June 28, 2010
Alhaji Bamanga Tukur is famously reported as saying that Yoruba people do not care who ruled them, as long as they are ruled well. He made example of the military administrations of Olagunsoye Oyinlola and Buba Marwa in Lagos state, contrasting the execration of his Yoruba kith and kin for Oyinlọla, with their hero-worship of northerner Marwa. Since Lagos is a melting pot of all of Nigeria’s ethnics, I believe the same can be said of the whole country.
Alhaji Bamanga Tukur is famously reported as saying that Yoruba people do not care who ruled them, as long as they are ruled well. He made example of the military administrations of Olagunsoye Oyinlola and Buba Marwa in Lagos state, contrasting the execration of his Yoruba kith and kin for Oyinlọla, with their hero-worship of northerner Marwa. Since Lagos is a melting pot of all of Nigeria’s ethnics, I believe the same can be said of the whole country.
The current gradual shift and emergence of new dominants of political power in the country is a natural occurrence, something that was meant to happen. It is happening because power, like all dynamic concepts, flow from higher ground to lower. These dynamics have also been aided by the fact that northern politicians and their cohorts continually demonstrate a stupendous incapability to use power to benefit mankind. Power for the sake of power has never lasted. How can anyone expect, for example, that the blatant oppression of the Niger Delta will simply continue forever? It is against natural justice and no one can stop a natural change.
Even if the country does not witness an appreciable shift of power dominance by 2011, it will not be because the nation would have succumbed to the group of geriatrics going about threatening hell-fire if the presidency is not illegally zoned to the north. There are now too many young politicians from the north, rich and powerful in their own right, enjoying their new time and status and who, unlike spent old men with nothing to lose, will, as happened in 1999 when the chips were down, choose the path of least resistance. In 2007 General Buhari threatened to call the mobs out if he was not handed the presidency he blindly believed he won. The nation called his bluff. Not one leaf on a tree was rustled. By the way, power rotation makes mockery of the post of vice president or deputy governor as we have seen with Goodluck Jonathan and in Kaduna state, unless the incumbent and his deputy come from the same zone.
Many commentators like to make so much of the shrewd northern political leadership, in a way that suggests southern leaders had gone to sleep while their northern counterparts articulated leadership for the north’s benefit. The reality is that while traditional northern Nigeria political leaders may be arguably more astute compared to their southern counterparts, it is, if true, only marginally so.
We are well aware that Hausa language (not religion, not origin) is the single most unifying factor of the north. We however forget that just as Sir Ahmadu Bello, a Fulani, was able to harness the various ethnic groups of the north Chief Awolowo, a Remo, also coalesced the nations of the south-west into one Yoruba political group to the extent that all of the south-west today have one lingua franca and only a few people today know that the Ijebu, Egun, Remo, Awori and a few others are not even Yoruba. Many south-westerners have not forgiven Awolowo for subjugating the status of many traditional Oba in the southwest, to achieve his pan-Yoruba aims.
Similarly we overlook that Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe from Onitsha brought all of Nigeria’s south-easterners under the dominance of the Igbo. The oppressive nature of Igbo power in the east is the single most important reason they lost the Biafra war. You cannot win a war with slave soldiers. Servile collaborators are usually potential saboteurs. This dominance is also the root cause of the highly charged abandoned properties issue in Port-Harcourt.
Being very articulate though, perhaps only marginally better than the south, is one of the reasons the north’s elite have ruled Nigeria for so long.
There is an argument that, given power, anybody can rule; that leadership is entirely a different concept. Such arguments are right, but only up to a point. They argue that since the British decidedly handed the major implements of power (especially that institutional rigging device called national population by a dubious census) to the Hausa, the north’s hegemony is assured.
The reality is that it required more than a little help from colonial friends to force a subjugation of the south in the way the north have done. We must all admit that most of the power-devices that now reside in the north have been acquired progressively, through systematic foresight, through strategic planning, and through hardnosed execution.
