March 24, 2010
To hear some of my Hausa-Fulani Northern brothers comment on the Jos crisis is to be reintroduced to the imperialist vocabulary of 19th and early 20th century European colonial racism in Africa. Some of it even goes beyond the language of haughty imperialism and detours into the nihilist rhetoric of genocidal bigotry. For all the human tragedy of the crisis, the bigger tragedy for me is that the arrogant, supremacist declarations of this commentariat have exposed a much bigger problem, one that would shake the patriotic commitment of even the most idealistic Nigerian nationalist.
To hear some of my Hausa-Fulani Northern brothers comment on the Jos crisis is to be reintroduced to the imperialist vocabulary of 19th and early 20th century European colonial racism in Africa. Some of it even goes beyond the language of haughty imperialism and detours into the nihilist rhetoric of genocidal bigotry. For all the human tragedy of the crisis, the bigger tragedy for me is that the arrogant, supremacist declarations of this commentariat have exposed a much bigger problem, one that would shake the patriotic commitment of even the most idealistic Nigerian nationalist.
With such ethno-religious supremacist thinking being expressed by the Hausa-Fulani intellectual and political elite, one has to ask if Nigeria has a future.
For years, the Southern Nigerian press has reveled in what seemed like a fantastical straw man variously labeled “Northern Oligarchy” “the Caliphate” “Born to Rule” etc. At every tense juncture in our political life, this straw man was the favorite punching bag of Southern political analysis. For years, many Northern commentators dismissed the idea of Northern (read: Hausa Fulani) political arrogance and sense of providential political entitlement as a fiction constructed for the purpose of validating Southern political anxieties.
Sadly, the writings of folks like Adamu Adamu, Bala Muhammad, Muhammed Haruna, Garba Deen Mohammed, and even the usually nuanced and circumspect Dr. Aliyu Tilde, have validated these seemingly outlandish Southern interpretations of Northern oligarchic politics. Contrasting the Beroms (and by extension the Middle Belt, non-Muslim ethnicities) with the Hausa, Adamu claimed in a recent commentary that the Hausa-Fulani are naturally endowed with a capacity for wealth creation and societal political organization—the gift of command and control. The Berom are, by contrast, a “tribe” which is stuck in its “primitive” ways. They are, in this narrative, jealous of Hausa-Fulani endowments and are blaming the economically driven and political resourceful Hausa-Fulani for their political and socio-economic lag.
There is no clearer, more brazenly offensive illustration of the born-to-rule thesis than this ethnic supremacist reasoning. I had to make sure that I was not reading a British colonial anthropological description of the Hausa and the Fulani or a familiar British ethnological juxtaposition of African ethnic groups. What Adamu is saying is precisely what the British colonialists said about the Fulani and their relationship with the people of the Middle Belt. The difference is that the British could be excused on account of their ignorance and their baggage of racism. Adamu’s supremacist posturing cannot be excused. If he had looked further into colonial anthropological scripts, he would have noticed that the British described the Fulani and Hausa in unprintably racist and condescending terms and with labels as jarring as those that Adamu applied to the Berom.
It is truly tragic that Adamu had to invoke a colonial racist taxonomy to demarcate what he believes to be a superior Hausa-Fulani culture from a supposedly inferior and “tribal” Berom (Middle Belt) culture. This is Hausa-Fulani ethno-religious arrogance run amok.
Even Dr. Aliyu Tilde, an otherwise lucid thinker, has joined the Berom/Middle Belt-bashing, simultaneously wearing a nationalist hat and a Hausa/Fulani supremacist one.
For his part, Garba Deen Mohammed even claimed that the “first emir” of Jos was Hausa. The Hausa chief of Jos was appointed by the British for the sole purpose of aiding initial British administrative control of the growing mining town. Today it is proof to Mohammed that Jos was a Hausa city. How can you have an emir in a non-emirate town? This type of ahistorical rhetoric would be laughable if our people were not so receptive to fabricated drivel. It is symptomatic of the type of political arrogance that Southern Nigerians have caricatured as “born to rule.”
