Discourse 346: The Christian Answer to Boko Haram

Discourse 346
By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde

The Christian Answer to Boko Haram

Last Sunday, the attention of the nation was drawn to the killings of innocent Nigerian Muslims, including unsuspecting travellers on the Kaduna-Abuja Highway, by Christians as a reprisal attack to Boko Haram bombings of churches in Kaduna and Zaria. A number of Mosques and shops were also burnt that Sunday in Christian-dominated neighbourhoods in the southern part of the city. In all the attacks, as at the last offical count, has killed 21 Christians, while the reprisals killed 29 Muslims and hundreds werreinsured. As a result, I will pause my series on Kano to say a word about the matter.

Before we continue, however, I have a confession to make. Writing on matters of religion in Nigeria and especially where lives and places of worship are involved is very difficult for commentators that would like to remain impartial. So many times, as we try it, a writer finds it difficult to walk the tight rope of objectivity, balance and reason. Yet, the mettle of a writer is not tested by his treatment of populist topics or points of view but by how delicately he handles tough issues with equanimiyt and fearlessness. In the midst of high tension and soaring tempers, a voice of reason, even if faint, is most welcome.

The fact that a group of Muslims in the name of Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnati Lil Da’awati wal Jihad – popularly known as Boko Haram - has been attacking churches in Northern Nigeria is a settled one. Its leader, Malam Abubakar Shekau, has twice featured on YouTube claiming its responsibility, and so does his spokesperson, Abu Qaqa, in the aftermath of many such attacks. The fact that there are Christians found involved in church bombing activities – and there are many reported and unreported cases – or in supporting Boko Haram as I once wrote on this page does not renounce the confession of Boko Haram; it only complicates our analytical equation by introducing more variables and, thus, making it less linear than most of us would wish.

Targeting churches and Christians with bombings by Boko Haram is a matter that has saddened every well meaning Muslim and Christian in this country. Attacking worshipers is not only un-Islamic but also cheap. The command of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to his companions on this is clear. A Muslim must not have a better model on religion than him. Demolition a place of worship is an act of fasad – or corruption of the world, as clearly stated in Suratul Hajj, ironically in the very verse that the leader of the group quoted in his first video to justify its resort to arms, though he did not complete it.

A worshipper is a guest of God. When a delegation of Christians once paid a visit to the Prophet in Medina, he not only camped them in his mosque but also asked them to use it for their worship. That is how the sanctity of worshippers and their place of worship became a settled issue among Muslims of various sects. That is why destruction of churches are hard to find in Muslim history. Muslims have left churches and even idols in Jerusalem, Syria, Europe, Egypt and Asia intact to date. The Taliban that destroyed the idol of Buddha in Afghanistan a decade and half ago was widely condemned by Muslim scholars across the world.

I am yet to come across a Nigerian Muslim – a scholar or a layman like me - that approves of the demolition of churches and attack on worshippers. That was how the first claim by Boko Haram came to the Muslim community as a great shockand shame. Of course, Muslim rioters have burnt churches before and they continue to do so, just as Christians also burn mosques when there are unrests. The difference is in organization. Those are acts of mobs. The ones of Boko Haram are organized operations of a sect that claims to be waging a holy warfor Islam, for God. But what is its justification, if we may ask?

Fortunately, the group is unequivocal on its reasons. It seeks to legitimise such operations based on the principle of retaliation. It is true, as it says repeatedly, that Muslims in the past twenty years became targets of barbarous attacks by some Christians in areas where the latter dominates. The examples of Kafanchan, Tafawa Balewa, Zangon Kataf, Kaduna, Plateau and Zonkwa cannot be denied. It is not the barbarity of such attacks that worries Muslims most, however but how Christians get away with the crimes so easily. Many accuse the Christian dominated security and law enforcement agencies of complicity.

It is difficult to recall any substantial prosecution or even arrest of Christians in all these despite the presence of hardcore evidence, including videos, in the hands of security agencies and the general public. The most recent of them are the attack on Muslims on Eid ground in Jos and the cannibalization of their bodies in the presence of law enforcement personnel and that of how Muslim villagers were massacred in Southern Kaduna during the post election violence, both in 2011. On the other hand, the violent reactions of Muslims to these atrocities are greeted by severe punishments by tribunals, courts and law enforcement agents that play the prosecution and the judge at the same time. From Karibi-whyte tribunal of 1987 to the latest arrests on the Plateau, it is Muslims who consistently receive the butt.

It is this selective justice and indifference of Nigerian authorities to Muslim blood, property and dignity that gives Boko Haram the pretext to retaliate on Christians. But here too, the group is wrong. No doubt, God has permitted the Prophet to retaliate against the polytheists of Arabia who transgressed against Muslims for over a dcade. In issuing that permit, however, God was specific about the target and the proportion of the retaliation:

“Whoever transgresses against you, transgress (in return) against him in proportion to his transgression against you, and know that God is with those who fear Him (i.e. those who follow his command without retaliating beyond the proportion of the offence they received). (Chapter Baqarah)

In another verse He said,

“And fight those who fight you and do not transgress (beyond the proportion that you were attacked with). God doesn’t like those who transgress.” (Chapter Baqarah again)

This is equal to the principle of proportionality in international law.

The interpretation of Boko Haram that every Nigerian Christian bears the burden of the crime that another Christian committed is absolutely untenable Islam:

“And no soul would bear the burden of another soul…” (Chapter Fatir)

Therefore, the actions of Boko Haram on these matters do not conform with the provisions of the Qur’an. Throughout his life, the Prophet of Islam was specific in punishing those who wronged Muslims on the few occasions he could not forgive them. For example, he never generalized punishment on the polytheists of Arabia then. When he was fighting those of Mecca, he was fighting those of Mecca alone. Neither did he treat the different tribes of Jews and Christians then in Arabia as one. He treated each on its own merit, befriending them except those who proved hostile to Islam. This is the provision against collective punishment in international law, again.

In the same manner, even if we were to accord amargin for retaliation, which I will discount later in the discussion, we must accept that Nigerian Christians cannot be treated as one organic collection of murderers that deserve a carpet treatment of bombs and bullets. In this case, the task is even made easier because the communities where these atrocities are perpetrated are known; so are the names and pictures of people who committed the crimes.

Why would Boko Haram then target innocent worshippers for God’s sake? Why not go for the criminals specifically? If it would avenge the cannibalization of Muslims on the Eid grounds of Rukuba for example, let the it obtain the video, take the pain of identifying the attackers and go after them with a surgical precision. Why then attack a cheap target of Christian worshippers in Gombe or Kaduna and leave those in Zonkwa or Rukuba? Come on. This is not Islam.

I remember the fatwa once given by Sheikh Salisu Abubakar Suntalma of Ahmadu Bello University during the Kafanchan crisis of 1987. He said, agreed that innocent Muslims were killed in Kafanchan, it does not warrant any Muslim to attack any church or Christian in Kaduna or Zaria. If you can find the culprits in Kafanchan and attack them, you may have a point, he said. Islam does not sanction attacking an innocent person, he concluded. During the same episode, Ibrahim Zakzaky expressed the same view. (Ironically, the Karibi-Whyte tribunal that was set up on the crisis jailed Zakzaky for five years, despite his opposition.) It is difficult to come across any scholar, leader or informed person in Islam that holds a contrary view.

So, though Boko Haram is in every sense right to become worried about the impunity with which some Christians commit barbaric actions against Muslims and go unpunished by the Nigerian authorities, the group misfired in its answer to situation even from the perspective of Islam. The Muslim community in Nigeria has repeated this objection times without number. This is not to mention the group’s lack of locus standi even from the Islamic perspective since in Islam only the judge can order the killing of a criminal if so ordained by the law.

By way of summary, if I were to grade the script of Boko Haram here, I would give it minus one (-1).

Now let us turn to our Christian brothers. The answer of some Christians in some Northern communities is, sad to note, a mirror reflection of that of Boko Haram. They too have collectivised Nigerian Muslims, as Boko Haram generalized Nigerian Christians, and made their blood and property targets of their retaliation. If Boko Haram has attacked a church, what stops the Christians from identifying Boko Haram, if they need to, and deal with them?

I question the need because the Christians have the mighty Nigerian security, law enforcement and military apparatus behind them, at their disposal, if we go by the sacred-cow treatment they enjoy from them. Why then resort to killing innocent travellers, burning mosques and shops? So if Boko Haram is wrong in attacking innocent worshippers and churches, what makes the attack by Christian fanatics on innocent Muslim travellers and burning their mosques legitimate? This is the wrong answer to the challenge of Boko Haram.

It is also wrong from the point of view of practicality. In how many communities are such Christians fanatics ready to barricade the highway and cowardly kill innocent Muslims? In how many states or communities in the North can they do it? Honestly, I see that possibility only in Plateau and Kaduna, in the very communities where those atrocities against Muslims have been repeatedly committed due to ethnic reasons and where there are state governors who would mastermind their protection from the law. (I was once told Yakowa is married to Jang’s sister but now I have confirmed that it is not true. The two only share the same local government of origin, Jaba. Yakowa's wife actually has her ancestry in Tafawa Balewa, in my state of Bauchi. I apologize for the inaccurate information I earlier published on this blog about the two sisters of mine.)

Man is a rational animal though he sometimes behaves stupidly at sub-human level especially when propelled by the spur of religion. Normally, he calculates his degree of safety before taking any risk on his life. Few are the fools that would dare start a fire that would consume them. Even in Kaduna State, why did not the Christian reprisal attack take place in Kaduna North or Zaria?

So, I grade the Christian answer script as minus one (-1), too.

When we add up the two, we end up with -2, two failures in the two negative quadrants of the Nigerian security equation. This is worse than where we were without either or both of them. That is where we are today. The fact is that retaliation could only serve as a deterrent for a short while. It often produces a vicious cycle of violence. Christians in some communities carry out war crimes against Muslims. Boko Haram says it retaliates but under the hidden tactic of bombings. Then Christians retaliate in areas they too think Muslims are weak. Both do it against innocent citizens, against places of worship, against God, though purportedly in the name of God.

This circle of cowardice can continue forever except we find a way to cancel the negatives and arrive at a positive digit. And to this we turn in the remaining part of the essay.

Christian leaders and opinion shapers have appealed to Muslim leaders to use their weight to restrain Boko Haram. But sincerely, which citizen would restrain any Nigerian that carries arms today? There is none. In the same vein, I have heard many Berom leaders saying that their youths are beyond their control. When some chiefs of Niger Delta tried to stop its militants from terrorist activities in the mid-nineties, the youths accused them of complicity and murdered them. Righ now, Nigeria has a high deficit of willing martyrs among its leaders.

