PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The politics of marginalization

kudugana@yahoo.com

Sometimes in October 1989, what Newswatch (October 16, 1989) described as a  “storm” broke out in the NNPC. The “storm” resulted from a disagreement between Alhaji Rilwanu Lukman, then oil minister, on the one hand, and the late Mr. Aret Adams, then Group Managing Director of NNPC, and Dr. Ejike Onyia, then managing director of LNG, on the other hand. The disagreement was over who should get the jobs of commercial manager and accountant of the LNG.

Lukman had nominated Abba Gana and A.A. Maliki as commercial manager and accountant respectively, at a time when there was hardly any Northerner in the top management of the LNG. Both Adams and Onyia saw this as interference in the internal affairs of the LNG by the minister and subsequently rejected his nominees without any consultation. Lukman in turn suspended the two for insubordination.

Then all hell broke loose. The Guardian of October 13, 1989, for example, said Adams and Onyia were being punished “for insisting on employing professionally competent officers to sensitive positions in the LNG project.” At the same time the paper accused the minister of “sponsoring candidates who, while representing geo-political interests, hardly qualified for these posts” (Emphasis mine).

Newswatch went even further than The Guardian to suggest that Lukman was pursuing a Northern hegemonic agenda in the oil sector. The “power-play” at NNPC, it said, was “over the control of the NNPC and therefore the oil industry.” It said Southerners resented Northerners being “maneuvered” in to top positions in the oil sector for two reasons. “First, the fall-out is that experienced and trained manpower for the industry are being denied top positions for the sake of federal character and second, the oil, though a federal subject, is located in the southern part of the country.”

While The Guardian and Newswatch, among several other newspapers and magazines, tried to paint Lukman and where he came from as villains of the piece, the truth was something else. First, contrary to The Guardian’s claims, Gana and Maliki were as qualified as any candidate for the LNG jobs. Gana was a 1973 Business Administration graduate of Ahmadu Bello University who had risen to the rank of General Manager at the SCOA,  a household name in trade and manufacturing. Maliki, on his part, was a chartered accountant and was the Executive Director (Finance) of Arewa Textiles, Kaduna, one of the leading textile companies in the country.

Second, at the time Newswatch was talking, or rather writing, glibly about Lukman’s hegemonic agenda  in the oil sector, out of the top 319 management staff of NNPC, Bendel State had 59, Anambra had 41, Ogun 28, Oyo 27, while the then nine Northern states had a total of 59 – same as Bendel alone.

Third, the logic of Newswatch’s argument that the Northern states had no business being part of the oil sector because oil was in the South was that only people from oil producing areas have a right to manage the sector. This, obviously, was patently ridiculous.

Fast  forward to 1994. That year, the African Concord, then very much alive, did a cover story in its edition of January 24 on the foreign currency black market. The story was headlined “The Malams Resistance”. The story was about the Federal Government ban on the black market. The newsmagazine’s story argued that the ban was futile because the Malams, in collaboration with some bank officials and oil companies, “held the Nigerian economy by the jugular.” And in case you thought the magazine was exaggerating things, it asserted that “Abacha and members of his cabinet are part and parcel of the trade.”

In spite of the African Concord’s hostility towards the Malams, its story did not begin to compare with an article by Reuben Abati in The Guardian of January 21, 1994, in the ferocity of his attack on the much-despised Malams. “The Malam”, said Abati, “is our main problem and unless something is done physically and legally about him, Budget ’94 will end up a suicide pill… I repeat: The Malam is the problem.” And as the problem, no punishment, as far as Abati was concerned, was too harsh to inflict on the Malam. If he should resist the ban, said Abati, the “law enforcement agents should be instructed to shoot him at sight”!

In painting the Malam (meaning of course the Northerner, especially if he is a Muslim) as the villain of the country’s financial and economic crisis, both the African Concord and Abati merely reflected a widespread sentiment shared by most Southerners. But as with similar stereo-types, the substance was a lot more complicated than the image the two sought to point.

In the first place, the finance houses and the many fly-by-night one branch banks of the period in question were much more responsible for the devaluation of the Naira at the time than the Malams. At that time there were over 66 commercial banks, 55 merchant banks and about 200 mortgage banks, few of them owned by Northerners. Those banks and finance houses, through round tripping, insider trading, and other financial shenanigans, were the main cause of the distress in the nation’s financial sector. As far as I could remember no newspaper or magazine focused their stories on where the owners of those banks and finance houses came from. And most certainly the North was not the place.

Second, it was common knowledge that the big time users of forex – The UACs, the PZs and the UTCs of this country, as well as the Asians and the Middle-Easterners – did not source their requirements, or at least most it, from the Malams. They invariably did so from the banks, albeit at a premium above the official rate. And, as I have just said, we all knew which part of Nigeria dominated the banks.

Third, it was strange that the African Concord would blame the Malams when it said, itself, that they sourced their own forex through “bankers, new returnees from abroad and bureau de change operators.” Strange, because the chaps at Concord must have known that these sources were dominated by Nigerians who were anything but Northerners.

Forward  to  1996. That year the African Concord, this time in its edition of October 7, published a cover story with the bold and sensational headline “THE NORTH HIJACKS NIGERIA” with the sub-title “The South Groans Under Domination.”  The  story focused on the alleged domination of politics and the army by Northerners. “The North”, it said, in a summary of the story, “often the senior partners in government, has virtually seized control of all the vital sectors.” These sectors, according to the magazine, included the armed forces in particular, as well as the judiciary, education, oil, you name it.