British colonial mistakes and arbitrariness like the appointment of Hausa Muslim chiefs to oversee Middle Belt polities are now being narrated and inserted into the claims of Hausa hegemony. It is a dangerous slippery slope because even a town as far south as Makurdi once had a British-appointed “Hausa Muslim” chief before, like the Berom, the Tiv protested and had a Tor Tiv appointed to oversee all of Tivland, including Makurdi. The colonially-aided spread of Hausa political and economic hegemony still resonates bitterly in the Middle Belt. For Garba Deen to be so insensitive as to invoke this sad history of British deployment of sub-colonial Hausa operatives to reinforce his claim of Hausa/Fulani primacy is the highest insult to the non-Hausa peoples of the old North. It rubs salt on their historical wounds.
Not to be outdone, Bala Muhammad claims in his most recent column in Daily Trust that “the Hausa [of Jos] are magnanimous settlers.” The reason: they did not engage in the genocidal imperialism of the European colonizers of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Is Muhammad so disingenuous as to compare the conduct of Hausa settlers in Jos to the imperial savagery of European settlers? Is that the moral baseline against which the conduct and politics of the Jos Hausa should be evaluated? This is truly appalling. The analogy is not only morally reprehensible; it is intellectually misplaced. How do you compare a European colonizing adventure with a routine migration for opportunities? And how do you compare a trans-oceanic colonial conquest motivated in part by racism and “manifest destiny” with the innocuous migration of Hausa folks to Jos in the early colonial days—an intra-African migration without the racial element of the cited examples?
Even the learned has to be occasionally reeducated, so here’s some historical education for Muhammad. Unlike the British settlers of Australia and America, the Hausa of Jos did not settle in Jos as colonizers. Their settlement of Jos was facilitated by the British colonial conquest and the growth of industrial mining. Like the Igbo, Yoruba, Edo, and other ethnic groups, the Hausa migrated to Jos to work on the mines and to take advantage of the vast formal and informal economy that mining spawned.
Muhammad’s claim re-evokes the question that Retired General Domkat Bali posed recently: if the Hausa settlers are so magnanimous, why are they the only ones among all the migrant groups who flocked to Jos in the early colonial period, who insist on staking a claim to political dominance in Jos North? Why have the Yoruba and Igbo settlers not made similar claims of political ascendancy in Jos? These questions disturb the still waters of Muhammad’s romanticized narrative of Hausa migration.
Migration is not a sin. Everyone migrates. But other Nigerian ethnic groups who have migrated and settled in large numbers in other parts of the country are magnanimous enough to concede political power to their hosts. That is the true meaning of magnanimity, which Igbo and Yoruba and other ethnic migrants in Jos continue to exhibit in the interest of peace. Until Nigerians are enlightened enough to value residency and economic contribution above ancestry and until our economy grows and creates enough wealth to render the struggles over grassroots political office and resources irrelevant, no host community in Nigeria would allow settlers to control their only remaining access to guaranteed state patronage. Not in Kano. Not in Sokoto, not in Uyo, not in Aba, and certainly not in Jos.
The problem in Jos and Plateau state is not just about the violence and counter-violence. It is now clear from the Freudian, impulsive commentaries of our Hausa-Fulani pundits that unless the Hausa-Fulani controllers of the levers of Northern political and economic power accord the Berom and other non-Muslim Middle Belt people their deserved humanity and unless they recognize and redress the unfolding legacy of 19th century emirate domination and dislocation and the subsequent oppression of colonially sanctioned Hausa administrative operatives, the cycle of resentment and counter-resentment will doom Northern Nigeria.
For many Hausa-Fulani commentators, blissful denial of the historical (precolonial and colonial) injustices that benefitted their ancestors and now benefit them to the exclusion of Middle Belt peoples is preferable to a courageous acknowledgement of Middle Belt concerns and legitimate grievances. As far as I know, only Mahmud Jega of Daily Trust has come closest to such a sympathetic understanding of the injustices that continue to limit Middle Belters while securing Hausa dominance.
The flippant dismissal of the Berom and their grievances by Hausa-Fulani commentators mirrors a fairly typical Hausa-Fulani attitude to the grievances of the beleaguered people of Southern Kaduna.
It is common to hear Hausa Fulani commentators condescendingly blame the Southern Kaduna for their alienation from the patrimony of their own state: the refrain is disturbingly similar to the rhetoric of Berom-bashing. The Southern Kaduna people are drunks; they are not ambitious, not leadership-oriented, are the architects of their own disadvantage, and should quit blaming the Hausa-Fulani for their problems. It reminds one of colonial officials’ lack of capacity to self-critique or to sympathize with African grievances, since every problem was never the fault of the British but was an outgrowth of “native character.”
