Muslim Leaders And The Myth Of Marginalisation

By

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi

lamidos@hotmail.com

Lagos, March 29, 2004

On Easter Monday, Muslim groups met in Kaduna under the aegis of the Jama’atu Nasril Islam and the chairmanship of His Eminence, the Sultan of Sokoto, to decide on a collective line of action in response to the “marginalisation of Nigerian Muslims” by the federal Government under Olusegun Obasanjo. According to newspaper reports, the meeting was rowdy and passionate. A leading Emir called for a Jihad by Nigerian Muslims against the Federal Government, before storming out of the meeting. Indeed so high was the temperature inside the Kaduna International Trade Fair Complex that, according to one newspaper, a leading northern politician, Second Republic minister and traditional title-holder from Bauchi state was slapped by a delegate. Every one who was present at the meeting reports that there was a charged atmosphere and that Muslims were angry at their alleged marginalisation.

As I read and listened to the reports, my mind went back to 1998 when southern politicians, and particularly Yoruba and Igbo politicians, launched an aggressive campaign against northern Muslims and “Hausa-Fulanis” who were accused of marginalizing the rest of the country. In those days the clarion call was for a “power-shift” to the south, and every one joined the fad. In that year, I gave a public lecture at Arewa House, Kaduna, (later published by the Trust newspapers), entitled “Power-shift and Rotation: Between Emancipation and Obfuscation.” To place the present intervention in context, I reproduce below and extensive quote from that paper:

‘To claim that the “north” has “exploited” or “marginalized” the south is linguistically incorrect and politically nonsensical. It is the equivalent of claiming that all or most of the human beings who are from the “north” possess or control the means of production, persuasion and coercion which are the source of power, while all or most of those in the South are dispossessed of these. Only the most hypocritical of analysts would pretend that he holds this to be even possibly true. A group made up of people hailing from different parts of this country controls these means to varying degrees and the vast majority of Nigerians, northerners and southerners, have been dispossessed and exploited by this group. What we have on the political stage today is an internal conflict among various subsystems of this class of oppressors, each trying to drag us into his camp by appealing to native instincts.’

Not too long after this lecture, elections were held and Obasanjo came to power. In 1999 when Obasanjo appointed his first cabinet, Muslim politicians and religious leaders claimed that Muslims were marginalized because the appointments were lop-sided in favour of Christians. Again I made a contribution to the debate in my published article entitled “Religion, the Cabinet and a Political Economy of the ‘North’.” In that paper, I was even more explicit and detailed in stating my position and I quote:

“That issues have come to this state is partly attributable to a patent lack of political education. Due to illiteracy of the masses and their manipulation by the dominant hegemony, the northern people are yet to comprehend the nature of the state, which is, as aptly described by Gramsci, ‘ the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules.’ Through a dialectical interaction between structure and superstructure, between the objective and the subjective, a form of consciousness is diffused through the mediation of agents of ideological control to the extent that it has become part of the ‘common-sense’ of the northern masses. By manipulating the intoxicating agency of religion, the dominant classes have been able to create a contingent, socially constructed form of correspondence between essentially contradictory economic and political regions of the northern social formation. Consequently, the poor Muslim peasant farmer in Zaria, condemned to life-long penury by the circumstances of his birth, the inadequacy of his education and the deprived state of his general existence, feels a stronger bond with and affinity for his rich, capitalist emir than his fellow Christian farmer in Wusasa. Similarly, the poor Christian peasant in Zangon-Kataf is willing to kill, maim and destroy his poor Muslim neighbour on the orders of a retired general who was, and remains, part and parcel of the oppressive establishment.

“This anti–reductionist emphasis on the specificity of the ‘popular-Islamic’ or ‘popular- Christian’ in contradistinction to class demands and struggle, has enabled the dominant northern classes, Muslim and Christian, to appropriate under their respective wings the so-called ‘Hausa-Fulani’ and ‘middle-belters’, as instruments in what, ultimately, is competition and struggle among various class-fractions of the bourgeoisie with the state as the principal arena. Viewed in this light, the northerner is in a pitiful state, crying for a saviour he does not know. Only education of the northerner, and up-liftment of his consciousness, will provide him with the requisite power of introspection through which the nonsensicality of his common sense can become apparent. Only then will it occur to him that although Babangida, Abacha and Abubakar were Muslims, and although Useni, Shagaya, Mark, Bamaiyi and Dogonyaro were Christians, the rising social profiles and increased personal opulence of these members of the establishment was accompanied by the continued impoverishment, ill-health, and deprivation of the Muslim and Christian masses. Only then will he wonder where his emir obtains his fancy limousines and well-fed horses, where his church gets its millions, where his pastor finds his wealth when the school to which his child goes is empty and teachers are not paid, when there are no drugs in the government hospitals, when he can not afford one square meal a day. Only then would it dawn on him that the issue is not one of Islam Vs. Christianity, but of competing vested political interests in which he has no stake. He can never be a minister even if there were one hundred ministers from his faith. Nor would his son be one. He fights and is willing to die in the name of Islam or Christianity, only to facilitate access of some lurking and predatory kleptomaniac to the Federal treasury, whose license to this access is his capacity for the manipulation of religious symbols and effective use of slogans and other tools of opportunistic propaganda.”