The truth is that when it comes to violence, the answer lies with the law and nothing else. The law it is that can cancel those negatives. It is the instrument that stripped all citizens of the right to possess firearms. If people had the right to protect themselves adequately, some of these atrocities would not be committed. (Though think about it honestly: if all of us would possess arms, it will be 160million guns and billions of ammunitions. How would there be peace? We would be facing another form of instability.) However, in most contemporary states, the law has entrusted the security of lives and property to the state. In Nigeria, keeping that trust has been in the decline for decades now. Unless we are interested in replacing the state with anarchy, we must rise to strengthen the law.

Strengthening the law means using it appropriately as an arbiter when injustice is perpetrated and getting the right people to enforce it, whenever possible. Muslims, as I have maintained, should, in the absence of any interest to bring the criminals that have been perpetrating crimes against them to justice locally, refer the matter to the International Court of Justice. They must be prepared to walk the ladder to its top. Armed with hard evidence like the ones we mentioned earlier, it is inconceivable that they will not be offered justice there. So the question of their retaliation is cancelled, ab initio.

Christians on their part must also resort to the law and support it. They must ensure that the law enforcement agencies that they control have risen to the challenge. They must also be patient with them until they succeed without complicating matters through retaliation. The current President is their making. They boasted of supporting him to victory during the last elections. In his hands lie the keys to our peace. He is the commander-in-chief. They must get him to act appropriately. Making a President is the beginning, not the end, of his service.

I will be dishonest to say that the government is doing nothing about Boko Haram. Achievements are recorded daily, albeit not enough to see us through completely yet. But when the President’s primary constituency dismisses him and resorts to taking the law into its hands by killing innocent travellers, I would think he has a problem at hand. He should not claim to be helpless, as he has often expressed in church services. He is not Moses. And we are not the Children of Israel on the bank of the Red Sea. Appealing to God without working hard maximally will only embolden the agents of destabilization. He must yield the stick as well as the carrot to both Boko Haram and his Christian counterparts in Plateau and Kaduna. Only this democratic distribution of justice would finally bring peace to our nation.

Ordinary citizens like me who have a voice must come out and speak boldly. The Christians have often emphasized that there is not enough voice of condemnation heard among Muslims. True. But that has to do more with the lack of protection from the government for those who would dare to do so. Man is a rational animal. Again, our dear Goodluck comes into the equation.

The Christians, on their part, often forget that they have been most economical with their voice against acts of sectarian violence. It is very hard, very rare, and very unusual to hear a Christian voice – a leader or opinion shaper – condemning the atrocities committed by his fellow Christians against Muslims, except Sam Nda-Isaiah of course, which mbay Christian fanatics say he is with Muslims. I cannot remember even a few, specifically directed at Christians. The best I would hear, if I am lucky on those rare occasions, are general statements condemning violence and calling for peace.

Has any Christian leader called for the prosecution of the massacres in Zonkwa or other villages of southern Kaduna of recent, for example? No. Have Nigerians heard the voice of any pastor on his pulpit condemning the Christians that attacked Muslims in Eid ground, roasted their bodies on vehicle bonnets and ate them in the presence of security agents? No. And so was it with every occasion of violence, including the latest killings on the Kaduna – Abuja Highway. What we only hear is the expression of shock, but not a single call for arrest. As usual, none is arrested and none will be arrested, anyway. There was never a time when any Christian cleric or traditional ruler even admitted that his people were at fault. The closest we heard was the recent statements by our Rev. Hassan Mathew Kukah. The videos are there. Let them join us in calling for the prosecution of the culprits. The truth, I must tell my Christian brothers, is that Nigeria cannot clap with one hand.

There are many other ways we can express our voice to garner support for peace though. For example, someone online has suggested mass rallies for peace across Northern Nigeria. Yes. I have seen the federal government and politicians rent crowds to show their solidarity for a cause or a candidate. Why cannot the president go beyond the pulpit and march across the road to the Eagle Square for the sake of peace? Why would not state governments summon all their ulama and priests and their followers to a peace rally in the largest public square of their states? These guys enjoy free largesse to Hajj, Umra Jerusalem and Rome. This is the time to ask for a pay back. Ehe now! Let us reassure the world with the pictures of oceans of peace loving Nigerians on international television screen. It will refute the notion that majority of Nigerians are murderers. It will also tell the agents of destabilization how insignificant they are in our midst.

As for the other forces that are interested for various reasons in aggravating the conflict in Northern Nigeria – those within the region and beyond – I wI'll say that it is our negligence that has given the allowance for the expression of their nefarious interests, using Boko Haram and Christian groups. The people of Northern Nigeria, and those of other regions, will continue to remain where they are, each in his own domain. In the North particularly, God has enriched us with diversity. It is a blessing, not a curse. And so shall we remain together long after the guns of Boko Haram and those of Christian fanatics are put to silence.

Bauchi,
19 June 2012

Discourse 332: Revolt of the Emirs

Discourse 332
By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde

Revolt of the Emirs

It is not in the tradition of a sitting aristocrat to revolt, more so if he is an Emir in an era when the institution is stripped of all its major functions but saddled with the enormous task of ensuring security of life and property. So when some royal fathers decided to breakaway from the tradition of waiting for the Sultan to announce the sighting of the crescent during the last Ramadan and do it themselves, little did they know that we the masses were watching with keen interest.

The revolt, if we may call it so, is more surprising when it came from emirates that are the closest to the Sultan in history, geography and government, given their long standing mutual associations under the Sokoto Caliphate, the defunct Northern Nigeria, Northwestern State and Sokoto State. In all these, the Sultan served as their Chairman. More importantly, the Sultan is their leader under the national Muslim umbrellas of Jama’atu Nasril Islam and Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. If there would be a revolt, we the masses would expect it to come from quarters more distant to the monarch than from these direct cousins of his.

To be fair to the dissenting Emirs, however, the practice of a Sultan announcing the commencement or ending of Ramadan is a recent one. It was not possible, administratively and logistically, for him to carry out that role in the pre-colonial era. The Sokoto Caliphate was a loose confederation of states. The centre at Sokoto did not have direct administrative influence over the periphery. Its authority was largely moral, as an acknowledgement of the founding role played by Usman Danfodio. Hardly did any Sultan dictated who would become an Emir or what expedition would he carry out. Annually, the Emirs would pay him a tribute, represented by a delegation carrying a number of gifts to Sokoto.

It was the loose link between Sokoto and the Emirates or, say, the lack of a strong federation that made it easier for a handful of soldiers under the command of few British officers to bring the caliphate to its knees in the last quarter of the 19th Century before they capped it with the subordination of Sokoto in 1903. If there were a strong federation, possibly – possibly – the contemporary history of Northern Nigeria would have been different today.

But what could not be done during the pre-colonial era became possible after the British conquest. Roads were opened and communication became enhanced. The entire North came under the authority of the British as a Protectorate. The British, for the purpose of indirect rule, decided to reinforce the authority of the Sultan not only by bringing the Fulani Emirs from Kebbi to Adamawa under his ceremonial leadership but also those in the old Kanem-Borno Caliphate and some hitherto independent Emirates like Yauri and chiefdoms that are not even Muslim. The Sultan thus became the Chairman of the Council of Chiefs in the defunct Northern region.

Regarding religious matters, the Sultan’s authority was further armored through Jama’atu Nasril Islam, the organ that Sardauna created to oversee the interests of Islam separate from the official administrative machinery of the regional government. The Sultan became its President. When the Supreme Council of Islamic affairs was later created as a sort of an expanded Jama’atu Nasril Islam, the domain of Sultan’s influence on religious matters now went beyond the North to include Muslims throughout the federation.

It is from these roots that the Sultan derived his present moral authority on matters of Islam in Nigeria. In all these functions and positions, the Sultan is deputized by the Shehu of Borno, then followed by the Emir of Gwandu, then of Kano and so on.

So the decision of some Emirs to announce the moon sighting independent of the Sultan can be seen as a reincarnation of their jurisdiction during the pre-colonial era, which is supported by the fact that the authority of the Sultan over Nigerian Muslims today is simply moral, not political. When authority is spoken of in terms of rights, one cannot help but conclude that they have the right to do so.

However, a judicious mind will not fail to discern that sometimes exercising a right may not be in the best interest of it's owner. He lends it to someone, if he is wise, in order to reclaim it with profit in the long run. In my view, this is just one of those times.

It is in the best interest of Islam and the Emirs themselves to be seen to speak with one authority, in this case to follow the ruling of the Sultan. Unity is a fundamental principle of Islam. It does not make any sense, no matter the level of disagreement, for different emirates in the same country to observe Ramadan and the Eid on different days in the 21st Cemtury. It was possible under the Sokoto Caliphate only because of the absence of effective means of communication. In fact the entire idea of the Caliphate being a loose federation was a child of necessity. If Danfodio had cars, planes, tarred roads, emails, and telephones in addition to the military hardware that we have these days, he would have adopted a system that accords the centre of the Caliphate greater power. It was just impossible for the ordinary Fulani man he was to effectively administer a territory so vast as the Sokoto Caliphate directly from the centre. He understood his limitations and abided by them. May God bless him!

Today we live in an environment where not only Nigeria but also the whole world is on the verge of becoming a small village. Muslims all over the country, nay, throughout the world, are increasingly becoming aware of happenings around the globe with great ease that was never contemplated by their ancestors. The communication gaps, geographical challenges and military handicaps that allowed the Emirs their independence in the days of the Caliphate have ceased to exist. In their place, a fused community of Muslims stretching from Sokoto to the Atlantic has emerged with a moral leadership that is no longer flat but hierarchical with the Sultan at the top. Nigerians have become used to that notion. Reverting to the olden pre-colonial order brings some discomfort amongst us – the followers.

The revolt especially is coming at a time when the unity among the traditional rulers in the country is needed most. Security is fast deteriorating; discontent among us – the masses – is at record high; yet, belief that the traditional rulers can fix some of the problems, despite their financial and political limitations, is prevalent. A crack in their ranks at this time would certainly be ominous.

So far we have discussed the political aspect of the problem. The religious one is more contentious. While the Sultan is working hard to see that Nigerian Muslims – from both North and South – unite in matters of their religion, there is a tremendous pressure on him and the Emirs that is coming from some ulama who want the status quo to be maintained. On the other when it comes to moon sighting Such ulama do not give a hoot if Northern Nigerian Muslims always find themselves on one side and the rest of the world. This cannot just be correct. The moon is one, whether in Nigeria or elsewhere. There cannot be one crescent for Northern Nigeria and another for the rest of the world. This defies common sense. Period.

The problem we have been having in this part of the world for decades now is that of false testimonies. Since Islam bases the moon sighting on the testimony of two people, Nigerians being what we are, there has never been a shortage of people that would come over claiming to have sighted the crescent even when it cannot there. The Sultan would thus announce the Ramadan moon always 29 for over 40 years, until some Emirs started to revolt a decade ago against what appears to be clearly irrational. When he was enthroned, the present Sultan started to introduce caution into the matter and some sanity started to prevail. It is an irony that another set of Emirs is now crucifying him for doing exactly what we earlier called for.

