeled trade liberalization wiped out local enterprises (especially the major textile industries and tanneries of the north) thereby eliminating jobs; the Babangida regime’s unhelpful religious politicking as evinced by its surreptitious dealings with the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) which gave the impression that it was a pro-Muslim regime and inflamed sectarian suspicions; and the collapse of the agrarian communities of Nigeria’s northern neighbours, Niger and Chad due to massive plagues of drought and desertification, spewing huge numbers of refugees into northern Nigerian cities where they fell into the void of extremism. Niger and Chad are essentially failed states and represent bleak prophecies of what could eventually befall northern Nigeria.

Even now, as desertification and drought devastate vast swathes of the north, a convergence of ecological, economic and social adversities is occurring. When rural areas lose ancestral farmland to the onslaught of the Sahara desert, huge numbers of disinherited young men flood northern towns and cities in search of jobs. In some places they become commercial motorcycle riders known as Achaba who now number about three million in the Kano metropolis; otherwise they swell the ranks of the urban underclass and most wind up on the margins of society from where they become easy recruits for politicians looking to build private armies or for roaming bands of outlawed extremists or bandits. Note that in the southeast where gully erosion has devastated rural communities, young men dispossessed of any means of livelihood make for the urban areas where many sadly enlist in the underworld. It is permissible to argue a direct link between the ecological degradation of rural areas and the uptick in urban crime and terrorism that has gripped south eastern metropolises.

These instances tell us that the umbrella of the Nigerian state is in tatters and while a derelict political class continues its self-indulgence, dispossessed Nigerians are embarking on the path of self-help by any means at their disposal. Religion is one of those means. It is tempting to argue that this pattern of perverse religiousity is something unique to the north and attributable to its Islamic heritage. This is untrue. Consider the neo-Pentecostal cults in Akwa Ibom that engage in torture of suspected child witches. In these communities, pastors or exorcists are engaged by poverty-stricken parents to seek out the witches in their household. Children are tortured, found guilty of witchcraft and banished from home from which point onwards they fall prey either to early death or sexual slavery and maltreatment as victims of child-trafficking. In a failed or failing state, religion assumes the role of locating scapegoats to explain social conditions of misery. In the north, Boko Haram blames the presence of western education and the Nigerian state itself; other extremists blame it on the presence of Christians or infidels, just as in some other parts it is blamed on the presence of non-indigenes, infidels or strangers. In parts of Akwa Ibom, defenceless children are the scapegoats for material conditions of poverty.

The view that Islam is solely to blame for religious violence in the north is simplistic for another reason. The south has a very substantial Muslim population (particularly in the southwest and parts of Edo state) and records very little of the sort of sectarian bloodletting that periodically grips the north. The region’s acceptance of western education and, especially, Obafemi Awolowo’s single-minded insistence on free education freed many communities from the yoke of illiteracy, boosted the technical capacity of the western region and created a vibrant middle class. Economic security meant that religious affiliation could not be the primary social identity in the region. Lagos State, for instance, has only ever had one democratically elected Christian governor – Sir Michael Otedola, who served in the short-lived Third Republic. Yet, this has never been an issue in Lagos politics. Compare this with Kaduna State where Governor Patrick Yakowa is the first Christian to occupy that position, despite the considerable Christian demographic presence in the state. His ascension to that office this year was attended with uneasy novelty, tension and fears of sectarian violence from some Muslims who saw his rise as a loss of power.  

