PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

PEOPLE AND POLITICS

By MOHAMMED HARUNA

Battling for the soul of the North

The politically alert reader may have noticed the fierce battle being fought, both directly and by proxy, for the control of the North among the leading contenders for the next presidential elections in 2007. However, in case you haven’t noticed, it should interest you that at least three key gladiators already battling for the leadership of this country four years hence, have turned the North into their main battle ground.

Actually, the battle for the control of the North is not new. It has been fought, on and off, since the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914 for no other reason than the fact that whoever controlled the North, as the most populous and the most politically sagacious of the regions in the country, controlled Nigeria. The emergence of General Olusegun Obasanjo as the first Southerner to become an elected president after a total of nearly 30 years of Northern domination of power in the country, introduced a new dimension into the battle for control of the North.

Before him all attempts to divide and rule the North met with very limited success partly because those who tried to do so, notably Chief Obafemi Awolowo who did all he could to create a Middle Belt region out of the North, had limited resources for achieving their objective. Obasanjo’s control of the federal might especially at a time when revenue from oil, the main source of the country’s revenue, was at its highest, gave him the resource which others before him lacked. Obasanjo, as we all know, has since deployed those resources arguably with near deadly effect for Northern unity.

The apparent irony of Obasanjo’s use of power against the North was that he got it almost entirely through the backing of the region; he was roundedly rejected by his own South-Western kith and kin in the 1999 elections, whereas the South-East and South-South seemed content to have taken the lead from the North. Once he settled down, however, President Obasanjo proceeded to do all he could to destroy the very source of his electoral success, apparently for no better reason than revenge for the humiliation General Sani Abacha, as a Head of State of Northern origin, inflicted on him in 1995 by sentencing him to death-- later commuted to life imprisonment-- for allegedly planning a coup. Obasanjo survived Abacha only through the mysterious death that snatched Abacha away in June 1998.

Even before he was sworn in as president, Obasanjo told the Northern leadership in February 1999 that anyone who imagined it would soon be time for pay-back, should think again. And as if to drive home his point that he owned no one any obligations, as soon as he sat down to his new job, he proceeded to sack Northerners in the senior ranks of the armed forces and the federal civil service under the pretext that they were political soldiers and deadwoods. By the same token he reinstated many sacked South-Westerners to the federal service for being victims of alleged ethnic cleansing by the Abacha regime.

Of all the many weapons Obasanjo sought to deploy to square or squash the North, the two deadliest were his use of religion and his attempt to reverse the demographic superiority of the North over the South through the manipulation of the over two-decade old National Identity Card Project. However, whereas he seemed to have succeeded with religion, at least on the surface, the I.D. card project may yet prove his waterloo, as we shall see presently.

One glaring manifestation of Obasanjo’s success in trying to divide the North using religion especially, was the reception organised last month by the Middle-Belt Forum for one of its founders and a key financier, Lt. General T.Y. Danjuma. This was to celebrate his happy (?) retirement as Obasanjo’s minister of defence. At the well-attended – both the president and his vice were there – reception in the well-appointed NICON HILTON Hotel, Abuja, the leader of the Middle-Belt Forum, Chief Solomon Lar, the former governor of Plateau State and Acting Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the ruling PDP, a.k.a. The Liberator (presumably of Plateau State from the “feudal North”), seemed to have taken a special delight in taking pot shots across the bow of the so-called feudal North.

“Those who think that the Middle-Belt is a misnomer or myth”, warned Lar, “will soon be made to realize that we are a reality that cannot be wished away… From now on those who take us for granted will do so at a great cost”.

Earlier, The Liberator had sought to clarify the demographic size of the Middle-Belt. “By way of clarification”, he said, “the geographic Middle-Belt is distinct from and smaller than the political Middle-Belt. The political Middle-Belt encompasses all the. marginalized minority groups in Northern Nigeria. These are the nationalities that have historically resisted feudalism, political oppression, injustice, religious discrimination and the economic emasculation of the unfavoured masses. It extends from Ilorin to Kabba to Adamawa, Taraba, Southern Borno, Gombe, Tafawa Balewa to Zuru, the Federal Capital Territory and every part of Northern Nigeria”.