Some ulama use the secular nature of the country to undermine the moral authority of the Sultan. This started during the Sardauna era, given the cold war that existed then between him – a Sokoto prince – and the then Sultan. This year some of the ulama said the sultan should not be obeyed because he is violating the rules of God: "nobody should be obeyed in violation to God." Such ulama and their groups exert pressure on their emirs who then became tempted to abandon the cause of unity and assert their independence from the Sultan.

I have followed the debate on moon sighting that took place this year on an Internet forum called the Nigerian Muslim Network which went on for some weeks after Sallah. There were testimonies from two reliable people that attempted to verify the reports of moon sightings in Zuru for example. One of them said the person he met was not steady in his testimony. The second, upon his failure to get to a specific person that will categorically affirm that he saw the new moon, passed what I regard as indicting statement about the behaviour of some Muslims in this country.

This is with the benefit of hindsight, though. The damage has already been done. People have sworn by Allah before the Emirs that they have seen the crescent and the Emirs announced that the moon is sighted, only for the rest of the universe to report the contrary. Rather than swim in such murky waters, if I were an Emir, I would prefer to enjoy the comfort of riding on the boat of the Sultan.

The issue of announcing the sighting of the crescent in Islamic tradition, like all collective obligations, is the jurisdiction of the authorities, not the ulama. Some scholars of the past insist that even the person who saw the moon must continue fasting until the authorities declare the moon sighted. This has been the practice throughout history and it is reiterated in recent literature – like the scholastic declarations in Fatawa al-Lajnatul Da'imah Lil Buhuthil 'Ilmiyyah Wal Ifta made by reputable Saudi ulama.

Given the difficulties posed by our widespread dishonesty in the contemporary world, many countries have resorted to supporting human vision in moon sighting with astronomical aids in form of calculations and equipment – like telescopes. The calculations give an idea of the days the moon is most likely to be seen while the telescopes support vision directly.

Despite these attempts there are still controversies in those countries, proving that the issue of moon sighting even in the Information Age is far from simple. The dilemma is that, on the one hand, we lack the honesty to unreservedly implement the prophetic tradition of accepting the testimonies of any two “trustworthy” people. Where people are many, knowing who is reliable becomes difficult. On the other, scientific methods themselves cannot be totally – 100 per cent – faultless.

In Nigeria, the Sultan is trying to draw his conclusions from various sources, including common sense. His task can only be made more difficult when other royal fathers decide to go their own ways.

Lastly, we must not forget that Sallah is not only for the Muslims. It is one of our public holidays and the nation can declare it only once. The need for harmony is therefore more imperative. Supporting the Sultan, from the foregoing, will definitely take us closer to the solution, which we hope to arrive at one day. Dissent can only take us backwards, perhaps centuries ago, when we have the capacity to leave that to our ancestors.

Bauchi
17 October 2011

POSTSCRIPT
Dear Readers,

I think I will chip in some points at this moment. First, I appeal to all of us to please calm down and dialogue gently in a cool manner. I have realized for a decade now that whenever the issue of moon sighting is brought up on this page and other fora tempers would easily rise and we quickly forget that we are dialoguing. Softly, softly, please. I believe we will one day get over this problem, but only when we dialogue intelligently.

Two. Whether it appeals to our egalitarian mindset or not, Islam has apportioned responsibilities to various categories of people. Obedience is for the ordinary followers, like me. If it is announced that the moon Is sighted, we follow. Some things are for the ulama, in this case educating people on the guidelines of moon sighting in Islam from what they understand to be authentic. Then rulers, no matter their age, moral standing or the type of seat they occupy, are saddled with the hard task of issuing directives regarding collective obligations like this one. When do we start fasting and when do we observe Eid is determined by their announcement or that of a body or person they delegated it to. This has been the practice throughout the history of Islam and I appeal to us to please abide by it. Islam is not politics. In no country would any Malam be allowed to announce the commencement or end of fasting, unless he is delegated by the ruler. I just cannot understand why we in Nigeria - and now our sister country Niger - are choosing to be different. Of course we all trust our local Imams more than our leaders because their spiritual domain is much easier to handle than that of a ruler.

Three. I do not agree that logic is out of the question here. Logic is very much of it because we are discussing a phenomenon that is both natural and physical. Let us not bring to Islam the dogmatic attitude that destroyed the Church in Europe. The human mind will always repel any illogicality in the physical world, no matter it's desire to believe it. That mind will continue to probe it until it finds the solution. Brothers, please let us open our minds. It is really illogical for a moon to be sighted in Nigeria alone, and not even in countries behind it with several hours or even days.. This is possible only in two cases:

It is either sometimes the sightings are false, as the many reports that reach the Emirs and are dropped, or they are actually true, like the one our brothers have reported in Tambuwal, Zuru, Yauri, Birnin Kebbi, etc. If what they have seen is actually a moon, then i strongly suspect that it must be an old one that was yet to go into hiding. It just can't be new moon! That is why I titled my first essay on moon sighting on this page in 2000 or so "Nigeria is Sighting the Wrong Moon." There is just no way the crescent would be seen today and then it dissppears thereafter to be seen again only two days later... It is just impossible. The ulama and astronimers know very well that a hiding of the old moon for at least a day precedes the emergence of a new moon. This is there in virtually all books of tafsir. That is the reason behind the old and prevailing belief that the crescent cannot be sighted in the western horizon on the day the moon was seen in the East in the morning. And science has confirmed this. There cannot be a day between morning and evening. Without a night? Come on my brothers!

Please let us investigate this physical phenomenon deeply and openly. We must be wrong somewhere. Otherwise the world is laughing at us. Agreed our noble Prophet has said we should start fasting and end it with the sighting of the new moon. By now this is common knowledge.

Finally comes the issue of process. When the sighting is wrong, there will always be a controversy even if we have the best process in place. May God reward both Dr. Gwandu and the Sultan and bless them. Both do not see the moon themselves but rely on the news to reach them from the bottom and then take a decision. But we may be feeding them with the wrong information as I explained above. I dont believe that the problem is with any of them. It is right here, where we are, at the bottom, where we sight the 'moon'.

The first step is to get our science of the moon right before the next outing. When we are clear about what we should sight, then it will be easy to arrive at a process of adopting any report that will lead to an announcement that does not put us at odd with the rest of the world. And to know the science, logic is inevitable.
There is the strong need

Discourse 309 Northerners (3)

Discourse 309
By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde

Poor Northerners! (3)

(Continued from last week)


There are also those who have never moderated on the partisan propaganda of the First Republic. Mostly in the Southwest, they perceive their region as still in opposition. A lot of lies were written during that period against northerners, the Balewa regime and whoever was in speaking terms with it even among citizens of the Southwest. This much has been admitted in the contributions to the ongoing debate between supporters of late Samuel Akintola and those of late Obafemi Awolowo on the internet. This propaganda polluted the minds of many Southerners with the hatred that eventually brought about the coup that ousted that Republic. Unfortunately, despite the demise of the Republic these old political viruses have replicated their DNA in the genomes of many youths and the tradition continues unabated. They continue to inject that venom into the minds of their youths, telling them about the peculiarities of their ‘race’ and the evil of their principal enemy, the North. These youths would spend their adult life as lecturers, journalists, politicians and businessmen unable to see themselves as Nigerians.

That was the point made by Sanusi Lamido Sanusi when he was invited to speak at a book launch by one of them a year ago. I doubt if his message that Nigerians of his age should be allowed to be Nigerians rather than northerners or southerners was well received by the audience at that event. Every act and every candidate must be for us or against us. I have been following the debate over the approval of Buhari by Pastor Tunde Bakare among members of the Save Nigeria Group. The most adamant opponent of Bakare’s endorsement in the exchange was Dayo Ogunlana. He wrote Egbon Sowumumi saying, “Don’t forget that Buhari has his own k-leg too. He is too tribalistic. I doubt if he has programs that will be of benefit to us in the southwest. He has no soft spot for us in the S/W.” There you are. The urge to return the Yoruba ‘race’ back to the old politics of ethnicity, away from mainstream politics, is strong among many. They hide behind the corruption of Obasanjo and the PDP and interpret the recent successes of AC as an signal that the Southwest is finally regaining its regional consciousness.

Then there is the partition politics of the so-called Sovereign National Conference (SNC). I will discuss its merits and demerits in a later article. Here, I will confine myself to saying that proponents of the conference have always viewed the North as an impediment to the success of their agenda. That assumption may be wrong. Rather than argue with them, I suggest that they come over and conduct an opinion poll among northerners to find out the level of support they may have here. The poll must give three options: a strong centre, as it is now; a lose federation with a weak centre; and partitioning of the country into smaller independent states. I am ready to support whatever would be the outcome of the poll and work hard towards its achievement. I will even switch to supporting a partition once the result of such a poll prefers that. The result of the poll would be a strong argument that will convince many other unionists. Without it, however, I remain committed to one Nigeria.

I have mentioned the aggravated case of the northern Muslim when religion is conscripted to serve political ends in the country. Then, many of his Christian counterparts, will join in the smear and missile hauling against him. The fact is that under such circumstance, the northern Christian is only used as a tool to support the various agenda we described above. The identity of the so-called Middle Belt was reinvented by Obasanjo to divide the North and serve his interest during his first term. He left office without doing anything better for the Middle Belt than the rest of the North. He cancelled the contract for dredging River Niger and Benue immediately he assumed power in 1999. Even now under Jonathan the dredging has stopped, as indicated by the recent appeal for it's resumption by a Lokoja traditional titleholder to the Senate President. In the end, when the chips are down, such Middlebelters suffer from the same injustice, as do the northern Muslims. When it comes to the Niger Delta, TY Danjuma is bombarded as a northerner for declaring profits worth billions of dollars from ‘his’ oil blocks. But when it comes to the power, he is a Christian who would be instigated to support the “Christian” south, like in the ongoing opportunistic power struggle to win the Presidency in 2011 for Goodluck Jonathan.

The Jonathan campaign is unfortunately taking that turn. Emphasizing his minority identity is unwarranted if his intention were to capture the support of every part of the country. He did not need to be so dishonest to dispute the existence of zoning since it is there in Section 7 of the PDP constitution and currently in practice. Otherwise, why aren’t there PDP aspirants from the Southwest, for example? Its obviously because Obasanjo has just spent eight years. Jonathan has not proved to be clever at all. He could not even outsmart his opponents by conceding that he will return the PDP ticket to the North, anywhere in the North, in 2015. No. He is bulldozing his way with the might of incumbency. His supporters among southern politicians know this. That is why in spite of thousands of southerners who are more competent than Jonathan, they would rather cling to him. Who can claim that the Yoruba ‘race’ and the Igbo ‘nation’ are bereft of a better person than Jonathan? Incumbency is the answer. As the President, he has the resources of state at his disposal. He can dish out money. He will rig elections. And he will allow his people to loot the treasury, a motive encapsulated in the ambiguous language of ‘our interest’. If free and fair elections were entrenched in our political culture, it would be difficult for any incumbent to win such unconditional support.

