THE AREWA CONNECTION

October 17, 2003

By way of ending the Southwest segment of this narrative, let me note that the unstated, but motivating, factor in the self-regarding solidarity of the Yoruba is the consciousness of Arewa hegemony and the general competition between nationalities in Nigerian history. In 1953, Sir Ahmadu Bello, leader of the Northern People¹s Congress had shown how conscious he was of the competition when he talked about the mistake of 1914. The mistake referred to the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorate under Frederick Lugard who had been appointed to mind the loot, already named by his wife, on behalf of the British Crown. The idea that it was a mistake derived from the presumption that, in that year, likes and unlikes were rammed together with British guns, the English language and a semblance of English common law. The mythology of it, or what philosophers would call its counterfactual, is that if the British had not intervened, the Fulani jihadists would have continued with their conquering streak into the sea. As it has turned out, the notion that the amalgamation was a mistake has also become the view of the champions of many nationalities across Nigeria. But for a different reason – what Ken Saro Wiwa has described as internal colonialism. These champions believe that, but for the mistake of 1914, their people would be living better lives or at least, they would be more independent of their near and distant neighbours than they have been within the lopsided contraption called Nigeria. Evidently, some want out, some want redress, some plead divine rights to rule, and few, too few, appear willing to try Ahmadu Bello¹s proposition of trying to understand the differences rather than trying to forget or ride rough shod over them. The pervasiveness of the view that 1914 was a mistake, and the fact that many Nigerians continue to act as if the mistake remains a mistake, is the reason I insist that we are not taking Nigeria seriously.

Essentially, the business of not taking Nigeria seriously was borrowed by the natives, North and South, from the British colonialists whose body language, and sometimes stated policy, was against ruling Nigeria as one country. Until economic hardships caused them to embark on amalgamation, the British simply did not know how to weld a country of so many ethnic groups into one whole. There was the little matter of empire builders who did not want to unite their colonies against themselves. But in the main, even if they meant to do it right, the British had little experience in the matter. They had proved it from continent to continent that they were mere apprentices in the building of multi-ethnic states. At home in the United Kingdom, they were failing woefully at national integration because they believed in the very European idea that a nation state must be made up of people of only one language, one culture and one religion. They had a country that was culturally plural, hence Federal by nature, but they sought to apply a unitary principle to its governance. Being inveterate Unitarians, theirs was a position of winners take all in which constituent groups were obliged to follow the dictates of a central authority commanded by one part of the whole. This was the source of the Irish Troubles, the demand for a Scottish Homeland, and today a Welsh parliament. Obafemi Awolowo who had taken pains to study the problem of ethnicity across time and space, had successfully predicted that before the end of the 20th Century, Britain would become a Federal State. In Nigeria, the case for Federalism was even clearer than in Britain, but the British would not allow the type of Federalism that could sustain a union of many nationalities. The type they allowed was one in which an ethnic group, albeit a minority ethnic group, the Fulani, was dominant over the largest region and that region had a virtual veto over the rest of the country. As a matter of sheer imperialist misrule, and to make assurance doubly sure, the British split up the smaller Southern Protectorate into East and West and left the geographically larger North intact. This was what Awolowo could never accept. Throughout his life, he proposed a Federal system in which no part was strong enough to exercise a veto over the whole.

As an aside, let me quickly note that in August 2003, the Arewa Consultative Forum has arrived at the same conclusion, arguing without apologies to Awolowo, that it is wrong to have one region being so large as to be able to hold the rest of the country to ransom. This intriguing argument from the Arewa Forum comes in the wake of the seeming acceptance by President Olusegun Obasanjo of the six zones, not yet recognized by the Constitution, as a basis for governance. The Arewa Consultative Forum, believing that the Yoruba would be the largest single ethnic group in such an arrangement, is seeking a return to old times when there was a large North that could respond effectively to the South. So we seem to be back to the arguments of the forties and fifties when it was the overbearingly large North at the receiving end of all the agitations for the creation of new states. Now it is the turn of the Yoruba to receive the barbs. Whatever is the case, it tells of the lingering problem of Nigeria¹s lopsided architecture which the British could not resolve because, apart from it being more in their interest to keep Nigeria divided, they were too much like apprentices in the matter of running multi-ethnic states. Frankly, as the Irish Troubles proved so well, the British were making so much of a hash of their own National Question that it seems unfair to have expected them to do any better by Nigerians. As in India, they simply found a divide and rule strategy that would help them keep a lid on a possible union of the whole country against the British Raj. Religion did the job in India. In Nigeria, they found it in education with religion playing a supportive role.

Unlike the case in the North, education was a full scale industry in Southern Nigeria before the British woke up to it. Individuals and communities, inspired by missionaries and the small Saro community in Lagos, had gone for education with a vengeance that produced Africans who could stand up to and out-lawyer the colonial officials and even defeat them at the Privy Council. This meant that in the South, the colonialists were already losing the battle against the spread of the Indian disease. The development of an indigenous intelligentsia was what the British described as the Indian disease. They could not stand it. Strategically, therefore, they kept schools out of the North. It was as if it was no longer true that Islamic scholars helped the West to get out of the Dark Ages. The consequence has been an artificial divide between Southerners who were Westernizing and Northerners who were mostly allowing schools to those authorized by the traditional authorities. No question: the educational disempowerment of the Northern Region was easily the greatest disservice that British colonialism perpetrated in Nigeria. Equally heinous, if not more so, is the highly successful planting of an indigenous political class that has consistently used the instruments handed over to it to stop the North and therefore to stop Nigeria from breaking free. Continued success at this negative task has been based on manufacturing Northern exclusivism which involves the pretence that all ethnic groups and zones in the North have a common culture as against the South. Although no such claim can bear scrutiny outside the gap in the rate of educational development, exclusivist arguments have been kept alive by artificial means even when they look grievously unwell.