The difference is that religion is at the centre of northern life. Matters of faith are synonymous with political allegiances. The north, historically hobbled by its cultural resistance to western education, experienced the absence of technical capacity and a lack of readiness for the demands of a modern economy, for which it had to compensate by accommodating southerners and expatriates. According to B.J. Dudley in his seminal work, Instability and Political Order, deep-seated resentment of the educated, technically-savvy southerners who formed the urban merchant middle class of the north was the source of ethnic violence in the region between the 1940s and 1960s. He argued that these explosions of inter-tribal animosity were also (indeed, primarily) class conflicts pitting wealthy southerners against the northern urban underclass. This thesis remains valid. Storefronts in commercial districts are specifically targeted during bouts of rioting by the armies of vagrants and juvenile delinquents that roam northern cities and towns. This kind of “ethno-religious” violence stems from cultural hysteria – the angst of communities who are unprepared for a modern social economy, who have been raised to be deeply antagonistic of modernity and who consider themselves assailed by outsiders as a result.  Young males are socialized to see themselves as victims and then to react as aggressors. Their rage is inevitably directed at presumed alien influences in their communities, often people of other faiths and ethnicities. Supremacist ideologies rooted in inferiority complexes gain increasing audience.

Without the skills necessary to access opportunities in the current socio-economic equation, the people are left with nothing but their religion as their sole resource and are thus vulnerable to all the monstrous mutations of faith that are liable to manifest in a climate of ignorance, corruption and economic inequality. Such alienation feeds the burgeoning subculture of violence embodied by street gangs like the Yan Daba in Kano and Sara Suka in Bauchi. The political imperatives are clear. The north in educational and socio-economic terms is a disaster area comparable to the ecologically devastated Niger Delta. Both zones are theatres of human and environmental carnage wrought by rapacious elites. Northern politicians have singularly failed to invest in education and to fast track infrastructural development in the region. Indeed, over the years, northern elites have cultivated the impression that illiteracy and ignorance are part of northern identity; that part of what it means to be a northerner is to be illiterate, in order to facilitate their own positions as political protectors of their victimized people. Even the Koranic education system is dysfunctional and is mainly mass-producing millions of almajiris – the street children that are fixtures in virtually every northern town and city.

This is a travesty of the region’s history and heritage. Northern Nigeria has a long-lived tradition of learning and literacy. Uthman Dan Fodio’s jihad was not only aimed at purifying Islam but also at replacing the rule of materialistic potentates with that of scholars. A comparable analog is Plato’s idealized government by philosopher-kings. But Northern-dominated anti-intellectual military regimes from the mid-eighties onward reduced the region to a crypt of learning. Anti-intellectualism is now promoted as being synonymous with Islam – a strange proposition since the religion gave the world gifts of insight in the sciences, astronomy, medicine and mathematics especially algebra. We still use Arabic numerals as the mathematical medium for explaining the physical universe.  In the north, there persists a residual antagonism of the so-called Yan Boko – western-educated northerners “who have forgotten their roots.” This obdurate resistance to education and glorification of illiteracy remains along with elite kleptomania, the region’s greatest obstacle to progress and the leading vector of sectarian violence and poverty.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the British colonialists and the Fulani aristocracy conspired to block the spread of western education in the north. The British wanted to avoid what had transpired in southern Nigeria where the ready acceptance of education had created a generation of anti-colonial nationalist agitators. They also wanted to avoid the emergence of educated Islamists of the sort that were then challenging their rule in Egypt. The British understood that western education would upset the conservative feudal social order over which their allies, the emirs ruled and would ultimately endanger colonialism itself. The Fulani aristocracy objected to western education because they feared that its Christian missionary purveyors would gain inroads into their domains.

Herein lies the source of the historic schism between northern and southern Nigeria. It was not political in the beginning but educational, technical and thus socio-economic. The northern elites of the independence era led by Ahmadu Bello necessarily saw their roles as slowly opening their society to modernity while preserving it from domination by the southerners who were better prepared for the rigours of a modern economy. Today, it is fair to say that the general antipathy to western education in the north has been sustained by political elites who understand that psychological subservience is best perpetuated in a climate of ignorance and fear. By using the bogey of southern domination and manipulating religious and cultural symbols, northern politicians have been able to maintain their access to power. Decades ago, the leftist academic Bala Usman extensively critiqued what he accurately identified as the elite manipulation of religion for economic and political advantage.

