People

PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Politicians, Press and the Indigene/Settler Question

Governor Ibrahim Saminu Turaki of Jigawa State titled it “Food for Thought for Northerners,” but at least one newspaper, The Comet, tried to dismiss it as “a sleight of the hand.” This was the advertisement the governor put out in several newspapers not too long ago on behalf of the governors of the 19 Northern States decrying the indigene/settler dichotomy which had lately set parts of the North ablaze, Plateau State particularly.

So horrific were the May killings in Plateau State in which the “indigenes” sought to cleanse out the “settlers” in their midst and so serious a threat did the killings pose to law and order in the North that President Obasanjo damned due process and imposed a six-month state of emergency on the state, in the first instance.

As we all know the state of emergency ended on November 18, thanks to intense opposition against its renewal, especially from the Christian Association of Nigeria, some leading Christian “indigenes” of the state like former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, and much of the media. Such a renewal, some of them said, could only be counter productive, and, in any case, its imposition, to begin with, was improper and unconstitutional, not to say discriminatory, since a similar emergency was not imposed on Kano State , which the killings in Plateau had spilled into.

Political and constitutional pundits can debate the propriety of the president’s action till the cows come home and still not agree among themselves, but it was hard to dispute its wisdom given the seriousness of the situation. Given the unprecedented scale of the killings and given the state’s governor, Chief Joshua Dariye’s, complicity in the killings – and this is putting it mildly, considering his repeated remarks about serving quit notice to “unruly tenants” – it was difficult to quarrel with the president’s choice of wisdom over propriety.

Having achieved its objective of putting out the fire on the mountain, in a manner of speaking, the next important step was to ensure that no smolders were left behind that could easily blow up into another, and possibly worse, conflagration. Clearly this was the objective of Governor Saminu Turaki’s advertisement which called on Northerners to ponder over the way they have allowed the indigene/settler dichotomy to creep into their political vocabulary and wreck such havoc on their ethnic and religious harmony.

Drawing from an impressive list of several Nigerians who became political leaders and climbed to the top of their professions outside their native homes, the Turaki advert argued that the indigene/settler dichotomy was an issue that should never have degenerated into the May killings and maiming we witnessed in Plateau, and which spilled over into Kano and was barely stopped from spreading to other parts of the region. .

It was this argument that The Comet, in its edition of June 21, dismissed as “a sleight of the hand”. Sounding more like someone gloating over the predicament of the North than like someone interested in searching for a solution to a serious problem facing the region, the newspaper said the Plateau killings, thanks to democracy, merely exposed the contradictions in the region whereby in years past, the “settlers” got all the privileges while the “aborigines” got nothing.

“The aborigine/settler” said the newspaper, “has remained with us because we have allowed two classes of people to exist instead of uniting the community ab initio. The settler-class has retained all the privileges of the conqueror while the aborigine class has been its hewers of wood and drawers of water. This contradiction is what democracy has enlarged.” This, said the paper, is what Northern leaders like Saminu Turaki “must begin to ponder upon to address in truth rather than pursuing a policy of denial of the aborigine/settler problem.”

This somewhat jaundiced and cliche-ridden view of Nigeria ’s history is hardly restricted to The Comet as a Southern newspaper. On the contrary it is an article of faith among Nigerians who see themselves as crusaders against the alleged apartheid and hegemonic policies of the Muslim-Hausa-Fulani in this country, regardless of which part of the country these “crusaders” come from. One of the most succinct articulation of the grudges of these “crusaders” was made by one Wakili Lamda, writing from Anguwan Bala, Wase, Plateau State, in a two-part rejoinder to an earlier article of mine about the historical struggle for a Middle Belt identity. Lamda’s article was published in the New Nigerian of January 10 and 11, 2001. “The Middle-Belt Movement” he said, “is essentially the struggle for the liberation by the Northern minorities from the apartheid policy of the Moslem Hausa-Fulani”.