Ironically, belief in incumbency, I must hasten to point out, is not limited to supporters of Jonathan in the South. Northerners in the PDP who are opposed to Jonathan are staunch believers in incumbency too. Adamu Ciroma it was who told Nigerians opposed to the re-election of Obasanjo in 2003 that PDP couldn’t be defeated by virtue of its incumbency. “In 1999, we were not defeated before we came to power, how can we be defeated when we are in power?” he reminded his opponents.

The crisis in PDP is over incumbency. It did not have to be shared by every northerner. Unfortunately, the common northerner has to again be brought in the line of fire before the equation could square up. Point a finger at him and many in the South would be eager to rally around you, by instinct, training or design. And that is when people like me take offence. Poor Northerners. Come rain, come shine, as a group, they must be fired at.

From the foregoing, I think I have made my point clear that the allegations labelled against northerners are really unfounded; if northerners have committed a sin, others have not proved to be saints. In these articles, the ordinary Northerner will find sufficient explanation on the roots of his disparagement. If he is hit by any missile again, as he would surely be, he can now say where it is coming from and why. I hope the victim of these wild accusations and unjust generalizations will continue to ignore them, as he has constantly done. He must not forget that much of these baseless allegations are coming from people who have never visited the North or lived among its people, even though their emails do carry “Sent From My Blackberry MTN” signature.

For those who deliberately do so to vent their anger on a section of the Nigerian population, they must realize that there is a growing number of Nigerians among their kinsmen who are desirous of the unity and progress of this country. To the latter I wish every well-meaning Nigerian would extend his hand of love and support. One day, together we shall leave behind the old Nigeria of religious bigotry and ethnic chauvinism to embrace the new one of love, unity and progress. Then, there will be no North, East or West, but a Nigeria ready to embrace the tenets of civilization, of respect to humanity and transparency in governance. This is the venture in which we must partake with perseverance despite the reluctance of retrogressive forces.

I must confess that this series was difficult to write because of the conscious effort to avoid hurting the feelings of many of my readers. Its length, however, was informed by the desire to forsake brevity for understanding. If you are among progressive Nigerians, you would not find much of its contents hurtful. However, if you are among those who propagate hate, please take delight, as usual, in writing a blistering rejoinder to serve your agenda. I will, however, welcome with equanimity both the praise of the companion and the scold of the rival. The former I receive with caution, the latter with pity.

(Concluded)

Tilde,
20 October 2010

Email: aliyutilde@yahoo.com

Blog: http://fridaydiscourse.blogspot.com

Arewa, In Search of Another Awoniyi

Arewa, in Search of another Awoniyi
aliyutilde@yahoo.com


Last Saturday 15 December 2007, Chief Sunday Awoniyi, the late Chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), was given a befitting burial at his home town, Mopa. The burial, which I attended, has already been elaborately covered by various newspapers. I will not, therefore, dwell on it here; rather, I will turn my attention to considerations which the organization he bequeathed needs to take in its search for a new leader.

In Awoniyi, the Last Sardauna, just as the Secretary of the organization also said, we expressed the fear that finding someone like Awoniyi will be very difficult in the light of his multiple identities, experience, sincerity, vision, hard work and humility. The task is made more difficult with the nature of ACF. If it were a monarchy, it would have been a matter of appointing an heir apparent. If it were a constitutional government, it would have just been a matter of swearing in his deputy instantly. If it were a business company, the seat would be declared vacant and a new appointment made through adverts or selection from existing general managers. We are confronted with the hard fact that ACF is not a monarchy, a republican government or a business company.

Still, the task would be easy were ACF a tribal organization like Afenifere or Ohaneze because of the homogenous composition of their followers. These organizations are exclusive preserves of members of their tribes. Contrarily, ACF pursues the interest of the diverse peoples of the North, a region inhabited by more than 400 tribes, each with a distinct language, culture and other micro-identities, in addition to the wider interest of the country. The only common thing which northerners share is a history of interaction largely characterized by conquests and migrations in the pre-colonial times and a common regional government for half a century between 1914 and 1967. It is this variety of tribes, languages, religions, geography, history and inevitably politics that makes the North unique and at the same time difficult for any leader to handle comfortably. Its first and only Premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello, was for twelve years always preoccupied with how to keep the region together in peace while at the same time pursuing the task of bridging the fifty year developmental gap between it and the other two regions. But even at the time of his brutal assassination in 1966, the problem posed by its diversity existed, and does so to date.

The cultural variety of the North which makes it difficult to control is at the same time a source of its strength were it to be utilized creatively. In nature, variety is an asset and an assurance for continuity of species. That is why nature created varieties of every plant and animal species, each with its shared and distinct adaptive capacities. In times of difficulty especially a choice could be made out of the rich pool of genes, abilities and skills.

It is like playing golf. A player who carries only one club (the equivalent of hockey sticks) can hardly go beyond the T-box. After taking his first shot, he is immediately challenged by the rough, bunker, hazard, trees or even a plain fairway that requires him to play a specific distance to the hole. He needs different clubs to meet these challenges. That is why he is allowed to carry up to fourteen different clubs in his bag, each with its distinct characteristics in terms of the loft he can attain and the distance he can cover with it. His success will then depend on knowing which club to use and how to use it whenever he is challenged by an obstacle. Therefore, whenever I look at the North I become gladdened by the multiplicity of its people because it accords it the tools it needs to meet various challenges on our path of nationhood in the same way as the variety of clubs accords the golfer the capacity to get out of various troubles in his game.

The task of ACF is not only to ensure sufficient harmony among the various peoples in its domain but to also get them work as a team. Here, the analogy with golf is more striking. Some golfers are better at driving, some in short game, and some in putting. I wish a team in a Ryder Cup tour would have players who, on the one hand, have mastered the power game like Moe Norman, Ben Hogan, Lee Trevio, Tom Weiskopf, Tom Purtzer, Johnny Miller and Tiger Woods, and, on the other, the best putters like George Archer, Ben Crenshaw, Dave Stockton, Loren Roberts, Bob Charles, Brad Faxon and Greg Norman. The North is a team that has these best players. The major task of ACF is getting such players to play as a team in order to facilitate its progress instead of allowing its diversity to become an impediment.

Such teamwork is more imperative in a democracy. Politicians will do whatever it takes to gain support. To win the Presidency in Nigeria, for example, requires support from every region. Here the North becomes easily vulnerable if it does not have the leadership that will prevent politicians from exploiting its differences to play the divide and rule game. That is why ACF emerged during the first tenure of Obasanjo, and not earlier. When the dictator realized that the unity of the North – with nineteen out of the thirty-six states – will constitute a clog in his wheel of dictatorship, he chose, right from the beginning of his administration, to divide it by pitching its smaller groups against the dominant ones through appointments, sacking military officers from the far North, religious and ethnic crisis, and so on. This is not to mention the atrocities of the terrorist group, Oodua Peoples’ Congress, which under the last dictator was given the license to kill northerners and Igbo with impunity. An elaborate media campaign to demonize the North was also staged. We had to come out and start firing salvos in self defense. The North was pushed to the position of an opposition for the first time in the history of Nigeria.

The divide and rule strategy worked but for a while. The North soon realized its vulnerability for the second time – the first was in 1966 – and came together to form ACF. The dictator had to rig elections shamelessly to remain in power in 2003. With the leadership of notable people like Awoniyi, peace was restored to the region which would have otherwise been engrossed in self-destruction. Finally, when he tried to become a life President through his third term bid, ACF along with other forces in the forefront gave a humiliating defeat to the dictator.

Outside forces aside, the North also needs to guard against its own internal elements that are ever ready to use the region to further their political ambition. In 2002, we have seen the desperate maneuvers of some politicians to get ACF to endorse them or at least intervene in their favor by persuading other aspirants to abandon their aspiration. There are also internal divisive forces of religion and history. The Muslims-Christian divide became sharper especially with the introduction of shariah which was used to foment disturbances in various cities, causing the deaths of thousands and large scale destruction of property. There is the long standing misconception among some groups that they have for long been dominated by others. All these factors tend to divide, rather than unite the North and ensure the peaceful coexistence of its people.

More difficult than the aforesaid is the political and administrative division of the region into constitutionally independent states. Since 1967 when the North was disbanded, the task of ensuring its unity and common good was deposited in the hands of its governors. Recent developments, however, has proved that they should not be entrusted with such role any longer, hence the emergence of ACF, which many of them did not take kindly.
Getting the governors to work in tandem for the peaceful coexistence of the region and its progress has proved very difficult in the past eight years for many reasons. Many of the governors were competing with one another to win the favor of the former dictator and become his heir apparent. They would not also like a father-like organization that will suggest to them where to belong or what to do with the resources of their state. Power got so much into their brains that they felt they must have total control over everybody and everything under their domain. That was why late Awoniyi had to go round all the nineteen northern states to assure their governors that ACF has no political ambition; it will not put its weight behind any candidate; it will, as it did in 2003, only define the parameters which people should use in choosing candidates during elections.

Also, getting the governors to concentrate on tackling the common problems of the region like education, health and agriculture meant interfering with the looting plans that many of them hatched. That was a dictation they were not ready to jot down from anyone. I will cite just one example here. The ACF once formed a committee after receiving a report of how backward the North still is educationally. It was composed of some distinguished former vice-chancellors from the region. Their task was to visit these governors – who do not even qualify to be their students – and plead with them to pay more attention to education. Most of them were paying N1,500.00 annually as scholarship before we lambasted them in this column. The first governor the committee visited, a governor in the north-central, kept them waiting for over four hours, only to shoot them, point blank, with a bullet of insult. What is this fuss about education, he queried them. Education is not my priority, he added bluntly. My priority, he continued, is electrification and roads. After that shocking disappointment, the elder statesmen decided to leave the chaps alone.

To make things difficult for ACF, it is not a rich organization. It does not run a business nor own any asset. It is run by volunteers, many of them retirees, who believe in its objectives. The governors, on the other hand, are loaded. Each of them has at his disposal over N60billion annually which he had the constitutional immunity to squander, in collaboration with his houses of assembly and local government chairmen. Now, given the parasitic nature of region’s elite and high poverty level of its masses, ACF is in no doubt as to who owns loyalty. I will not be surprised if ACF itself depends on the cash backing of governors to meet many of its financial requirements. The piper cannot dictate the tune.