Boko Haram and other extremist groups of its ilk have also emerged in the context of a yawning political vacuum in the north. Forty years ago, the poor of the north at least had champions like the great Mallam Aminu Kano and his Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and later the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP). Mallam Kano, a scion of the ruling class was an ardent advocate of the talakawa and made it his life’s cause to terminate the conservative power structures that he deemed responsible for their poverty. He championed education, women’s rights and the social emancipation of a people bent double under the yoke of feudal oppression. He used Islam as a liberating ideology against the preachments of those who used Islam as an ideology of subjection of the masses and women. In his excellent study, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria, Okwudiba Nnoli details how the British colonialists colluded with their local confederates in the 1950s to deny NEPU its electoral victory using thuggery, chicanery and intimidation.

In the years since the early eighties when Mallam Kano died, the fortunes of northern progressives have waned. There has been no other northern (or for that matter, Nigerian) politician of comparable iconic status and moral authority. The machinations of conservative opponents and military dictators ensured that the northern progressive movement was reduced to its entrails. No politician and certainly none of his prominent disciples have risen to claim Aminu Kano’s mantle. In the absence of a progressive opposition to the conservative ruling elite, a dangerous vacuum has grown in northern politics. The talakawa may have lost their political champions but this is not to say that they are completely voiceless. It is this vacuum created by the neutralization of progressive forces that extremist cults are now seeking to fill. It is their advocacy of the cause of the poor and their opposition to social injustice that lends these groups their appeal. Boko Haram and allied groups represent a potent if erroneous critique of the delinquent state and its dysfunctional leadership culture.

            Boko Haram’s actions cast some light on our institutional failings. Their assault on the federal prison in Bauchi may even be seen as an escalated protest against a travesty of justice. 70 percent of Nigeria’s prison population is awaiting trial. The justice system is over-burdened, beset by corruption, manpower shortages and other plagues. Keeping Nigerians in detention without trial indefinitely does not serve the cause of justice. From their point of view, Boko Haram simply liberated their brethren from illegal captivity by state agencies. If suspected terrorists cannot be charged to court and successfully convicted, then it is the fault of the state.

            

In a sense, the Boko Haram saga is also about chickens coming home to roost. For years, northern politicians paid lip-service to anti-Christian violence wrought by homicidal zealots. It was as though some secret diabolical transaction stipulated that Christian lives be used to placate the violent extremists to stop them from turning their attentions to their leaders. Emergent groups like Boko Haram, Kalo Kato among others are sectarian zealots like their forebears but have now arrogated to themselves the right to determine who or what is “Islamic.” To that extent, the double-edged sword of extremism is now aimed precipitously at the jugular of the northern ruling classes. It remains to be seen if northern politicians understand the catastrophic potentials of the Frankenstein monster that they have created; whether they can act to stamp out the homicidal pathologies festering along the margins of their society.

            

A few things can be done to arrest the slide into anarchy. The federal government should establish special tribunals mandated to deal expeditiously with cases of sectarian violence and terrorism. The capabilities of security agencies in terms of intelligence gathering and early warning systems should be enhanced. The operational conditions and capacities of the police mobile units, the army and other paramilitary agencies should be enhanced with respect to addressing urban terrorism and guerilla warfare. From all indications, our security forces are not yet attuned to the operational nuances of suburban counter-insurgency and conventional military approaches result in great collateral loss of life and property. Our northern borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroon are notoriously porous and have to be secured against the influx of weapons and would-be extremists and fanatics from these countries.

            

However, the greatest task lies in the domain of politics and public policy. The fact is that vast areas of the north are conducive to crime and insurgency. So too are the scores of decaying urban centres across Nigeria left desolate after the collapse of social services and public utilities in the late eighties and early nineties.  There needs to be serious commitment at the highest levels of government to address the entropic conditions incubating groups like Boko Haram. It might require some kind of federal intervention especially in the areas of education and healthcare and greater pressure on northern elites to develop the region. Without this, Nigeria could find itself battling with an insurgency in the north in addition to its manifold challenges. And unlike Niger Delta militants who are at least open to negotiating with the state, the absolutist extremist groups in the north want nothing except the very destruction of the state itself.  