Take the oil sector for example. It is not by accident that the large majority of Nigeria oil industry’s top executives are northerners. As soon as it became apparent in the early sixties that oil would become Nigeria’s economic mainstay and knowing then that they had no people qualified in that sector to enable their dominance, the north embarked on a short to long-term programme to train northerner professionals. I know this from authentic sources. The leading but only one of many of the products of that effort is Dr Rilwanu Lukman. Dr Lukman had the best qualifications and experience of any contender worldwide for executive and technical management of an oil economy. It is on the merit of his knowledge and experience that he was repeatedly appointed Chairman and Secretary General of OPEC over a long period. The petroleum refinery and the proposed petroleum university in Kaduna are all part of the same agenda.
Also recently when it looked that south-south militants might be winning the military conflict in the Niger Delta Hausa strategists achieved a total surrender (patronisingly termed amnesty) of the agitators by presenting a threat-to-Europe-and-America-oil-supplies argument to Western leaders who promptly assisted a satellite-aided bombardment of the creeks for a military rout of MEND.
The three major factors that have aided the north’s grip (some read stranglehold) on Nigeria’s political power are 1. The institutionalised rigging device called national population figures. 2. The army and military institutions are controlled largely by the north. 3. The north controlled and still controls Nigeria’s gigantic oil revenue, to dispense as they wish and to use to entrench themselves further in power.
These elements have enabled the Hausa and their cohorts operate Nigeria like a kingdom, where the ‘princes’ played and invited their southern and other ‘friends’ to play with them. Deconstructing this stronghold is what power shift is all about and currently all indications are that, gradually, the south has begun to chip large chunks off this powerhouse, which explains the obvious panic in Arewa camps where stranger-than-fiction bedfellows are pretending to have a non-existent common cause.
Nevertheless the possibilities of breaking the north’s powerhouse, built up over decades, need be rationalised, as it will require a systematic understanding of the factors.
We all understand now that this power shift is not engendered by the type of ethnically coloured military adventure of 15 January 1966. A similar attempt much later, by Gideon Orkar and his group, was doomed to fail in the long term for the same reasons. Neither will this change be achieved by the type of strategies adopted by Chief Awolowo and his team – great visionaries but hopeless politicians. It seemed that while Awolowo and his disciples had lofty plans to transform Nigeria into the leading world black democratic economy, they had no panacea for achieving necessary political power (necessary being the operative word).
That we can see the light at the end of the power shift tunnel today is largely thanks to two soldier politicians - General Babangida who relocated the north’s power axes from Emir’s palaces to Dodan Barracks and, subsequently, Aso rock; and Olusegun Obasanjo who, with a profound understanding of the power structures of both the north and south, set about making appreciable dents on the three major elements of the north’s powerhouse, in a way the combined efforts of Awolowo, Zik, Abiola could not. No wonder they hate him with a passion.
I was one of those willing to give the North a benefit of the doubt about population figures especially since, in 1975, General Murtala Mohammed yielded to popular protest and cancelled the 1973 figures. But when in 2007 census figures were submitted which implied Lagos’ population had stagnated or decreased for about fifteen years while Kano state, out of which another state, Jigawa, had in the meantime been carved out, increased in arithmetic progressions, nobody is left in doubt that the North is not interested in having a truthful head count. They have merely used fake population figures to declare false majorities. Three hundred members of the House of Representatives reportedly boycotted the official presentation of those figures to the national assembly. Olusegun Obasanjo displayed a world class sense of humour when he thanked the Chairman of the Commission Samu'ila Danko Makama for, among other useless platitudes, the secrecy of the exercise. Many Nigerians missed the sarcasm.
The deliberate overstatement of the north’s population and continued extrapolation of this intensely false basis into subsequent census and election figures has a simple antidote. It is already available. It is the ‘modified open ballot system’ of counting and declaring results at the polling booths, attended by neutral observers. This tactic in 1993 produced what is yet acclaimed Nigeria’s fairest election. President Jonathan’s camp is already making noises about bringing back this joker. Complementary use of current mobile phone technology and live television broadcasts, as in the last Anambra elections, will greatly aid the strategy.