Where were these Hausa/Fulani escapist pundits when the Emir of Zazzau, aided by the British, swamped the entire Southern Kaduna zone with Hausa, Muslim emirate appointees that pillaged the Southern Kaduna countryside and denied the people the right to govern themselves? Where was today’s Hausa-Fulani supremacist when this pattern of emirate colonial administrative dominance was parlayed into post-independence political and economic advantage? This historic head start has been proactively consolidated since independence, the Sarduana’s tokenist political cultivation of Middle Belt support not withstanding.
To be sure, neither the Hausa-Fulani nor the Southern Kaduna ethnicities were outright villains or heroes in this history. But the beneficiaries were clearly the Hausa Fulani, and the losers clearly the Southern Kaduna people. For good or ill, this pattern of Hausa-Fulani privilege and Southern Kaduna disadvantage has been preserved and reinforced till today.
What is abhorrent is not the unwillingness of the Hausa-Fulani to give up by their privileged perch by conceding some privileges to the Southern Kaduna people in the spirit of addressing or sympathizing with their legitimate grievances. What is galling is the denial of this history and of how present Hausa-Fulani preeminence and Southern Kaduna victimhood are grounded in it.
If we make a sincere effort to sympathize with each other, it will be clear that the unaddressed matter of systematic discrimination against Christian (and even some non-Hausa Muslim) northerners in appointments, school admissions, and other arenas fuel Middle Belt resentments that find expression at the Middle Belt grassroots in the form of projects that exclude or retaliate against perceived Hausa-Fulani competitors.
Unless this overarching reality of the alienation and marginalization of Middle Belt Christians from Northern Nigeria’s collective patrimony abates and unless the policemen of the Hausa-Fulani hegemony allow the North to become a truly competitive meritocracy with a level playing field for Hausa Muslims and Christian Middle Belters alike, they have no moral right to ask the Berom to concede political space to the Jos Hausa or to open up the politics of Jos to the competitive participation of everyone. It is like denying someone a fair share of a common property and then asking them to share their meager portion with you while you keep your own lion share. It is the exclusionary practices of the Hausa-Fulani power brokers in the North that have sown the frustration that stokes protectionist practices in fringe locales like Jos. If we truly care about fair competition and a level playing field, let’s not only emphasize Jos, but let’s have the courage to apply it throughout the North—from Sokoto to Zamfara to Bauchi, to Kebbi, to Kano and Katsina, to Kaduna and Yobe.
The retaliatory refusal of Middle Belt groups to open up the political space to Hausa “settlers” in their domains bespeaks the methodical denial of their right to compete for space in Northern institutions on account of their religion and ethnicity. The personal and professional biographies of many Middle Belters bear the scars of this discriminatory system. Some Hausa-Fulani folks reluctantly acknowledge this unspoken truth of the devaluation of Middle Belt Christians and the killing of their dreams and aspirations through discrimination. But they balk when it comes to doing something about it because redress will shrink their platter-of-gold privileges.
Some of our Hausa/Fulani brethren will do anything to prevent the ascendancy of Christian Middle Belters even when the individual case is compelling and an insistence on Hausa-Fulani Muslim dominance risks calling the reputational integrity of an important institution into question.
Take Mohammed Haruna’s campaign against Professor Andrew Nok’s candidacy for ABU’s Vice Chancellorship. Here was a candidate whose academic accomplishments dwarfed those of his competitors by a mile. Professor Nok is a scientist of international renown, with over 80 research publications in national and international journals and with a record of prestigious international grants. Last year, Nok won the Nigeria LNG Limited sponsored Prize for Science, for his work in discovering the gene responsible for the creation of sialidase, an enzyme which causes sleeping sickness. His work will constitute the bedrock for developing DNA-based vaccines against trypanosoma.
Professor Nok’s intimidating resume was not enough to overcome the filibuster of guardians of Hausa-Fulani interests or to offset the burden of his Christian, Southern Kaduna identity. The happy story of Nok’s unanimous emergence was dampened by a nasty campaign of ethno-religious devaluation that reduced a stellar candidate to a human pest whose ascendancy would undermine the sacred control of the Hausa Fulani over a major legacy of the Sardauna. He was shoved aside and the outcome of the nomination and voting process discarded. Today ABU has an acting VC that is acceptable to Haruna and his ilk because he passes the muster of Muslim, Hausa identity.