Finally, the national challenge to keep this country united and peaceful is there resting on the shoulders of the ACF. The history of Nigeria shows that unscrupulous people from other regions are quick to cash on any instability in the North to generate a national crisis. The political instability of the 1960s led to the assassination of prominent northern politicians and their allies and, as a consequence, the Biafra cessation and protracted civil war. Just before the Kaduna Shariah crisis, Ojukwu, the former Biafran leader was reported to have addressed a congregation of Christians in a Church in Kaduna. He said the Igbo sympathize with Northern Christians for the situation they find themselves and assured them of Igbo support in case of any eventuality. These are shocking facts reported by dailies and still available to any researcher. Within days, Kaduna was engulfed in flames, leaving thousands dead.

If the effect of such crises would be limited to the North, things would have been less worrying. However, they affect other regions as well because their people living in the North get affected too, invariably, and you have a backlash in which northerners, regardless of their religion or ethnic group, are killed in those regions. Pastors of northern origin working in churches in the East were not spared. We have seen this occur time without number. That is why I believe so much in working for the unity of the North because it amounts to working for the unity of this country. I fail to see such effort as pursuing parochial sectional interest as some pseudo-nationalist would quickly allege. The imperative on ground contradicts their utopian stand. I will not concede that I am less patriotic than they are; the only difference between us is that while I vividly see peace through understanding our differences they claim to see it through sweeping them under the carpet.

These are the considerations which I believe the North must give in its bid to find a successor to the last Sardauna. The composition of ACF is unique, the challenges many, the resources little, the options few, and the task excruciating. In the wide consultations that are going, I beg that these considerations be given much weight because when the task is defined the right person to shoulder it is easier to find. If you have a trailer-load of goods, you do not hire a pick-up van; you go for the trailer that does not only have the room but also the engine capacity to convey it.

In the apparent, leaders of the organization must fight against the maneuvers of those ambitious leaders who would like to install one of their stooges. The governors will definitely prefer someone they can juggle with. Our political megaweights – Yar’adua, Babangida, Buhari and Atiku – will each be glad to have someone close to him as Chairman of ACF. The challenge before the organization is to get someone who belongs to none of these camps.

The organization needs someone – preferably outside the major tribes – who shares the vision of our common good, experienced, hardworking and sincere. He must be independent minded and humble at the same time. Since ACF can only command moral authority, its chairman should be someone who our minorities will accept and our majorities respect. We need another Awoniyi. I wish we could find one.

Awoniyi: The Last Sardauna

Awoniyi, The Last Sardauna
aliyutilde@yahoo.com


It was an early Saturday morning. We met him at Sheraton Hotel from where we drove to his home town, Mopa, to attend his 70th birthday anniversary. The entourage consisted of two former Heads of State, Generals Yakubu Gowon and Muhammadu Buhari, a friend – Adamu Adamu – and many others. That was the first time I saw Chief Sunday Awoniyi. It was a wonderful occasion. Few people are fortunate to be recognized by their people as was Chief Awoniyi that day. The Church ceremony which both Adamu and I attended for curiosity was well conducted. The speeches were well articulated. The hymns were well composed and their beautiful melodies lingered in my memory for days to come. We saw the contribution he made to his community. I could only wish we were all like him.
We returned to Kaduna the same day. I was to meet him again at the Government House in Bauchi when he was going round to meet with northern governors and explaining to them that the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) was not a threat to their ambitions for power. The guys were so power drunk and hysteric of any grouping. As usual, it’s now history. As I was introduced to him at the lodge he rose and shook my hands. “Oh, Tilde the writer,” he exclaimed. “Well done, well done.” I do not need to say that I was delighted as anyone in my position would be. My delight was not for the praise which I was accustomed to already but for the fact that someone at the top, at the very apex of northern political hierarchy was appreciative of our little effort to save the region both from itself and from Obasanjo’s machinations.
That was not the last time. During the battle for third term, in which he served as one of the grand commanders, he will often call, after reading any of my writings on the matter, shouting at the top of his voice, “Well done, well done. That was a beautiful piece. You – the younger generation – are doing a very good job. Keep it up.” I never gave him my phone number. He took the pain to collect it from my then Editor in Chief, Mr. Sam Ndah Isaiah (another “Awoniyi” in the making).
Lastly, during last Sallah, he sent me a text message which even then I believed was sent to many others whom he wanted to encourage. “Barka da Sallah,” he opened the message, then followed it with this forceful advice: “PLEASE DON’T give up on this potentially great but thoroughly misused country. It’s a luxury we cannot afford. Awoniyi.a`,”
I am not aware of another Nigerian who has shown this degree of commitment to the cause of this country. Here was someone at 75, one of the best whom the country could produce, calling on others purposely to encourage them, taking the pain of writing them text messages, without any motive other than salvaging his country. He was not eying for any office. He was not fighting anyone. His goal was simple: People should not give up. They must not. The potential of the country remains great despite the ongoing abuse. More importantly, the little effort made by individuals regardless of age cannot be dispensed with – in his opinion.
Such little things are what our leaders miss, again and again. Few would recognize the efforts of others, neither of their generation, nor ours. They are waiting for us to rush and register as their servants, a position they consider a favour to us. For the past eight years of my writing career, only three other people came close to Awoniyi in this regard: Alhaji Magaji Dambatta, Dr. Lema Jibrilu, and the present Emir of Dutse, His Royal Highness, Alhaji Nuhu Sanusi.
Of all the disciples of Sardauna, Awoniyi could be considered as the most outstanding. He has remained on the course of his mentor until the last moment. In the struggle for a united North within the context of a great Nigeria, Awoniyi never abandoned his post even when the Arewa army was divided by geography, religion and ethnicity. He did not kill the dream of Sardauna by listening to those who wanted him to assert his Yoruba and Christian identity first. To them he eloquently replied: “Who can be more Yoruba than Awoniyi, and who can be more Christian than Sunday?” They were, typically, accusing him of promoting the cause of Hausa-Fulani.
Unquestionably, he was the last Sardauna. The North must rise to salute this truly civilized Nigerian who has proved impervious to the divisive influence of both ethnicity and religion. It must immortalize him, from Sokoto to Otukpo, from Borno to Ilorin.
ACF could not have found a better leader at a time when the prophets of hate were busy tearing the region apart, breaking its heart, spilling its blood and destroying its property. Awoniyi was a rallying point who restored order in the house. Amidst the battle, he raised the flag of oneness and summoned us to his fort and, behold, the battlefield went quiet. Today, the noise about the Middlebelt is silent; the Shariah controversy is gone; and, through his resolve, the quarrel for the position of President through manipulating ACF has died a natural death. We were guided by his vision. Sardauna could not have done better.
Now that he is gone, the task of finding another all-embracing leader will be one of the greatest challenges before the ACF. The organization is not blind to this fact. Its Secretary, Col. Hamidu Ali (rtd) had this confession to make: “Certainly, it's a big gap that will be created by his absence. I hope we'll gather ourselves together, but certainly we cannot replace him, I must confess. We hope we'll get people who will work as hard. Honestly, we are in a state of shock.”As the late Haruna Uji would put it in Balaraba, if it can find a northerner, he may not be middlebeltan; if he is a middlebeltan, he may not Christian; if he is Christian, he may not be Yoruba; if he a Yoruba, he may not be the Aro of Mopa; if he is Aro of Mopa, he can never be Chief Sunday Awoniyi!
If ACF was not there to prepare a grande funeral for Sardauna of Sokoto, it now has the opportunity to prepare one for his disciple, the Sardauna of Arewa and Aro of Mopa. To the occasion, the organization must summon all its dignitaries, emirs, chiefs, governors, commoners, everyone –big and small. Let us all match to Mopa in a show of solidarity that was never exhibited to any leader before. This is the last tribute we can pay to a man who to the last moment was both Danladi, as named by the Sardauna, and Sunday as named by his parents. Let him be buried at a personal cemetery that will later be transformed into a centre that will depict his vision of a united North and a great progressive Nigeria. ACF must not wait for the Federal Government to do this, though it is a project that will gladly receive its contribution and blessing.
I owe no apology for the above northern rendering of his portrait. He was among the few that served as symbols of what the first leadership of the North represented. That leadership differed sharply from the ones we have today. It was an embodiment of transparency, hard work, honesty, purpose and service. This was the gospel preached by Awoniyi; they were the values he learnt from the Sardauna and the ideals which he stood for until his death. Through his dedication and speeches we caught a glimpse of the personality and vision of Ahmadu Bello. In 2006, he delivered a lecture on his mentor whom he described in the following words:
“He was a workaholic. He loved the country and the people. And his concentration on the North, to bring up the North quickly, was his way of working for the unity of the country, because he believed that the North must be got into a position of competitive parity with the rest of the country if there was going to be peace and unity He had no moment for himself. It was work, work, work.
“He respected human beings, no matter your origin and your religion. He trusted you as an individual not as somebody who belonged to a certain religion or to a certain place where their politics at that moment happened to differ from his own politics. I was the Secretary to the Executive Council of Northern Nigeria. I wouldn’t normally have qualified if it was on the basis of my religion, my tribe or my ethnicity. He did not care. He just demanded your quality. Your talent was what mattered to him.”
If the country had lived to the above ideals, it would have been great. However, its leaders were to work in a completely opposite direction. These were the ideals that Awoniyi intended to sell to the People’s Democratic Party after fifteen years of military dictatorship. To his disappointment, the person he helped to become the President under its auspices turned his back and romanced his ego. With the cooperation of other party members, Obasanjo transparently rigged out Awoniyi from becoming the Chairman of the party. Yet, he was to pay him a tribute after his death as a man whose place in “Nigerian politics and development as a civil servant, politician and patriot will be very difficult to fill.” Machiavelli was right. The dead poses no threat to us, nor does the past; so we can afford to speak truly about both without constraint.
I salute the sage that who was good for Nigeria, but not good enough for the PDP power regiment! What an irony! Read this tribute from the PDP federal government: “He was a man who demonstrated passion and great zeal in the political formation of modern day Nigeria. During the time he served as the Secretary to the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the late statesman was known to have worked for policies and programmes which enhanced the unity and progress of this country. The government, however, takes consolation in the fact that Chief Awoniyi did not die in vain as his works both as administrator and as a political leader would continue to serve as guide and directional map for continued unity and peace in this country.”
And now the party that failed to appoint him its chairman, in the words of its National Publicity Secretary: "Chief Sunday Awoniyi's death has created a vacuum that no one can replace. It is era that is gradually winding down. He was a politician of long standing who set examples for many politicians and he paid his dues in politics. The younger politicians are following his footsteps and it is unfortunate that he died when the party was preparing for its national convention. The party is losing its founding members and the party mourns his death." Vacuum ke! Long standing ke! Footsteps ke! Loss ke! Unfortunate ke! The PDP still has a long way to go. The journey ahead of it is as long as the difference between its first Board of Trustees Chairman – Awoniyi – and Obasanjo, the present BOT Chairman. That difference, I must be bold to mention, is like the distance between heaven and earth.
Finally, I completely agree with Atiku when he said, "I believe that there is no better tribute we can pay to this great son of Nigeria than for all patriots to rededicate themselves to the service of our country.” However, it is a call that few can answer because everybody is busy making that call at the top of his voice. If we had allowed one person to make it – and that person must have the locus standi to do so, someone like Awoniyi – while we remain attentive, we would have risen to the occasion. But as our eyes are blinded by self-aggrandizement and our ears deafened by the encompassing cloud hypocrisy, few people will hearken to it.
To the Last Sardauna I pay my tribute, to Awoniyi I give my salute, and to his family I convey my condolence. Death is inevitable, by sword or by otherwise, as al-Mutanabbi would say. “Take heart in his honour,” the poet once advised Banu Is’haq, “certainly, great (people) endure great things.” Till we meet at his burial.

