PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The Sun’s NIGERIA’s GOLDEN BOOK

ndajika@yahoo.com

 

In what was clearly a reflection of Nigeria’s poor reading – and writing – habit last year’s celebration of the country’s Golden Jubilee witnessed few publications about its History. Elsewhere, perhaps even in countries less literate than Nigeria, a country celebrating its 50 years of existence would have been literally flooded with books about its past, present and future.

This embarrassment of the poverty of literature about the country on its 50th Anniversary was the greater considering the fact that Nigeria has produced arguably  Africa’s most celebrated novelist, Chinua Achebe, whose highly regarded classic, Things Fall Apart, celebrated its 50th year of publication a year ahead of Nigeria’s. This is not to mention the other fact that the country has been the first to produce black Africa’s first Nobel Literature Laureate, Mr Wole Soyinka.

Happily, however, there were a few brave efforts at producing comprehensive histories of the country to mark its Golden Jubilee. This reviewer is aware of at least three such efforts, all of them by newspaper publishers. He was indeed involved initially with the attempt by the Federal Ministry of Information and Communication, jointly with the now comatose Daily Times of Nigeria (DTN), to produce one of these three books. In the end a little known 1st October Publications Limited took over the publication from the two and titled the book NIGERIA AT 50: A COMPENDIUM - The Official and Authoritative Book About Nigeria.

The two rival publishers to 1st October Publications Limited of the story of Nigeria at 50 were Leadership and Sun newspaper companies. Leadership, which publishes from Abuja, titled its 440-page book Nigeria @ 50: A Review of the Last 50 Years and a Preview of the Next 50. Sun titled its own simply and more imaginatively as NIGERIA’S GOLDEN BOOK: Celebrating a rich past and a bright future.

Of the three, however, the Sun’s GOLDEN BOOK has so far enjoyed the widest publicity, what with the country-wide tour of the country by its Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief, Mr. Tony Onyima, during which he has introduced the book to some of the country’s leading citizens.

The 509-page book is divided into five sections –actually six – beginning with an account of the country’s colonial history up to the civil war in 1967 in Section 01. This section starts from page 40. The book then ends with an un-numbered Epilogue entitled “To the Future With Hope,” on page 509, making it the sixth and final section.

Following the Contents page there is a useful 23-page section of the basic facts about Nigeria and its 36 states plus the Federal Capital Territory in alphabetical order. There are, however, some errors of commissions and omissions in this section. For example, in a brief one paragraph profile of Nigeria’s “Political History,” the book describes Flora Shaw who famously coined Nigeria’s name from its biggest river, the Niger, as “the mistress of Lord Lugard.” Lugard was the British colonial official who amalgamated Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914.

Here the Sun was merely repeating what has become a popular fable about the relationship between Lugard and Miss Shaw. A mistress, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “a woman having a sexual relationship with a man married to someone else.”  Miss Shaw was Lugard’s fiancée not his mistress.

And the difference is not trivial considering how this fable about Miss Shaw being the colonial governor’s consort has often been held out even by otherwise serious-minded people as proof positive that Nigeria couldn’t have been a more frivolous creation whose disintegration is inevitable.

In that same short paragraph, the publishers said Nigeria was “originally made of four regions – the Northern, Western, Mid-Western and Eastern Region.” This is obviously an egregious error. Nigeria, as every elementary school boy knows, was originally made of three regions – the North, East and West. The Mid-West was not created until three years after the country’s Independence.

There are also a few not-so-minor errors in the states’ facts files. For example, the book lists Hausa as the only indigenous language in Kebbi State. Nothing could be further from the truth. At least one significant Nigerian ethnic group is missing from what ought to have been a list of several indigenous languages in the state. This is the Dakarkari, famous as a warrior-like ethnic group that has contributed more than its fair share of the rank and file of the Nigerian military, including a former army chief, Lt-General Ishaya Bamaiyi.

Similarly in Ondo State, Yoruba, the publishers said, is the only indigenous language. This, again, is not true. There are indigenous Ijaws, among others. Also in Niger State, the third of the languages listed as spoken in the state is Kambari, not Gambari, a word the Yoruba generally use pejoratively to refer to the Hausa.

Worse still is the case of Kaduna where the book lists Hausa as the only indigenous language, conspicuously leaving out the Gwari, the Antyap, and a host of other indigenous languages in Southern Kaduna.

The book also suffers generally from a lack of rigour that should characterise a book that is meant to be a definitive authority on the history of a country. On page 100 the book, for example, repeats, as a matter of fact, the popular fiction that historically the North has been a parasite on the South, a parasitism supposedly accentuated by the discovery of oil in the South. 

Yet a more clear sighted peep into our history would have shown that long after the amalgamation in 1914 and even for a while after the discovery of oil in the late fifties, the North, with its vast land and abundant agricultural produce, livestock and mineral resources like tin, subsidized the budgets of the South. As pointed out by Malam Adamu Fika, the Wazirin Fika and a former Head of Service of the Federal Government, in a widely published rebuttal of the North as parasite, this notion couldn’t have been wider off the mark.   

The Wazirin Fika’s rebuttal, published in several newspapers in May last year, deserves to be quoted extensively if only to expose the injury this fallacy of the North as the nation’s parasite does to the country’s History. “It is,” he said, “clear from the foregoing schedules that during the first forty years of unification of Nigeria it was only in 1919 and1920 that the revenue contributions from the South marginally exceeded those from the North. In 1919, the South contributed £575,890 compared with the North’s £555,040 giving difference of £20,850 in favour of the South. On the expenditure side, the Government actual expenditure on services in the North was £350,279 compared with the actual expenditure on services in the South of £1,154,307. In effect the North could still be regarded as having contributed more if the combined effect of revenue and expenditure were taken into account.

“In 1920 the south contributed £588,210 compared with the £579,210 contributed by the North, giving a difference of only £9,745. On the expenditure side, the Government spent the sum of £509,515 on services in the North and £1,900,973 on services in the South.

“During the period of forty years the contribution of Northern Provinces to the central fund totalled about £18,000,000 compared with about £8,000,000 contributed by the Southern Provinces. On the expenditure side, the Government spent a total of about £13,000,000 on the services in the Southern Provinces compared with about £6,000,000 on provincial services in the North. In other words, the North contributed almost 225% more than the entire South, but itself received only 46% of the share the South got out of the common pool.

“Contributing to the central revenue fund and receiving less spent on the Provincial Services in the North was not the only sacrifice made by the North. A number of projects and services which should have been more properly charged directly on the central fund were in fact financed by the Native Administrations in the North.”

But even now that oil has since replaced agriculture and commerce as the main source of government revenue, it is mere propaganda to single out the North as the country’s parasite. The truth is, oil has turned at least virtually all the elites of this country into parasites, regardless of where they come from and what god they worship. And indeed if anything, the Southern elites, considering their control of the oil sector and of the country’s economy and the bureaucracy, have been even more parasitic than their Northern counterparts, as exemplified by the recent financial scandal that has surrounded the management of the well endowed Niger Delta Development Commission.

Having identified some of the book’s shortcomings, I must commend the publishers for embarking on what has been the most independent of the few attempts at producing a definitive History of Nigeria as it celebrated its Golden Jubilee last year. The publishers also deserve praise for the book’s high quality printing and production. And as President Jonathan said in his Forward, Nigerians would find it useful as a source of education and research on the first 50 years of existence of Nigeria as an independent country.

 

PENTASCOPE

 

Dear Mohammed,

 

Just read your column (of last week). Pentascope is Dutch, not Danish.

 

Clem Baiye

 

I stand corrected.

 

Mohammed