PEOPLE & POLITICS By MOHAMMED HARUNA

The Middle Belt: the facts, the fictions

kudugana@yahoo.com

Over three years ago the late Chief Bola Age visited Taraba State, not as the minister of justice and attorney general of the federation that he then was, but as an Alliance for Democracy chieftain; he went there in October 2000 to launch AD posters at Taraba Motel in Jalingo, the state’s capital.

Jalingo, as anyone familiar with Nigeria’s political history knows, was an Action Group stronghold in the North. Ige’s visit therefore was like a return to what he might have regarded as the good old days. Not surprisingly, he used the occasion to remind his audience about Jalingo’s old ties with his political godfather, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Awo, he reminded the audience, was a champion of the creation of the Middle-Belt. During the struggle, Ige said, Awo worked hand in glove with the likes of “Senator Joseph Tarka, Joseph Olawoyin, Reverend David Lot, Joshua Zagi Dass, John Adeyebe and Gaius Gilama”.

Ige then told his audience that the time was now ripe to re-visit the case for the Middle-Belt. Ige did not define the boundary of his new Middle Belt, but from his list of Awo’s comrades-in-arm in the struggle for the sub-region, it was clear that Ige’s Middle-Belt was wherever Christian minorities were predominant in the North. Otherwise, Ige would have remembered to include in his list anti-Establishment Muslim Northerners like Raji Abdallah from the old Kwara Province and Abubakar Zukogi from the Niger Province.

That Ige, in effect, singled out religion in defining the boundary of the new Middle Belt was however not surprising. Ethnicity as a political weapon in a sub-region which contained probably more than half of Nigeria’s estimated 250 tribes plus, many of them with a history of rivalry and wars, was a weak and blunt weapon. However, the plurality of these tribes, albeit not their majority, had the common denominator of being Christians.

This disparity between the Christian plurality of the minority tribes in the North and their numerical size has been at the centre of the confusion over the definition of the Middle Belt. Let me explain. Last year, at a reception for General T.Y. Danjuma following his resignation as minister of defence, Chief Solomon Lar, the foremost advocate of the Middle-Belt, define the sub-region thus: “By way of clarification”, said Lar, “the geographical 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”.

Lar, of course, was not alone in his emphasis on politics – or religion,if you will – instead of geography in his definition of the Middle-Belt. Among many others, Group-Captain (rtd) Jona Jang, former military governor of Benue State and the AD governorship candidate for Plateau in the last election, shared the same view with Lar. In an interview in The Comet of November 12, 2000, Jang’s emphasis in defining the Middle-Belt was again religion, even though he was quick to deny it. “We” he said, “have already stated what areas we consider the Middle-Belt, which are Southern Kebbi, Southern Kaduna, Southern Borno, Southern Bauchi, Southern Gombe, Adamawa, Taraba, Benue, Nassarawa, Kogi, the Federal Capital Territory, Kwara and Niger”. These are states or parts of states where Christians are in the majority.

The reason for the emphasis on, or the singling out of, religion, in defining the Middle-Belt should be apparent to anyone who takes even a cursory look at the population of the geographical Middle-Belt which is the North-Central Zone. This zone comprises Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nassarawa, Niger, Plateau and the FCT. Of these six states and the FCT, only Benue and Plateau states, the heart of the Middle-Belt, have an overwhelming Christian majority. Of the remaining four states, Kwara and Niger have an overwhelming Muslim majority, with Nassarawa and Kogi probably having a not-so-slim Muslim majority. With the FCT it is hard to tell; among indigenes, Muslims are probably in the majority since the FCT was carved out mostly from Niger, Kwara and Nassarawa states in that order. Its new status as the country’s capital has changed this demography in such a way that it is hard to tell without an exercise specifically aimed at determining the religious mix of the city.

It is this fear that Christians will be a minority in the geographical Middle-Belt that may have driven such Middle-Belt champions as Ige, Lar and Jang to redefine the Middle-Belt essentially by religion, if not by singling it out as the criteria. Not only that, there is also the fact that the North-Central as a whole has the smallest population of the three putative geo-political zones in the North, the others being North-East and North-West. The INEC voters registration exercise in late 2002, showed that the North-Central had an adult population (18 years and above) of 8,389,803 compared to 8,823,766 for North-East (Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Taraba and Yobe) and 15,161,193 for North-West (Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara).

Comparative figures released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs after its Identity Card registration exercise, showed that the North-Central with 7,696,203 was only marginally bigger than the North-East with 7,398,922. North-West with 13,184,004 still led the region by a wide margin.

Clearly, religion, rather than geographic or ethnicity would be the preferred weapon for anyone interested in dividing the North, by mobilizing the smaller tribes against the dominant tribe, in order to rule the region and Nigeria. As I have said several times before on these pages, President Olusegun Obasanjo has made excellent use of this weapon to divide and rule the North and Nigeria, with more than a little help from the Middle-Belt leadership as currently self-constituted.

