When the North met

LAST Monday, when the 19 governors of the northern states met with their traditional rulers in Kaduna, few observers needed to guess what the agenda would be. The Boko Haram menace may be receding in memory though its wounds are still fresh and in some isolated cases still festering, but in its place, the Southern Kaduna killings have begun to occupy prime media spaces everywhere. The northern elite, for that is what they really are, whether political or traditional, met amidst much flourish to begin the task of exploring hidden and open factors disposing their states to such unrestrained and unfathomable bloodletting. They appeared to recognise that such an exploration could not be done in a day or even days. The enterprise will take them time, and their success will depend on how honest and scrupulous they are in plumbing the depths of violence in a geographical space the chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum, Borno State’s Governor Kashim Shettima, continues to describe as the Northern Region.

Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, was their host, though of course Kaduna city is understandably recognised as the political capital of the North. Perhaps, too, the Southern Kaduna killings, which the governor has badly mismanaged, was the immediate reason for the meeting. However, it is hard to say to what extent the northern leaders would tell themselves the unblemished truth about why their region is in such an uproar, why its youth are restive, and why and how regional leaders have shirked their political, cultural and religious responsibilities. Had they been capable of telling themselves the truth, had they developed the temper for discourses unfettered by sometimes religious and sometimes feudal restraints, had they approached the changing dynamics of the modern era with the openness and calculation the times needed, and had they acquired the principled introspection required to deconstruct and learn from the Boko Haram revolt, perhaps Kaduna would not be boiling. But if it boiled, the challenge would not mystify or frustrate their collective gifts and aspirations.

Governor Shettima and the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammed Sa’ad Abubakar III, were the principal voices at the meeting. The Borno governor was eloquent, and the Sultan was passionate, but neither rose, nor attempted to rise, to the stature of the region’s First Republic leaders. While the governor struggled to situate the restiveness in the region within the context of its socio-economic disparities, even announcing the establishment of a regional economic programme under the leadership of Tanimu Yakubu Kurfi, the Sultan sought symptomatic relief in his denunciation of hate speeches which he presumed to be the triggers for violence. Elements of everything they have identified are embedded in the crisis bedevilling the region, but it is doubtful whether the regional leaders have made a persuasive case, or whether they even have the dispassion and discipline to make any case whatsoever.

The problem with many analyses about the country’s objective conditions is that analysts make many prior assumptions about the state (nation) and proceed from that universal predicate to examine the state’s many dysfunctions. Thus, they make the assumption that a poor region like the Northeast ravaged by, say, religious revolt will respond to economic stimuli and other forms of interventions like any other poor state elsewhere, say in Europe or the United States. That classical, textbook one-solution-fits-all approach exemplified by the Breton Woods institutions neither works well, nor even when they do, last long. One of the key missing links in the North — other parts of Nigeria are not exempted from this malaise — is that after Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, no one has been able to envision anything for the region. And so while the concept of a region continues to exist and even thrive in the subconscious of the average northern leader, its foundational and driving vision has been lost in the moraines of their undisciplined approach to life and politics.

Unlike many other leading countries in the world, Nigeria does not have a unifying vision for the country. In the 1950s, regional leaders managed with varying degrees of success to enunciate regional visions. Those visions determined and shaped the kind of societies they wanted to establish and under what rules and laws they wished to build their economies and peoples. The visions circumscribed religious beliefs and practices, propelled education and healthcare services, and imbued both the peoples and leaders of the various regions with self-confidence, again with varying degrees of success. It was that vision, whether written or not, that carved the obtrusive northernisation policy of the eponymous Sardauna, helped him to run an inclusive northern government that saw Christians and Muslims rise to top positions, shaped his utterances, and allowed him to preside over a merit-driven, multicultural system that gave fillip to the region’s developmental quest.


No one in the North today has the depth of understanding that the Sardauna had, nor his discipline. They not only misunderstood the revolt that ravaged the Northeast; indeed, they even fostered and misinterpreted it in its early years, exulting in Boko Haram’s promotion of injustice against other faiths, and revelling in the ethnic cum religious bigotry that is stymieing the growth, development and peace of the region. That lack of vision manifests in by-passing Christians and ethnic minorities on line for promotion whether in the judiciary or elsewhere, and somehow even justifying murder as an astonished and disgusted country witnessed in Kano last year. The North is overdue for soul-searching, for renewal, and for recreation along the lines of its founders whose sense of justice, fairness and equity the present regional leaders can’t match.

The North is of course not alone in abjuring vision as a guiding principle of nation-building and development, but it is an exemplar. The hot and emotive talk by the governors and traditional rulers last Monday in Kaduna will remain nothing but gaseous talk until they go back to their roots and rediscover their own essence. Last Monday, after indulging in virtually futile rhetoric, the northern leaders seemed to have gone away with the impression that once the socio-economic indicators of the region were enhanced, peace and development would be restored. They are terribly mistaken. Let them first rediscover their roots, exhume their founding vision of a noble, just and tolerant society, if possible envision afresh a society that does not discriminate against any group or faith, and let them recognise and adapt to the changing global dynamics against which they have frittered away opportunities and resources.

Northern leaders must stop pretending that their region is accommodating to all. It used to be; it is no longer so. As the controversial regulation enacted by the authorities of the Yar’Adua University in Katsina State banning any other faith group on the campus other than Muslim Students Society indicate, because they said no Christian group had asked for registration; as the deliberately botched trial of those accused of openly murdering a 74-year-old Igbo woman, Bridget Agbahime, in Kano last June shows; and as the dangerous display of ethnic exceptionalism by Fulani herdsmen and their political supporters also shows in kaduna thereby inspiring murderous rampage in Southern Kaduna and other parts of the country, northern leaders have their work cut out for them.

Instead of living in denial, let them acknowledge that they have deviated badly from their foundations. Let them acknowledge the biases and bigotries that have been introduced into the body politic by known and shadowy figures. Let them recognise that they cannot gift the country what they do not have. One of the reasons Nigerian leaders since 1966 have been so unsuccessful is because their governments were not anchored on any great vision or ideology. The same malady afflicts the Buhari presidency even now. That same malady, of not standing for anything deep, noble and inspiring, is what would make last Monday’s gathering of northern leaders in Kaduna a waste of time. They will not be the first to so gather, nor will they be the last. As long as they deny reality, as long as they continue to subscribe to the inequities and injustices that engender revolt in their region, no meeting they summon, nor how long and intensive it might be, can create the peace they vaguely conjure.

Culled

TheNationOnline