This is just one example. Look at the scornful humiliation meted to Isaiah Balat when he dared to display the audacity to aspire to the governorship of Kaduna State. He had to explain to Hausa-Fulani power brokers in Kaduna why a Kataf man should be trusted with the governorship of Kaduna state! He had to essentially apologize for who he was! The disdain for “minority” Christian ambition in the North is such that in a state like Kaduna, it is much easier for a person of Southern Nigerian (or even foreign) ancestry who is a Muslim and has become Hausaized to aspire to statewide political office than a Southern Kaduna indigene of the state. We ignore or pretend about this sad reality at our own peril.
The Sardauna may have practiced the politics of tokenist patronage with the Middle Belt, but to his credit when he found a Middle Belt Christian who was exceptionally qualified for a job and there was no close Hausa competitor, he yielded to the logic of competence and hired the Middle Belt Christian. His religious bias was moderated by his pragmatic and visionary commitment to the development of the North and its institutions, which demanded that the best and brightest, regardless of religion, be recruited.
This logic is one that most Hausa-Fulani businessmen understand and deploy. Because of the profit motive, they never take a chance with mediocrity on account of some puritanical religious and ethnic commitment. They hire those who can do the job and boost their bottom line regardless of religion or ethnicity.
Our Hausa-Fulani political gatekeepers of today are motivated by a different logic: that of ethno-religious conformity. They have sacrificed the limited meritocratic tradition of the Sardauna era for an embrace of mediocrity that is baptized by religious and ethnic bigotry. The irony is that the enforcers of Hausa/Fulani exclusivity would claim that they are protecting the Sardauna’s legacy from Christian contamination. The Sardauna would be appalled. For all his shortcomings, he gave Middle Belt Christians a reason, however limited, to feel Northern. He did this for two reasons: he feared that if the North didn’t patronize Middle Belt Christians with opportunities for self-fulfillment, common religion and proximity would endear them to the South and rob the North of their political and intellectual benefits; and he cared so much about Northern advancement that he didn’t care if he had to recruit and empower Middle Belt Christians to achieve it. Northerners use religion and ethnicity to screen out many of their best and brightest and wonder why the North is so backward in major economic and social indicators.
The effect of this failure of our Hausa-Fulani brethren to countenance and come to terms with Middle Belt aspirations and grievance (even through token symbolic concessions) is the heightening of mutual resentments between Hausa-Fulani Muslims and their Middle Belt brothers.
If we don’t find a way to moderate this cultural and political arrogance and to tame the virus of supremacy inherent in the recent rhetoric of Hausa-Fulani commentators, the rift will grow and the new alliances that will emerge may isolate the Hausa/Fulani.
The author can be reached at: [email protected]
With such ethno-religious supremacist thinking being expressed by the Hausa-Fulani intellectual and political elite, one has to ask if Nigeria has a future.
For years, the Southern Nigerian press has reveled in what seemed like a fantastical straw man variously labeled “Northern Oligarchy” “the Caliphate” “Born to Rule” etc. At every tense juncture in our political life, this straw man was the favorite punching bag of Southern political analysis. For years, many Northern commentators dismissed the idea of Northern (read: Hausa Fulani) political arrogance and sense of providential political entitlement as a fiction constructed for the purpose of validating Southern political anxieties.
Sadly, the writings of folks like Adamu Adamu, Bala Muhammad, Muhammed Haruna, Garba Deen Mohammed, and even the usually nuanced and circumspect Dr. Aliyu Tilde, have validated these seemingly outlandish Southern interpretations of Northern oligarchic politics. Contrasting the Beroms (and by extension the Middle Belt, non-Muslim ethnicities) with the Hausa, Adamu claimed in a recent commentary that the Hausa-Fulani are naturally endowed with a capacity for wealth creation and societal political organization—the gift of command and control. The Berom are, by contrast, a “tribe” which is stuck in its “primitive” ways. They are, in this narrative, jealous of Hausa-Fulani endowments and are blaming the economically driven and political resourceful Hausa-Fulani for their political and socio-economic lag.