The second major factor that has aided the north’s stranglehold on power is the military. The north had traditionally enjoyed a preponderance of military personnel, leadership and institutions. The Ikeja cantonment explosions that killed more than 2,000 Lagosians, is a casualty of our military politics. Reports say while he was president General Abacha ordered the removal of vital weapons and munitions from southern states and other ‘unfriendly’ locations. When Obasanjo came to power he ordered the return of such equipment earlier so relocated. What triggered the explosions in Ikeja, we are told, were bombs and rockets brought back and waiting to be stored safely in the cantonment but which were yet left dangerously exposed on lorries that brought them from the north. There is speculation that political reluctance may have contributed to the delay in safely storing the explosives.
That coup plotting has become seriously unattractive amongst our military may not be entirely due to the democratic instincts of our soldiers. It also has to do with the realisation amongst our officer cadre that the period of cowering of other sections of the population into instant submission using military menace is over. Today each major component of the federation boasts its own army, be it regular or militia. Consequently civil wars are just not on the Nigerian menu now.
The recent blood-letting in NNPC inspired by Jonathan and his Petroleum minister, the delectable Diezani Allison-Madueke is simply to redress years of Hausa near-monopoly of milking of Nigeria’s cash-cow. Even peoples’ revolutions need money let alone Nigeria’s political economy. It is hoped that the new Aso Rock power brokers will temper justice in our oil industry with technocracy, so that needed progress can be made.
In the eighties one of my old tutors, and Englishman, told me a story he said symbolised Nigeria. Three men - one Yoruba, one Hausa and one Igbo - were walking along a country road when they came to a pawpaw tree with ripe fruits. The Yoruba man said it would be good to have the fruits. The Hausa man said if it was the will of Allah they would have them. The Igbo man climbed up the tree, plucked the fruits, came back down and sold the fruits to the other two.
Keen to show that I knew my country better than any foreigner, I told him the story did not end there. The ending, I told him, was that the Yoruba and Igbo men woke up the next day to find the Hausa man now owned the pawpaw tree. That was 1988.
My ending will be even different today. It will be that the three men – Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba – now realised that a man who they had ignored but who sleeping quietly under the papaw tree when they arrived, has now woken up and he is claiming he actually planted the tree. He is a south-southerner.
The current gradual shift and emergence of new dominants of political power in the country is a natural occurrence, something that was meant to happen. It is happening because power, like all dynamic concepts, flow from higher ground to lower. These dynamics have also been aided by the fact that northern politicians and their cohorts continually demonstrate a stupendous incapability to use power to benefit mankind. Power for the sake of power has never lasted. How can anyone expect, for example, that the blatant oppression of the Niger Delta will simply continue forever? It is against natural justice and no one can stop a natural change.
Even if the country does not witness an appreciable shift of power dominance by 2011, it will not be because the nation would have succumbed to the group of geriatrics going about threatening hell-fire if the presidency is not illegally zoned to the north. There are now too many young politicians from the north, rich and powerful in their own right, enjoying their new time and status and who, unlike spent old men with nothing to lose, will, as happened in 1999 when the chips were down, choose the path of least resistance. In 2007 General Buhari threatened to call the mobs out if he was not handed the presidency he blindly believed he won. The nation called his bluff. Not one leaf on a tree was rustled. By the way, power rotation makes mockery of the post of vice president or deputy governor as we have seen with Goodluck Jonathan and in Kaduna state, unless the incumbent and his deputy come from the same zone.
Many commentators like to make so much of the shrewd northern political leadership, in a way that suggests southern leaders had gone to sleep while their northern counterparts articulated leadership for the north’s benefit. The reality is that while traditional northern Nigeria political leaders may be arguably more astute compared to their southern counterparts, it is, if true, only marginally so.
