PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The Emir of Gwandu, His Critics and the Press

kudugana@yahoo.com

When emirs and other Muslim leaders in the country met March 28 in Kaduna to deliberate upon what to do about the marginalisation of Muslims in the composition of the membership and leadership of the on-gong National Political Reform Conference, you could almost predict the negative publicity it would attract from the country’s newspapers. Their reports the following day did not disappoint. Almost to the last, those that reported the event focused on the bellicose speech of the Emir of Gwandu, Alhaji Mustapha Jokolo, and his somewhat dramatic exist from the venue of the event, following the deadlock which ensued from his suggestion that Muslims should consider boycotting the conference if their grievances were not looked into.

Some of the newspapers reported as fact that the emir, the third in order of protocol in the North, after the Sultan of Sokoto and the Shehu of Borno, called on Muslims to wage a Jihad on the government if did nothing about their complaints. Others also reported as fact that he said the Obasanjo regime has so thoroughly purged the army top brass of Muslim officers that the highest-ranking officer currently is only a Colonel.

Predictably, these newspaper reports of the emir’s words and deeds at the Kaduna meeting provoked several reactions, some harsh, some measured, some in between. All of them, however, seemed concerned more with the emir’s style than the substance of his case.

One sharp reaction came from the North-Central Zone chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). In a statement signed by its chairman, Reverend Yakubu Pam, and its secretary, Dr. Caleb Alima, after a day’s meeting in Jos on March 31, the CAN chapter said the alleged Muslim leadership’s call of Muslims to arms on March 28, “can no longer be tolerated and we shall go for a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye if the threat for a Jihad as being called by Muslims is left unnoticed”.

The call, said CAN, was “provocative and a hallmark of irresponsibility”, and those who made it must be arrested and tried, presumably for treason.

Another sharp, albeit somewhat mild, reaction came from Col. Abubakar Dangiwa Umar, former military governor of Kaduna State and a well-known radical social critic. Not too long ago, Umar grabbed newspaper headlines for severely criticizing President Obasanjo as a religious hypocrite, given the gap between what he preached and what he practiced, and a political failure, given the sharp decline in the welfare and security of Nigerians since he came to power in May 1999.

This time, however, Umar was on the president’s side. The president, like some state governors, he said in a statement he issued on April 2 in reaction to the March 28 meeting, may have been one-sided in his nominations to the national conference, but such one-sidedness was “not unprecedented” and certainly did not justify anyone issuing “inflammatory” threats. Umar also said he believed the solution did not lie in a  “radical decomposition” of the conference as this “can only lead to a polerisation of the conference on religious lines”.

In any case, Umar argued, it was not just Northern Muslims that have been marginalized in the country’s scheme of things. “Both Northern Muslims and Christians”, he said, “are marginalized because of the region’s backwardness in educational development, poor infrastructure, low internally generated revenue and of course social instability.”

There were also criticisms of the March 28 meeting from Alhaji Umaru Ali Shinkafi, Marafan Sokoto, and from newspaper pundits like Lamido Sanusi Lamido and Azubuike Ishiekwene, the editor of THE PUNCH who also writes a column in the paper on Tuesdays.

Shinkafi’s criticism was well measured. The issue of marginalisation, he said, was political and should therefore be rightly tackled by politicians, not traditional rulers or clerics. But, he said, “fair is fair. If the institutions that are supposed to do something somehow fail to do it, then someone else will be tempted to step in and do it.” Politicians, he said, had apparently failed to do their job because they have been active or complicit in the smashing and ruining of the political institutions – the National Council of State, the political parties and the National Assembly, etc – by those ruling the country.

As for Lamido, it appeared as if he could not make up his mind whether or not the North and Muslims have indeed been marginalized in the scheme of things. Writing in the Daily Trust of March 31, he entitled his article, “Muslim leaders and the myth of marginalisation”. Muslims, he said, have not been marginalized because no one has stopped them from practicing their religion or organising their personal relationships according to Sharia. What was more, he said, they have even been given the right to implement Muslim criminal law, regardless of the controversy surrounding that right.

Marginalisation, Lamido concluded, was in reality a class issue, and not of religion, region or tribe. Towards the end of his article, however, Lamido admited that   the marginalisation of Muslims was true, after all. “We are marginalized” he said, “because we are weak and divided and our weakness comes from the loss of our solid and negotiating base as a united, multi-cultural and multi-religious North”.

Finally,  Ishiekwene. The Northern leadership, he said, writing in THE PUNCH of April 5, “should hide its head in shame” instead of crying about marginalisation. “The northern elite, obviously accustomed to a life of patronage from import licence to fertilizer scams and from fuel diversion to rentier living, is out of its depths as the system has become more open, more competitive and more merit-driven. This is the heart of the matter”.