There is no clearer, more brazenly offensive illustration of the born-to-rule thesis than this ethnic supremacist reasoning. I had to make sure that I was not reading a British colonial anthropological description of the Hausa and the Fulani or a familiar British ethnological juxtaposition of African ethnic groups. What Adamu is saying is precisely what the British colonialists said about the Fulani and their relationship with the people of the Middle Belt. The difference is that the British could be excused on account of their ignorance and their baggage of racism. Adamu’s supremacist posturing cannot be excused. If he had looked further into colonial anthropological scripts, he would have noticed that the British described the Fulani and Hausa in unprintably racist and condescending terms and with labels as jarring as those that Adamu applied to the Berom.
It is truly tragic that Adamu had to invoke a colonial racist taxonomy to demarcate what he believes to be a superior Hausa-Fulani culture from a supposedly inferior and “tribal” Berom (Middle Belt) culture. This is Hausa-Fulani ethno-religious arrogance run amok.
Even Dr. Aliyu Tilde, an otherwise lucid thinker, has joined the Berom/Middle Belt-bashing, simultaneously wearing a nationalist hat and a Hausa/Fulani supremacist one.
For his part, Garba Deen Mohammed even claimed that the “first emir” of Jos was Hausa. The Hausa chief of Jos was appointed by the British for the sole purpose of aiding initial British administrative control of the growing mining town. Today it is proof to Mohammed that Jos was a Hausa city. How can you have an emir in a non-emirate town? This type of ahistorical rhetoric would be laughable if our people were not so receptive to fabricated drivel. It is symptomatic of the type of political arrogance that Southern Nigerians have caricatured as “born to rule.”
British colonial mistakes and arbitrariness like the appointment of Hausa Muslim chiefs to oversee Middle Belt polities are now being narrated and inserted into the claims of Hausa hegemony. It is a dangerous slippery slope because even a town as far south as Makurdi once had a British-appointed “Hausa Muslim” chief before, like the Berom, the Tiv protested and had a Tor Tiv appointed to oversee all of Tivland, including Makurdi. The colonially-aided spread of Hausa political and economic hegemony still resonates bitterly in the Middle Belt. For Garba Deen to be so insensitive as to invoke this sad history of British deployment of sub-colonial Hausa operatives to reinforce his claim of Hausa/Fulani primacy is the highest insult to the non-Hausa peoples of the old North. It rubs salt on their historical wounds.
Not to be outdone, Bala Muhammad claims in his most recent column in Daily Trust that “the Hausa [of Jos] are magnanimous settlers.” The reason: they did not engage in the genocidal imperialism of the European colonizers of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Is Muhammad so disingenuous as to compare the conduct of Hausa settlers in Jos to the imperial savagery of European settlers? Is that the moral baseline against which the conduct and politics of the Jos Hausa should be evaluated? This is truly appalling. The analogy is not only morally reprehensible; it is intellectually misplaced. How do you compare a European colonizing adventure with a routine migration for opportunities? And how do you compare a trans-oceanic colonial conquest motivated in part by racism and “manifest destiny” with the innocuous migration of Hausa folks to Jos in the early colonial days—an intra-African migration without the racial element of the cited examples?
Even the learned has to be occasionally reeducated, so here’s some historical education for Muhammad. Unlike the British settlers of Australia and America, the Hausa of Jos did not settle in Jos as colonizers. Their settlement of Jos was facilitated by the British colonial conquest and the growth of industrial mining. Like the Igbo, Yoruba, Edo, and other ethnic groups, the Hausa migrated to Jos to work on the mines and to take advantage of the vast formal and informal economy that mining spawned.
Muhammad’s claim re-evokes the question that Retired General Domkat Bali posed recently: if the Hausa settlers are so magnanimous, why are they the only ones among all the migrant groups who flocked to Jos in the early colonial period, who insist on staking a claim to political dominance in Jos North? Why have the Yoruba and Igbo settlers not made similar claims of political ascendancy in Jos? These questions disturb the still waters of Muhammad’s romanticized narrative of Hausa migration.
Migration is not a sin. Everyone migrates. But other Nigerian ethnic groups who have migrated and settled in large numbers in other parts of the country are magnanimous enough to concede political power to their hosts. That is the true meaning of magnanimity, which Igbo and Yoruba and other ethnic migrants in Jos continue to exhibit in the interest of peace. Until Nigerians are enlightened enough to value residency and economic contribution above ancestry and until our economy grows and creates enough wealth to render the struggles over grassroots political office and resources irrelevant, no host community in Nigeria would allow settlers to control their only remaining access to guaranteed state patronage. Not in Kano. Not in Sokoto, not in Uyo, not in Aba, and certainly not in Jos.