For both Lamda and for The Comet, as well as for almost all southern newspapers, Islam in the North is synonymous with oppression while Christianity is synonymous with emancipation. Similarly, religion to them almost exclusively defines who in the Middle Belt is an indigene and who is a settler. Thus Lamda, for example, would assert in his article that Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar “are only settlers in the Middle-Belt and as settlers they are the worst enemies of the zone since they use their knowledge and contact in the zone to destroy the indigenes while promoting the interest of their stock”.

Before Lamda and The Comet, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, the ex-rebel leader, had canvassed the same notion of Muslims as settlers and oppressors and Christians as indigenes and oppressed. This was in a controversial, if not inflammatory, lecture he gave in January 2000, at the HEKAN Church , Kaduna , under the auspices of the Kaduna State Chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN.

“I dare say since 1960,” he said, “we have watched the human rights of our fellow citizens, INDIGENES TO THIS AREA, their human rights being trampled with impunity” (Emphasis mine). Those who did so, he argued, “will not stop until they have annihilated your faith.” He then urged the “indigenes” to stand up and fight. They can do so, he said, in the full knowledge that all Nigerian Christians are four square behind them. Christians all over the country, he said, will henceforth “join hands to stand shoulder to shoulder and face the onslaught on our rights.” One month after the speech, the first of the two Sharia riots in the state that year broke out.

That this distinction between Muslims as settlers and oppressors and Christians as indigenes and oppressed in the Middle-Belt is an article of faith of CAN was further demonstrated only last month, when, according to the Sunday Sun of November 7, the association petitioned President Obasanjo over the just ended Ramadan Tafsir by Sheikh Ahmed Gumi, the son of the late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi. The petition, said the Sunday Sun, alleged that Gumi had called upon Muslims to attack and destroy Christian lives and property as well as their churches. The Kaduna CAN leadership, whose Plateau State compatriots had denounced Obasanjo for imposing a state of emergency on the state following the May killings, then called upon the same Obasanjo to impose a state of emergency on Kaduna State purely over their mere suspicions of Muslim intentions.

As if to underscore the seriousness of its allegations against Gumi, CAN proceeded to describe the Sheikh’s family as settlers, not just in Kaduna State , but even in Nigeria . The insinuation was obvious; as settlers, the Gumis have no stake in the peace and stability of Nigeria . “Sheikh Ahmed Gumi”, said CAN, “is the son of the late Sheikh Abubakar Mahmoud Gumi, and the grandson of Mallam Mahmud Na-Gumi. The surname was adopted from the town of Gumi where the Malam settled after years of nomadic wanderings. The Malam’s father was Malam Mohammed Marina, one of the three children of Sheikh el-Badawi, an Arab from the Bedowin nomads.”

Nineteen days after the Sunday Sun’s sensational story, i.e. on November 26, its daily stable-mate followed up with its own accusation against Gumi. It accused the Sheikh of, among other things, “…stirring up people against the federal government.” Gumi’s crime seemed to have been his severe criticisms of President Obasanjo’s record of apparent neglect of the welfare and security of Nigerians in the past, criticisms that only someone living on the moon in the past five years will disagree with.

In accusing Gumi of stirring people against the federal government, the newspaper clearly used one standard for the Sheikh and another for its owner, Chief Orji Kalu, the Abia State governor. For, back in March, the Saturday Sun (March 6) had published the full text of the governor’s petition to President Obasanjo in which he alleged that Chief Tony Anenih, the Acting Chairman of PDP’s Board of Trustees and the President’s Man Friday, had threatened to send assassins after him.

Apart from making allegations against Anenih, the letter also had very nasty things to say about the president himself. “What justification do we have,” the governor said in his criticism of the president, “for our present economic predicament? I do not think it is morally right to allow hapless Nigerians to suffer the way they do, even in the midst of plenty. Yes, I have nothing against reforms by your administration per se, but they should have a human face.”

