Of Nigeria’s 65 years of independence, leaders of Northern extraction have controlled the Federal government for approximately 40 to 41 years.
Nigeria gained independence from Britain on October 1, 1960. This means that leaders from the North have held the primary executive power for over four decades out of Nigeria’s 65-year history as a sovereign nation.
Throughout that period, Northerners ruled the region, whether as Sultan, Emir, Governor etc but, unfortunately, with no discernible positive developmental impact, whatever .
As a result of this negativity, the following factors combined to birth a virulent banditry and all kinds of terrorism, spearheaded by all kinds of murderous Islamic groups, which soon spread their violence to the southern extremities of the country:
widespread poverty, unemployment, competition over scarce resources, poor, almost non- existent education with more than 10 million -out – of – school children which, as a group, has become a super market for recruitment of would – be terrorists; poor governance and
the weakening of state authority as well as poor law enforcement which have all further exacerbated the problem and allowed armed groups to operate with impunity in every corner of the region.
Additionally, the North became literally ungovernable, especially given the large swathes of ungoverned spaces which terrorist groups, keen on spreading Sharia, use to maximum effect, daily killing in numbers.
Terrorism was given such free rein, no arrests, no trial, that some sponsors of Boko Haram, fingered by the UAE, and recommended for trial in Nigeria, were left completely untouched by the Muhamadu Buhari government.
Back during the Buhari years, as a result of neither the Federal Government, respective Northern states nor consequential leaders in the region doing anything meaningful to stanch the unbelievable bloodletting, I saw all that was happening then as only a precussor of far worse things in the future and I have been more than proven right.
This, indeed, was the background to my article of 21 April, 2019 which now appears on pages 195 – 197 of my book ‘ Simply a Citizen Journalist’ (Amazon Link: https://a.co/d/dXnfY77).
What particularly underpinned that premonition was the attitude of President Muhammadu Buhari when he visited Benue State on March 12, 2018 in response to mass killings by Fulani herdsmen which saw no less than 70 people killed and mass buried in the state.
He had visited only because of significant public criticism, including that from former President Olusegun Obasanjo and, even, Ibrahim Babangida, both of who condemned his delayed and indifferent response to the killings.
And what did he, an ethnic Fulani, tell the grieving people of Benue? ‘Live in peace and cooperate with your neighbours’, meaning those who had just killed them in numbers. Meanwhile, that was the same man who, a few years earlier, led a Miyetti Allah delegation to the Oyo state governor to protest the killing of a few Fulani herdsmen.
Titled: The North – Militancy, Bandits and The Rest of Us’, the referenced article reads as follows:
‘It is really a crunch time. This harvest of despair is the product of many years of servile bondage, repression, suppression, deliberate pauperization of the people and placing their destinies and lives at impossible angles. My late father used to warn the
Northern elite. This is morning yet, the Somalization of the far North is fast becoming a reality’ – Dr C.C. Nwagwu.
Completely unknown to me that this newspaper would be running an interview it had with Anthony N. Z Sani, my friend, and Secretary- General of the Arewa Consultative
Forum, in its edition of Sunday, 14 April 2019 in which, incidentally, my own article:’It is Crunch Time’ appeared, I had written to him as follows some three days earlier on Friday, 12 April, 2019: ‘Tony what’s the problem with the North? Please talk to me at some length.
Why has the North become a killing field? Is it that human lives mean nothing up there?
I am at a complete loss; so am raising these questions in my column this Sunday.
I wrote further:
Without a doubt feudalism, I guess, is the root of Northern problems. For far too long education was denied the children of the poor. Of course, you know that religion and illiteracy are the two things invigorating Boko Haram.
But who and who is funding BH and are our security agencies so helpless they can’t find them out all this while? Has it occurred to Northern leaders that the region is becoming
a massive drain on the country?
What is the exact cause of the problems in Zamfara? The million dollar question really, is: how do we exit these North- inspired problems?
Please feel free to share this within your circle so that we can generate well distilled reactions.