These two quotes sum up my historical view on marginalisation. It was on this basis I criticized and debated with the tribalistic elements that formed Afenifere (see “Afenifere: Syllabus of Errors” for example). It was the basis for my debates with Urhobo nationalists like Darah and Ekeh. It was the basis for my long and intense altercations with Ike Okonta and his fellow-travellers among Fulani and Islam-hating Igbo intellectuals. I did not criticize southern advocates of the “marginalisation” thesis because of where they come from or where I come from. I criticized them on principle. I do not believe, period, that because the cabinet has more people who are Muslim then Muslims are better off. Each minister is an individual and he/she either performs or does not perform. Obasanjo’s government has failed to deliver on many of its promises. For the north in particular, the problems of poverty, unemployment, collapsing infra-structure and illiteracy are myriad and reflect incompetence and corruption on the part of Christian and Muslim public officers at federal, state and local government levels. We have every right to criticize the Obasanjo for incompetence. The North as a whole, has many reasons to complain. But to reduce Obasanjo’s crime to the number of members of the Muslim elite he has appointed-or rather not appointed- to key positions, and to pretend that if we had more Muslim appointees then Muslims would be better off automatically, to say this, is to speak from an ethically blind perspective.

The marginalisation thesis has too many flaws. The most obvious is that has not been borne by history. Indeed in 1998, northern supporters of power-shift like Balarabe Musa hinged their argument on the fact that northerners had not benefited from the political dominance of the north. The second, which is captured in my two quotes above, is that the real issue is not about the people, and what the government must do for them, but about the elite and which positions and perks they should be entitled to as their share of the national cake. To call this fight over the sharing of offices a jihad is to make a complete mockery of the Muslim faith. Third, it has nothing to do with religion. No Muslim has claimed that he has been stopped from practicing the five pillars of Islam. Our personal and civil laws-marriage, divorce, inheritance, custody, burial rites, contracts etc-are all governed by the shari’ah. Our courts have been given the right to implement Muslim criminal law, including amputations, even where controversy rages about the propriety of these punishments in the present circumstances among Muslims themselves. We build our mosques all over the country, and Muslims of all sects and denominations and orders from Shiites to Wahhabites, Malikites to Salafites, Tijjanites to Qadirites etc continue to worship God in the manner they choose without hindrance. So the problem is not about the freedom of Muslims to worship or practice their religion, but about sharing the spoils of political office. This is a legitimate political struggle and politicians have the right to negotiate for a larger share of these spoils. But it is not a struggle about the religion or the quality of life of the poor Muslim in the street and he should not be deceived and co-opted into it through the manipulation of sacred concepts.

But there is a more fundamental dimension to this. When a group is marginalized this is only possible because it is weak. Marginalisation, if anything, is a symbol of political fragility and decay. In other words, when a leader complains about marginalisation, he is like a doctor who addresses the symptom of a disease (say a fever) instead of addressing the underlying illness or infection. The point is this. If the Muslims, and particularly northern Muslims are today marginalized as is being claimed, this marginalisation is but a symptom of a more profound problem. We are marginalized because we are weak and divided, and our weakness comes from the loss of our solid political and negotiating base in a unified, multi-cultural, multi-religious north. As partners with  Christian neighbours and compatriots, northerners in the First and Second Republic were able to form a formidable political group that was unbeatable in the race for office. The marriage was not always blissful for both parties and it had many internal problems, but while it lasted it served the best political interest of the North and, in particular the Muslims. The protection of Shari’ah and the preservation of our cultural values would have been impossible without control of politics. By losing this simple sense of political pragmatism and reducing ourselves to religious bigots, we weaken our hand in the game of politics and everything we cherish is now vulnerable. The rise of Muslim and Christian fundamentalism has been a major contributor to the fragmentation of the north and its binarisation through the reactionary process of reciprocal “Other-ing”.

We may dispute the reality or extent of marginalisation of Muslims, or Christians or northerners or southerners. I am even willing to concede, for the sake of argument, that because a smaller fraction of northern Muslim elite has access to the spoils of power then northern Muslims as a whole are marginalized. But this much must be acknowledged: The political asphyxiation of Muslims has been directly collateral, diachronically correlational and causally conjoined with the above-mentioned fragmentatory processes.

We are therefore left with a paradox. The more we resort to claims of marginalisation, construct religiously-charged political identities and threaten jihad, the more we divide the north and weaken its Muslim and Christian elite alike. We fell into a trap.

The problem of religious conflict and parochialism  bedevils the north. Of course it is not the only problem, which is why a unified northern forum must address the common problems faced by all northern people. The north suffers from the neglect of agricultural production, the lack of proper access of cash-crop farmers to the international market, the collapse of industry, the debilitation of its infra-structure, lack of alternative source of power to hydro-electricity, among others. Most of all the north suffers from the general massification of its population that is to say, its collective subjection to the intense and deliberate processes of qualitative leveling for the purpose of quantitative maximization. As a result of this, politicians and religious demagogues and fanatics have a ready army of uneducated, unemployed northerners willing to participate in bloody riots and attend rallies where emotional inanities pass for patriotic leadership.

What we expect our leaders to do is to ask Obasanjo what he is doing about these things. More important, to ask our governors and legislators and Local government chairmen and councilors what they are doing to address these things. This should be done on the platform of a unified north, with common problems. Our jihad should be about changing these pathetic circumstances and this can be done by competent leaders. It is difficult for me, for obvious reasons, to take a position that is critical of the Muslim leaders who gathered in Kaduna. But I took this position on principle against those who claimed they were marginalized by the north. Where principle is concerned-and this is the real point-what is good enough for the goose has to be good enough for the gander.