Ordinarily, they formed part of the project of the conservatives of the North who had a prudential need to keep the North free of influences that could destabilize constituted feudal authority. It was understood as a need to protect feudal privileges, including the ultimate of such privileges, the colonial device of using economic largesse from the South to balance budgets in the north. This was the node of reality that eventually cornered not just one class but all classes in the North behind the project. It became more clamant when oil revenue from the Delta became the life wire of every state in the Federation. Oil revenue achieved the dubious distinction of freeing the peasantry of the North from the horrid exploitation and repression that had hitherto been their lot and against which Northern radicals fought many epic battles. Once oil revenue became the deal, the struggle for it at the center overtook the essence of class warfare between northern radicals and the old and modern feudal classes. Released from the harsher aspects of internal colonialism, it was as if they were importuned to protect the security of the North and the extractive capacity of a unionized Arewa against the South. At a purely intellectual level, a cross-ideological, cross-ethnic and cross-class coalition among Northerners found an Archimedian point for staging the Mistake of 1914 as an opportunity rather than the liability it was once said to be. Equally, belief in the sanctity of Nigeria became a mere extension of the necessity for the North to have a share of the wealth from the South. Since the defenders of Northern regional security do not necessarily believe that there are cultural, religious or serious political reasons for treating North and South as one, the material dimensions of the relationship that the British loved so much, became the main issues. It has provided a good basis for stressing Northern exclusivism such as we find even among some of the most radical Northerners. It may well be recalled, in this respect, that those who professed adherence to Marxism in the days of the Cold War were obliged to revise their ideology to fit such exclusivist ends. Whereas Karl Marx had called for a workers revolution, Northern Marxists demurred on the grounds that a workers revolution would be a Southern revolution because there were more workers in the South than in the North. Since, in their view, there were more peasants in the North than in the South, they preferred to have a peasant revolution. Even at that time, it was clear that both sides were wrong about the kind of revolution that they thought possible. But it was all part of the splitting of hairs that built up the image of an exclusive North, as colonial Britain preferred it, which could never work with the South. It has made it difficult if not impossible for so-called progressives across Nigeria to see eye to eye enough to have a common organization. Not being able to take Nigeria seriously, many Northern radicals have had to find reasons from out of this world for sharing the wealth of the country.

Although, there is no reason why people who live in the same country should feel shy about laying claim to the wealth from any part of their country, the very exclusivism which they claim has made it imperative to make such claims only through sheer sophistry. Thus, for the sake of having access to oil wealth, Bala Usman and Balarabe Musa, among the best minds that Nigeria produced in the twentieth century, consistently proved to be hostages of the mistake of 1914. Ignoring the human and environmental tragedy in the Delta, they have argued the right of Northern access to the wealth of the Niger Delta on the grounds that the sediments swept for eons by the River Niger from the North created the oil in the Delta. They could as well have argued, more plausibly, that all the peoples along the Niger from its source in the Fouta Jallon, have equal the rights to the wealth of the Niger Delta as Nigerians have. The argument is the psuedo-sophisticated complement to the position simply asserted in the year 2002 by the Emir of Kano that Resource Control by peoples of the Niger Delta is against the interests of the North. It was a way of saying that what is good for the Delta must be bad for the North. And what is good for the North, is it good for the Delta? It is a question which the position of Northern exclusivism cannot deal with because it is based on a zero sum mindset that cannot picture Nigeria beyond what the British did to ensure that only a colonial logic functions within the Nigerian firmament. This mind-set had long spawned queer re-interpretations of Nigeria¹s history. For one, it¹s been against the restructuring of Nigeria in favour of ethnic states on the grounds that the British did not hand over Nigeria to any particular ethnic group but to all Nigerians at independence. What it fails to say is that Lugard specifically wrote in 1902 that the British project involved raising one ethnic group, the Fulani, to the level of a superior race and that three decades after independence Sokoto state, the natal state of Uthman dan Fodio has actually named itself Born to rule. Besides, Nigeria as a country was not taken from all Nigerians at the same time. It was taken in piecemeal fashion, kingdom after kingdom. Also, the idea of independence, when it came, percolated from region to region at different rates until all Nigerians found that it was good and supported it. To know this and to argue that even the injustices that the British piled upon some of the ethnic groups should be allowed to continue to block the enhancement of the capacities of those groups is to make a colonial logic, and therefore the sustenance of internal colonialism, the basis for the Nigerian Federation. What is worse is to go on implying that any alteration must pass through riots and coups and contrived stalemates as has happened in the past, a strategy that has destroyed the basis for genuine debates, dialogues, confabulations, and conferences. Interestingly, even those who prefer to use the language of debates and dialogues end up with deliberate mis-descriptions of other Nigerians for the purpose of sustaining Northern exclusivism. Take, for instance, the proposals for using the ethnic criteria to determine the creation of states. One of the most classic mis-descriptions popped up recently in one of Mohammed Haruna¹s columns in The Comet entitled The dangers of ethnic politics. In it, Haruna, whose admirable clarity of expression turns his biases and errors into superlative goblins, claims that Awolowo recommended 64 ethnic states in his book Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution. It does not seem like the kind of mistake a literate person makes unless it is aimed at deliberate mis-information. Anyone who has read the same book must have seen a listing of the states in Appendix 3 beginning at page181. Eleven States were recommended on a purely ethnic basis and seven on a mixed principle of multi-ethnicity: to make sure that no fraction of a majority group gets mixed up with minority ethnic groups and that a number of minority ethnic groups, holding together, could achieve viability and a basis for mutual self-defense against bigger neighbours.

