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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA The NPRC deadlock: North as a whipping boy
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United Stated, it was who, sometimes in the late 19th century, observed that “Public sentiments is everything … He who moulds public sentiments goes deeper than he who executes decisions. He makes statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute”. In other words, the press, he believed, was mightier than government. More than a century after Lincoln, the American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. rephrased this dictum about the power of the media. “Karl Marx,” Schlesinger said, “held that history is shaped by control of the means of production. In our time history is shaped by control of the means of communication.”
Regular readers of column may have seen these quotes on these pages before but they bear repeating in the light of the media handling of the on-going National Political Reform Conference (NPRC) deadlock.
Last Wednesday, the governor of Naarawa State, Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, re-echoed these not-so-famous quotes, putting them in the Nigerian context. The occasion was a media interactive dinner organized by the Arewa Media Forum, a Kaduna-based organization of media buffs, journalists and non-journalists alike, who share a concern about the unhealthy imbalance in the country’s information order between the North and South.
In a very powerful indictment of Northern journalists and rich Northerners alike, the governor asked “Where is the Northern Press?” It was obviously a rhetorical question. “We need a torchlight in the day time,” the governor promptly answered his own question, “to find the northern press… If we cannot find a northern press, it follows that we cannot hear the Northern voice.”
The governor’s remarks could not have been more accurate. The New Nigerian, once the most literate and the most authoritative newspaper in the country, is now a shadow of its former self. Several private sector ventures into the industry like The Reporter, The Democrat and Citizen, which I co-founded in 1990, have long been dead or dying.
Compare this to a long list of successful - if not financially, at least professionally – newspapers and magazines in the South, like The Guardian, Thisday, Punch, Vanguard, Tribune, The Comet, The Independent, Champion, Sun, Newswatch, Tell, Insider, The News etc. This picture of the print media is replicated in the electronic media and even in the internet.
This near-monopoly of the Nigerian media by the South, said Governor Adamu, has put the North at a grave disadvantage in the propaganda war for the public mind. “The prevailing image of the North in the Lagos-Ibadan axis of the press”, said Adamu, “is a caricature of the Northerner as a greedy individual who does not sow but seeks to reap from the sweat of others.” This caricature of the North and the Northerners has generally been accepted at home and abroad as essentially true.
Your typical Northern elite, if not the ordinary Northerner, is painted by this same press not just as greedy but also as arrogant and lazy. “The problem with Nigeria” Minere Bayagbon, a columnist and an editor with Vanguard once declared, “is the problem of Northern elites, indolent, greedy, parasitic.” (Vanguard April 18, 2001). No less uncharitable was another columnist and editor of Punch, Azubuike Ishiekwene. “Put simply,” he once wrote in his column (Punch, March 9, 2002), “from Ige to January 27 to the feverish rise in violent crimes, anyone with half an eye can see that powerful elements in our midst are still very active. They obviously enjoy the support of two groups – 1) Northern politicians whose access to patronage has been severely curtailed and 2) insiders who should be more correctly described as self-imposed fifth columnists. They started with Sharia and gradually they’ve been squeezing every major artery of our corporate existence.”
Outrageous as it was, the Punch columnist and editor clearly wanted the world to believe Northerners murdered Chief Bola Ige, the country’s minister of justice and attorney-general in December 2001, and were also responsible for attempting to cleanse themselves out of Lagos in the Odua Peoples’ Congress inspired widespread killings in January 2002! Such is the difficulty in resisting the temptation to lie through one’s teeth when the other side has no voice at all or even a weak one to tell its side of a story.
As in the past, the Lagos-Ibadan press has found it impossible to resist the temptation to paint the North and the Northerner as the villains of the current deadlock at the NPRC, i.e. the deadlock that has resulted from the boycott of the conference by the delegates of the six South-South states on account of the conference’s decision to give derivation 17% in revenue allocation, up from the current 13%. The delegates wanted 25% for a start and 50% in five years.
Apparently echoing popular sentiments in the South, Gbade Ogunwale, the Punch correspondent at the NPRC, said in his column on June 24 that “The rigid position of the Northern delegates on the 17% derivation is, to put it mildly, very insensitive.” Reuben Abati of The Guardian was even more uncharitable. In his column of June 24 titled “Revolt of the South-South,” Abati said that the North was a “lazy parasite” and a “venal rent-collector.”
In the current competition to paint the North and Northerners as the villains of the piece, the one to beat is Chief Edwin Clerk, a minister in General Yakubu Gowon’s regime and a Delta State delegate to the NPRC. “Some people,” The Comet of June 23 reported him as saying “see themselves as first class citizens and others as second-class citizens, but we say no. They don’t even pay tax. This Internally Generated Revenue is not known to them in the North. But for a group of people who do not contribute to the Internally Generated Revenue to determine what should be given to the Niger Delta, we say no.”
Not too far behind Clerk is one Dr. Peter Ajube. Speaking for the Ijaw Youth Congress, Ajube was quoted by the Sunday Independent (June 26), as saying. “It will be over our dead bodies that a Northern president will emerge in this country in 2007. In fact, the continuation of President Obasanjo beyond 2007 is preferably better than a Northern president because Obasanjo’s continuation in office is far less unjustifiable than the North’s resistance to resource control.”
