If a word captures the central content of the responses I got to my first piece last week, it would be “vitriol”. Not that I was surprised; but the depth of anger against me, for daring to deconstruct the prevalent perspective about Northern Nigeria, within media, intellectual and even popular levels, in Southern Nigeria, was simply amazing! The space of knowledge has narrowed dangerously. Most of those who read my piece could not accept that there cannot be one view of our society, anymore than there can be one way of being human.
If a word captures the central content of the responses I got to my first piece last week, it would be “vitriol”. Not that I was surprised; but the depth of anger against me, for daring to deconstruct the prevalent perspective about Northern Nigeria, within media, intellectual and even popular levels, in Southern Nigeria, was simply amazing! The space of knowledge has narrowed dangerously. Most of those who read my piece could not accept that there cannot be one view of our society, anymore than there can be one way of being human.
Disagreement or dissent is at the heart of democratic life, but the cultured or educated person disagrees with decency. That was not my experience last week. But more than ever before, we need to dialogue across the divides in our country, to be able to know ourselves better, or at least understand why each one of us thinks or behaves as we do, given the historical currents that moulded us.
Nigeria is seriously divided between North and South, between religious groups and even between generations. 70 per cent of our population is under thirty. They have never experienced a country which worked, even minimally, for the people. Born during military dictatorship, in a Hobbesian jungle of rampaging globalised neo-liberal capitalism, where life is nasty, brutish and short; these young people have come into adulthood, when civic culture has collapsed. The positively-inclined heroes that our young people can look up to are very few; the social milieu is one of mind-bending religious fanaticism or delusional consumerism; unemployment; clandestine and open prostitution; escapist social networking and the virtual world of facebook and twitter, if they are not doing drugs! It is very difficult to be young in Nigeria, because ideals have evaporated and anger seems to have become the central motif of existence. But in moments of despair, let us attempt a stroll on the shores of history to assist our understanding of contemporary reality. Unfortunately, even the teaching of history has all but collapsed in our school system.
Let me offer some examples from the history of Northern Nigeria. The jihad of Sheikh Usmanu Dan Fodiyo, was one of the most important events in our history. The jihadist scholars (my own forefathers were jihadist scholars), used the platform of Islam to re-order the injustice in the society of their times. The writings of Sheikh Usmanu, his brother, Abdullahi and son Muhammadu Bello, were very clear about the central place of justice and respect for the values of decency, in the building of society. Infact, Sheikh Dan Fodiyo taught that a society can endure with unbelief, but it will collapse, sooner rather than later, if it is unjust. Eventually, colonialism overthrew the jihadist state while the post-colonial/neo-colonial successor state through injustice, avarice and greed gradually sucked dry, whatever remained of the lofty principles which were the foundations of the society which became known as Northern Nigeria. There was a contemporary movement for reformation to the East, in Borno, with the work and leadership of Muhammad El-Kanemi. When Sokoto jihadists tried to enter Borno, there came an incredible exchange of letters between Bello and El-Kanemi, which entered history as the “Sokoto-Borno letters”.
What I am trying to draw out of this narrative, is that even when degeneracy entered Northern Nigerian society, there has remained memory, that there once reigned a culture of struggle for justice led by committed intellectuals who preached and fought to institute just societies. But as Ibn Khaldun, founder of the science of sociology, also taught, these societies eventually succumbed to the cycle of ascendancy and degeneracy that is the fate of polities, through history. Placed within contemporary reality, Northern Nigeria is going through arguably its lowest phase. An alliance of a succession of military dictators and rapacious political, economic and traditional elite eventually brought us to the despair that we all know so well today. According to the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, the poverty rate has continued to grow in Northern Nigeria, alarmingly as follows: 1980, 35.1%; 1981, 52.60%; 1982, 45.50%; 1983, 70.67% and 2004, 70. 13%. This is a region where the majority is under the age of 30. It is these hopeless youth, which is appealing to the history of Islam in search of justice. The mass of people here are completely alienated from the Nigerian state; they do not see the benefits of modernity, and have lost hope in the leadership of the elite. That was why the uprising which followed the presidential election targeted the Northern elite in the main. But there is also the very troubling violence, often perpetrated by the urban lumpen, directed at symbols of modernity, and tragically, at the “other”: often non-Muslim; Christian or non-Northern. It is unacceptable but again, this should not surprise anybody with an understanding of history.
The twentieth century was the century of great political ideas: communist, socialist, social democracy, fascist and national liberation movements. The fin-de-siecle, saw the end of ideological politics and the emergence of identity politics. Contemporary neo-liberal, capitalist globalisation changed the character of politics just as the citizen has given way to the consumer. In our setting, the dominant mantra from the mid-1980s of rolling back the state, gave rise to its privatization and a vicious struggle for power between groups of elite willing to manipulate identity, especially religion and ethnicity. The North faces other contradictions: like those between the old Muslim elite and a new Christian elite, each often lapsing back into history in the struggle for contemporary advantages; an ecological contradiction which pits nomadic groups against settled agricultural communities with very serious consequences for shared citizenship, as the desert encroaches and population increases; the collapse of the rural economy as well as de-industrialization. There are no jobs for millions of desperately poor just as the ruling elite is lost in a regime of brazen theft and lacking in a basic sense of history and a frightening incompetence, about how to secure their class project.
Unfortunately, because of a low level of education and modern skills, Northern Nigeria risks becoming excluded, abandoned as superfluous, marginalized and generally locked out of productive participation in contemporary capitalist production. The danger is that a whole region of our country is becoming a huge slum, where warring groups, appeal to idealized interpretations of religion and ethnic jingoism. These are the political, economic, cultural, ecological and demographic factors, causing the seismic movements in Northern Nigeria. They explain the heated nature of the politics of the region and they concern all of us in Nigeria.
LIVING A LIE LIKE NIGERIA!
COMPLETE SPORTS newspaper of May 3, 2011 carried a lead story which announced “PRESIDENTIAL WELCOME FOR ‘GOLDEN’ EAGLES”. The nut and bolt is that President Jonathan will host Nigeria’s under-20 Flying Eagles team, which won the African championship in South Africa. It looked a good reason to celebrate, especially in the ambience of the triumphalism of Jonathan’s election victory. Meanwhile, SUNDAY VANGUARD of May 1, 2010, carried the words of one of Nigeria’s great footballers, Adokiye Amiesimaka.
Amiesimaka, who knows these things, “believes that all the players paraded by coach John Obuh are above 20 years and are therefore not supposed to take part in the competition”. He asked “why do we keep deceiving ourselves? Stanley Okoro, for instance, has no business in that team, which everybody knows, he cannot be anything less than 33 or 34. Olanrewaju Kayode was also my player in the Sharks feeder team in 2002, he played alongside Fortune Chukwudi, both of them were mates, he too cannot be less than 29 or 30. Abdul Ajagun…dropped out of school in the 1990s and so cannot be under-20”. But the fraudulent team is paraded as African champions. Nigeria is on a roll and living a lie!
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