Federal Nigeria

October 21, 2003

The most recalcitrant are the ones that emanated from the skirmishes of 1941 and 1951. They are based on sheer folklore and poorly connected anecdotes, some of which are to be found in some of the foundational texts of Nigerian politics like James Coleman¹s seminal, Background to Nationalism, and, later, Chinua Achebe¹s highly influential pamphlet, The Trouble with Nigeria. Many Nigerian children are taught early in their lives to believe that it was all tribalism at work in the many situations that tore the peoples apart. The truth, however, is that the 1941 and 1951 episodes prove the alternative point that those who do not take their country seriously begin by not taking their own history seriously.

To begin with the 1941 episode. It happened that Awolowo, who was not a Lagosian at that time, supported Ernest Ikoli, an Ijaw, against Samuel Akinsanya from his own Ijebu-Remo community in the elections into the Legislative Council. Akinsanya was Zik¹s candidate. If anything was guaranteed to have laid a solid foundation for Nigerian Nationalism, this was it. But Ikoli¹s victory did not sit well with the foremost nationalist of the time. Ikoli was Zik¹s competitor in the world of newspapering. So those on Ikoli¹s side automatically became Zik¹s competitors. This was turned into a fight between Igbo and Yoruba at a time when the West African Pilot was the very Bible of the Nigerian masses.

The charges and counter charges of those times were mixed up with the folklore of everyday market situations in ways that have literally framed the psychology of whole populations on both sides of the divide. Ten years later, in 1951, another incident occurred which was easily turned in the same way into an ethnic fracas. It was the election into the Western House of Assembly. Zik claimed to have won the election. Zik¹s story, as retailed on a radio programme on December 18, 1978 is that his party, the NCNC, won “43 members out of 80 but within 24 hours, 20 of them had crossed carpet.” And, he was left “with only twenty three members.” This story has formed part of the mythology (and demonology) activating the antagonism between Zik and Awo and between the Igbo and the Yoruba. It has been sold to successive generations of Nigerians who, not having the ready means to decide between history and fiction, have been plodding along as permanent hostages of contemptible prejudices.” 52 years later, many kobo and penny columnists still manage to repeat the loaded untruths in spite of the overwhelming information available that there was no way the NCNC could have won that election. Azikiwe¹s own newspaper, The West African Pilot, claimed after polling day that the NCNC won 25 seats while the Action Group won only 15 seats and the rest went to independents.

This was not the case. But even if we accept that this was true, how could 25 seats in an 80 seat Assembly be regarded as a victory? The intriguing part is that thereafter every Igbo indigene was made to believe that the defense of the untruth is a matter of ethnic honour. Those who opposed Zik were to be treated as being against the Igbo. In essence, every Igbo person was made to feel that they had been short-changed by the Yoruba. Tribalism was easy to fling at other people, as it is still being done today. That tribalism was everybody¹s cup of tea was proved by the Port Harcourt episode, brilliantly reported by G.O.D Dawodu, in which Dr. Adesokan who was the NCNC Deputy Chairman of Branch was summarily thrown out as a candidate in favour of MCK Ajuluchuku in the same 1951 election. Because Adesokan never became a big politician nobody talks about it. Thereafter, however, when you read or hear it said that carpet crossing wiped out NCNC victory on the floor of the Western House of Assembly, tribalism is hoisted in a one directional tilt of the pole.

What ought never to be allowed to be forgotten, because too many lives have been wasted for it, is that what happened in the West bears little resemblance to the dominant folklore. As against the argument very well documented in Zik¹s biography that more than 17 people crossed carpet, the truth is that only three legislators crossed carpet on the floor of the Western House of Assembly. This is contrary to all the folk history that tells it otherwise.

As Bola Ige has written in his book, People, Politics and Politicians of Nigeria(1940-1979) what could be said to be damaging about what the Action Group did to Azikiwe happened later when the AG-dominated House, which was the electoral college for the Central Legislature, did not vote for Azikiwe to lead his party to the Central Legislature in Lagos. But that was only possible because other NCNC legislators from Lagos, who should have stepped down for their leader, contested against him. I would hazard the point that Zik failed to get AG endorsement to go to the Legislative Council more because they feared him for his oratorical skills and his capacity for political footwork, rather than because he was not Yoruba. One speech by Azikiwe, as mythology has it, could have sent all of them scampering for cover in every debate. At any rate, Zik¹s partymen who ran against him were from determinate Yoruba homesteads that they could mobilize across party lines to defeat their leader.

Still I would argue that what was most significant about that election, was not that Azikiwe¹s party lost but that an Igbo leader who was a known President of the Igbo State Union could win an election in Yorubaland up to the point of wanting to be a Premier. More significant is that the NCNC actually defeated the Action Group in the Western Region in the 1954 election to the Federal House, four years after the Regional elections which Zik claimed that the NCNC won.

Unfortunately, by this time, Zik had perfected his return to the East to drive out the Efik stalwart who was leading, by an earlier agreement, a predominantly Igbo region. Everyone who cares about good human relations must agree that what the Yoruba and other ethnic groups in Southern Nigeria gave to Azikiwe was a committed followership that their leader did not reciprocate. Which makes it particularly odd to hear it being said that when the people turned away from Azikiwe they were showing hatred to the Igbo. The truth is that the Igbo who identified with Azikiwe and therefore could not raise a finger of protest at his toying with the support that other nationalities gave to him, must bear a lot of responsibility for what happened. Since I come from what was a predominantly NCNC family, I can tell how deep is the disappointment that Zik¹s followers felt when he abandoned them, so to say, in the cauldron of Awolowo¹s dictatorial insistence on compulsory education.