I will be the first to admit that the magazine was nearer the truth on the army. But even there, the much maligned Hausa/Fulani (meaning mostly any Northerner who is a Muslim) is much less culpable of marginalizing others than is widely claimed. I have made this point before on these pages but it bears repeating. For example, between 1953 to date, the army has had 20 chiefs. Fifteen of these have come from the North. Out of these, seven were so-called Hausa-Fulani and eight were Northern Christians. Out of the seven so-called Hausa/Fulani, only two, the late Major-General Hassan Usman Katsina and Lt-General Aliyu Mohammed, President Obasanjo’s National Security Adviser, are bonafide Hausa/Fulani. The rest, Generals Muhammadu Wushishi, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha, Salisu Ibrahim and Al-Wali Kazir, are or were minorities who happened to be Muslims.

As for the Navy and the Air Force, again, as I have said before on these pages, out of 16 Naval chiefs since 1956, only 2 have come from the North while out of the 14 Air Force chiefs since 1963, only six have come from the North, out of which only one, the late Air Marshal Ibrahim Alfa, was a Muslim, he too, a Northern minority.

If I have bored you with these stories of past claims of marginalization, I am sorry. It is, however, necessary to do so to show you that the charge that Northerners have always expropriated everything to themselves from day one is based more on media say-so than on substance. True, the North, by virtue of its numerical size had always dominated the country’s politics in times of democracy except of course in the last six years. Again the region had also dominated politics in times of military dictatorship because, until comparatively recently, few educated Southerners considered the army, especially the fighting services, as a place to make their careers.

But whether in times of democracy or dictatorship, at no time did the Northern leadership deliberately marginalize Southerners in the way in which President Obasanjo has tried in the last six years to marginalize the North and Northerners, especially if they are Muslims. As I have tried to show, whether it is in the oil sector, in finance or in the armed forces, Northerners, with the possible exception of the army, have never taken an undue advantage of their control of politics at the centre. At no time did any Nigerian leader of Northern origin, for example, pursue an energy policy that would locate the sources of both the generation and transmission of electricity in the North, regardless of whether or not it made economic and logistical sense. Again, no Nigerian leader of Northern origin ever pursued financial policies that would subordinate the economic interests of the South to those of the North, as is clearly the case with President Obasanjo’s policy of 25 billion Naira equity for all banks – something which in itself is a contradiction in terms for a political leadership that says it is liberalizing and deregulating the economy – and with his the privatization of social insurance.

Yet again, no Nigerian leader of Northern origin had ever treated the national budget with the contempt with which President Obasanjo has regarded budgets since 1999, implementing whatever took his fancy and ignoring the things he disliked, all this in total disregard of the constitutional stipulation that a president must not spend one kobo on anything without appropriation by the National Assembly.

Having said all these, however, I must point out that I have never considered the actions of commission or omission of the central government as an excuse for the negligence of political leaders at the lower levels, of their own responsibilities for the security and welfare of their own people. As one Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) says, “Everyone of  you is a shepherd, and everyone of you is responsible for his flock.” In other words, the responsibilities of shepherd  ship  is not a matter for the top dog only, if you pardon the awkward metaphor. Whatever the political leadership at the centre may have done or not done, the leaderships at the lower levels have no excuse for not doing their own bit and then turning round to blame it all on the centre.

We may have run more of a unitary government than a federation since the army first intervened in politics in January 1966, but from the moment states were created in July 1967, it became unfair, indeed irresponsible, for anyone to blame everything that has gone wrong in the states on only those in control at the centre. This is simply because, first, in spite of the unitary tendency of our central governments, no state had ever been deprived of its statutory allocations. And these allocations were always enough to make a significant impact in reducing insecurity and poverty in the states. Second, even during periods of military rule, no state has ever been ruled by non-indigenes below the rank of the military governors, and not even the military governors could get away with misrule if they did not have the support, or at the least the complicity, of the indigenous elite.

It is to this extent that I agree, up to a point, with Isyaku Dikko, one-time editor of the Weekly Trust, when he said in a paper he presented during the Students’ Week of the Katsina State Students Association of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, over three years ago, and published in the Weekly Trust of November 9-15, 2001, that the Northern political leadership is to blame for the “tragedy” of Northern Nigeria. “The fact, which some people have been trying to hide from us,” he said in that paper, “is that Northerners are responsible for the tragedy of Northern Nigeria.”

Just like I believe one should not blame the centre alone for everything that has gone wrong in the country, so also do I believe that the states themselves alone should not be blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the states. On balance, I believe the centre has the greater blame because it controls the greater share of the nation’s resources and its capacity for good or evil is greater than that of the states. But however negligent the centre is of its responsibilities to the states, any dutiful political leadership at the state level can do a lot to reduce insecurity and poverty in the states.

If, for example, the political leadership in the North was serious, the region would have since gone a long way in solving the problem of the region’s educational backwardness, which is the main source of the region’s marginalisation. However, instead of investing massively and in a transparent manner in primary and secondary education, the Northern governors have been all too busy competing among themselves in building universities which they may not be able to sustain and when they hardly produce enough students to fill in their quotas in existing universities.

The point of all this is that there is a lot Northerners can do for themselves, marginalisation or no. Therefore the sooner the region’s leaders wake up to those responsibilities, the better its chances of making it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to marginalize it.