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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The New Naira Notes, Obasanjo, Soludo and Soyinka
And so after 40 years of adorning the Arabic inscription, our national currencies are now rid of it to the apparent satisfaction of those who have harboured an obsessive dislike of anything with a link to Islam or the North. Prominent among them must be our one and only Nobel Literature laureate, Wole Soyinka.
In his first press conference on October 16, 1998 after returning from self-exile during General Sani Abacha’s tenure, our Nobel laureate, obviously blinded by his hatred of Abacha and everything he thought the general represented, unleashed what was arguably his bitterest diatribe on the North and Islam, its predominant religion. The kernel of his long speech was that the North was the problem with Nigeria. Among it’s crimes were that the region had imposed Arabic and its coat-of-arms on the country’s currencies.
“Yes,” said Soyinka at that press conference,
Soyinka went on to argue that this was a “diabolical orchestration of subliminal indoctrination…” Then in a rhetorical flourish he asked “Is it incidental that the other language on our national currency is Arabic?”
The amazing and surprising thing about the lecture, however, was not its hatred for the North and its predominant religion. Anyone who has read his obtuse The Man Died would not have been surprised or amazed by Soyinka’s vitriol. The surprising and amazing thing was that as a scholar, he could so easily mistake the Arabic alphabets on our currencies for the language itself. Equally surprising and amazing was the mental contortions he was prepared to take his listeners through to prove how the North surreptitiously inserted its coat-of-arms in our currencies.
Now that President Olusegun Obasanjo and his governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria have granted Soyinka’s eight-year wish, one would to justified to suspect both the country’s and its Central Bank’s leadership of all along harbouring the same prejudices against Islam and the North as our literary giant.
During a recent visit to the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, a visit which was clearly meant to anticipate and assuage Muslim and Northern hurt and anger over the removal of the Arabic alphabet, the CBN governor, Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, said this was done to promote Nigeria’s unity and culture!
“I will,” he said, according to Thisday of February 16,
Soludo was subsequently re-echoed by my good friends Drs. Obadiah Mailafia and Shamsudeen Usman, both of them deputy-governors of the CBN. First, Mailafia told journalists a couple of weeks ago in Jos that the Arabic inscription was removed because it had outlived its usefulness as those it was meant to serve have since become literate in Roman alphabets. Then his colleague, Usman, told the BBC Hausa Service on Thursday that those who felt that the inscription was removed because Arabic was the primary language of Islam were wrong since the wordings themselves were in Hausa and not all Nigerian Muslims were literate in Hausa. In other words the inscription was discriminatory even within the Muslim community.
President Obasanjo finally weighed in with an uncharacteristically subtle dig at those who would object to the removal of the inscription. “I personally admire the polymersubtrate material used for the notes and THE TRANSLATIONS WHICH MAKE THEM TRULY NIGERIAN,” he said during his formal launching of the notes on February 28.. (Emphasis mine). The insinuation was obvious; Arabic, but presumably not English, is alien to Nigeria.
Most people will, I am sure, agree with the president that the looks of the new notes is something to be proud of. The quality of the material used in printing the notes, their smaller and more convenient size, the little map of Nigeria in the nation’s colours and the security features make them by far superior to the old notes.
The most innovative feature, however, was the translation of the values of the notes in the country’s three main local languages. This was an innovation no rational person will quarrel with. The most reasonable argument one could make against the Arabic inscription was that it discriminated against non-Hausa readers. As one, I.D. Kris, who reacted to my last article on the subject said in an email he sent to me on August 16, 2006, “If the inscription is written for Hausa readership, which is the one written for Yoruba, Ijaw, Igbo readership? How do you define selfishness?”
Reasonable as Kris was, I am sure he will agree with me that the discrimination argument can only go so far. Now that the currencies carry Nigeria’s other two major languages besides Hausa, all the other languages, especially the big minority ones like Ijaw, Tiv. Kanuri and Nupe, can complain of being discriminated against. But obviously the notes cannot carry all of Nigeria’s languages which number more than 500 according to some estimates.
The point is whatever decision one takes, one group or the other is bound to be discriminated against. The overriding consideration therefore should be what is practical within a tolerable degree of discrimination. I would have thought that including Igbo and Yoruba on the notes was a reasonable compromise between Nigerians who wanted the Arabic inscription retained and those who did not.
However, from virtually all the reasons that those who have spoken against the Arabic inscription have given, it is clear that their objections were based basically on blind prejudice against anything with even the remotest link to Islam.
Arabic of course has more than a tenuous link with Islam; it is the original language of Qur’an, its holy book. But today the language is no more synonymous with Islam than English, or for that matter, Latin, is synonymous with Christianity. I am a Muslim and I can read my Qur’an in Arabic but like the majority of Muslims in Nigeria and in the rest of the world, I do not speak the language. By the same token there are millions of Christian Arabs today who read their Bible in Arabic because they do not speak or understand English.
So even though Arabic is linked to Islam, it does not symbolize the religion like, say, the Crescent which is the equivalent of the Cross for Christianity.
I am surprised therefore that Soludo, the CBN governor who should know better as a scholar would peddle the prejudice that Arabic is alien to Nigerian culture. First, like Soyinka Soludo mistook the alphabet for the language itself. Second, if Soludo had any sense of history he would know that the Arabic alphabet arrived in Nigeria at least a century before the Latin alphabet in which English is written.
Those alphabets had defined the lives of millions of Nigerians long before the Whiteman came to our shores. And given the ubiquity of the almajirci system of Islamic education in the North, at least twice as many more people in the region understand the alphabet than those who are literate in Latin alphabet.
As a Muslim and as a journalist I felt Soludo insulted my intelligence when he told the Sultan of Sokoto that the Arabic inscription was removed in order to promote Nigeria’s culture and national unity. How, for heaven’s sake, does the presence of Arabic alphabets, which are no more symbolic of Islam than Latin alphabets are symbolic of Christianity, promote disunity? How, if one may also ask, is the Latin alphabet any more indigenous to Nigeria than its Arabic counterpart? Surely pandering to blind prejudice cannot be a sensible way to promote Nigeria’s culture and unity.
Unpalatable to some as it may be the truth is that the Arabic alphabet is, at least, as much part of Nigeria’s history and culture as the Latin alphabet. At any rate commonsense alone dictates that we should be promoting the language itself not trying to banish it. At least half of Nigeria’s population, which is Muslim, has a symbolic attachment to its alphabets just like our Christian brethrens have a symbolic attachment to the Latin alphabet. On the international scene, Nigeria is a key member of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) whose majority member-states are Arab. The language is also among the official languages of the African Union and the United Nations.
In any case the more multi-lingual in the world’s major languages the citizens of a country are in a world that has become a global village the better for that country. Today Arabic is one of the world’s most important languages. With 175,000,000 native speakers, according to a 2005 book, The Shite History of Nearly Everything, it is the sixth largest language in the world after Chinese with over a billion, English with around 350 million, Spanish with about 330 million, the Bengali with nearly 190 million and the Hindi/Urdu with 182 million. Why then a country would like to ignore a language of such global importance in the history, politics and economics of the world, not to mention its significance for at least half of its citizens, truly beggars belief.
Not too long ago the CBN mistakenly captioned the portrait of the famous Zuma Rock on our 100 Naira note as located in the Federal Capital Territory. The Niger State Government petitioned the federal authorities on this annexation of its landmark. It was corrected in subsequent printings of the note.
Unlike the annexation of Niger State’s Zuma Rock the removal of the Arabic was not in error. It was a decision clearly informed by prejudice. This is all the more reason why it should be corrected.
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