More specifically Ishiekwene took a gratuitous swipe at the Emir of Gwandu, as a spokesman of the marginalized Muslims. “As ADC to Buhari”, he said, “most people remember that Jokolo was the young man who helped his father, the then Emir of Gwandu, to bring 53 controversial suitcases in 1984, at a time when government had shut the borders to catch alleged currency traffickers unawares. He is one in a million Northerners whose road to the top was paved by good fortune and indulgence”.

All these criticisms of the March 28 Kaduna meeting raise a number of questions. First, are the claims of the marginalisation of Muslim and the North by Obasanjo true or false? Second, on the specific case of the national conference, are the demands of the Muslim leadership reasonable or not? Third, is it true, as Lamido has said, that marginalisation is purely a matter of class, not religion, region or tribe? Last but by no means the least, who really is to blame for the marginalisation of the North and Muslims? Northerners and Muslims themselves, or at  least their leadership, or outsiders?

On the first issue, none of those who have either criticized or condemned the March 28 Kaduna meeting has denied that the North and Muslims have been marginalised in the scheme of things since Obasanjo came to power. CAN was conveniently silent on the issue and instead chose to condemn the alleged threat of Jihad by the Muslims if their demands were not met. All the others admitted the cry of marginalisation was justified but differed on who is to blame and what should be the remedy.

Umar focused more on what, rather than on who, is to blame, although he did put some of it on Obasanjo for not reflecting the federal character of the country in his selection of candidates to the national conference. The retired Colonel, however, said the remedies sought by the Kaduna meeting were unreasonable. But where  they?

Umar says a recomposition of the membership and leadership of the conference would only lead to the religious polarisation of the conference. This sounds to me like reversing effect for the cause and blaming the victim rather than the culprit. Obasanjo nominated by far the single largest member of the delegates to the national conference and was therefore responsible more than any other person for its lopsidedness. He also single-handedly composed its leadership. He was therefore in a position to remedy the situation.

All he had to do, as the March 28 Kaduna meeting demanded, was to appoint a co-chair, just as he did appoint a co-secretary, and increase the number of Muslim members to achieve at least some parity with Christians. No one said he should reduce the number of Christians.

Of course, the idea of selecting, rather the electing, delegates was wrong, at least in principle, but having forced it on Nigerians, fairness demanded that he should be even handed in his selection of delegates from among the country’s religions, regions and tribes. And it is not an excuse for people to argue that the quantity of those who felt marginalized is not the same thing as the quality of the delegates needed to do the job. In spite of the wide and increasing gap between the North and the South and between Muslims and Christians in Western education, there are more than enough qualified people from among those marginalized to achieve a balance in the composition of the national conference.

Clearly then it was a case of giving a dog a bad name in order to hang it for some critics of the Emir of Gwandu and likeminded Muslims to have made their demands look unreasonable or even like war-mongering. The emir, as anyone who knows him would testify, is anything but a demagogue. However, to make him look like one, some newspapers claimed he said the most senior Muslim army officer currently is a Colonel, consequent upon Obasanjo’s purge of the army in 1999.

The emir never said so and could never have said so. He enlisted in the NDA as a regular cadet in the ninth course in 1970. He knows that there is at least one course mate of his still serving as a senior Major-General and that there are several other Muslim Major-Generals and even more Brigadiers-General in the army.

Not only did he not make the false claim that the highest ranking Muslim officer is a Colonel, he never even called for Jihad. He did call for Muslims to stand up for their rights, but if the newspapers chose to interpret that as a call for Jihad, surely it would be unfair to blame him for their mixing up opinion with fact.

Of all the attempts made to give the emir a bad name in order to hang him easily the most mischievous was Ishiekwene’s. In trying to give the emir a bad name, THE PUNCH editor even recalled the notorious 1984 episode of the 53 suitcases. Yet time and time again it has been pointed out that neither Jokolo, as ADC to Buhari, nor his father, the then emir of Gwandu, had anything to do with the suitcases. It was sheer coincidence that Jokolo was at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport to receive his father who was returning from the lesser Hajj when the story broke.

The suitcases belonged to one of the country’s top diplomats in the Middle-East who was finally returning home. However, it made a much better copy for reporters to link the story to an emir – a very important one at that – and his ADC-to-Head-of-State son than to link it to a faceless diplomat. All the key people involved, except the late emir – Jokolo’s boss General Muhammadu Buhari, General Ibrahim Babangida as Buhari’s army chief, Vice-President Atiku Abubakar , the senior Custom’s officer in charge of the airport at the time, and of course Jokolo himself – are alive and have refuted the newspapers’ fanciful story of the 53 suitcases saga. However, these refutations have apparently never deterred editors and reporters hell-bent on making mischief from peddling the fake story.

For reasons of space, the issue of whether marginalisation is a class issue or not as well as the issue of who is to blame for its current manifestation will have to wait until next week, God willing.