By Abraham Ogbodo
Amid the pains, we are always not too willing to give President Bola Ahmed Tinubu any flowers. On impact, his so-called balm hurts more than it heals. Intensive attempts by his handlers to force a contrary view, has not worked. The hunger, hardship and everything wrong in the land are heaped on his head. Nigerians are therefore very angry with him. But the North is even angrier. That is precisely why I am here today. To explain the reason for the excessive anger in the North and the region’s apparent determination to teach the President a lesson in 2027 for the wrong he is currently doing to it.
To get the context right, certain fallacies have to be debunked. The idea that the North lives entirely on political power, and that, Just as fish cannot survive outside of water, the region also dies outside of political power, is not true. We think like this because we equate class access with comprehensive access. Largely, the region and its people, just as many other parts of the country, have been living without political power since the birth of Nigeria in 1960. This is why the correlation between the long access to power by the North and development in the region is usually difficult to establish. The goodness and all the advantages that come with power are exclusively retained among the power elite on behalf of the people. They eat on behalf of the people. They also go to school on behalf of the people.
But they never wish to die on behalf of the people. When these advantages are threatened by an adversarial swing of the power pendulum, these same famished people are mobilised to fight and die on behalf of the elite, which approximates the entire region. When this small class of people is angry, the entire Northern Nigeria is said to be angry. Right now, this is the situation between President Tinubu and the North. El-Rufai and Rabiu Kwankwaso, for instance, are angry with him. Aliyu Ndume and Babachir Lawal are also very angry. But one Daniel Bwala who used to talk angrily is no longer angry. He is at the table and maintaining good table manners.
I am saying there is nothing bad as such that the President has done to the ordinary people of the North that is causing their anger which he has not done to other ordinary people in the country including the ordinary people of Lagos State and everywhere in the Southwest. The difference is in the operating environment. While in the South, people are asked to put their fate in their hands, in the North, the ordinary people are usually advised to wait on Allah to bring power and the good things of life them. Legitimate aspiration looks almost like a crime against God and humanity. It is close to the Indian caste system where a victim has to wait for death and a merciful reincarnation unto a higher caste to move up the social ladder.
This is the only way to explain a nomadic culture that neither changes with the dynamics nor diversifies into capacity building in the essential areas. It is all about grazing cattle in the savannahs and forests across incredible distances from North to South and back and along so-called tortuous grazing routes that were delineated close to century and half ago. Mohammadu Buhari, as president, had his children schooling in ivy leagues outside the country. The audacity, even as President of Nigeria, to stand tall as a defender of the Fulani race and assert the grazing rights of iterant Fulani herders on any open field in any part of the country, derived entirely from absolute submission to pre determinism that leaves the victim with no options.
Fulani herdsmen do not own cattle. They rear cattle for the cattle owners who may be emirs, military generals, governors, ministers, senators, or anything but ordinary. They are not among the people in the North who are angry with BAT. This was how the North also got angry with President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015. The same grudge of marginalisation of the region was woven in the narrative of cluelessness and bad governance and orchestrated to a national agitation that terminated the hegemony of the PDP. Jonathan was naïve. He was offering milk and honey to gods that were bailing for blood. He yielded every power post except the Presidency to the North in a bargain to return in 2015.
Appeasing the North for the sake of 2015 became a fundamental policy of the Jonathan’s administration. Even when the signs were foreboding, he voted to retain Prof. Attahiru Jega as Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). He discharged late General Andrew Azazi as National Security Adviser (NSA) for Col. Sambo Dasuki to assuage accusations that the former’s tough stance on Boko Haram insurgents was a move to decimate Northern Nigeria freedom fighters and bring the region under political conquest. Former Managing Director of Nigerian Breweries PLC, Festus Odimegwu had been profiled and prepared to assume office as the Chairman of the National Population Commission (NPC). That did not happen. For stating the obvious that Kano could not hold a higher number than Lagos in an objective analysis and computation of the demographics, the arrangement was upturned. Every statement of truth that did not sit well with Northern elite interest was interpreted as marginalisation of the region. And so, when Rabiu Kwankwaso, then Governor of Kano State, raised yet another alarm on plans to emasculate the North through the incoming census chief, Jonathan cheaply capitulated. He sacrificed Festus Odimegwu to appease the North.