Unfortunately, it is on the basis of the fictions of the fifties that the stratachy of Igbo leaders have failed to work with the Yoruba even when their lives depended on it. To be fair, there was one critical moment when Igbo leaders actually chose to work with Awolowo. It was after the 1959 Federal election into the first independence parliament. Although, they did not appear to know how much the British had invested in ensuring that neither of them would win the election, there was a chance that if Zik and Awo worked together they would be able to reach a solution with the North on a fairer way of running the Federation. Zik¹s later reason for jettisoning the AG proposal for a coalition is interesting because it was against the advice of many Igbo stalwarts in his party. Zik argued that it would have led to the break up of Nigeria. But that was not on the cards at all as anyone could have foreseen who knew, not only of Ahmadu Bello, Ribadu and Tafawa Balewa¹s good sense, but the need for Britain to keep Nigeria together.

All the same, under pressure from the British who had set up the Western arm of the NCNC to revolt against Azikiwe if he dared to shake hands with Awolowo, the great man buckled. The charge was later made that the NCNC refused to work with the AG because of Awolowo¹s double dealing between the NCNC and NPC. This was simply a red herring thrown into the fray to make compromise look good. The majority of Igbo leaders were actually quite disappointed at what happened although the share out of largesse at the Federal level managed to assuage many frayed nerves. Part of that share-out was the agreement to smash the Action Group. The NCNC plan, as Billy Dudley has revealed, was to win the Western region over the dead body of the Action Group and then confront the NPC with a solid Southern solidarity. They did not reckon with the resilience of the AG and the capacity for wheeling by the Ladoke Akintola¹s faction of the AG which moved closer to the NPC, much closer than the NCNC could afford. And so the story of the smashing of the Action Group actually was the beginning of the smashing of Azikiwe¹s legendary capacity for political gamesmanship.

This became quite obvious with what every serious student of Nigerian politics must see as the first coup in Nigeria¹s history. It took place in 1964; before the big one of January 15, 1966. It was a coup serviced by the British Head of the Nigerian Army, Welby Everard, who would not obey Azikiwe, the commander in chief of the Army forces. As it happened, an advance copy of Zik¹s national broadcast had already been published in The West African Pilot saying that he would not call Balewa to form a government because the election had been massively rigged. But soldiers took over the state house, putting the Governor General, so to say, in protective custody. Zik was obliged to re-write the speech which he actually delivered calling on Balewa to form a government. Officers loyal to the Governor General, mainly of Igbo extraction, had wanted to carry out a coup to save Zik¹s good name. But Zik would not oblige. He went for a sea cruise and another group of mainly Igbo officers carried out the January 15, 1966 coup. The real leader of the coup, Emmanuel Ifeajuna, before he surrendered, wrote about their plans in a still-unpublished manuscript made famous by Olusegun Obasanjo in his book, Nzeogwu.

The plan was to release Obafemi Áwolowo from Calabar Prison, and if he refused to be their leader, they would lock him up in the State House and issue decrees in his name. Obasanjo¹s book gives no credence to the plan perhaps because it tends to shock many Nigerians who are drowning in their culture-clash ethnicity. It still shocks many when they are told that Igbo officers could carry out a coup in 1966 for the purpose of making Awolowo their leader. But anyone genuinely familiar with the goings-on in the early years of independence would not be surprised. The faith in Awolowo stemmed from the discovery not only that he was more sinned against than sinning, but that only he of his generation had the moral savvy, intellectual rigour, and ideological acumen to set Nigeria right. In short, more than any other Nigerian in the twentieth century, he was one leader who took Nigeria seriously. But the January 15 coup was hijacked by a different echelon of Igbo officers who did not know or care about the mission of the original coup makers.

They would not release Awolowo from jail. More critical is that it became forbidden to even suggest that Igbo officers carried out a coup with the intention of handing it over to a Yoruba enemy of the Igbo people. No one can tell whether the release of Ifeajuna¹s manuscript in those gory days of crisis in 1966 could have doused the impression that was thereafter created that the January 15 coup was purely and simply an Igbo coup. Incidentally, the manuscript has still not been fully published apart from the snap quotations made from it by Obasanjo in his book. It tells of one golden opportunity that was lost. Surely, it was time that the manuscript saw the light of day for all Nigerians to see. The reason is not only that what one prime actor in our history has to say is important even if it is about the bare bones, but because we need a re-interpretation of the events that took place if we are not forever to allow the costly silences, and the falsehoods peddled in the heat of the moment on all sides, to go on over­determining our history. We need to do more than re-interprete. For the sake of younger generations being thoroughly misled by self-serving folklorists, it is important to ask the right questions; if only to help us deal with the kind of situation we have had on our hands since the 4/19 elections in 2003.

The elections provide an angle to the matter of taking Nigeria seriously which we need all to pay attention. I want to take it from the part that, in the past few weeks, especially as a result of the crisis in Anambra State, many columnists of Eastern extraction have mounted a common plank in the narration of Nigeria¹s history to explain how the Igbo got to where we are today. The Anambra saga hit the media with a bolt after Dr. Chris Ngige, as the elected Governor of the state, was put under protective custody by an Assistant Inspector General of Police. The Governor had been forced to sign cheques running into billions of naira and a letter of resignation. He had been made to read his letter of resignation on a yet to be shown video film. Acting on the letters, the House of Assembly had colluded with the Deputy Governor, his personal friend and bestman at his wedding, to give him the coup de grace. The act of protective custody, a virtual attempted coup, sanctioned by yet to be properly identified powers from above, hit the rocks when media exposure made unscripted entrance into the scenario. It shocked a supposedly unshockable nation when it was discovered that the supposedly elected Governor Ngige was considered fit for dumping because he was not loyal to Chris Uba, the young godfather who had boasted that he was responsible for the election of the Governor, the Senators, members of the House of Representatives, and House of Assembly members from the state. Still awaiting full confirmation, although already partially exposed by the election tribunals, is that the accredited candidates of the ruling PDP in Anambra State were displaced, after polling, in favour of a new list of names provided by the godfather.

