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Can a Community Develop Without Government’s Aid? By Abdullah Musa From the start let me draw attention to a fact: this article is written from the head, without recourse to library research. It is not meant to serve as a sermon from the mimbar, where the expectation would be that everything said is absolutely true. We are obsessed with the question of development. Whether this is of our own making, or we are behaving this way because of values thrust upon us may be hard to differentiate. What may be said with high degree of certainty is that prior to colonization we doubt very much if we considered it necessary to define our existence as to whether we were developing or not. If we were developing, what were the indices used to measure that kind of development? In Muslim communities development could have been measured, (if that were found necessary) in terms of the number of people who memorized the Holy Qur’an, the number of converts to the Islamic faith, and may be the number of people able to pay Zakkat ( the dues to the poor). In primitive societies that survived on hunting, farming, and possibly marauding, life could not have been measured using any indices. Individuals may boast of the number of women in one’s custody, the goats tethered, or even the tanks of alcohol in one’s abode; unlike today, number of male children sired used to be an index of human, individual development. But to define development in terms of a nation state, this came with European invasions. Today, development seems to evade us. I do not have the indices that United Nations uses to measure the development of human society. I may not be wrong to state that school enrolment is one of them. Number of doctors per thousand might be another, and even tele-density might be included. I may not be out of the way to state that women-related indices are also used: total number of girls enrolled in schools, birth-related deaths per thousand, and so forth. One thing that stands out clearly is that development measurement comes with the type of lifestyle adopted by a given nation or community. Like is known, and deserves repetition only for the sake of emphasis, the Europeans imposed their lifestyles, such that the use of the indices cited above becomes the only acceptable yardstick to measure whether a society is developed or not. Could there have been a development model that could have been more suitable for us than this one? A model, where we could have been the leaders rather than the led? That may seem to be wasted thinking. The question that may seem more relevant is this: how do we develop without waiting for the Governments to develop us? The reader should not deride this question. Developmental thrusts that may lead to industrial take-off seem to elude us. Today, power supply system in Nigeria has virtually crumbled. We cannot refine petroleum; neither can we produce the fertilizers we need. We have been unable to run a railway system, nor provide an average security for lives and security: only recently it was reported in the newspapers that members of Odua People’s Congress, (OPC) macheted two motorcyclists to death for causing them inconvenience on the road. Is this a sign of developed society? What may be more worrisome for us is not the discernable failure to develop after the Europeans decided to step aside. What is irksome is the fact that the road leading to an elective office is fraught with the severest danger, the possible loss of lives. A lady aspirant to the Senate in the middle belt is said to have recently narrowly escaped death. Two or is it three gubernatorial aspirants were felled by the assassins’ bullets, and as is usually the case, their memories are fast fading from the national consciousness, and may be even that of the police. It is only in our society that laws, or the interpretation of them, are not believed-in. You may note I use belief instead of obeisance. We may be forced to obey but at the lifting of pressure, we revert back to our unbelief. A case in point is the issue of disqualification of Nigeria’s Vice President from contesting the Presidency. If he is corrupt, dishonest, or is proved to have abused office, those who throng Action Congress’s rallies do not seem to believe so. As far as they are concerned, government is about patronage not justice. If Atiku gains power they gain state patronage, if he loses they lose. So in our own context, it is impossible to develop because development means different things to different people. The Yoruba press and clubs were vociferous in their attacks on the Northerners for their corruption when they held power. Recently a permanent secretary, who is their son, was being prosecuted for corruption, and the government being headed by their own kin, decided to discontinue the case. This act was acceptable to them. How then can the government be an agent for the development of society when there is no agreement on the set of values that are to guide the development? It is this apparent contradiction that brings to the forefront of the thought process, to look at the possibility of searching for developmental tools outside government structures. But this is not the only reason. The federal government in Nigeria is more than federal in the political context of it. It is more like unitary form of government. It