As Sam Nda-Isaiah argued in his article on this subject in the Daily Trust of last Monday, the cry of marginalisation of the smaller tribes against the so-called Hausa-Fulani is not without basis. However, though the cry has a sound historical basis, its contemporary basis is rather tenuous, at best. Tenuous in the sense that whereas during the Caliphate era non-Muslim minorities were treated as slaves or at best were looked down up, the subjugation of the Caliphate by the British changed all that slowly but surely. Consequently, by the end of colonial rule under Sir Ahmadu Bello, the region’s premier, non-Muslims and Muslims alike had equal opportunity to realize their potentials in business, the bureaucracy and the professions.

In any case, the First Republic of four regions i.e. North, West, East and eventually Mid-West, lasted only all of six years after which it was divided into 12 states one year later and eventually into the present 36 states. Therefore from 1967 onwards, the minorities were sufficiently on their own to lift themselves up by their own boosts traps. Accepted, the creation of states stood the concept of federalism on its head with the parts becoming all too dependent on the centre, but as we shall see presently, the minorities had as fair a shake, possibly even more, at controlling the centre as the majorities.

Unfortunately, much of power politics is about creating bogeymen to take the blame for one’s failure of leadership, a failure all too often occasioned by incompetence, greed, self aggradisement and such other vices. Chief Solomon Lar’s recent threat that there will be no peace in the North unless a political Middle-Belt is created out of it is the classic case of scapegoating others over one’s leadership failure. For four years and three months from 1979 Lar, as governor of Plateau state, and his fellow indigenes were completely in charge of the state. For those four years and three months, they had enough statutory allocations to the state, not to mention other grants and internal revenues, to have turned the fortunes of their people around. Instead they left them no better than they found them, if not poorer. Twenty five years later, Lar turns round to blame others for enslaving his people.

His case for blaming the so-called Hausa-Fulani for the poverty of his people is clearly a weak one. It is further weakened by the fact that out of the 332 months during which Northerners ruled the country from 1967 when General Yakubu Gown came to power, the so-called core-Northerners (General Murtala Mohammed, Alhaji Shehu Shagari and General Muhammadu Buhari) ruled for only 77 months, depending on whether you regard General Abacha, who ruled for 60 months as a minority Kanuri or an adapted Kano indigene. Between Generals Gowon, Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, all from the geographical Middle-Belt, they ruled Nigeria for 215 months.

Clearly, if the sub-region has been marginalized, its leadership has itself largely to blame. Unfortunately, politics is all too often about distorting or even fabricating facts and appealing to emotions rather than to facts and logic. This is why the Middle-Belt Liberation Vanguard can issue a statement in defence of Lar’s threat to peace in the North, in which it said, among other things, that the people of the Middle-Belt could no longer be slaves to the “Hausa-Fulani”. “After the administration of Alhaji Shehu Shagari and General Muhammadu Buhari”, the MBLV added, “it is high time chances are given to other zones in the North particularly the Middle-Belt to freely participate in choosing the next president, who God willing, will come from the Middle-Belt.

This statement obviously ignores the fact that Generals Gowon, Babangida and Abubakar come from the Middle-Belt. The statement also ignores the fact that General Abacha was originally from the North-East and that our first and only Prime Minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Belewa, was also from the North-East.

Clearly politics, whether under the military or civilians, has thrown up leaders from all sections of the North. It has also done so for the rest of Nigeria, except the South-South, if you define leadership as only the man on top of the heap. If, however, you define leadership as a collective thing, then no part of the country can claim to have been left out. Therefore, zoning should have no place in our politics especially if we truly wish to practice genuine and not counterfeit democracy. It was dishonourable for President Obasanjo to have, in effect, disowned the zonal pact struck by his party through which he came to power, but zoning itself is the very anti-thesis of democracy.

I do not share Nda-Isaiah’s assertion in his column last Monday that “Politically there can never be such a thing as Middle-Belt. I do not know what a Tiv, a Tarok, a Nupe and a Kabba man, have in common politically to discuss and take common positions”. Geography is a factor of politics, just like ethnicity, religion and history. That he is wrong to deny geography its place in politics is obvious from his assertion two sentences later that “Members of the states that make up the North have historical and cultural affinity”. What is true of a larger entity cannot be untrue of its constituent parts.

However, my idea of a Middle-Belt and I am sure that of Nda-Isaiah, and for that matter, of anyone who means well for Nigeria, is one in which all its ethnic and religious groups alike live in peace and harmony with each other and with others in the larger North, and, needless to say, in Nigeria. For in the end whether like me and Nda-Isaiah you are Nupe or whether you are Tiv or Tarok or Kabba and whether like me you are Muslim or like Nda-Isaiah you are a Christian and of course whether you are from the North or South, our people, if not we ourselves as leaders, all face the common enemies of poverty, disease, illiteracy, insecurity and general backwardness. Playing politics with tribe, religion, history or even geography instead of balancing them within the framework of one man one vote will never solve those problems.

The sooner those of us in leadership positions come to terms with these facts, the sooner Nigeria will be on its way to the promised land.