The stronger claim, being made at the electoral tribunal by the supposedly defeated candidate of APGA, the opposing party, is that even Governor Ngige did not win the election but was declared winner as part of the general cook-up that enabled non-candidates to be given victory certificates. The evident contempt for universal adult suffrage is goring. It tells the story of an election for which, on a nation-wide basis, there was no respectable electoral register; and police commando units and private armies exercised unbridled powers over electoral logistics, and electoral officers were granted discretion to allow or disallow voters whose names did not appear on the roll. There was no chance that the electoral commission could have an independent existence outside the whims of godfathers empowered from above. To put it another way, the Anambra episode is merely the tip of a national circumstance that points to the untold stories of many other states in which opponents and monitors have virtually argued that there was no election.

South South Zone as the deprived goose

October 22, 2003

In the face of the facts, it is interesting that many otherwise hard-headed columnists like Ocherome Nnanna of the Vanguard and Ike Okonta of This Day have found it more interesting to explain what has happened in Anambra by dredging the psychology of the Igbo who are said to have been so pulverized by the machinations of Awolowo during the civil war that they have been unable to get things right politically. Blaming one man Awolowo for the problems of the Igbo in Nigerian politics is already quite an industry. Awolowo is said to have joined the Federal Government in the late sixties so that the Yoruba could take over all the jobs in the Federal bureaucracy as well as buy up the foreign companies that were being indigenized. The consequent deprivation suffered by the Igbo, especially after the post-war ex-gratia payments, is said to have prepared them for the mish-mash that has overtaken the politics of the Igbo people. It is quite a good story for continuing a hate-war that started with pure fictions. But it does not square with the reality on the ground, as anyone can tell who saw the rise of Midwesterners, more than Yorubas, in the Federal bureaucracy and their subsequent fall from grace under the Babangida administration. It is not even necessary to deny the foresightedness that we all know Awolowo had, to prove that the charge is misplaced as it relates to either the bureaucracy or the private sector. One should wonder why it has been necessary to climb upon the fiction-directed wagon which, in the past, merely prevented the Igbo from seeing the true face of their own collective biography. Perhaps, while Awolowo was alive, it made sense to use any such means to prevent him from becoming a Head of State. But 16 years after his death, at a time when the Yoruba have presumably used up their own slot in the zoning formula, it is bemusing, for any generation of Igbo people to fall back on stories that are not even true, as a way of winning a battle that the other side does not even have to fight. It has become a case of allowing old unbecoming animosities to rob a people of a future space for negotiation in the national spoils system.

Now, to move over to the commonly talked about issue of how Awolowo lured the Igbos into fighting the civil war and then abandoned them. Only Igbos without self-respect can say that they needed “an old enemy” like Awolowo to advice them on how to respond to the massacre of Igbos that took place after January 15, 1966. Fortunately, what Awolowo told Ojukwu when they met has been transcribed from tapes captured after the fall of Enugu during the civil war. Check Path to Nigerian Greatness, edited by MCK Ajuluchuku. Yes! the same MCK. In it, Awolowo requested for what many now call a handshake across the Niger. But he made it conditional on a common fight to federalize Nigeria with the backing of the minorities for whom states must be created. Awolowo knew that the regular cynic could say that the North and the East had more to lose in the creation of states because the Midwest had long been created in 1963 out of the Western Region. But he had paid his dues not only by causing the Western House of Assembly to vote in advance to meet the eventuality of having Midwest created; he had argued in his biography published in the year of independence in 1960, that it was important to create the Midwest even if states would not be simultaneously created in the other regions. After the events of 1967, he could trust that the Middle Belt population was strong enough in the army to make state creation possible across the board. However, the idea of creating states, for which he had been struggling from his entrance into national politics, did not appeal to the new leaders of the East. Ojukwu decided to go it alone. He could speak for the Eastern Region which included minority ethnic groups that had been agitating for their own region for many decades. But he obviously did not see why the minority groups should want to speak for themselves. At any rate, as H.M.Njoku, the commander of the Biafran Army has written in his memoirs, A Tragedy Without Heroes: the Nigerian Biafran War, there was no relationship between Awolowo¹s agreement with Ojukwu and what the leaders in the East eventually did. Since old animosities die hard, as war propaganda had re-established, other issues have since been added up to make a case for the continuance of hatred between the two Southern nationalities, thus putting Nigeria¹s unity unnecessarily at the mercy of fictions.