            

Superior bullets, bombs and spies alone will not defeat extremism. Terrorism as a form of protest beckons to a generation of youths who see that they are destined to live and die in poverty and deprivation. Their present is bleak and their future is uncertain. Thus, they take refuge in a manufactured past, a mythical 7^th century Islamic Utopia into which they seek to forcibly induct the rest of the society. For these alienated legions, life is a more frightening prospect than death so presumed martyrdom has an allure because it offers a post-mortem status that exceeds anything that Nigeria can currently offer them.  Such cults threaten national security because they virulently oppose the pluralism, tolerance and civic mutuality generated by the very existence of the Nigerian nation. Their ideologies are by nature exclusionary accommodating only one perspective. Our national ideal, even if observed mostly in the breach for much of our history, is inclusion. Furthermore civic solidarity is undermined when a growing number of Nigerians aspire to relocate to the 7^th century while the rest strive to master the 21^st century. It is worse when these mutually exclusive aspirations occur along geographical lines.

Ultimately, we must redefine the notion of Nigerian citizenship in such a way that it provides a framework of civic purpose and welfare for every citizen. Being a Nigerian must offer a measure of existential meaning for Nigerians otherwise disaffected millions will seek definition in narrow, exclusive and polarizing sectarian identity constructs. The only cure for extremism is an umbrella of psychological, social and economic security spread over the nation by a socially responsible state, one that sees its role as guaranteeing the common good. Constructing such a state is the most urgent task of leadership today.     

Why Nigeria Can't Break Up

No bad idea is regurgitated as constantly as the notion that the solution to chronic violence in Nigeria is for her to “break up.” The case for Nigeria’s disintegration surfaces routinely after tragic episodes of violence and has emerged following the recent increase in sectarian terrorism. Some perspective is necessary. Since the days before the Civil War, beating the drums of separatism has become a sort of pre-programmed response to national calamity. Rumours of our impending divorce attended the 1964 elections, the June 12 1993 crisis, the death of Moshood Abiola in 1998 and the Sharia controversy in 2001. In 1990, a gang of over-ambitious soldiers attempting to oust the Babangida regime even purported to evict five northern states from the federation. Thus, current debates about the durability of Nigeria are nothing new.

It is intellectually lazy and astonishingly parlous thinking to suggest that the solution to our national crisis is disintegration. It is true that much life has been expended on the Nigeria project to no apparent redemptive effect but what we owe the dead and the unborn as well as ourselves is clear-minded thinking on the fate of our union rather than just emotive polemics.

The usual suggestion is that Nigeria be divided between a “Muslim North” and “Christian South” or among its so-called big three – the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. Beyond these imprecise propositions, there is little specificity as to what shape post-Nigerian nations would look like except perhaps for the preposterous suggestion that every ethnic group should become a nation. These arguments are fallacious. Nigeria is not and has never been a country of monolithic religious halves. Christians and Muslims are scattered in substantial proportions and ethnic variety across the country. There are Fulani Christians and Igbo Muslims. Millions of Yoruba families contain adherents of both faiths. Nigeria is far more complex and diverse than the Hausa-Yoruba-Igbo tripod. Making each ethnic group a nation throws up problems. What would we make of Ijaw communities who hug the coastline stretching from the south to the south west? The sheer diversity and interlocking spread of hundreds of ethnic nationalities makes tidy disintegration a virtually impossible proposition.