controls all the resources. With exception of only one state, (Lagos) and may be Ogun, no any other state can pay its civil servants without grant or allocation from the almighty federal government. It may due to this strong financial appeal of the federal seat, and the fact that one becomes either a President of Nigeria or Head of State, not of its component parts, that the quest for the control of the centre results into nearly full scale war. For the first time in the history of the nation, political power was sought with the sole intention of incapacitating a segment of the nation. All major and significant infrastructural developments are based outside the hinterland. A re-structuring of the financial sector made sure the North has only one Managing Director in 25 consolidated banks. And funny enough, the North has three or more Presidential candidates. There does not seem to be a clear perception of the danger; the danger not necessarily of being out of federal power, but the danger of marginalization by the sheer sophistication of the ‘brother’ adversary. We read, even if we were not old enough then to appreciate the reasons behind the Nigerian civil war of the early seventies; that the Igbo suffered terribly. They nearly lost everything. Today, unless there are still scarred areas from the shelling and bombardments in their areas, one would not say the Igbo suffered the travails of war. How did they do it? How did they recover? Were they given hand-outs by the federal government? If yes, was it 100%? I doubt it very much. Today, without any physical civil war, the core North is devastated. We groan out loud: no business, nothing moves, nothing goes, and nearly everybody is bankrupt. Do we know the rogue elephant responsible for this destruction? They say it is Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. So the question that easily comes to mind is this: if the assertion is true that Chief Obasanjo enacted economic policies that bankrupted the core north, would it then be out of order to think that a President from the North should seek to reverse them? And would it be in accord with reason that the Chief would not try to block any person who shows inclination of reversing of the gains from his ‘reforms’? If Arewa exists as a single economic and political bloc, (and I don’t believe it exists in that form) then it must have an alternative plan of action if it fails to capture federal power. What we are seeing from the banking sector reforms, the gas supply lines, the aviation reforms and so on, is a structuring of the economy in favor of the Yoruba and their geographic area. They have no cause to apologize. What did we do with power when we had it? Not that one cherishes inequity. But the fact remains that nobody had ever been able to sell Nigeria to Nigerians. We used the nation as a kind of garment: when it proves suffocating we discard it in favor of a more comforting tribal affiliation. But the challenge today is not to do with the logistic of power cornering or power sharing. It is to do with survival. With our unplanned population, we are reproducing without the capacity to educate the children. Of all the tribes in the country, the Hausa-Fulani are the less able to privately fund the education of their children. Even the almajiri system is an indicator of the poverty of the parents to fund the Quranic education they say that they cherish. If you broadly classify our trades into three of four sectors, you may see glaringly the challenges we face more clearly. We start with the educated elite who are mostly employed in government or government-dependent services. Next comes the farmers who cannot pay the market price of imported fertilizer and we are unable to produce more cheaply at home. Next you come to the commercial sector where our business men tend to favor the imports of all manner of manufactured goods, which goes against the endeavor of Lagos/ Otta-based industries owned by the Yoruba. The finance sector had already been mentioned above, the implication being that we control, (even that is not total) only about 4% of the power to disburse credit from financial institutions. I could remember that some years back, some foresighted Kanawa felt that there was need to establish a Fund to boost the education and economy of Kano. It was called Kano Foundation, (Gidauniyar Jihar Kano). Today is it a decade or more lately, the institution may still exist, but have the objectives been met? Who owns it? To whom does the management report? It could have been our desire to saddle it with the business of meeting the challenges outlined above, with or without the control of the federal government. When I see what is going on now in the country, and our response to it, I feel like an illiterate, incapable of reading the hand writing on the wall. Before I try to decipher what the writing on the wall is, I would like to draw the readers’ attention to one text message I read in Daily Trust newspaper by one frustrated Northerner, calling the attention of a respected Governor in the North. He said: please know that we are not living in a Stone Age! And what to my understanding is written on the wall to read and act upon is: Hausa-Fulani, you are living in Stone Age!
Abdullah Musa Special Assistant to Kano State Governor On Societal Re-orientation
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