It remains to be seen how far this highly elastic redefinition of the Middle-Belt based essentially on Christian solidarity, would survive the end of the tenure of President Obasanjo who is widely regarded as its chief promoter. For now, however, there is no disputing the fact that the Middle-Belt leadership is on a roll, its deep ethnic divisions, as say between the Jukuns and the Tivs, papered over by its political access to federal largesse.

If the NICON-HILTON Hotel reception for General Danjuma was one glaring manifestation of Obasanjo’s success in dividing the North, an even more glaring manifestation is the recent media war between Governor Attahiru Bafarawa of Sokoto State and supporters of the Vice-President Atiku Abubakar. This media war is the more significant of the two because it demonstrates that even within the so-called feudal North, there are deep political divisions.

The media war seems to have been started by Bafarawa when he took out adverts in several national newspapers last month to attack the Vice-President for honouring a reception by the North-East zone of the PDP to celebrate its “victory” in the last presidential elections, a reception during which the Vice-President lamented what he called the marginalization of the zone. The Vice-President’s presence at the reception and his complaint of marginalization on the zone’s behalf, argued Bafarawa, could only further divide the North.

The advert may have been Bafarawa’s voice, but many observers of Nigeria’s politics believe, rightly or wrongly, that it was General Ibrahim Babangida’s hands that nudged the Sokoto state governor from behind. Babangida is widely suspected to have his eyes on the presidency come 2007 and his supporters, if not himself, regard the Vice-President as his greatest rival.

No sooner did the newspapers publish Bafarawa’s advert than a couple of the Vice-President’s supporters replied him in similar fashion. One Alhaji Bala Salisu, the National President of an organisation calling itself United Coalition for Stability of Democracy, indeed poured a lot of scorn on Bafarawa for daring to accuse the Vice-President of being divisive of Northern unity. Bafarawa’s statement, he said, were mere “tantrums” and the governor himself was no more than a “mouthpiece for some of the anti-democratic forces produced, nurtured and over-pampered by the nation’s past”. These, clearly, were code-words for General Babangida.

From the foregoing it should be obvious that for now there are at least three major contenders for the soul of the North, ahead of the next presidential elections in 2007. These are President Obasanjo, Vice-President Abubakar and General Babangida.

At first glance, it seems odd that Obasanjo should remain in contention for 2007 since he is in his second and final term as president. However, widespread speculations that the man wants to carry on regardless of the current constitutional limitations, makes it politically imprudent for anyone to ignore him, the more so as it is not impossible or even difficult for him to surreptitiously engineer a stalemate between the Vice-President and Babangida that would leave the field open for him to grab a third term or even a tenured presidency. Either that or he may quietly push for a Northern Christian minority demand for the job .

For now perhaps, the one obstacle to his tazarce may be his failure to manipulate the National ID card project in favour of the South. Preliminary figures released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in May following the registration exercise in late 2002 shows that North has maintained its lead over the South.

Those figures show that the South-West states registered nearly 11 million adults while the South-East and South-South registered a little over six million and 6.7 million respectively, making a total of just over 23.7 million for the South. This is against the figures for the North of slightly over 28.2 million disaggregated as nearly 13.2 million for the North-West, nearly 7.4 million for the North-East and nearly 7.7 million for the North-Central. The final figures may indeed show a wider gap between the North and the South considering the more massive and better organised turn-out in the South.

This inability of the president to confirm the Southern stereo-type of a North merely populated by goats, cows and sheep, despite all the massive weapons of state at his disposal, may yet prove his undoing, if indeed he plans to carry on for a third term or indeed for ever.

The sad and tragic thing about all these political battles, however, is that the vast majority of Nigerians on whose behalf the protagonists claim to be fighting, invariably end up merely as cannon fodder. Hardly do they ever taste the sweet dividends of victory, no matter who wins and who loses.