All that may be said, for now, is that it is wrong for war propaganda to be made the basis for eternal narration of a people¹s history. Although it is very true that the civil war against the Igbos has not yet ended, as proved by the many disabilities that Igbos have continued to suffer under successive Federal Governments, the situation is worsened by a pervasive inability by protagonists of the Igbo cause to confront history without succumbing to the propaganda of war and the personalist maneuvers of leaders seeking momentary advantage in elite battles at the Centre. For that matter, the blind hate that governs such stories have merely proved that the quality of mind which the Igbo apply to most other undertakings has never been applied in politics. Otherwise, after the civil war, which I argue, is still on in all manner of ways, what one expected was that, like the Jews after the Second World War, the average Igbo nationalist and intellectual would refuse to depend on hearsay but would investigate every story and nail down each charge against their real or imagined traducers to its minutest detail. Those who have been doing this unfortunately are not the most popular Igbo people. What has been happening, as younger generations are drawn into it, is to levy charges off-the-cuff and whimsically. In books written by respected intellectuals, the very masterminds of the pogroms against the Igbo are lionized and valorized while those who were too far away to have a word on the matter are pilloried in accordance with the fictions of antecedent tribal-hate. It is not only that many innocent Igbo people have been made to suffer for the lies being told, but that coalitions that could have moved the Igbo case beyond grumblings about marginalization have been scuttled from pure bad belle by those who say: whether our children would benefit or not, we do not want the handshake.

Yet, it is not, I argue, as if the Igbo people have a choice in the matter. If it is solutions we seek, the first need is to acknowledge the reality that the problems do not have their roots in Igboland. Any presumption that it will be solved in Igboland is like the pursuit of the whirlwind which turns and turns and returns again and again. The problems arise from the interaction with other Nigerians and must be confronted in terms of that interaction. The current approach of seeing the crisis of the Anambra coup as a problem that has befallen Igbo people rather than a problem that has befallen Nigeria, is part of the crisis. People have gone about looking for something in the Igbo character which is supposed to help resolve a problem that emanated from the larger context of a national malaise. So you have the proud ethnic champions rousing to defend Igboland and naming all the great people from Anambra, or all the great people that Igboland has produced, in order to show that the fault is not in their character. A search for unnecessary proof. It is the mistake of those who write eight-legged essays to explain corruption by looking at Umuofia Progressive Union in Chinua Achebe¹s novel, No longer at ease. The more meaningful tack is to look at the relationship, or lack of relationship, between the Umuofia people and the other Nigerians who are not necessarily visible in the novel. In trying to seek a solution, we need to look at the relationship between the Igbo and other Nigerians who have the same problems and without whom the problems may be tackled but cannot be solved. Which is to say that those who see an Igbo problem instead of a Nigerian one will always go wind-hunting and never have something concrete to hold on to.

Otherwise, if an explanation needs to be provided for the current mayhem taking place in Anambra State, it ought to focus on the command that diaspora politics has in Igbo affairs. The manner in which diaspora politics over-determines situations is proved by the impact of Abuja politics, as Lagos politics once had and still has, upon Igbo affairs. I argue that rather than allow the history of post civil war Igbo politics to rest on the fact that Awolowo, as a war-time Commissioner for Finance, over-empowered his own Yoruba people, it ought to matter a lot more to narrate the steps taken by Igbo leaders, in the national system, to empower their own people. They have generally built up ethnic unions for the purpose of lobbying the center for individualistic ends, rather than working at communal self-development. The spectacle of Ohaneze Ndigbo appealing to a former dictator to help put a word in for the Igbo is one of the sad fiascos of our times. The truth is, beyond collaboration with every government in power at the Centre, none of which has had a disposition to offer more than crumbs unbecoming of true citizens, nothing has distinguished the average Igbo leader of today from their Yoruba counterparts who believe that joining the mainstream to share loot rather than equipping their people to provide for their own welfare is what politics is all about. To go on to propose that Awolowo was responsible for reducing the Igbo to the level where the area can now be overcome by the Uba-type of godfather is a damning cop-out from the necessity to explain the profuse growth of Uba-types across the Federation before and since the politics of the civil war. Or who does not know that Chief Nanga in A man of the People was not just an Igbo type but a Nigerian type that flourished across country? Or is it only among the Igbo that we have had them? Surely, while no one may tell an aggrieved people how to nurse their grievances, one ought to insist on not having one¹s intelligence insulted by people who think that once they find a scapegoat they no longer need to reason properly about their own problems. In this and in many other cases, the charge is so poorly conceived, and aimed, that it begins to offer some insight into why the dominant type of godfather is the Uba-type. Assuredly, when social engineers who should lead their people with the quality of mind already displayed in other sectors withdraw from constructive engagement with social problems, they tend to concede the stage to mechanics. Since the mechanics are not afraid to dirty their hands, they tend to loom larger than life and to assume statuses even bigger than the big godfathers at the center have grafted upon them. As in the Southwest, where those who arranged a national zoning formula also decided who will be chosen for them to do business with, so it is among the Igbo. It does not take any special insight to see why the Abuja-based Mafiosi will always chose those who will do their bidding. It raises however the question of what those in the conscious segment of the population are doing to prevent their lives from being mis-managed by mechanics that they have not chosen.

The way forward, as I see it, does lie in how the Igbo relate to themselves at home in Igboland, but more strategically, it is about how they relate to other Nigerians, not just in pursuit of jobs and contracts for ambitious Igbo sons and daughters, but for the purpose of restructuring Nigeria so that more independence will reside with the people at the state levels. The core of the matter concerns Federalism: one that must make Abuja less present in the politics of the states, and with less leverage for the role of wheedler and spoiler, than it has at the moment. This is saying that it is the coming together of the states, less than Abuja¹s supposed power, that should give meaning to national decision-making. The loss or disempowerment of one constituent unit must be deemed a calamity in a properly conceived state. The matter, I insist, is not so much an Igbo problem as a Nigerian one which cuts across ethnic groups, zones, and regions.