We are well aware that Hausa language (not religion, not origin) is the single most unifying factor of the north. We however forget that just as Sir Ahmadu Bello, a Fulani, was able to harness the various ethnic groups of the north Chief Awolowo, a Remo, also coalesced the nations of the south-west into one Yoruba political group to the extent that all of the south-west today have one lingua franca and only a few people today know that the Ijebu, Egun, Remo, Awori and a few others are not even Yoruba. Many south-westerners have not forgiven Awolowo for subjugating the status of many traditional Oba in the southwest, to achieve his pan-Yoruba aims.
Similarly we overlook that Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe from Onitsha brought all of Nigeria’s south-easterners under the dominance of the Igbo. The oppressive nature of Igbo power in the east is the single most important reason they lost the Biafra war. You cannot win a war with slave soldiers. Servile collaborators are usually potential saboteurs. This dominance is also the root cause of the highly charged abandoned properties issue in Port-Harcourt.
Being very articulate though, perhaps only marginally better than the south, is one of the reasons the north’s elite have ruled Nigeria for so long.
There is an argument that, given power, anybody can rule; that leadership is entirely a different concept. Such arguments are right, but only up to a point. They argue that since the British decidedly handed the major implements of power (especially that institutional rigging device called national population by a dubious census) to the Hausa, the north’s hegemony is assured.
The reality is that it required more than a little help from colonial friends to force a subjugation of the south in the way the north have done. We must all admit that most of the power-devices that now reside in the north have been acquired progressively, through systematic foresight, through strategic planning, and through hardnosed execution.
Take the oil sector for example. It is not by accident that the large majority of Nigeria oil industry’s top executives are northerners. As soon as it became apparent in the early sixties that oil would become Nigeria’s economic mainstay and knowing then that they had no people qualified in that sector to enable their dominance, the north embarked on a short to long-term programme to train northerner professionals. I know this from authentic sources. The leading but only one of many of the products of that effort is Dr Rilwanu Lukman. Dr Lukman had the best qualifications and experience of any contender worldwide for executive and technical management of an oil economy. It is on the merit of his knowledge and experience that he was repeatedly appointed Chairman and Secretary General of OPEC over a long period. The petroleum refinery and the proposed petroleum university in Kaduna are all part of the same agenda.
Also recently when it looked that south-south militants might be winning the military conflict in the Niger Delta Hausa strategists achieved a total surrender (patronisingly termed amnesty) of the agitators by presenting a threat-to-Europe-and-America-oil-supplies argument to Western leaders who promptly assisted a satellite-aided bombardment of the creeks for a military rout of MEND.
The three major factors that have aided the north’s grip (some read stranglehold) on Nigeria’s political power are 1. The institutionalised rigging device called national population figures. 2. The army and military institutions are controlled largely by the north. 3. The north controlled and still controls Nigeria’s gigantic oil revenue, to dispense as they wish and to use to entrench themselves further in power.
These elements have enabled the Hausa and their cohorts operate Nigeria like a kingdom, where the ‘princes’ played and invited their southern and other ‘friends’ to play with them. Deconstructing this stronghold is what power shift is all about and currently all indications are that, gradually, the south has begun to chip large chunks off this powerhouse, which explains the obvious panic in Arewa camps where stranger-than-fiction bedfellows are pretending to have a non-existent common cause.
Nevertheless the possibilities of breaking the north’s powerhouse, built up over decades, need be rationalised, as it will require a systematic understanding of the factors.
We all understand now that this power shift is not engendered by the type of ethnically coloured military adventure of 15 January 1966. A similar attempt much later, by Gideon Orkar and his group, was doomed to fail in the long term for the same reasons. Neither will this change be achieved by the type of strategies adopted by Chief Awolowo and his team – great visionaries but hopeless politicians. It seemed that while Awolowo and his disciples had lofty plans to transform Nigeria into the leading world black democratic economy, they had no panacea for achieving necessary political power (necessary being the operative word).