Never known to disappoint, Tony wrote back as follows: ‘Good morning and thank you for the concerns. I think there is a swarm of locust in the land and we do not seem to know the pests. Hence our inability to device the appropriate pesticides. I am happy some of you down there are also concerned. This is because Nigeria is a big river being fed by tributaries, and when one tributary is poisoned, the whole river is contaminated.
When in 2011 there was post election problems and the hoodlums burnt down some traditional rulers’ houses, Prof Bolaji Akinyemi called, and warned about the consequences of destroying the only platform of effective control in the North. To him, it is not time to dismiss the vestiges of indirect rule. That is, he saw wisdom in indirect
rule by the British. Then there was the problem of education whose slow pace of development in the North cannot be blamed entirely on the leadership all of who could not possibly be depicted as feckless. I told him to consider the time Western education started in the South and when it reached the North which is almost a century. There is also the factor of unbridled growth in population. I mentioned ‘unbridled growth in population’ because, the rate is not commensurate with growth of the economy, hence
the poverty that comes with unemployment. For instance, the population of Nigeria and Britain were at par at our independence but today Britain is 62M while Nigeria is
about 180M. What rate of GDP can cope with such increase? Without a doubt, the challenges are far more overwhelming than the capacity of the leaders, considering the difference between the level of education at independence, and today, in the North. The difference is much. Somehow, I believe in what Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore once wrote that: order, justice, liberty, common decency, and prosperity, are never the natural order of things, but are attained through ceaseless hard work by the leaders, and the led, and that there is no country or society that is perfect. What matters when challenges arise is consciously directed effort to overcome them. I believe that President Buhari has what it takes to overcome our challenges.
Terrorism is universal, and unfolding; and Nigeria has predisposing factors that encourage it. The sponsors of BH may not even be Nigerians. During one of our interactions with Alhaji Atiku Abubakar on the underlying factors of terrorism or insecurity, he traced BH to thugs used by Gov Kachalla and Senator Modu Sheriff. Whether he is right or not, one cannot say. When the minister of finance (read Defence) accused traditional rulers in Zamfara of complicity in banditry, I had my doubts.
Sani and I went on, and on, in a few exchanges later, but then let’s cut to the chase and properly distil his full-throated piece in which he identified: lack of education, uncontrolled and unbridled population growth and poor governance.
It is sad that poor governance continues till today as exemplified in the 10M plus out – of – school children who wander about as Alamjiris, whilst the governors live in opulence and go about in their free flowing
babarigas, at best buying them okadas after which they are trucked down, in their hundreds, to every nook and cranny of the South, as Okada riders maiming themselves as well as their patrons. I am sure the governors see this as Youth Empowerment. May Allah forgive them.
So, what has been the response of the Northern elite to the factors so perspicaciously identified by the Secretary – General of the ACF which, this past week, weighed in on the increasing Somalisation of the region when it called on President Buhari to stop the killings? Northern political elite read politics into it when, before and after independence, Chief Obafemi Awolowo drew their attention to what trouble the North was breeding when it chose, deliberately, not to educate the children of the poor; when it looked askance at both the Western and Eastern regions putting massive investments into education.
Today village chiefs, even some minor
Emirs, are being chased out of their palaces in the North. And like Dr Nwagwu wrote in my intro, this, unfortunately, is only the beginning, as Somali, Sudan and Syria have shown.
With regards to over population, what was the North’s take away when during the 2015 campaigns Mrs Patience Jonathan, poked fun at the North on account of its many children most of who are thrown into the streets from early age? Which one single governor made a move towards checking his state’s unproductive population growth? Or which cleric lent a hand in their tough preaching’s which governor El Rufai had to warn against? The North has many, if not most, of our highly regarded monarchs.
What has any of them done to mitigate the factors that continue to undermine the North economically, and socially?
Isn’t political, even traditional power, for a purpose?
How exactly has the Northern traditional and religious elite – helped to positively impact the region? Or wasn’t it only this past week we heard that Zamfara monarchs are helping bandits with intelligence? Have they taken time to reflect on a future when the North begins to reap the whirlwind? Finally, as we can infer from Sani’s statement, when will this Northern tributary stop contaminating the big Nigerian river?
When?
A stitch in time can still save nine.