“The axe forgets, but the tree remembers”— African proverb
I have been in many situations where I am asked to explain why the North of Nigeria does or does not do something of a specifically political nature. I do not get offended by this. I had spoken for the ‘North’ in the context of Nigeria as Spokesman of Northern Elders Forum, NEF, in the past, without apology or reservations. It tended to get lost in conversations that I also spoke for Nigeria, when we raised issues that represent threats to national unity and a sense of fairness which is vital to our survival.
A number of other groups did exactly what NEF did, on many occasions with language and style that were more emphatic in their parochialism. I see no contradiction between loving the nation and defending your portion of it. My entire adult life was devoted to Nigeria and its promises and challenges. I am acutely aware that the North will be imperiled if Nigeria is threatened. I am also convinced that its size and assets represent a liability if they are abused or ignored by interests that make progress only at its expense. No part of part of Nigeria can be degraded beyond a certain point without threatening the entire country.
We have always been a nation of parts. When a comrade demanded that constitutional amendment proposals from a group we shared be pushed forward with or without the North, I understood this as staple response to situations which exasperate people that think the North is unreasonably stubborn around its interests; arrogantly incapable of making concessions, or being plainly obstructionist around anything ‘progressive’. When my friend, the famous anchor of the Channels TV programme “Daily Politics”, Seun Okinbaloye, looked me straight in the eyes and asks, ‘How has President Tinubu offended the North?’ I knew he was being deliberately pedestrian and provocative, but asking a very pressing question in APC circles.
When former Governor of Kano State, Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, raised his voice over the severely lopsided Federal Government spending in favour of the South, he spoke the minds of a lot of Northerners. It is safe to assume that many people from the South who heard Kwankwaso’s grievance lost no sleep. Not many Nigerians really care what happens outside their bit of Nigeria. More significantly, there is little sympathy for the wretched impotence of the North in political, economic or thinking circles in much of the South. Either the North is blamed for its circumstances, or it is reminded that it could waits its turn to do what it wants to do with Nigeria as it did in the past.
This massive land and its people have always been major factors in Nigerian history and politics.The British created a colony and country of non-equals. The old North protected its disadvantaged status by an aggressive posture which gained positions it would have lost against intense competition and hostility. In democratic Nigeria, its assets have been its massive voting population and occasional near-consensus over political matters. Its complexity and diversity makes it a fertile hunting ground for politicians seeking to exploit fault lines. Its relative poverty and widespread insecurity have been both cause and consequence of collapse of its famed formal and informal leadership.
Northerners have shed each others’ blood over faith matters, land, poverty, politics and everything else which they have aplenty. Northern citizens carry the burden of 19 full-blooded state governments and 410 Local Government Councils, all of which contribute to making it the poverty capital of the world. Abuja, every inch of which used to be land of people of the North, now houses the Federal Government and mansions of other Nigerians which Northerners see from distant shanties. The North ranks high among parts of the world whose children are becoming increasingly malnourished. Millions of its young do not attend schools worth the name. Young adults learn no skills and many are drug addicts and petty thieves. Today’s bandits and terrorists are mostly the children that received no preparation, Western or Islamic, for responsible adulthood. The North provides cheap labour and raw commodities to the rest of Nigeria, while its economy continues to shrink from lack of power, infrastructure and security.
This is the North that is routinely held responsible for holding the country back. Its only value now is its huge voting numbers, and politicians are already eying them as familiar commodity. It is being told of plans to introduce a battery of constitutional amendments and legislations with or without its consent. It is relatively easy to do this because those who have its mandate to protect its interests are on the sides that believe the powers of the North have to be diluted or broken. Its governors receive massively improved allocations, but you will find it hard to see any improvement beyond tokenism.
Its representatives in Abuja stay away, confident that they are in the right camp for re-election purposes. Their children go to expensive private institutions. They go to foreign hospitals. Children of its poor will have to pay for humongous loans being secured with the futures of their children. They cannot bring friends from other parts of Nigeria home because they will be shamed by broken down schools and hospitals and non-existent roads and almajiri and lines of neighbours begging for food for the day. Above all, the rampant fear which pervades the North keeps its elite away, so they only hear of emptied villages and abandoned farmlands and dangerous highways.
This is the North that has moved into the eye of the political storm that will build up to 2027. It can sink deeper into wretchedness if it plays victim and blames others for its woes. Or, it can discover its strength and rally its poor, its desperately alienated young and remnants of its pained leadership to take a stand at attempts to weaken it further politically, deepen its poverty and push it beyond recovery. How it responds to overtures for its votes in 2027 is vital. The North should resist being votes that can be bought. It can begin now, by letting those who represent it know that it will judge them on their loyalty to its interests in 2027. It should also let the rest of Nigeria know that it is passionate about a united country that protects the rights of all parts to be respected and treated fairly, but will not play second fiddle.
The post North this, North that, by Hakeem Baba-Ahmed appeared first on Vanguard News.