Discourse 180 The North in Search of Identity

Monday Discourse (180)

North: In Search for Identity

The North is in search of identity. As a writer, I must confess that this is one of the articles I found most difficult to write for two reasons. One is the crisis of nomenclature – I mean the difficulty in finding names that will suit the various groups one is referring to or a common feature with which to identify them. In academic literature there is enough space for a writer to indulge in definitions and probe specifics. In popular writings, however, we are limited by space and impatience of readers, most of whom would like the language to resemble their daily vocabulary as much as possible. If the North were unanimous about its goals, it would have been pardonable to refer everybody in the North as a Northerner. But where its people differ in their goals differ and the acrimony between them is increasing by the day, and the word Northerner is gradually being used to stereotype the so-called Hausa-Fulani, blanket application of the can only be done cautiously and out of necessity, especially when some people, though bona fide members of the region, prefer to be called something else.
This issue arose at Hill Station Hotel, Jos, when the management of Thisday was conducting its nationwide tour in 2000. When Nduka was using the word northerners before the gathering of its readers, the MD of PRTV, Jonathan, who was the Chairman of the occasion immediately took an exception to people like him called northerners. They have their identity, he said, which they want to be identified with. It was odd because when I was given the chance to speak later on, I asked about the properties of that identity and the new name that they want the world to be called them with. To my surprise, there was no answer. So if I address Jonathan as a northerner, he will certainly be offended. I wish people like him had another name, for that will ease the crisis of definition we often encounter in popular literature.
One is therefore tempted to categorize northerners into Hausa-Fulani and minorities. But here also two difficulties are encountered. One, the Hausa-Fulani do not like to be referred to as Hausa-Fulani partially because the amalgam does not recognize the existence of many small tribes whose people still want to retain their identity. Some of the groups against which such injustice is done include very large ones like the Kanuri, Nupe, Gwari, who match the Hausas and the Fulani in everything, including statehood and scholarship, past and present.
Then there are smaller groups within each sub-region. In the area covered by ancient Borno alone, Abdullahi Mahadi has mentioned, among others, Shuwa Arabs, Kanuri, Ngizim, Bolewa, Karekare, Sura, Tuareg, Marghi, Chibok, Bata, Bura, Pabir, Kobochi, Falli, Tera, Mandara, Gamergu, Musgu, Bana, Banana, Kulung, Lame, Mobar, Wula, Bade, Manga, Kanembu, Koyam, Kotoko, etc. Lumping most of these groups with Hausa-Fulani does not reflect justice in any form. It is important to mention this such that protagonist of sovereign national conference who cannot extricate themselves from the primitive stronghold of ethnicity will know that while the Yoruba will be eligible to only one delegate since they represent only one ethnic group, the so-called Hausa Fulani will be sending as many as 150 delegates.
Two, I have not met any Hausa or Fulani that approves the term ‘Hausa-Fulani.’ I have many Hausa friends who do not like to be called Fulani, and vice-versa. In fact, the term Hausa Fulani itself is Biafran in origin, designed to divide the North by attempting to isolate the Hausa and the Fulani from other groups in the region. So using the term, as we are sometimes compelled to do in popular literature, is playing into the hands of secessionist and other forces of anarchy.
It is important to note that the crisis of identity has arisen from four angles. One of them is the effort to meet the increasing demand of integration in Nigerian politics. It is easier to collect people with the same cultural tendencies into one, though they may not be speaking the same language. That is exactly the dilemma of neo-Middle Belt protagonists. They can only cling to the name of a region in the absence of any convincingly unifying factor in history or culture.
The second reason is the attempt by Yoruba and Ibo scholars to view the North the way their regions are, with a single dominant group, which actually does not exist over here. Titrate the blood of Sardauna, for example, and you will find that he is half Mumuye and half Fulani. Check the origins of leaders of the former Northern civil service, hardly will the Fulani and the Hausa make 20%.
The third, as we said earlier, is the desire to demonise a section of the North and pitch others against it. This campaign has succeeded and today we find it at the root of every recent ethno-religious crisis.
The fourth is the convenience it provides to use others as their scapegoats. When a crop of elite fail to provide their people with a purposeful leadership, it is clever to create an enemy to whom the attention the people will be diverted. Behind the ensuing culture of hate, the elite can hide his dishonesty and incompetence.
On the other hand, I find the word minority is very unsuitable. How can we describe Mumuye, Jukun, Tiv, Idoma (Oh Mary!), Igala and Igbira as minorities when, one, we have failed, as shown above, to establish a consensus on what constitutes the majority. Two, the term is denigrating; it locates the existence of so-called groups only in reference to the majority. Three, it portends a presupposition of victimization of the group described as minority by the one called majority such that the minority can hide behind their name and perpetrate an atrocity against the majority and yet gain sympathy of the listening public by asserting its minority status. This undue advantage is oppressive to the majority. Four, it misrepresents the balance of power when, as we have on the ground today, all instruments of power lies with the minority or groups sympathetic to it. How can you be a minor and at the same time most powerful? Five, the term minority, like Hausa-Fulani, is divisive and serves the interest of agents of anarchy and disintegration.
The second reason why writing about the North is difficult is the terrible injustice arising from generalization. If we ascribe a certain habit to a group that share nothing but the broad features of language or location, we run the risk of doing injustice to many within the group who do not possess that habit. If someone says northerners are lazy, for example, then are we doing justice to the hardworking farmers and pastoralists who are feeding the nation from their sheer sweat without any government subsidy or machinery?
And what do we say of Southerners who are lazy, like those who refuse to go to schools but simply agitate for more control of oil resources? If northern leadership has held Nigeria back, where do you put Obasanjo, a Yoruba, who will be our longest serving leader and who has nothing to show for his tenure and the massive foreign exchange earned during his time? Has the money been stolen by northerners this time, again? Or if northerners are thieves, where do you place Murtala and Buhari? In the same vein, where do we put Gowon, Awoniyi and my dear Sam Nda Isaiah if we hold that Christians in the Middle Belt are antagonistic to Hausa-Fulani? In fact, where do you place Berom, Afezere, or Angas who are Muslim?
Naming the northerner therefore is as difficult as describing him, though over the years he has earned many bad names and descriptions. After the failure of geography to describe him for us, or to segregate them into majority or minority, we can go further to see whether other disciplines could provide us with a solution.
History and economics are the cousins of geography. To an appreciable extent, history of northern kingdoms and empires has helped to unite its people in some parts of the North. There was Borno and Sokoto Caliphates, two pre-colonial states that dominated the history of what is today termed as the core-North. But while they have provided some common cultural and political platforms for some people, the historical dominance of the two empires is what exactly creates resentments among others. Anyone who answers Kanuri, Hausa and Fulani is regarded by some as a culprit in the historical atrocities committed by the aristocracies of those caliphates and thus he deserves to be killed or enslaved as retribution.
Then the colonialists came adopted policies that more or less extended the style of governance in the Caliphates to areas which did not share that history. The creation of chiefdoms for the purpose of indirect rule in Tiv land is an example. How ironical is it that today blood is being shed by some ‘minority’ community in demand for chiefdoms?
With independence intra-regional politics aggravated the differences and the Sardauna was seen as a modern scion of the Sokoto Caliphate. Sadly, these historical differences were used by others to contribute in the destabilisation of the First Republic. In spite of the demise of that republic, the massacre of the Sardauna and other Northern leaders, and forty years of leadership rendered by people from other ethnic groups, ‘minorities’ and ‘the south’ are still calling for restructuring, despising the very institution – the Military – they employed to oust the First Republic and calling for the return of the regional governments they disbanded.
So our history, except for the first sixty-five years of the last century, has failed to provide the common platform for integration. Let us not forget that it was Lugard who, through his conquests and unification of the North, accorded the Shehu of Borno his first opportunity to watch a durbar mounted by any emir in the defunct Sokoto Caliphate, a fact which Lugard never missed to include in his report to the Home Office in England after he was sworn in as Governor-General.
It is here I find economics a better instrument of integration than geography or history. The North today is unique in the way it is underdeveloped. Oil, the chief culprit, has turned its people lazy, suppressed its potentials, wasted its resources, corrupted its elite and impoverished its inhabitants. I am not aware of any index of development in which the North is faring better than the South. It has surpassed other regions only in all indices of underdevelopment: illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy, name it. That is one spectacle through which the south sees us, a burden which should be shed and left to perish on its own, especially now when our dependency appears irredeemable. I have also not seen a region blessed with selfish leaders as the North. It is here that a government expects an indigene to become an undergraduate with an annual scholarship award of only N1,500.00 and, yet, and return to serve it for thirty-five years. This crime is perpetrated by leaders who received nothing less than the equivalent of N250,000.00 annually during their undergraduate days.
In the politics of underdevelopment, there is no difference between Jukun and Tiv, Hausa and Tarok, or Kanuri and Idoma. The last six years have been especially impoverishing as the federal government deliberately pursues the policy of pauperising the North. Kano, which used to be one of the most important centres of West African commerce, is now replete with abandoned factories and unemployed people, caused essentially by withholding its pubic facilities, especially electricity. What has Obasanjo done, on the other hand, to improve the lot of the Middle Belt since he came to power? Let someone mention a single project.
Instead of uniting to fight against their pauperisation, northerners have chosen to emphasise their differences, leading the region to convulse and become a scene of barbarism. How many lives, for example, have been lost in the clash between Jukun and Tiv in Taraba and Benue states, or between Muslims and Christians in Kaduna, Kano and Jos? In what way does convulsion relieves a victim of his wounds is a puzzle that finds an answer only in the unpersuasive logic of the abject northerner.
In conclusion we can say that the actual reason why we failed to reach a consensus over a common name or why some northerners would not like to be referred to as ‘northerners’ is principally due to the sad economic state of the region. If it were as rich as Kuwait, or, say, Niger Delta, even others will be scrambling to identify with it. Ordinarily, a child will be ashamed to answer his family name only when the family is not successful. Once it is flourishing, he will take pride in identifying with it. Self-rejection is a clear symptom of inferiority and despondency.
To get out of this mess we need to rebuild our economy, not based on the monthly handout of oil revenue but through education, agriculture and mining which must include the exploration of oil in the Chad Basin. It is a goal that can quickly be achieved because the required ingredients – land, labour and market – are within our reach. It is only in the context of a purpose like this that unity can be achieved. Without a goal to push them up or maintain them in a position of potential energy, the gravitational force arising from their differences will pull them down. The only two factors blocking our ascension to glory today are bad governance and mutual hostility. We must find a way of stamping out their causes. If we can get rid of both, we can surely stand on our feet without any support from the central government. Then, in that atmosphere of success and pride, both Jonathan and Tilde will proudly answer their family name: northerners.