That we can see the light at the end of the power shift tunnel today is largely thanks to two soldier politicians - General Babangida who relocated the north’s power axes from Emir’s palaces to Dodan Barracks and, subsequently, Aso rock; and Olusegun Obasanjo who, with a profound understanding of the power structures of both the north and south, set about making appreciable dents on the three major elements of the north’s powerhouse, in a way the combined efforts of Awolowo, Zik, Abiola could not. No wonder they hate him with a passion.
I was one of those willing to give the North a benefit of the doubt about population figures especially since, in 1975, General Murtala Mohammed yielded to popular protest and cancelled the 1973 figures. But when in 2007 census figures were submitted which implied Lagos’ population had stagnated or decreased for about fifteen years while Kano state, out of which another state, Jigawa, had in the meantime been carved out, increased in arithmetic progressions, nobody is left in doubt that the North is not interested in having a truthful head count. They have merely used fake population figures to declare false majorities. Three hundred members of the House of Representatives reportedly boycotted the official presentation of those figures to the national assembly. Olusegun Obasanjo displayed a world class sense of humour when he thanked the Chairman of the Commission Samu'ila Danko Makama for, among other useless platitudes, the secrecy of the exercise. Many Nigerians missed the sarcasm.
The deliberate overstatement of the north’s population and continued extrapolation of this intensely false basis into subsequent census and election figures has a simple antidote. It is already available. It is the ‘modified open ballot system’ of counting and declaring results at the polling booths, attended by neutral observers. This tactic in 1993 produced what is yet acclaimed Nigeria’s fairest election. President Jonathan’s camp is already making noises about bringing back this joker. Complementary use of current mobile phone technology and live television broadcasts, as in the last Anambra elections, will greatly aid the strategy.
The second major factor that has aided the north’s stranglehold on power is the military. The north had traditionally enjoyed a preponderance of military personnel, leadership and institutions. The Ikeja cantonment explosions that killed more than 2,000 Lagosians, is a casualty of our military politics. Reports say while he was president General Abacha ordered the removal of vital weapons and munitions from southern states and other ‘unfriendly’ locations. When Obasanjo came to power he ordered the return of such equipment earlier so relocated. What triggered the explosions in Ikeja, we are told, were bombs and rockets brought back and waiting to be stored safely in the cantonment but which were yet left dangerously exposed on lorries that brought them from the north. There is speculation that political reluctance may have contributed to the delay in safely storing the explosives.
That coup plotting has become seriously unattractive amongst our military may not be entirely due to the democratic instincts of our soldiers. It also has to do with the realisation amongst our officer cadre that the period of cowering of other sections of the population into instant submission using military menace is over. Today each major component of the federation boasts its own army, be it regular or militia. Consequently civil wars are just not on the Nigerian menu now.
The recent blood-letting in NNPC inspired by Jonathan and his Petroleum minister, the delectable Diezani Allison-Madueke is simply to redress years of Hausa near-monopoly of milking of Nigeria’s cash-cow. Even peoples’ revolutions need money let alone Nigeria’s political economy. It is hoped that the new Aso Rock power brokers will temper justice in our oil industry with technocracy, so that needed progress can be made.
In the eighties one of my old tutors, and Englishman, told me a story he said symbolised Nigeria. Three men - one Yoruba, one Hausa and one Igbo - were walking along a country road when they came to a pawpaw tree with ripe fruits. The Yoruba man said it would be good to have the fruits. The Hausa man said if it was the will of Allah they would have them. The Igbo man climbed up the tree, plucked the fruits, came back down and sold the fruits to the other two.
Keen to show that I knew my country better than any foreigner, I told him the story did not end there. The ending, I told him, was that the Yoruba and Igbo men woke up the next day to find the Hausa man now owned the pawpaw tree. That was 1988.
My ending will be even different today. It will be that the three men – Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba – now realised that a man who they had ignored but who sleeping quietly under the papaw tree when they arrived, has now woken up and he is claiming he actually planted the tree. He is a south-southerner.
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