As if all this was not enough stirring of the hornet’s nest, Kalu proceeded to warn of dire consequences if President Obasanjo did not mend his ways. Soldiers, he said, may not come back to clean up the mess the president has created because they have become too discredited by their own record in politics, but “I foresee the peoples’ rebellion if our leaders continue to conduct themselves in an untoward manner.” If this was not stirring up people against the federal government, then I don’t know what was. Yet, I do not remember any of the Sun newspapers pontificating about Kalu committing any treason.

But I digress somewhat. Our main concern this morning is not the Sun’s double standards but how the Nigerian press, which is predominantly southern, prefer to pour petrol rather than water on fires that break out in the North. Indeed at times they seem more than happy, not just pouring petrol on such fires, but even starting some of their own.

Take The Comet for example. Any outsider reading its editorial of June 21, would think the indigene/settler dichotomy is a Northern peculiarity. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. As the editors of the paper know very well, there has been similar and even longer running clashes between “indigenes” and “settlers” in Ife/Modakeke, Osun State , not far from its own Lagos backyard, and in Warri in the Niger Delta. Again, as the paper itself acknowledged in a lengthy news-feature in its edition of December 1, the race for the governorship of Lagos State has since rekindled the age-old question of who are its “indigenes” and who are “settlers” in the state, especially its capital. The question is, why has the newspaper not reduced the problems in Ife/Modakeke, the Delta and in Lagos to that of settlers and indigenes and oppressions and the oppressed? Why, one may also ask, is that when Muslims in the South complain about oppression and marginalization as they often do in Edo and in several Yoruba states, they are invariably dismissed as trouble makers?

All this is not to say that Christian minorities in the North have no course to complain about discrimination or marginalisation. They do. But, fist of all, it is a gross disservice to the widely acknowledged struggle for justice for talakawa by Muslim leaders like Malams Aminu Kano, Sa’ad Zungur and Abubakar Zukogi, for anyone to say only Christian minorities in the North suffer oppression. Second, it is absolutely not true for anyone to claim, as The Comet has done, that “indigenes” in the Middle Belt have nothing while “settlers” have everything. If that were true no “indigene” would have risen to the top of his profession or jobs as countless numbers of them have. In any case since the first creation of states in 1966 which gave minorities their autonomy, they, as Christians or Muslims, must accept ultimate responsibility for their inability to correct any perceived economic and political marginalization to the extent that these wrongs have persisted.

Third, if Nigerians did not distinguish between themselves as indigenes and settlers when they were fighting for independence in the 19^th and 20^th century, it is clearly retrogressive and reactionary for them to do so in the 21^st century. The fact, indeed, is that, in the end, we are all settlers. History, it can be argued, is about the migration of the various peoples of the world from one place to another as well as about the conflicts and resolutions arising from these movements. The difference then should lie not simply on who got where first but in what value they have added to the community. since no one, except Adam and Eve, descended from the heavens, so to speak.

Last, and perhaps most important, it should be obvious to us by now that our emphasis on group identity rather than merit and individual rights and responsibilities for the resolution of our socio-economic problems is an emphasis in vain. People talk glibly of a national conference – sovereign or not – of ethnic nationalities as a cure-all for our ills. They also seek to promote turn-by-turn political leadership as part of that cure-all. They forget, perhaps conveniently, that whatever your tribe or religion, you have essentially the same needs, the same rights and the same responsibilities as a human being. They forget, therefore, that the emphasis in looking for solutions to our problems should be on our humanity not our tribes or religion.

All this, of course, is not to say that there are no religions or ethnic questions begging for answers in North as in the rest of the country. The trouble is that all too often we ask the wrong questions. The big question about the indigenes/settlers dichotomy is not who settled where first. Rather the question, to use the words of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, writer and Ogoni rights activist, in one of his essays in his book, SIMILIA:Essays on Anomic Nigeria, is “why do incompetent, failed politicians, poor managers of the political economy try to create a schism between Nigerians of different faiths to mask their failures and inanities?”

What he failed to ask was why do pressmen, the supposed watchdogs of society, all too often allow themselves to be pressed into the service of such incompetent, failed politicians and poor managers of the political economy?