PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

MEND’s Threat To Terrorize The North (II)

ndajika@yahoo.com

 

 

 

Thanks largely to the domination of Nigeria’s politics since independence in 1960 by the Northern elite, it has since become an article of faith among Southerners that the North, or its elite at least, is the problem with Nigeria. Typical of such belief was an article by Midebo Bayagbon, once a columnist with Vanguard.

           

Writing in the April 18, 2001 edition of the newspaper, Bayagbon said “The problem with Nigeria is the problem of Northern elites, indolent, greedy and parasitic.” The article was in response to my column of the week before in which I made the hardly profound observation that greed on the part of the power-elite, regardless of region, religion or tribe, was the driving force behind the heated Resource Control controversy that raged at the time.

           

Bayagbon was, of course, not alone in propagating the idea that the Northern elite were Nigeria’s problem. Long before him the editors at Newswatch, The Guardian and the rested Daily Times, among others in the South, had peddled the same idea in the wake of a conflict in 1989 between the then (and now) minister of Petroleum, Alhaji Rilwanu Lukman, and the late Mr. Aret Adams, then Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), over a couple of top appointments at the Liquefied Natural Gas Company.

           

Newswatch, for example, had argued in effect that the attempt by Northerners to participate in the management and control of public sector of the oil (and gas) industry when their region produced no oil was a misnomer and simply untenable.

           

At that time I tried to show that if anything was untenable it was precisely Newswatch’s editorial judgment. Figures from NNPC then showed that out of its top 319 managers, the entire North had 59. Out of the remaining 260 from the South, three states alone, Anambra, Ogun and Oyo, had 41, 28 and 27 respectively, making a total of 96. Yet like the North, none of the three produced oil. Clearly, this was a case of double standards on the part of the newsmagazine.

           

The North may have dominated the politics of this country since independence nearly forty nine years ago, but contrary to all the propaganda against it, this has not translated into the region’s ownership and control of the country’s political-economy. This much was demonstrated by Alhaji Falalu Bello, the managing director of Unity Bank, in a paper he presented at a forum organized by Leadership last year on the crisis of the Northern economy in the wake of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s economic reforms.

           

In his paper, Bello categorized Nigeria’s economy, post Obasanjo’s reform, into four, namely, South West, South East plus Delta, North and South-South minus Delta. The South-West with an area of 76,852 square kilometer and a population of 25.2 million, he said, owned or controlled 60% of the nation’s industrial capacity, 40% of its banking assets and 67% of its insurance assets. The region also housed the nation’s deep sea port of Apapa, Tin Can Island and Roro, the busiest international airport in Ikeja, and three thermal stations at Egbin, Papalanto and Omotosho.

           

The South-East plus Delta (what Bello called “their (Igbo’s) cousins across the Onitsha bridge”) controlled 20% of the country’s industrial assets, 50% of its banking assets and 21% of its insurance assets.

           

The North and the South-South minus Delta were a study in contrast to the South-West and South-South minus Delta. With an area of 719,435 square kilometers or 79% of the country’s land mass and 75 million people or 53.6% of its population, the North, Bello said, had ownership and control of only 10% of the country’s industrial assets, 3% of its banking assets and 2% of its insurance assets.

           

Similarly, the South-South minus Delta which is largely the coastal creeks of the River Niger and has a small land mass of only 48,321 square kilometers had control, Bello said, of no more than 10% of the country’s industrial assets, 3% of its banking assets and 10% of its insurance assets.

           

Private enterprise may have had something to do with this distribution in the ownership and control of these three assets which are critical in any economy, but even in Britain and America, the world’s leading free market economies, government, as the biggest patron of the military-industrial complex that drives their economies, has remained the biggest game in town in spite of all the hype about the Thatcherite and Reaganite free market revolutions in the eighties.

           

In Nigeria, as in most under-developed countries where governments play an even bigger role, it is obvious that the ownership, control and management of oil as government’s biggest source of revenue has had a lot more to do with the country’s regional distribution of wealth than with private enterprise.

           

One telling evidence of this came from Chief Edwin Clerk, no less. Clerk, as we all know, has for long championed the cause of the Niger Delta. Seven years ago at the second anniversary of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), he made some interesting remarks about who indeed were the biggest beneficiaries of the country’s oil wealth.

           

We do not want to eat alone,” he told his audience, “but you cannot come to my backyard to take the oil away and we are being neglected.” Clerk went on to say that “the big majority groups, particularly the Yorubas and the Igbos, have taken over our place, they have colonized us.

           

To illustrate his point he said in 2007 after Shell Producing Company trained 133 Nigerians it employed 39. Out of these 13, he said, were Yorubas, 12 Igbo, one Hausa and none was from Delta.

           

“We have,” he said, “documents to show that the battle for supremacy within the oil companies is between Yorubas and Igbos”.

           

Yet, for some perhaps not-so-inexplicable reason, the North continues to be blamed for the problems of the country’s oil-dependent public sector and, indeed, for the problems of the country as a whole. MEND’s recent threat against the North is simply the latest in the casting of the region in the role of villain of the piece.

           

The Northern elite, as I said on these pages over six years ago, may be everybody’s favourite whipping boy for the country’s problems, but the fact is that its members are not the only ones that easy oil wealth has made indolent, greedy and parasitic. If any thing they have benefited far less from oil wealth than their southern counterparts as is crystal clear from the regional distribution of wealth in this country.

           

The difference is that their domination of the country’s politics notwithstanding, they have not been able, mainly because of the South’s head start in Western education, commerce and industry, to own and control the country’s media. And as the American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jnr. said in his rephrasing of the Marxist dictum about history being controlled by those who owned the means of production, in this century history is controlled by those who own the means of communication.