In the convoluted politics to appear nice before the North, Jonathan had graphically replayed the naivety of pre war time British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who thought appeasing Adolf Hitler would stave off the upheavals of another war in Europe after World War I. Every act of appeasement including the Munich Agreement that allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia only encouraged Hitler to push for the sanctity of the Third Reich and towards the original frontiers of Germany before the Versailles Treaty of June 28, 1919. On September 1, 1939, following the invasion of Poland by the Nazi forces, it became clear to the British appeaser-in-chief that palm oil was not same as blood. Jonathan came to the same realisation when the results of the 2015 presidential election were returned. His appeasement of a blood sucking demon with red oil failed woefully.
The same Jonathan who faithfully attended to the needs of the North with the massive establishment of almajiri schools was considered not good enough for re-election. His wife, Patience, had thought that crying more than the bereaved on the matter of unfortunate street children in the North would tilt the scales. She thought she was on a national service and had openly applauded schemes by her husband to take the children off the street. Little did she know that she had effectively stepped beyond the red cloth at the shrine to attract consequences to her husband. Her emotional identification with the almajiris was considered a taboo by the northern establishment. Rabiu Kwankwaso told Mrs Patience Jonathan that the same street children she was crying over would be used in the impending presidential election to vote out her husband from the seat of power. And it happened as predicted. Every street factor in the North was mobilised to take out Jonathan from Aso Rock Villa. The North alone contributed more than 12 million to the about 15 million votes with which Mohammadu Buhari and the APC won the 2015 presidential election.
Meanwhile, what the North said about Jonathan in 2015 is what it is saying today about Tinubu regarding 2027. The only difference is that while it lied against Jonathan on the charge of marginalisation, it is saying the truth about Tinubu on the same charge. And this is where I think the Jagagban should be applauded for being truthful. He has just served a dish of the bitter truth to the Caliphate. He has come to align the cruel and baseless charges of 2015 with hard facts and the guilty are afraid. When there was no wolf, the North shouted wolves. Now, that there are wolves everywhere, it is legitimate for those that are threatened by their presence to shout wolves! The only issue here is that reasonable people may refuse to be persuaded about the new reality and rally to help the North contain the danger. This is because of persistent false alarms in the past, even when the region was at peace and in control of all the variables.
Tinubu worked with the North in 2015, 2019 and 2023. It doesn’t concern me if he has suddenly decided to marginalise his allies. The Urhobo people, too, are marginalised. They have been in the margins of everything, managing marginalisation since the advent of Nigeria and almost at the point of getting accustomed to marginalisation. And so, let nobody tell me any nonsense about marginalisation. Everybody, except the President’s real men, is a marginal player in Nigeria. What I truly want to hear are ways to push beyond the privileged few marketing marginalisation for personal gains to the forgotten mainstream.
Tinubu can get serious and provide a bouquet of cross-cutting solutions to reach the mainstream and terminate these hypocritical choruses of marginalisation across the land. This should include security guarantees so that farmers in the North can work on their farms without fear of being killed by marauders and others elsewhere can move freely in any part of the country as stipulated in the constitution without fear of being killed by herdsmen or unknown gunmen. Also, instead of a phoney coastal road across swamps that will gulp trillions of naira and take a thousand years to anchor, Tinubu can construct real roads to facilitate movement to all the cardinal directions of North, South, East and West in the country. You cannot be stuck with a coastal road when there are no good connecting land roads in a country of more than 200 million people.
If availability of public electricity is at the touch of the switch and homes and businesses do not run on diesel, anybody still shouting marginalisation in the country shall be made to undergo psychiatric examination. But because the mainstream is not only marginalised but completely excluded from the real as well as the political economy, power oligarchs who get short-changed in their nefarious trade, have devised ways of arousing mainstream sentiments to bargain hard again. The thing to do is for government and governance to, at all times, reach out directly to the mainstream and isolate these oligarchs to dissipate in their island of greed and corruption.
To isolate a set of oligarchs from the Caliphate and accommodate another from Oduduwa does not translate to justice to the people. It is justice among thieves. While we thank PBAT for his democratisation efforts and shifting the oligarchical privileges from North to Lagos, or Southwest at best, it should be mentioned that nothing will be achieved if the noose merely transfers from the neck of the lion to the neck of the tiger. They are both killers. These are the issues that should define the politics of 2027 and the players, be they Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi or whoever.