Discourse 179 The Burden Called North

Friday Discourse (179)

The Burden Called North

The first thing to learn about Nigeria is the variety that characterise its political geography. In the beginning was Northern and Southern Protectorates. Then three regions were created with the adoption of a federal constitution. Few years into independence a third region, the Midwest, was carved out of the former Western region. Finally, regions were abandoned and the federation became continuously sliced into increasingly diminishing units called states.
Moving from two protectorates to thirty-six states has been a journey of 100 years which involved three phases, each aimed at satisfying the political whim of the most powerful group of the time. The protectorates were desires of the British colonial masters; the regions were the demand of politicians who demanded for greater political participation; and the states are products of agitations at sub-regional levels – largely from minority groups, which have come to represent the most potent political block in post independence Nigeria.
Thus, the country has structurally been responding to for demands of power sharing. But while constitutions and military councils could easily change the political structure of the country in pursuit of unity and development, the minds of Nigerians appear fixated to the old regional nomenclature and taxonomy. People have failed to see the states as actual reference points for political identity. The North and the South, or the North, East and West, continue to define our vision of where we belong to in Nigeria. They have also become convenient chips for people bargaining for power within the context of the power sharing concept. The agitation for a Middle Belt is an effort, in spite of state creation, to find a geographical space that will accommodate the political whims of some minority groups that are intolerant to the concept of sharing a common North.
Our concern here is that North – a region that has been most incapable of liberating itself from the stronghold of history. On the one hand, the amalgam of tribes that form the dominant ethnic group in the region – the so-called Hausa-Fulani and their allies among the minorities – have continued to politically operate within the framework of one North in spite of the structural changes since 1967. Despite the clear signs of cracks in their house, such elite continue to perceive North as an indispensable tool in Nigerian political reality that deserves preservation at all cost. On the other hand, some of the minorities who have always been contemptuous of the unity of the North have failed to do away with the fear of domination by the major groups, again in spite of changes in our political structure that accords them complete freedom of political self-determination and management of resources.
The cracks have recently gone deep. They have culminated in the worst form of violence where the innocent has suffered for no fault of his. He has become a victim of the imprudence of the politicians that hold his future at ransom. Mistrust has taken over the minds of the once peace loving people of the region to the extent that neighbours who have grown together since childhood have been killing one another. They have driven themselves homeless. Towns like Kaduna and Jos are today divided into quarters along ethnic and religious lines. In some instances, the degree of barbarism exhibited by some of the participants in the violence defies the ownership of the slightest measure of civility. I cannot imagine a worst situation even in Rwanda, Somalia, or Sierra Leone.
The violence which engulfed the North can effectively be explained in the light of the above divergence in mission of its people. To ensure their relevance and preservation of their privileges at the national level, the major groups tend to pursue the culture of a homogenous region – like the Southwest – largely with a common vision, direction and goal. Put another way, they are still battling to continue with the vision of the Northern patriarch – Ahmadu Bello – that unity of the backward region is essential in pursuit of its rights and privileges as it competes at the national level with two other regions which are ahead of it with half century of development.
The above stand of the majority and their allies is rejected by the elite of the some minorities who continue to work on the presumption that their identity is defined by the cultural antithesis of the Northern majority, a view which must be expressed only through the destructive language of schism and violence. The best guarantee to their relevance is the assertion of that difference at the national level through a conspiracy to subdue the influence of the so-called Hausa-Fulani.
Two other factors have served to fuel the fire of discord and hate among northerners: religion and external influence. With the rising tide in fundamentalism in both Islam and Christianity that has resulted in the worldwide politicization of religion, trust among Muslims and Christians is becoming increasingly eroded by the day. Politics has become a subject of binomial mathematics. What is good for one is almost instantly seen as bad for the other. So entrenched is this distribution in the North that even the intellectuals can afford to be reckless with the most glaring facts at their fingertips. I remember the blunder committed by Rev. Mathew Hassan Kukah three years ago at Second Anniversary of the Arewa Consultative Forum. In a paper he delivered he asked a question that remains the epitome of disregard for facts. Why is it impossible, Kukah asked, for a Christian to become the Vice Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University? Cheaply, the discussant of the paper – Dr. Alkasum Abba –reminded the reverend that ABU has had many Christian Vice-Chancellors including Professors Ishaya Audu, Akingkugbe and Saror!
Agitation for Shariah was quickly used to whip sentiments of Islamization, an attempt to dislodge the status quo that is colonial and Christian. And despite the assurance that Shariah does not aim at forcing anyone to accept Islam and despite the reassurance by the President that it will wane out shortly, thousands of lives had to die before the tempers of some people could cool down. The disciples of Shariah themselves did not help matters. They introduced it as if they were serious about achieving its goals. Few years later, it is clear that it has woefully failed to reinstate social justice and equality among people, the very principles that form the bedrock of Islamic leadership. We can easily conclude that none of the Shariah governors has exhibited one-tenth of Danfodio to social justice. Instead, most of them are as pervasive in loot and sin as their non-Shariah colleagues in other parts of Nigeria. Dariye is not alone; many others are equally guilty. And if it were not for the immunity they enjoy under the constitution, the contradiction between Shariah and the character would have been exposed.
The second factor is outside influence. Politicians from other regions, realising the growing differences among Northerners have tried many times to seduce some of the minorities to their side. Awolowo has played this role during the First Republic. Before the recent religious crisis in Kaduna, the Biafran warlord, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu addressed a congregation of Christians in Kaduna where he expressed the support of his people for the struggle of Christians in the North using an extremely inciting language. It is also widely believed that the recent ethno-religious violence was precipitated as part of a political strategy to divide Northern votes.
I quite agree that there is an urgent need to restore confidence and mutual understanding between the peoples of the North, if not for politics, at least for the sheer imperatives of survival. Geography has made it impossible to build barriers between ethnicities and religions in the North. Any attempt to assert one religion over the other, or deny some people on the basis of religion their constitutional rights will only fail, as we have seen since the inception of religious crises in this part of the country in 1987. These crises have yielded nothing other than breeding further hate and desperation. The North, we must understand, will ever remain home of people with different cultures and given the nature of liberal democracy and constitutional government it must imbibe the culture of free political intercourse. To aim at any political singularity will be a burden too heavy to carry, just as is the attempt to delineate part of it as their exclusive preserve of people whose commonality is only defined by their hate of others.
The solution to our problems will thus start by the realization of two core facts. The majority must realize that there has never been one North devoid of acrimony and divergence of political persuasion or even interest, and there can never be one. Thus the burden of unifying the North under one voice in politics is not worth carrying. They better drop it. The second is the real shift on the part of many minority politicians that are benefiting from the destructive indoctrination of their followers, telling them that someone up there in there – as far away as Bauchi, Kano, Sokoto or Borno – has all along been dominating them or threatening to convert them into his religion. This hysteria must be dispelled as a farce for the realities on the ground today point exactly to the opposite. The contrary – i.e. the domination of the majority by the minority – can easily be proved statistically.
Once the self-appointed task of the majority and the hysteria of some of the minorities are abandoned, then it will be possible to create an atmosphere conducive for meaningful discourse aimed at rebuilding mutual respect, accommodation and trust. Tolerance will naturally ensue and the ties of brotherhood will be strengthened.
But both the false cry for unity and the self-imposed hysteria against domination by others will not be abandoned without fighting one common enemy who continue to exploit our differences to his advantage – the northern politician who today suffers from the poverty of ideas and moral degeneration. He aims at a seat in government in order to plunder the treasury without any credential to prove his competence to govern effectively. He has not executed a single community project among his people, unlike his southern counterparts, which will attest to his sense of common good. His testimonials contain high grades in the art of thuggery and the science of deceit and theft. To win the hearts of his people his greatest weapon however is the exploitation of sentiments of his people, of religion or ethnicity, or both, whichever is convenient. Even after winning the elections, the sentiments help to conceal the colossal theft he partakes in office and the incompetence to deliver any of his promises. He does not care if his people will perish, for he has saved enough for his children.
My worry is that the country will not continue to tolerate the persistence of this trend. Without contributing to the major source of foreign exchange – oil – the North will be imprudent to inundate Nigeria with insecurity. We have seen that whenever there is a crisis in Kaduna, Kano or Jos, people from other regions are equally affected. It is therefore also in the interest of other Nigerians to help Northerners find a way of living peacefully with one another.
While Northern politicians continue to hold peace conferences at Kaduna and other places ahead of 2007, I intend to dedicate a number of subsequent articles on this page to the cause of mutual understanding that is necessary to breed trust. The present article is only an introduction. The thrust of my argument will be to dispel many prevalent misconceptions about our history, identities, positions and roles in one Nigeria; to prove that both the major and minor have been victims of oppression of the ruling class; that the real enemy is within, those who exploit our differences to further their political and economic goals; that we are united more in our problems than we are divided by whims; that our diversity is an asset, not a liability; that, in fact, peace and progress are easier to obtain in a multicultural society that the North is blessed with.
I will conclude this article with small story that portrays hope. Three weeks ago, someone, certainly among the northern minorities, heard my conversation with a German friend in a subway on my way to Central London. From my accent he concluded that I am a northerner. He suddenly shouted, “You are from Northern Nigeria. Right?” I replied in the affirmative. “So you are my brother,” he concluded, “I am also from the North.” When he was alighting from the train he said, “Sai anjima danuwa”, meaning, “Goodbye, brother”. Back home in Nigeria I am not sure if we would not hack each other during any of the ethno-religious crisis. But there we were, appreciating the commonness of our accent, lingua franca and a brotherhood fostered by our geography and common history. It appears, from this narration, that whatever the Suleimans, Lars, Dariyes and Obasanjos would like us to be, there still exists the hope that trust will one day be restored.

Discourse 88: Malam B.

Friday Discourse (88)

Malam B.