A popular fallacy is that prior to the advent of the colonialists, Nigeria’s ethnic groups existed in self-contained cocoons of utopian bliss unburdened by the necessity of interaction with others. But many of the ethnic and regional identities which are now presumed “sacred” are in fact colonial creations. For instance, it was only after colonization, that the term “Yorubaland” began to be applied to the realms of all rulers who claim descent from Oduduwa, instead of only to the Oyo Kingdom. Before the British came, the Egba, Ijebu, Ekiti, Ijesha and Ilorin peoples fought costly interstate wars among themselves. The longest pre-colonial civil war was the sixteen year Kiriji war which was fought between Yoruba city states. Yoruba nationalism was forged by Obafemi Awolowo who rallied the descendants of Oduduwa as a political force in the new nation. Similarly, Igbos were organized into separate and autonomous republics. Many of them had scant contact with each other with some entirely oblivious of others before the advent of colonialism. Consequently, Igbos fought no wars as a collective. Igbo national consciousness was largely the handiwork of Nnamdi Azikiwe who at one point preached the manifest destiny of the Igbo in Africa. Hausa city-states co-existed through times of war and peace. Even when Uthman Dan Fodio’s jihad established the Sokoto Caliphate, the new emirates were never synonymous with “the North” which was a later British invention and was fortified as a political identity by Ahmadu Bello.

Significantly, pre-colonial societies were not based on ethnic units but rather on age groups, occupations, residence and settlements. Instead of monolithic tribal blocs competing for a share of the national cake, city-states, inclusive kingdoms and republics for the most part made up the area that was eventually christened Nigeria and experienced centuries-long commercial links and cultural cross-pollination.

Dissolving the Nigerian federation will not resolve the violence that bedevils places like Jos, the conflicts between the Ife and Modakeke in Osun, the Aguleri and Umuleri in Anambra or the Ezza and the Ezillo in Ebonyi, the Jukun and the Tiv or the Itsekiri and the Urhobo. Nor will it end conflicts between nomadic Fulani pastoralists and agrarian communities stretching from the north to the south. These are essentially either local or intra-ethnic conflicts.

Ethnic homogeneity cannot indemnify society against conflict. Somalia, the world’s poster child of failed statehood, has only one ethnic group, the Somali, only one language and is one hundred percent Islamic. South Sudan which only recently celebrated its divorce from Sudan is now embroiled in inter-ethnic conflict within its borders. Back home, we need only look at Bayelsa State and other ethnically homogeneous states to establish conclusively that ethnic homogeneity is not a predictor of peace, social justice or smart governance.

While prodigal political elites practise divisive politics, the Nigerian people themselves live in a socio-economic reality of interdependence and integration. The use of oil wealth from the Niger Delta in sustaining state bureaucracies all over the country may be the most obvious example of this. Less remarked is the dependence of southern urbanites on northern produce for food. The Fulanis are the main custodians of Nigeria’s livestock population, holding over ten million cattle, twenty million goats and millions of sheep. Their industry significantly accounts for protein consumption in the south. The north remains Nigeria’s food basket.

We are so captivated by the witchcraft of separatism that we fail to appreciate the fortuitous or providential alignments of ecological, geographical, cultural and economic factors that have fostered interdependence and integration. For example, if violence in the north was simply about anti-Igbo hatred then it would be saner for Igbos to stay home in the east. But the east is disadvantaged by its erosion-prone poor soil which cannot sustain the population density of the area and which accounts for the comparatively high level of migration of Igbos to other parts of Nigeria. Despite everything, Igbos (and other Nigerians) continue to migrate and mingle because human coexistence dictates it. No man is an Island. Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man is from Kano but has most of his investments in the south and employs more southerners than northerners. Millions of Nigerians have become socio-cultural hybrids through intermarriage, cultural adoption and transplantation.   