The problem in Jos and Plateau state is not just about the violence and counter-violence. It is now clear from the Freudian, impulsive commentaries of our Hausa-Fulani pundits that unless the Hausa-Fulani controllers of the levers of Northern political and economic power accord the Berom and other non-Muslim Middle Belt people their deserved humanity and unless they recognize and redress the unfolding legacy of 19th century emirate domination and dislocation and the subsequent oppression of colonially sanctioned Hausa administrative operatives, the cycle of resentment and counter-resentment will doom Northern Nigeria.
For many Hausa-Fulani commentators, blissful denial of the historical (precolonial and colonial) injustices that benefitted their ancestors and now benefit them to the exclusion of Middle Belt peoples is preferable to a courageous acknowledgement of Middle Belt concerns and legitimate grievances. As far as I know, only Mahmud Jega of Daily Trust has come closest to such a sympathetic understanding of the injustices that continue to limit Middle Belters while securing Hausa dominance.
The flippant dismissal of the Berom and their grievances by Hausa-Fulani commentators mirrors a fairly typical Hausa-Fulani attitude to the grievances of the beleaguered people of Southern Kaduna.
It is common to hear Hausa Fulani commentators condescendingly blame the Southern Kaduna for their alienation from the patrimony of their own state: the refrain is disturbingly similar to the rhetoric of Berom-bashing. The Southern Kaduna people are drunks; they are not ambitious, not leadership-oriented, are the architects of their own disadvantage, and should quit blaming the Hausa-Fulani for their problems. It reminds one of colonial officials’ lack of capacity to self-critique or to sympathize with African grievances, since every problem was never the fault of the British but was an outgrowth of “native character.”
Where were these Hausa/Fulani escapist pundits when the Emir of Zazzau, aided by the British, swamped the entire Southern Kaduna zone with Hausa, Muslim emirate appointees that pillaged the Southern Kaduna countryside and denied the people the right to govern themselves? Where was today’s Hausa-Fulani supremacist when this pattern of emirate colonial administrative dominance was parlayed into post-independence political and economic advantage? This historic head start has been proactively consolidated since independence, the Sarduana’s tokenist political cultivation of Middle Belt support not withstanding.
To be sure, neither the Hausa-Fulani nor the Southern Kaduna ethnicities were outright villains or heroes in this history. But the beneficiaries were clearly the Hausa Fulani, and the losers clearly the Southern Kaduna people. For good or ill, this pattern of Hausa-Fulani privilege and Southern Kaduna disadvantage has been preserved and reinforced till today.
What is abhorrent is not the unwillingness of the Hausa-Fulani to give up by their privileged perch by conceding some privileges to the Southern Kaduna people in the spirit of addressing or sympathizing with their legitimate grievances. What is galling is the denial of this history and of how present Hausa-Fulani preeminence and Southern Kaduna victimhood are grounded in it.
If we make a sincere effort to sympathize with each other, it will be clear that the unaddressed matter of systematic discrimination against Christian (and even some non-Hausa Muslim) northerners in appointments, school admissions, and other arenas fuel Middle Belt resentments that find expression at the Middle Belt grassroots in the form of projects that exclude or retaliate against perceived Hausa-Fulani competitors.
Unless this overarching reality of the alienation and marginalization of Middle Belt Christians from Northern Nigeria’s collective patrimony abates and unless the policemen of the Hausa-Fulani hegemony allow the North to become a truly competitive meritocracy with a level playing field for Hausa Muslims and Christian Middle Belters alike, they have no moral right to ask the Berom to concede political space to the Jos Hausa or to open up the politics of Jos to the competitive participation of everyone. It is like denying someone a fair share of a common property and then asking them to share their meager portion with you while you keep your own lion share. It is the exclusionary practices of the Hausa-Fulani power brokers in the North that have sown the frustration that stokes protectionist practices in fringe locales like Jos. If we truly care about fair competition and a level playing field, let’s not only emphasize Jos, but let’s have the courage to apply it throughout the North—from Sokoto to Zamfara to Bauchi, to Kebbi, to Kano and Katsina, to Kaduna and Yobe.
