February 4, 2010
Since Jang has become the supreme villain in the understanding of pundits who view the crisis with a narrow us-versus-them lens, the position of the governor in the crisis deserves a careful and dispassionate examination. Jang has obviously gone overboard with some of his utterances. However, and without excusing some of his rhetoric, a governor who has been humiliated and caricatured in the Northern media alternately as a bloodthirsty fascist and a clueless clown will, sooner or later, lash out and, in a feat of self-fulfilling prophesy, invert his demonization into a reverse vilification of those who have ridiculed his very existence.
Some of these media caricatures have not stopped at Jang but have liberally advanced him as an archetypal Birom or non-Muslim Plateau person — inhospitable, hateful, and primitive. You can only take so much abuse before you succumb to the virus of hate. Psychologists have long underlined the self-fulfilling impact of negative stereotyping. Unable to change the mind of people who stereotype and mischaracterize them, some victims begin to exhibit behaviors that bear out the stereotype. This is the problem with Jang. He is ironically a creation of the vitriol of the Haruna-Adamu-Mohammed media lynch mob and their cheerleaders, who show only disdain and disrespect for the Birom and their aspirations. The mystery for me is how the trio finds the moral backbone to criticize Jang when their own ethno-religious baiting competes with Jang’s divisive posturing. Jang’s defiance is partly his way of running the Haruna-Adamu-Mohammed gauntlet.
At times Jang has sounded a little paranoid. When he expelled those Fulani nomads, I thought he had completely lost it. He played right into the hands of his traducers. They used the incident to reinforce their image of him as a man on a mission of ethnic cleansing.
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But there was a subtext to that story, one that opens a window into the larger agenda of Jang bashing. The expulsion story was distorted and sensationalized by the Northern media and its pundits. The credible angle of the foreign nationality of some of the deported "Fulani nomads" was not given any prominence in media reports. The suspicious circumstances of their sudden arrival in a Plateau village and the fact that Hausa Muslim villagers were the ones who reported their suspicious arrival and activities to the authorities were lost in the hysteria of Jang bashing. Jang was ossified as an irredeemable monster, so distorted stories like this one fit perfectly into the media-created image of his intentions. The Haruna-led gang has often played God, discerning Jang’s supposedly murderous thoughts and intentions. The goal is to portray Jang as a governor gone berserk. It continues to work in spite — or because — of the sloppy, agenda-laden journalism that underpins it.
The narrative of Jang’s supposed complicity in the crisis has taken on a life of its own, spawning bizarre theories and reductive analyses on a complex problem. For all of Adamu’s huffing and puffing against Jang in his essay, the only evidence he proffers to substantiate his claim of the governor’s culpability is that he refused to pick a call from the Sultan of Sokoto a day before the crisis! Even celebrity gossip tabloids have more discriminating standards of evidence than the sectarian pundits, whose outlandish, illogical speculations, innuendoes, and extrapolations can only take us away from the real issues.
The relentless campaign of vilification resulted in the federal Government being pressured into taking the unprecedented step of setting up a parallel probe panel after the 2008 crisis, undermining Jang’s authority, validating the anti-Jang conspiracy theories, and humiliating a man who had already been forced to embrace the painful status of a political pariah.
The coordinated assault on Jang’s authority has produced a situation in which the man now fears for his political life. This has made him a tad paranoid and a bit irrational. You would be too if a powerful political oligarchy and its large demographic base have savaged your reputation and marked you out for destruction — political and physical. His paranoia (and the way he acts on it) is now part of the problem in Jos.
Jang is a pathetic figure. He finds himself helmed in between two powerful, dug-in political forces. His Birom kinsmen are as hardened in their insistence on controlling the politics of Jos as are the Hausa of Jos in their determination to carve out a zone of political autonomy and control in that city. Amidst such uncompromising extremes, Jang appears to have done what every Nigerian politician would do and has done: cast his lot with his kinsmen, his primary political constituency. Whatever he does, he is damned because it will run afoul of the political aspirations of one of the two groups.
Already distrusted by the Hausa partly because of all the propaganda against him, Jang seems to have made the politically safe choice of speaking out in partisan tones so as to be seen to conform to the dominant narrative among the non-Hausa population of Jos and Plateau state. This has further alienated the Hausa and confirmed their anti-Jang suspicions.