Nigeria’s problem is not her diversity but the failure of the state to affirm Nigerian citizenship as the ultimate identity superseding all other allegiances. It is our failure as citizens, intellectuals and politicians to articulate an all-embracing Nigerian ethos. Rather we waste valuable time and energy rebooting hackneyed definitions of Nigeria as an artificial creation or a mere geographical expression. Yet all nations, possibly except Australia, being creations of human political will, are artificial and begin as geographical novelties; they are not received from heaven. It falls on succeeding generations to transform them from mere geographies into socio-political moralities; to create transcendent solidarities where none existed before. This is what nation-building is about and this is what we have failed so spectacularly to do. Sectarian politics thrives largely because of the dazzling scale of ignorance that Nigerians demonstrate about their history, geography and each other.  

It is foolhardy to believe that the failure to treat ourselves as citizens rather than as ethnic and religious partisans will disappear if we dissolve Nigeria. If we cannot treat each other humanely now that we are compatriots, how on earth are we going to do better if we become foreigners? Last year, the Abia state government fired thousands of Igbo-speaking “non-indigenes” from its employment to make room for equally Igbo “indigenes.” Significantly, most conflicts in Nigeria are between so-called “indigenes” and “settlers,” a dichotomy that at times seems to defy ethnic or religious solidarity. These petty bigotries and manifestations of apartheid will not disappear with the Nigerian union. The challenge of civic security is inescapable for there is no possible post-Nigerian construct that would not contain either religious or ethnic minorities. It is worth noting that Biafra, the most serious separatist effort in our history was undermined both by the superior power of the federal forces and the reluctance of ethnic minorities who feared for their own prospects as citizens of Biafra. The problem remains creating a just, fair and equal citizenship that shelters all of us regardless of creed, ethnicity, class or gender.    Nothing suggests that new ethnic republics would in any way be more peaceful, stable or more prosperous than the current Nigerian reality. In short, it would require less effort to renew the Nigerian enterprise than to construct afresh new polities.

Having said all this, nations are not eternal but finite, expiring when they have outlived their usefulness to history and humanity. Nigeria is no different. Nigeria does not currently face immediate disintegration but a slow and steady erosion of federal authority by sundry paramilitaries, warlords and terrorist gangs, until the nation slips inexorably into failed statehood. Already we see signs of this in the brazen terrorism of pseudo-religious extremists who seek to establish alternate governments as well as the rise of oil-bunkering pirate gangs in our southern coastal waters.

It would be a pity if we were to let Nigeria fail. No one who has studied her history, encountered her acute humanity, sampled her cultural riches and researched the dreams of her founding fathers can fail to sense her ordination for higher purposes. For us to abort this purpose would be nothing short of cosmic treason. As Eme Awa once remarked, “If we were to dissolve the federation, a future generation of people will pass the verdict that the Nigerian elites committed suicide while of unsound mind.” Nigeria has not been tried and found wanting. We simply have not invested enough of our intellectual and moral energies into actualizing her promise. 

(All Images are sourced from Google Images.)

Posted by Chris Ngwodo at 1:29 AM

Edo Governorship And The Gathering Of Tribes

| SUFUYAN OJEIFO

The stage is set for the July 14 governorship election in Edo State with the emergence of General Charles Airhiavbere (rtd) as the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).  The endorsement of Governor Adams Oshiomhole as the candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in the election is a fait accompli.

In essence, the governorship contest, from all indications, is a two-horse race.  This is because the ACN and the PDP are the only parties with solid structures in Edo.  Both dominate the sphere of power.  The PDP has five members in the State House of Assembly by virtue of which it has produced the minority leader.

At the national level, the PDP has Senator Odion Ugbesia (representing Edo Central District) and the two members of the House of Representatives —Friday Itulah and Patrick Ikhariale — from the district.  There is, indeed, something significant about the PDP in Edo Central: the five members of the party in the state legislature are from there.

The party lost the sixth constituency seat marginally to the ACN candidate, Festus Ebea, who is today the deputy Speaker of the House of Assembly.  The central senatorial district holds special attraction: it is the enclave of the godfather of Edo politics and Iyasele (prime minister) of Esanland, Chief Tony Anenih.  It took his sagacity and legerdemain to win the district for the PDP.