SOUTH OF THE SOUTH and other minorities

In the South-South, it did not take much time for the conclusion to be reached that the issue centers on the search for true Federalism. There was never a time when the discomfiting nature of the so-called mistake of 1914 stood up well with the ethnic groups that were being repressed for others to gain ascendance. Even in the flush of the unitarist wave that followed the early Pan-Africanist concept of “we are all Africans”, a romantic carry-over from battles based simply on the colour of the skin, there was always a fair appreciation of the need to defend the minority ethnic groups in the face of the larger battalions. That explains why the Efiks and Ibibio people were unionized before either the Yoruba or the Igbo. Long before Nnamdi Azikiwe escaped from the ethnic conundrum in the Western Region and returned to the East, from whence he came, to drive Eyo Ita away from the state house in Enugu; and long before JS Tarka and JS Olawoyin were jailed for championing the demands of their ethnic groups for a fair deal in Northern Region, it was already a unionized minority echelon that the majorities had to deal with. True, they were all victims of the assumption that unitarist Britain was the fit model for running Nigerian affairs. Many in the radical labour movement, the Zikist Movement, and several pan-African cultural bodies, failed to distinguish the realities of the struggle against the colonialist from the multi-ethnic realities on the ground which pre-dated the colonial impasse. This created a naïve reaching for unitarism which blocked the capacity for many to see that only a Federal option was truly available for unifying a multi-ethnic state. Those, like Awolowo, who stressed the ethnic factor as a basis for federalizing the country were seen as the ones creating problems where there were none. Hence, it was claimed that he brought tribalism into Nigerian politics. But the core leaders among the minorities, not yet swindled by diaspora politics, knew that the matter was not just about things in people¹s heads. The agitation for the creation of more states was not just about what Awolowo wanted, but what many minority ethnic groups, were suffering in majority-dominated regions. The minority Commision of 1958 and then the 1963 and 1967 creation of states took the lid permanently off the matter. By the seventies and eighties when Ken Saro Wiwa categorically identified Awolowo¹s ideals as the firmest basis for the kind of struggles the minority groups were involved in, the oil rigs had added weight to knock it home to many, that they could not thrive on the basis of the unitarist contraptions they felt obliged to parley with in the name of being close to the mainstream of Nigerian politics.

South-South as the deprived goose (II)

October 23, 2003

All the same, it must be said, that politics was too much in command for many of the leaders to see clearly. Or, to put it another way, the need to position one ethnic group in relation to other ethnic groups, overtook the necessity to mobilise for change. In many instances, the micro-nationalism of the individual ethnic groups, and the competition between them, stood in the way of their common demands. The fact that Federalism¹s most coherent and consistent advocate, Obafemi Awolowo, was of Yoruba origin, whom many disliked as a result of battles in other fronts, stood in their way of accepting the rationality of the Federalist ideal. They preferred to support unitarist-inclined organisations whose approach to national unity was detrimental to the very communal goals they enjoyed shouting to high heavens. Thus, many of the unionised ethnic groups which stood to gain most from Federalism made a big deal out of opposing it. With specific reference to what is now called the South-South, there was always among the constituent ethnic groups from the Ogoja, Efik, Ijaw, Kalabari, Urhobo, Itsekiri, Ika, Edo and other areas, so much less concern with the collective interests of all the groups than the interests of individual nationalities. The urge to re-design the larger nation, to re-draw the whole national map, enjoyed only a vague consideration as a result. It did not involve attention to the relationship between the minority groups themselves. A common plight but not a common sense of culture or political viewpoint counted much in the common propositions that led to the demand for regions of their own. Hence, there was always a blind-spot in the relationships they shared between themselves. More often than not, the cooperation between them was a function of the relationship with the nearest majority group in the national spoils system. Although differing from region to region, the relationships were marked by the seeming agreement between the majority groups to keep the minority groups in their place. It was therefore always the case that the minority ethnic groups became unintended beneficiaries of any failure of cooperation between the majority groups. For instance, when an attempted coalition between the Action Group and the Northern People¹s Congress failed in 1952, or when the attempted handshakes across the Niger between the Yoruba South-West and the Igbo East collapsed, it appeared as if the failures were specially staged, although unwittingly, for the benefit of the minority areas. The truth is that every handshake across the Niger always threatened to materialise upon the dead body of some minority cause. This was the case with the Awolowo/Ojukwu handshake across the Niger in 1967. It failed because Ojukwu did not let the self-defence of his Eastern majority turf to allow for self-defence by the minorities of their own cause. Incidentally, earlier, in 1957, Awolowo himself, who does not take second place to any other Nigerian in the matter of pursuing autonomy for the minority groups across the country, was confronted at the Constitutional Conference with a British demand that put him in the kind of quandary that Ojukwu found himself in 1967. Since you are so in love with the minorities, he was asked, would you like to delay Nigeria¹s independence so that the minorities could have states created for them? Awolowo¹s quandary was different from Ojukwu¹s who obviously was not game to the idea of autonomy for the minorities. But Awolowo did not want it to be said that he whose party was the first to fix a date for independence and the first Nigerian to become leader of Government Business was rejecting independence. If he agreed to a delay, his party would be used as a dishrag by his NCNC opponents to wipe so much mess across Nigeria. He did not want members of the NCNC, who were in effective contestation for control of the West, to have such a potent weapon against his party. He reached an agreement with them that it must be independence before the creation of states. With an obvious chuckle, the British who did not believe that human rights written on a piece of paper could guarantee anyone¹s freedom, agreed to give the minorities a sop through a Minorities Commission that inserted the protection of Fundamental Human Rights in the Constitution. This insertion did little to protect the minorities. Thereafter, Awolowo¹s continued insistence on the creation of states, including his wish for the Mid-West to be created even if no states were created in other regions, became his albatross. The Mid-West State was indeed created, breaking up his own constituency, without a corresponding creation of the Middle Belt in the North and COR State in the East. This was the atonement that Awolowo had to undergo, including his trial for treasonable felony and his term in jail, for showing uncharacteristic weakness when he allowed the plum of independence to take priority over the autonomy of the minorities.