But Jang is playing out a familiar script. Other governors and ex-governors like Ibrahim Shekarau, Isah Yuguda, Ahmed Makarfi, Rabiu Kwankwaso, and Adamu Muazu have also pandered to and grandstanded before ethno-religious constituents during moments of crisis, with devastating consequences. It is the logical but tragic outgrowth of Nigeria’s politics of ethno-religious legitimacy. It should be condemned in all situations, not just when the theatre of crisis happens to be Jos.
Joshua Dariye faced a similar dilemma as Jang. Haruna and his gang portrayed Dariye as the face of anti-Hausa persecution. They essentially created Dariye — not Dariye the treasury looter but Dariye the bumbling partisan — because they needed him to confirm their outlandish theories of anti-Hausa conspiracy. When he yielded to their script, he merely revved up their vitriol. They have created Jang for the same purpose and now he is mimicking the media caricature.
Finally, let’s return to Garba Deen Mohammed’s recommendation of the creation of a state for the Hausa of Jos. This is escapism at its most emotional and simplistic. It avoids the kernel of the problem. It is emblematic of a pervasive preference for atmospherics and a reluctance to grapple with the substance of the conflict: the problem of citizenship. The short term palliative, of course, is to severely punish those found to be behind the crisis. The more enduring solutions are the constitutional reform of citizenship from one based on autochthony to one based on residency and the criminalization of political and social discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or heritage. This should apply not just in Plateau but in the entire country. The Plateau people would rightly resist any attempt to target their state as a laboratory for this novel socio-political experiment.
In every state of the federation the attachment to origin and nativism as a basis for claim-making routinely injures and truncates the socio-economic and political aspirations of so-called non-indigenes. The difference between Plateau and other states is that the Hausa of Jos have, in the absence of proactive constitutional action and effective national leadership, decided to take matters into their own hands and to take what they feel entitled to. Other sufferers of the indigene/settler dichotomy have endured their pain in silence, making peace with their subordinate status in their states of residency.
Let’s boldly embrace constitutional reform, which, truth be told, those of us in the Lugardian North have regarded for far too long with excessive suspicion. We have always seen constitutional reform as a euphemism for break-up or as an instrument for achieving political arrangements that would deny our region access to the oil revenue of the South.
We need to conquer this fear of reform in the North because it may hold the key to restoring peace in our fractured region and for recovering whatever we can of the dream of the late Sardauna, the architect of Northern political identity.
The author can be reached at: [email protected]
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Some of these media caricatures have not stopped at Jang but have liberally advanced him as an archetypal Birom or non-Muslim Plateau person — inhospitable, hateful, and primitive. You can only take so much abuse before you succumb to the virus of hate. Psychologists have long underlined the self-fulfilling impact of negative stereotyping. Unable to change the mind of people who stereotype and mischaracterize them, some victims begin to exhibit behaviors that bear out the stereotype. This is the problem with Jang. He is ironically a creation of the vitriol of the Haruna-Adamu-Mohammed media lynch mob and their cheerleaders, who show only disdain and disrespect for the Birom and their aspirations. The mystery for me is how the trio finds the moral backbone to criticize Jang when their own ethno-religious baiting competes with Jang’s divisive posturing. Jang’s defiance is partly his way of running the Haruna-Adamu-Mohammed gauntlet.
At times Jang has sounded a little paranoid. When he expelled those Fulani nomads, I thought he had completely lost it. He played right into the hands of his traducers. They used the incident to reinforce their image of him as a man on a mission of ethnic cleansing.
articleadslinks
But there was a subtext to that story, one that opens a window into the larger agenda of Jang bashing. The expulsion story was distorted and sensationalized by the Northern media and its pundits. The credible angle of the foreign nationality of some of the deported "Fulani nomads" was not given any prominence in media reports. The suspicious circumstances of their sudden arrival in a Plateau village and the fact that Hausa Muslim villagers were the ones who reported their suspicious arrival and activities to the authorities were lost in the hysteria of Jang bashing. Jang was ossified as an irredeemable monster, so distorted stories like this one fit perfectly into the media-created image of his intentions. The Haruna-led gang has often played God, discerning Jang’s supposedly murderous thoughts and intentions. The goal is to portray Jang as a governor gone berserk. It continues to work in spite — or because — of the sloppy, agenda-laden journalism that underpins it.
