The talk in town is that power must perforce stay in the North if anything untoward should happen to ailing incumbent President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. This entails standing the Nigerian Constitution on its head in the crude attempt to please a particular section of the country.
Nigeria’s stagnation over the years owes a lot to this kind of knee-jerk bowing to expediency when there are clear rules to follow. The Constitution expressly states that the Vice-President should take up the mantle of leadership once the President is out of the way, following incapacitation or death. That is how it should be, and there should be no beating about the bush on the issue.
A lot of ink has been wasted on the colonial policy of the British in enthroning the North over and above the entire country. The British ostensibly left in 1960 following Nigeria’s arrival at flag independence, but the reality today is that the indulging of the North is continuing at a giddy pace. The aggregation of forces in the Nigeria-Biafra war did not help matters, as the North somewhat inherited the mantle of defending the federal cause. The oppressed minorities, especially in the South, found a ready ally in the Northerners in fighting the Igbo. It needs to be stressed that Isaac Adaka Boro led his “twelve-day revolution” mainly because he was afraid that power has left the North following the January 1966 coup made by Majors Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Chukwuma Nzeogwu. The eminent historian Prof Ebiegeri Allagoa will bear me out on this fact. Of course Isaac Boro died fighting on the federal side during the civil war, and there is suspicion that he was actually shot from the back by his so-called allies!
The embrace of the North was taken to a new height by Ken Saro-Wiwa such that when he was ignobly hanged by General Sani Abacha it became the lot of ex-Biafra leader Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu to lament thusly: “What do you want me to do in the circumstances when Ken was killed by his mentors?”
The Biafra war came about because after the murder of General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi seniority in the Armed Forces was thrown aside to make allowance for Gowon, a soldier of Northern extraction, to take over power. Nigeria is yet to recover from that disaster of a war and we are here inviting another war by refusing to stand by the Constitution.
It ought to be expected that the North should show much respect to the South-South given the support the oil-bearing zone had over the years given to the arid North. Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan as deputy to President Yar’Adua has received more humiliation than any second-in-command in living memory. Yar’Adua has never been known to hand over to him in his many travels abroad for medical attention. Even the so-called “laying” of the budget at the National Assembly in the absence of Yar’Adua had to be done one Alhaji Aba Aji, the Presidential assistant on National Assembly Matters, when Vice-President Jonathan ought to constitutionally do the job. Power-mongers of Northern extraction are reportedly putting pressure on Jonathan to resign his post so that power must stay in the North. The lickspittle of a political jobber known as Godwin Dabo Adzuana is purporting to speak for the so-called North by stressing that power must stay in the North until 2015.
This nonsense is beyond any untidy dalliance between the North and the South-South. The Constitution of the country ought to be a hallowed document that must be respected at all times, or the country is doomed for good. The crooked idea of power rotation is not meant to put the Constitution in abeyance. It is either we are running a constitutional democracy or we are in the jungles of a kind of Northern theocracy.
The uncanny pressure on Vee-Pee Jonathan has already drawn the ire of the opposition Action Congress (AC) which said in a recent release by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Muhammed: “Despite the rush to deny the veracity of the story by the office of the vice-president, we know there is no smoke without fire and we are concerned that some dark forces can be plotting to thwart the constitution for whatever reasons.”
The perennial fear is that something grave would come upon the country if the North is somewhat not allowed to call the shots all the time. The promoters of this fear are only clever by half; Nigeria needs to confront her demons now. If it comes to breaking apart simply because the North is not in power, then let it be so! This country is not meant for any particular group, and Nigerians must as a whole insist that we are ruled by constitutional means instead of the wishes of some devil-may-care power-mongers.
In my book, the North is blessed with some of the finest minds Nigeria such as Col Abubakar Dangiwa Umar, Clem Baiye, Audu Ogbeh etc who would not bow the knee to any sabotage of the Nigerian Constitution as is being arranged currently by the more decadent elements up North. We must show solidarity with these progressives to defeat the vile forces of darkness.
What has to be understood is that real development does not depend on where power is based. Otherwise the dominance of the North in ruling the country over the years would have transformed the region beyond all others. Emphasis should now be placed more on the devolution of powers than piling up everything in the centre. This way, the injurious indulging of the North which has resulted into the underdevelopment of the entire country will be nipped in the bud.
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