What that did was to put the lie to the claim that Oshiomhole has taken absolute control of Edo politics.  Indeed, the bottom-line of the last April general election in the state is that contrary to the theme song of his political propaganda, that he owns the land, “Oshiomhole, indeed, does not own the land.”  The land belongs to Edo people.

Edo people are a complex diversity made of different tribes.  There are monolithic tribes of the Binis and Esans as well as the multifaceted Afenmai ethnic nationality comprising Etsako, Akoko-Edo and Owan people.

Figuratively, there is a tribe of students.  There is a tribe of civil servants.  There is a tribe of market men and women.  There is a tribe of other self-employed people who have been at the receiving end of the harsh tax regime and other financially draining policies of the Oshiomhole government in Edo.  There is, on the political terrain, a tribe of godfathers, which Oshiomhiole has tried, in vain, to eclipse.

These are the elements that will coalesce to define a trajectory for Edo State on July 14. Will they bring about a leadership change or will they maintain the status quo?  There is no doubt that the cloud is gathering.  The wind is beginning to act gutsy while the prospects of a torrentially devastating rain are quite evident.  The tribes are gathering as the governorship election beckons on Edo people.

For instance, will the tribe of students, especially those in Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, who have been victims of Oshiomhole’s harsh policy of tuition fee increase from N18, 000 to N64, 000, invest their votes in the perpetuation of the policy?  Will the market men and women, whose shops were demolished for the reason of questionable road expansion and beautification of Benin City, consequent upon which they were impoverished, happily step out in the sun to vote for a man whose administration had meted to them a raw deal?  The self-employed and private businesses have continued to buckle under a draconian tax regime.  Will they embrace an administration whose policies are bereft of a human face?

In Edo Central, Oshiomhole’s claim of road development has been more of taunting political campaigns than genuine development efforts.  He is wont to claim that he has tarred the road that leads to the home of Anenih.  But all of these claims will be subjected to acceptability test by the people as they vote on July 14, this year.

But, significantly, will the tribe of godfathers within and outside the ACN allow Oshiomhole to eclipse it?  Even though his claim that he had buried the godfather (Anenih) of politics in Edo has been proved to be tenuous, should that not give him away to the harried godfathers in the ACN that Oshiomhole is a desperate power monger who wants to be the only cock that crows in the political firmament of Edo?

Will they gleefully watch as he transmogrifies into the grand patron of godfathers in their party?  Where are the Tom Ikimis, Tony Omoaghes and Osagie Izze-Iyamus of this world?  Is it not possible that these men are smarting in silence from the onslaught against their tribe in the party they laboured to form in the state? Won’t they be disposed to reaching out quietly to the tribe of godfathers outside the party for a concert of forces to edge out a man who has vowed to eclipse them?

It is a fact that Anenih has been the first and the last man standing in and out of the PDP. He now has formidable supporters in multi-billionaire businessman-politician, Captain Hosa Okunbor and Chief Mike Oghiadhome (former Deputy Governor and Chief of Staff to the President).  Where is Samuel Ogbemudia?  Where is former Governor Lucky Igbinedion with his camp who provided the structure that made Oshiomhole’s governorship candidature of the ACN in 2007 possible?  Where is the patriarch of the Igbinedion family, Chief Osawaru Igbinedion (the Esama of Benin)? Are they suffering Oshiomhole’s political antics gladly?

These represent the finest crops of political elite (read godfathers) in Edo politics.  Will they allow an opportunistic late entrant into the political field to decimate their tribe using the instrumentality of state power which they can avert by collectively mobilizing the electorate to vote for another candidate?  Can Oshiomhole, on the basis of his self-acclaimed achievements and in spite of the tribes, win the governorship battle on July 14?  Time will tell.  

— Ojeifo sent in this piece from Abuja