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Kai, bahaushe ba shi da zuciya
Za ya sha kunya nan duniya
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In the conclusion of our last discourse, we stated that if northerners are still interested in catching up with the South, they “need to change the social habits and beliefs that divide between them and material development.” In No Apology, we have earlier quoted Olawale Albert who said northerners in the 1950s were “presented as very lazy and unprogressive people for whom the Southerners were not ready to wait.”
And today here we are starting our discourse with a verse of Arewa, Jumhuriya Ko Mulukiya, a poem composed when the father of northern progressivism, Mal. Sa’adu Zungur, made up his mind to return home in 1950. The author of Sa’adu Zungur, A. M. Yahaya, has rendered the above verse in English as
God! The Hausa is mindless
He will suffer shame in this world
Our purpose today is to probe at the broad reasons behind our backwardness. We did this by basing our analysis on the three factors that prevent people from maximizing their potential – laziness, fear and pride – as listed by M. Scott Peck in the latest (1997) in his series, The Road Less Travelled and Beyond.
Laziness?
Many people at first instance share the notion that northerners are lazy. This is a generalization that could only be true if its generic existence can be proved. For this reason, in spite of the commonness of the belief, I feel it is wrong. Nothing in our history for example shows that our ancestors were lazy. They have remained self-sufficient when they were masters of their own destiny up to the end of the nineteenth century.
This has been substantiated by the accounts of early travellers like Park and Clapperton. The later account of the journalist, E. D. Morel gave a picture of self-sufficiency and vigour even after the first decade of colonization. I crave the indulgence of the reader to quote, for the second time on this page, a passage that expresses his amazement at the level of civilization he found the region in 1911. He wrote in the book Nigeria: Its People and Its Problems:
“They learned to smelt iron and tin; to tan and fabricate many leather articles, durable and tasteful in design; to grow cotton and fashion it into cloth unrivalled for excellence and beauty in all Africa; to work in silver and in brass; to dye in indigo and the coloring juice of other plants; to develop a system of agriculture including (in certain provinces) irrigated farming, which, in its highest forms, has surprised even experts from Europe; to build up a great trade whose ramifications extend throughout the whole western portion of the continent; to accumulate libraries of Arabic literature; to compile local histories and poems, and, in a measure, to become centers for the propagation of intellectual thought.
“That is the condition in which Leo Africanus found them in the sixteenth century, when he first revealed their existence to an incredulous and largely unlettered Western world; in which the pioneer explorers of the nineteenth century found them; in which the political agents of Great Britain found them ten years ago.”
The point has therefore been made, that generalizing our laziness is wrong since it cannot be applied to our society even as late as the first decade of the twentieth century. Even by the mid-twentieth century, there were evidences that show that the northerner, in his natural form, cannot be accused of indolence. Let us recall the groundnut pyramids and also the fact that, until recently, the word unemployment was unknown to us. Today, as the rainy season begins, the entire rural North is turned green with crops, not by the ploughs and harrows of foreign machinery, but by the manual labour of our men and women who are trying to make a dignified living. Their toil feeds the entire country and forms 40% of our GDP.
However, the average western educated breed of the Hausa has proved to be a total failure. I have talked much about him in this column before. He has shown the greatest degree of insensitivity and weakness. He has been trained to be the guide of the society to modern means of production, its compass that will guide it through the fierce ocean of competition among other regions and nations, and finally, its shield that will defend it against the threat of servitude and extinction.
The average northern elite has failed to meet these challenges for almost three decades now. He has chosen to be a leech, which will rather drain the blood of his host by diverting into his pocket any good intended to reach the masses. If you say he is lazy, I cannot help but agree with you. And since modern system of government has conferred leadership on him, it will not be surprising if his society remains backward. He has to wake up. If he were to honestly work hard using his learning and training, just like the Hausa farmer or trader does, his society would progress. But change requires energy, something he is reluctant to acquire and less more interested in expending it.
Fear
Has fear contributed to our underdevelopment? I believe it has. Wherever there is an established old order, people generally become content with the status quo. Here, the more entrenched is the order or its history, the more difficult it is to alter. Whenever change constitutes an immediate departure from the past, fear becomes natural and justified, because while the immediate could be seen, the end remains unknown. Take the threat that republicanism in the late 1940s posed to the political traditions and institutions of the North. It was with such urgency that made even progressives like Sa’adu Zungur quiver and retreat. He quickly expressed the fear in 1950 that the monarchy will be abolished as it happened the previous year in India and Pakistan. In fighting it, Malam Sa’adu was ready to join hands with the same traditional rulers he was castigating. He said:
To sarakai sai ku yi tattali
Na adala banda haramiya
Sai ku hango gemun dan’uwa
Da ya kama wuta da gaganiya
Don ku nemi ruwa ku yi yayyafi
Kada ku ma naku ya sha wuya
He drew from the common heritage that binds them together, the flags of Danfodio, saying:
Tutocin Shehu Mujaddadi
Dada ba su zama jamhuriya
Today, we wish that the North was bold enough to take the course of India or Pakistan. We wonder if that alone would not have extricated us from the clutches of political conservatism.
Perhaps the most extreme expression of this fear is the strong resistance to western education at the beginning of colonization. They are to this day tagged “makarantun boko”, meaning ‘schools for fake knowledge.’ This fear has endured, in spite of over half a century of campaign and graduation.
The North had to pay for this reluctance, as the Sardauna once put it before an audience of northern students in the U.K. But to my understanding, the fear was mutual; the colonialist were in fact reluctant to educate northerners, which explains why no secondary school was established in the region until 1946, just fourteen years to independence. I believe that the colonialists were not interested in extending western education en masse to northerners for the fear that doing so will turn the colonialists into the proverbial chicken that discovered the knife of its master.
The result is that Northern Nigeria today has remained in the firm grip of tradition. Changing it has failed in almost every respect. I have the strong conviction that once the region would liberalize its wrong notions about life and society; and once it would rid itself of all factors that impede change; its dream of catching up with the rest of the world will become real despite what we said earlier.
Pride
This leads us to the third cause of our inertia. We often feel that we can continue with life in the same way as our ancestors did because we believe that they did well, as we mentioned at the beginning of this discourse. This type of pride is common among established societies. The Qur’an too has mentioned it, saying, “When our messengers came to them with Clear signs, they took pride in what they had of knowledge…”
We saw western civilization as Christian in all its ramifications and therefore refused to separate the chaff from the grain. We are not still interested, after 100 years, to adopt its technique, as Jacques Ellul once called it in The Technological Society, and throw away what is in direct conflict with our value system. Rather, we often insist that the technique is impregnated with Christian values. I wonder, what “Christian value” is there in sending a child to a primary school, or learning how to manufacture drugs, automobiles or weapons.
We would rather erroneously choose to be content with consumption, denouncing, for example, the manufacture of a plane but enjoy flying it to the Holy Land. Some of us even claim that God has made the European our slave; he does the invention, and we do the consumption. This is a fatal error, as proved by history, time without number. This is a testimony that our acceptance of Islamic teachings is selective. We partake in what does not call for economic and physical suffering, rejecting what will task our brain and suffer our body to make us keep pace with developments in our surrounding. He has perfected looking at all pre-requisites to progress with disdain, perfection and precision is denigrated as kakale, timeliness as turanci, enteprise as son duniya, modernity and change as zamani, and inquiry as bincike, kuma Allah ya hana bincike...
I once thought that our backwardness had something to do with our misconception of fatalistic doctrines of predestination, like chosing tawakuli instead of tawakkuli. But looking around, I can see Muslims from the southwest working as hard as others, and those in other countries trying to catch up with the West. Suddenly, I was forced to conclude that the problem is with the person of Malam Bahaushe.
I wish fifty years ago we had paid heed to the following exhortation of Malam Saadu Zungur:
In kun dage kun shantake
Bisa al’adu na mazan jiya
Zaku rera fadar da-na-sani
Da na bi jawabin Gaskiya
Mindlessness
The result of our collective fear and pride and of laziness of our elite is the state of mindlessness that Malam Sa’adu Zungur charged in the opening verse of our discourse. We are mindless, oblivious of happenings and trends in our surrounding. We still feel that we are alone, protected by the shield of culture and isolated by our rejectionist philosophy and resort to archaic standards. We are always taken unawares, devoid of any strategy, but reaction, which does not change situations but defer their consequences for a while.
We have remained simple, hoping that the present will prevail. Imagine that political participation started long ago, with representation in Legislative Council as early as 1922 and the formation of the first political party in 1927 by Herbert Macauley. We were not represented in the Legislative Council until 1947, a twenty years gap. Hardly did we realize that the British would soon leave. We were content being subservient and passive since it seemed to us that our ‘traditional institutions’ were not tampered with.
Then as Second World War came to an end and the British showed that they could afford to lose their largest colony, India, we started, with their assistance, to react to the situation. But it was too late. Other regions were already waiting to take over from the British, with enough of their people in the federal civil service, which explains their attempt to stampede the North into accepting independence by 1956. At independence, we were left to hold the horn for them to milk the cow, a role we are glad to play to date. Given the brunt that we are already taking, the warning of Sa’adu Zungur has become a reality:
In kunka sake jama’ar kudu
Suka hau mulkin Najeriya
Dada ba sauran mai tambaya
Kowa ya san zai sha wuya
Conclusion
Once again, Bahaushe is today stampeded with privatisation, resource control, deregulation, national conference, etc. As usual, he is facing the challenge with a combination of laxity and timidity because he never worked hard to chart a course for himself; he would rather believe that the world around him is static, and if it would ever change, he can make do with whatever little is thrown at him. What his opponents simply need to do is to dangle money in the legislature and he will readily trade off the interest of his people. Otherwise, they would mount pressure on him in the press, threaten that Nigeria will break up if he does not concede to their request. He will then readily acquiesce, unconditionally, as he did on zoning and power shift. He is defiant to the advice of Malam Saadu:
Farfagandar makirci duka
Sai a bar ta, a bincika gaskiya
Hudubobin kinibibi duka
Dangin zance na filaniya
A jaridu ko a matattara
A wurin lacca da hatsaniya
Life, after all, according to his complacent philosophy, should be taken lightly. He would claim, “Duniya ce kawai.”
Kai, bahaushe ba shi da zuciya
Za ya sha kunya nan duniya
Today, I am sending a telegram to Malam Sa’adu in the grave, saying:
Kunyar duniya mun sha ta kau
Allah ka tsaremu ta lahira
The 1950 Bahaushe in Malam Saadu’s poem is still afraid to come out of his thick shell of tradition.
Do not be deceived by his mobile handset, his brocade or his posh car. His penchant for consumption is still as pervasive and rudimentary as that of the “Dan Kauye ya shiga alkarya” that Abubakar Ladan described in 1969 as:
Ga riga na diban hakki
Ga kantar dauda ba wanki
Sai ya hango mai alkaki
Ya kira ya saya ya ci yai tanki
Gogan sai ya ji yana hakki
For his strong resistance to change, he is today losing even his sisters to others. Kaito. When the sisters see him from a distance or speak about him in his absence, they will respectively whisper and refer to him with his latest nickname – Malam B.


24 May 2001