The retaliatory refusal of Middle Belt groups to open up the political space to Hausa “settlers” in their domains bespeaks the methodical denial of their right to compete for space in Northern institutions on account of their religion and ethnicity. The personal and professional biographies of many Middle Belters bear the scars of this discriminatory system. Some Hausa-Fulani folks reluctantly acknowledge this unspoken truth of the devaluation of Middle Belt Christians and the killing of their dreams and aspirations through discrimination. But they balk when it comes to doing something about it because redress will shrink their platter-of-gold privileges.
Some of our Hausa/Fulani brethren will do anything to prevent the ascendancy of Christian Middle Belters even when the individual case is compelling and an insistence on Hausa-Fulani Muslim dominance risks calling the reputational integrity of an important institution into question.
Take Mohammed Haruna’s campaign against Professor Andrew Nok’s candidacy for ABU’s Vice Chancellorship. Here was a candidate whose academic accomplishments dwarfed those of his competitors by a mile. Professor Nok is a scientist of international renown, with over 80 research publications in national and international journals and with a record of prestigious international grants. Last year, Nok won the Nigeria LNG Limited sponsored Prize for Science, for his work in discovering the gene responsible for the creation of sialidase, an enzyme which causes sleeping sickness. His work will constitute the bedrock for developing DNA-based vaccines against trypanosoma.
Professor Nok’s intimidating resume was not enough to overcome the filibuster of guardians of Hausa-Fulani interests or to offset the burden of his Christian, Southern Kaduna identity. The happy story of Nok’s unanimous emergence was dampened by a nasty campaign of ethno-religious devaluation that reduced a stellar candidate to a human pest whose ascendancy would undermine the sacred control of the Hausa Fulani over a major legacy of the Sardauna. He was shoved aside and the outcome of the nomination and voting process discarded. Today ABU has an acting VC that is acceptable to Haruna and his ilk because he passes the muster of Muslim, Hausa identity.
This is just one example. Look at the scornful humiliation meted to Isaiah Balat when he dared to display the audacity to aspire to the governorship of Kaduna State. He had to explain to Hausa-Fulani power brokers in Kaduna why a Kataf man should be trusted with the governorship of Kaduna state! He had to essentially apologize for who he was! The disdain for “minority” Christian ambition in the North is such that in a state like Kaduna, it is much easier for a person of Southern Nigerian (or even foreign) ancestry who is a Muslim and has become Hausaized to aspire to statewide political office than a Southern Kaduna indigene of the state. We ignore or pretend about this sad reality at our own peril.
The Sardauna may have practiced the politics of tokenist patronage with the Middle Belt, but to his credit when he found a Middle Belt Christian who was exceptionally qualified for a job and there was no close Hausa competitor, he yielded to the logic of competence and hired the Middle Belt Christian. His religious bias was moderated by his pragmatic and visionary commitment to the development of the North and its institutions, which demanded that the best and brightest, regardless of religion, be recruited.
This logic is one that most Hausa-Fulani businessmen understand and deploy. Because of the profit motive, they never take a chance with mediocrity on account of some puritanical religious and ethnic commitment. They hire those who can do the job and boost their bottom line regardless of religion or ethnicity.
Our Hausa-Fulani political gatekeepers of today are motivated by a different logic: that of ethno-religious conformity. They have sacrificed the limited meritocratic tradition of the Sardauna era for an embrace of mediocrity that is baptized by religious and ethnic bigotry. The irony is that the enforcers of Hausa/Fulani exclusivity would claim that they are protecting the Sardauna’s legacy from Christian contamination. The Sardauna would be appalled. For all his shortcomings, he gave Middle Belt Christians a reason, however limited, to feel Northern. He did this for two reasons: he feared that if the North didn’t patronize Middle Belt Christians with opportunities for self-fulfillment, common religion and proximity would endear them to the South and rob the North of their political and intellectual benefits; and he cared so much about Northern advancement that he didn’t care if he had to recruit and empower Middle Belt Christians to achieve it. Northerners use religion and ethnicity to screen out many of their best and brightest and wonder why the North is so backward in major economic and social indicators.
The effect of this failure of our Hausa-Fulani brethren to countenance and come to terms with Middle Belt aspirations and grievance (even through token symbolic concessions) is the heightening of mutual resentments between Hausa-Fulani Muslims and their Middle Belt brothers.
If we don’t find a way to moderate this cultural and political arrogance and to tame the virus of supremacy inherent in the recent rhetoric of Hausa-Fulani commentators, the rift will grow and the new alliances that will emerge may isolate the Hausa/Fulani.
The author can be reached at: [email protected]
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