The narrative of Jang’s supposed complicity in the crisis has taken on a life of its own, spawning bizarre theories and reductive analyses on a complex problem. For all of Adamu’s huffing and puffing against Jang in his essay, the only evidence he proffers to substantiate his claim of the governor’s culpability is that he refused to pick a call from the Sultan of Sokoto a day before the crisis! Even celebrity gossip tabloids have more discriminating standards of evidence than the sectarian pundits, whose outlandish, illogical speculations, innuendoes, and extrapolations can only take us away from the real issues.
The relentless campaign of vilification resulted in the federal Government being pressured into taking the unprecedented step of setting up a parallel probe panel after the 2008 crisis, undermining Jang’s authority, validating the anti-Jang conspiracy theories, and humiliating a man who had already been forced to embrace the painful status of a political pariah.
The coordinated assault on Jang’s authority has produced a situation in which the man now fears for his political life. This has made him a tad paranoid and a bit irrational. You would be too if a powerful political oligarchy and its large demographic base have savaged your reputation and marked you out for destruction — political and physical. His paranoia (and the way he acts on it) is now part of the problem in Jos.
Jang is a pathetic figure. He finds himself helmed in between two powerful, dug-in political forces. His Birom kinsmen are as hardened in their insistence on controlling the politics of Jos as are the Hausa of Jos in their determination to carve out a zone of political autonomy and control in that city. Amidst such uncompromising extremes, Jang appears to have done what every Nigerian politician would do and has done: cast his lot with his kinsmen, his primary political constituency. Whatever he does, he is damned because it will run afoul of the political aspirations of one of the two groups.
Already distrusted by the Hausa partly because of all the propaganda against him, Jang seems to have made the politically safe choice of speaking out in partisan tones so as to be seen to conform to the dominant narrative among the non-Hausa population of Jos and Plateau state. This has further alienated the Hausa and confirmed their anti-Jang suspicions.
But Jang is playing out a familiar script. Other governors and ex-governors like Ibrahim Shekarau, Isah Yuguda, Ahmed Makarfi, Rabiu Kwankwaso, and Adamu Muazu have also pandered to and grandstanded before ethno-religious constituents during moments of crisis, with devastating consequences. It is the logical but tragic outgrowth of Nigeria’s politics of ethno-religious legitimacy. It should be condemned in all situations, not just when the theatre of crisis happens to be Jos.
Joshua Dariye faced a similar dilemma as Jang. Haruna and his gang portrayed Dariye as the face of anti-Hausa persecution. They essentially created Dariye — not Dariye the treasury looter but Dariye the bumbling partisan — because they needed him to confirm their outlandish theories of anti-Hausa conspiracy. When he yielded to their script, he merely revved up their vitriol. They have created Jang for the same purpose and now he is mimicking the media caricature.
Finally, let’s return to Garba Deen Mohammed’s recommendation of the creation of a state for the Hausa of Jos. This is escapism at its most emotional and simplistic. It avoids the kernel of the problem. It is emblematic of a pervasive preference for atmospherics and a reluctance to grapple with the substance of the conflict: the problem of citizenship. The short term palliative, of course, is to severely punish those found to be behind the crisis. The more enduring solutions are the constitutional reform of citizenship from one based on autochthony to one based on residency and the criminalization of political and social discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or heritage. This should apply not just in Plateau but in the entire country. The Plateau people would rightly resist any attempt to target their state as a laboratory for this novel socio-political experiment.
In every state of the federation the attachment to origin and nativism as a basis for claim-making routinely injures and truncates the socio-economic and political aspirations of so-called non-indigenes. The difference between Plateau and other states is that the Hausa of Jos have, in the absence of proactive constitutional action and effective national leadership, decided to take matters into their own hands and to take what they feel entitled to. Other sufferers of the indigene/settler dichotomy have endured their pain in silence, making peace with their subordinate status in their states of residency.
Let’s boldly embrace constitutional reform, which, truth be told, those of us in the Lugardian North have regarded for far too long with excessive suspicion. We have always seen constitutional reform as a euphemism for break-up or as an instrument for achieving political arrangements that would deny our region access to the oil revenue of the South.
We need to conquer this fear of reform in the North because it may hold the key to restoring peace in our fractured region and for recovering whatever we can of the dream of the late Sardauna, the architect of Northern political identity.
The author can be reached at: [email protected]
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