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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Bode George and Nigeria’s demography
Penultimate Thursday, Is’haq Modibbo Kawu, the chairman of the editorial board of Daily Trust, said in his column that Nigerians have Chief Olabode George to thank for “spilling the beans” about the Southern – more specifically, the Afenifere – agenda of overturning the numerical superiority of the North in the next census. Chief George, a principal officer in the regime of General Sani Abacha, was chairman of the much-pillaged Nigerian Ports Authority and a chieftain of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, if not a member of President Obasanjo’s kitchen cabinet.
During the recent rally of the Southern Leadership Forum in Enugu, a somewhat over-excited George told his equally over-excited audience that Southerners should be rest assured that the next census will confirm their cardinal belief that the numerical superiority of the North over the South was a dubious colonial fabrication. “We,” boasted George, “will change that,” much to the audience’s applause.
According to George’s Iron Law of Demography, the South of every country in the world has more people than its Northern hinterland – except Nigeria. Nigeria’s exception to this law, according to its peddlers, has come about because our British colonizers found the Northern leadership a rather submissive lot compared to their Southern counterpart who couldn’t wait to see the back of the colonizers. The British therefore rigged every national census they conducted from 1911 right through to 1952/53 in favour of the North in order to guarantee the region’s permanent hold on power at the centre.
Somehow it never seemed to cross the creative minds of our demographic theoreticians that colonizers every where always preferred those who would like to inherit their system lock, stock and barrel to those whose heritage offered an alternative no matter how submissive it seems. And it is an undeniable fact of history that the leading agitators for independence wanted the colonizers out more to inherit their system than to replace it or even reform it. But this is another subject for another day. For now our concern is with the validity of Chief George’s Iron Law of Demography. Actually I exaggerate somewhat in attributing the discovery of this law to George. Long before him the late Chief Bola Ige, Senator Abraham Adesanya – yes, he of the famous phrase about sheep and goats and cattle counting for humans in the North – and Chief Ebenezer Babatope have peddled the same theory as fact.
Indeed contrary to what Is’haq Kawu said, George is not even the first person to “spill the beans,” about a Southern agenda to overturn the North’s numerical superiority. Long before George spoke in Enugu about the prospects of finally settling his region’s demographic score with the North, Chief Victor Omololu Olunloyo, though himself hardly an isolationist Yoruba, told The Comet over five years ago that the Yoruba insistence on the National Identity Card project as a condition for participating in the 2003 elections, was a tactical error.
Clearly Olunloyo’s quarrel was not with the strategic objective of squaring Nigeria’s population to conform with the South’s cardinal belief that its population is more numerous than that of the North. Rather his quarrel was with the approach for achieving the objective. Our over-excited George was therefore merely restating in Enugu what Afenifere chieftains like Senator Adesanya and Chief Ige have said many times before.
As I have pointed out this strange law of the South always being more populous than its Northern hinterland rests on two pillars, in the particular case of Nigeria. The first is that the South is denser and more urbanized than the North and the second is that being forested the South is more hospitable and habitable than the North. Both pillars rest on a foundation of sand.
Let us take the pillar of population density and urbanization first. Elementary science teaches us that density alone does not determine the relative weight of an object. This can be illustrated by comparing, say, Kaduna State with Imo. At 458 persons per square kilometer, according to figures from the National Population Commission, Imo has the third highest population density in the country after Lagos and Anambra. Kaduna state, on the other hand, has a much smaller density of 91 and is less urban. Yet the state, with an area more than eight and a half that of Imo – Kaduna is 43,460 square kilometers compared to Imo’s 5,430 – has a population more than one and a half times that of Imo.
It follows therefore that the South being more densely populated and more urbanized than the North does not necessarily mean that its population is greater than that of the North. If density and urbanization alone determine population size, China’s population, for example, would not have been at least four times that of United States. Nor would India’s have been more than three times that of the U.S.
This takes us to the second pillar of hospitability and habitability. The first evidence that the belief that the North is at least relatively inhospitable and inhabitable compared to the South is false is the geographical location of Nigeria itself. Nigeria, as I pointed out elsewhere, is located between 4 degrees and 13 degrees latitudes north of the Equator. Elementary Geography teaches us that that world’s arid, and therefore essentially inhospitable, zone is located between 14 degrees and 30 degrees latitudes north and south of the Equator. Clearly only the very northern fringes of the North are somewhat arid.
Anyone who doubts this should refer to a 2002 publication of the Federal Government titled Atlas of Nigeria edited by Dr. Emmanuel Ogbu Igah with a forward by President Obasanjo himself and a preface by the renowned professor of Geography, Akin L. Mabogunje. That book shows that there is no desert zone in Nigeria. It shows that more than four fifth of the North is Guinea and Sudan Savannah an area which produces the bulk of the country’s food and livestock. Only a small portion of this region which is west of Lake Chad is the relatively inhospitable Sahel Savannah. The map also shows that the Guinea Savannah covers large portions of Oyo State, including its capital, Ibadan.
The second evidence of the falsity of the belief that the North has a hostile geography comes, ironically, from our dear George himself. In his excitement to show that the South has a greater population than the North, he pointed out that there is no nook or cranny of the North you will go to where you will not find a Southerner. The same thing, he said, could not be said of Northerners in the South.
Even if we make room for George’s excitement, at least anecdotal evidence suggests that there are more Southerners in the North than Northerners in the South. The obvious question to ask is if the North is inhospitable and inhabitable, what are Southerners doing there?
Five years ago when Afenifere insisted on the I.D Card as a condition for Yoruba participation in the 2003 general election, it did not get its way. However, it forced the federal authorities to conduct the exercise in spite of reluctance on the part of Northern leadership, a reluctance informed, not by any fear of the exercise as such, but by the fact of its politicization. The Ministry of Internal Affairs which conducted the exercise declared the results in May 2003.
It is highly instructive that in spite of the better organization of the exercise in the South and in spite of the control of the ministry by a Yoruba who was an Afenifere chieftain, the figures still suggested that the North has more people than the South. A story in The Guardian of May 15, 2003 showed that there were 28,279,129 Nigerians between age 18 and above in the North as against 23,724,645 for the South. This margin was somewhat similar to that of registered voters between the regions.
As The Guardian said in its story, the I.D Card figures were unlikely to end the controversy over the population distribution of the country. Even then it was only reasonable to expect that after the exercise, objections to the population of the North will be far less trenchant than what came out of the mouth of our dear George in Enugu in the heat of the excitement of the South Leadership Forum rally.
But then the capacity of the Nigerian politician for hyperbole is truly hard to beat.
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