In the subsequent politics of the South-South, that moment of weakness that Awolowo showed has been thumbed as one of the reasons for South-South commitment to hegemonic political parties rather than opposition parties in national elections. Many leaders of Southern minority ethnic groups have tended to be overwhelmed by the idea that ethnic groups will always lose out when they are not within the mainstream of national politics. This idea, so thoroughly ingrained in the South-South, has led the leadership circuits to get trapped in political movements with programmes and policies that are inimical to their interests. Either for reasons of career pursuits in national politics, or due to sheer incapacity to appreciate the core issues, they have tended to reject the very ideas that promised the kind of autonomy they claimed to be seeking. They have reduced the Niger Delta to a handmaiden of extraneous interests that are objectively, diametrically, opposed to either true Federalism (no matter how defined) or resource control. The leaders have handed their struggle to a federal compromise that is roughing up the very idea of Federalism. Thus, from the sheer need to protect the PDP, a party that had only an opportunistic interest in the Niger Delta from its inception, all the PDP governors in the South-South refused to take the Federal Government to court on Resource Control until Bola Ige was obliged to jump them. How determined they were to win the case came out in the admission by at least one honest governor that they did not want to disgrace their PDP President. The objective observer would have thought that the interests of the people that they represent should override party bonhomie and the ego of their President. Even before the resource control case, it was already clear what attitude the leaders had towards their own struggle. They embraced the NDDC, as previous leaders had embraced OMPADEC, although the commissions were clearly recipes for second class citizenship. They made so much out of taking half a loaf that even the evidently unconstitutional intervention of the Federal Government in the revenue disposition of the affected states has been seen as normal. As if they have lost their rights under the superior ordinance of federal might, the South-South states have unwittingly allowed themselves to move from the status of minority states to that of minors who must be spoken for. A case of minors, for whom a godfather at the centre must draw up benefices. The short of the matter is that the South-South states are in a jam because they have not worked out a stand for self-development between themselves that is superior to or different from that of the barn-storming spoilers from Abuja who are barely able to hide their enjoyment of the status of internal colonialists. The South-South states for instance do not need to wait for the Federal Government to build them a speed train to link their areas as a nucleus for a national build-up of such linkages. Nor should they allow a federal agency to play colonial consulate between them. If the narrow-mindedness of transient wielders of power in the area can be side-stepped there is no reason why there should be more investment in building the means for oppressing neighbours than in building a basis for building stronger bonds for meaningful development.

Talking about a worked- out relationship between the minority states, the obstacles to their progress have to be considered within a broader band beyond the issues at stake in the Niger Delta at the moment. It may help to remember that what Awolowo did at the Constitutional Conference when he bowed to the pressures for independence above the need for the creation of states for the minorities, was a general weakness of the age to which he belonged. It should always be compared to the circumstance of those intrepid Mid-Western leaders who considered it an abomination to be asked to wait for a common agreement to be reached for states to be created at the same time in all the three regions in the federation. After they got a state of their own, it became obvious that with the other minority groups in the federation still under old regional contraptions, the leaders of the newly created Mid-West State could do nothing about the structure of the whole federation. The federation continued to retain a shape that turned the new comers into mere buffers between the politics of the West, the North and the East. Even today, it would be difficult to convince the average Mid-Westerner, Bendelite or Edo-Delta indigene, that their victory in 1963 had a worm in its ointment. The non-linkage of the freedom of the Mid-West to the freedom in the other minority areas actually laid the basis for the kind of politics that soon followed. It was a politics that made Middle belt leaders to accept that their fate lay within the contraption of majority politics in the North. In effect, the so-called Middle Belt freedom fighters fell for the trappings of internal colonialism by Arewa stalwarts as a basis for extracting largesse from national coffers.

Incidentally, the same issues are still implicated in the Resource Control struggles of today when the average Middle Belt or Arewa activist demands to know where the allocation for his local government will come from after the restructuring. As in the sixties, the Middle Belt climbs open-eyedly into the role of a permanent subaltern in order to get the crumbs from the table of internal colonialism. Wittingly or unwittingly, it is the position of a beneficiary from radical injustice who acknowledges that the North is an economic part of Nigeria but belonging to a different moral universe. The same old fear motivates the question: what will happen to the allocations for the North after the restructuring? The question requires those who need justice to resolve not only that the statutory armed robbery against the Niger Delta must not continue but that there must be a way to share national resources which reduces the injustices by bringing the internal colonialist down to the level of normal citizens answerable to normal civil morality. One inadequate response is to say that every nationality, state, region or zone in Nigeria already has resources that could be developed to tide over the many problems of the moment. Such a response amounts to a restatement of the question rather than an answer. The adequate answer is to consider a programme of national development which, as Awolowo prescribes it, must begin by establishing a national minima below which no part of the country must be allowed to fall. It is about allowing every ethnic group or fraction to have a sense of self-rule without impugning the necessity to defend a common welfare system that cuts across all ethnic groups. There is an evident need for a national system, a common basket, which is independent of particularistic ethnic determinations and on the basis of which we can all say that every child born to a Nigerian should be able to go to school and live and work anywhere in the country without suffering undue disabilities. Without such a sense of common welfare as a hyphen that links all the nationalities across Nigeria, a serious engagement with the so-called National Question is conceivable only as self-deceit.

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