The fact is that all these comments are either half-truths or even barefaced lies. To begin with the specific case of the NPRC, it is a lie to give the impression that only the Northern delegates voted for 17% for derivation both at the committee level and at the plenary, or that they are the only ones still left standing by the decision. The chairman of the NPRC, Justice Niki Tobi is from the South-South, specifically, Rivers State, possibly Nigeria’s oil richest state. The chairman of the Resource Control committee that recommended 17% for derivation to the expanded committee of elders, Chief Afe Babalola (SAN), is from the South-West. The chairman of the committee of elders, Professor J. O Irukwu, is from the South-East. The suggestion of 18% for derivation that broke the deadlock at the committee stage was made by Chief Gamaliel Onosode, who, like Tobi, is from the South-South. At both the committee level and at the plenary, all the South-South delegates present took part in the voting exercise over the issue. In principle and in law this means they were bound by the decision of conference.
Therefore if anyone was to blame for that decision, it was certainly not the much maligned North. If the region’s delegates were guilty of anything, it was simply that they believed the principle of democracy should be adhered to. Resource control may have been the most contentious issue, but as Father Mathew Hassan Kukah, the co-secretary of the conference pointed out, it was only one out of 11 such contentious issues which were put to vote. In this the South-South was not the only region that lost some, just as it won some.
The misfortune of the North, much of it self-inflicted, is that it lacks the strong voice to state its own case on this issue as in so many others. If it had a strong voice, or better still, if it had many strong voices, it could have easily pointed out the North and Northerners individually have never been the greatest beneficiaries of the country’s oil wealth. On the contrary, as the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, novelist, polemicist and Ogoni rights activist, once argued in his Sunday Times column, Similia,, which ran for about a year from October 1989 before it was axed by the newspaper’s management because it was becoming too controversial, possibly the biggest beneficiary of the country’s oil wealth has been the South-West and its people.
“Yes, indeed the Yoruba” Ken said, “have been the main beneficiaries of the petro-dollars of the Niger Delta and environs. The loss of the Ogoni, Ijaw, Urhobo, Isoko, Ekpeye, Ogba, Iwere, Ibibio and Igbo has been the profit of the Yoruba”.
It may be ironical that Ken spent the last years of his life, and eventually lost it, fighting, not against the Yoruba, but against a Northern leader, General Sani Abacha. Still this irony could hardly detract from the fact that the North, for geographical and historical reasons has never been the greatest beneficiary of oil wealth. First, the bulk of oil wealth has been spent on urban areas and the North, more than any other region, is agrarian. The South-West, on the other hand, is the most urbanized in the country. Second for historical and religious reasons, the predominantly Muslim North has been backward in the Western education necessary for the knowledge to get employed or to prospect for oil. This means that far fewer Northerners, as individuals, have stood to gain from oil wealth than other Nigerians. Third, since oil was discovered in the country nearly 50 years ago, it has never earned as much money as it did in the last six years. During this period the oil minister has been the president himself. This makes a South-Westerner the longest serving oil minister, and this minister-cum-president has demonstrated an apparent bias for his region in the distribution of oil wealth. For example, in December 2000, the South-South Parliamentary Caucus of the House of Representatives charged the president with neglecting the Delta region in the disbursement of the ecological fund. “A recent case in point,” it said in an advert in the National Interest of December 30, 2000 “is the share of N3.3 billion in November 2000 out of which N2.3b went to Ogunpa River Chanelisation Project in Oyo State. This is grossly unfair.”
For these reasons alone it is obviously wrong to single out North and the Northerners as the culprits for the South-South’s glaring poverty-in-riches. Truth be told, the blame for the region’s fate belongs to all, I repeat, all, Nigerian elites, including those from the South-South. This is pretty obvious from first, the fact that the inter-elite squabbles about oil wealth has essentially been about its distribution along horizontal lines, rather than vertical. The poor peasant or worker in Sokoto, Maiduguri or Langtang, for example, has never been any richer, for all the charges that the North has cornered the country’s oil wealth, than his counterparts in Ibadan, Enugu or Ogoni.
Second, the intensity of the fight over oil money is simply because it is easy money. It is mostly outsiders that have invested in prospecting for it while the Nigerian elites, through government, have merely stood (and still stand) by to collect and share rents, royalties and taxes. Third, all the Nigerian elites, have little or no care for transparency and accountability in the spending of oil money. This was best exemplified by a remark Chief James Ibori, the governor of oil rich Delta State once made in defense of Dr. Eric Opia, one time boss of the defunct OMPADEC, who had been on the run for allegedly embezzling the commission’s monies. “Our son Opia”, he said in the defunct Post Express (July 11, 2001), “is on the run today … If Opia took our money and actually embezzled it, yes he is our son, the money is still within the region.”
For these reasons alone, no section of the country has the moral right to condemn any other section as greedy, lazy and arrogant. In a country whose agricultural sector contributes about 40% of its GDP, it is wrong to condemn the section that dominates the sector as lazy. Oil may contribute over 80% of government’s income and about 95% of the country’s foreign exchange, but its contribution to the GDP remains much smaller than agriculture’s.
However, after all is said and done, the North only has itself to blame for its portrayal as the villain of all Nigeria’s troubles. If only the region’s legatees of its great premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello, had continued with his educational and agricultural policies and programmes, and, more importantly, if they had been as transparent and accountable as he was, they would have since created the socio-economic conditions – a literate society and a financially empowered citizenry - for a thriving mass media that would have given it the voice to state its own side of the Nigerian story loudly and clearly.
It is never too late for them to do so. The Nigerian media’s handling of the stalemate at the NPRC, as Governor Adamu said last week, is a wake-up call for the Northern elites, particularly its political elite, to do what is right by its people
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