After 47 years, Major Chukwuma Nzeo-gwu
Kaduna, stripped of rank, has resurrected
as an academic major-domo. Professor Ben
Nwabueze, a former minister of education, a
Senior Advocate of Nigeria and a leader of
The Patriots, has written a paper on the
problem posed to him and others by the
Northern Region. The paper is typical of
what the Northerner has to put up with in
national discourse—the gullibility of a self-
proclaimed vanguard and the extent of
venom long har-boured for, and now
released and ready to be injected into, the
brave new region.
It comes with its simple but gravely warped
logic and represents a pitiful latter-day
Southern discomfiture and outcry at
Northern political versatility even at its nadir.
Its unstated final solution is the rejection of
everything. It began with the Amalgamation,
which the Sardauna, for very different
reasons, had called ‘the mistake of 1914.’
Professor Nwabueze believes the
amalgama-tion was done to divide the
country! ‘In other words, the effect of the
1914 Amalgamation, indeed its purpose, is
to dichotomise the coun-try from its
inception; to keep its northern and southern
segments apart by an imaginary, artificially
created boundary line, and conse-quently to
disunite them in interest, attitude, outlook
and vision. That defines the magnitude, the
enormity, of the problem bequeathed to us
by Lugard and his 1914 Amalgamation.’
But this is clearly illogical. First, how do you
draw ‘an imaginary, artificially created
boundary line’ between regions that
according to the thrust of his own logic are
still not one—no nation, no national front! It
is not sensible to assume that an
amalgamation is the best or right or even
sensible way of keeping two parts that are
already apart. And if they have to be
amalgamated to bring them together, then
there is no question of an “artificially created
boundary line” to keep them apart, because
they were not together before. It is the
bringing together that is artificial
Second, if the British, for their own
purposes, were more interested in keeping
the two separate they would have go on to
administer them as two, or even three,
separate countries as indeed they had done
before the amalgamation, and grant them
different independence dates, so that they
would have ended up only as neighbouring
countries, not just regions within a single
country.
According to him, the North-South divide,
which, by the way, is not the same as the
Northern unity with which Professor
Nwabueze has drawn false equivalence and
which he has been bashing, is the idea that
has become an obstacle to the creation of a
nation and a national front. So, why didn’t
we see the rudiments of a nation and a front
taking shape at the East-West divide
separating their patriotic enclaves of the
country?
Actually, as we all know, this East-West
divide which, presumably, doesn’t have any
of the North-South hang-ups and which will
therefore help, and not hinder, the
achievement of national unity and the
creation of the national front, has not been
able to date to to achieve even Southern
unity or the creation of a Southern front, as
Nwabueze himself has lamented, the two
objec-tives of those who spearheaded the
creation of the Southern Nigeria People’s
Assembly last year, as liberally quoted by
the professor in his essay. The idea of the
nation and national unity are rooted in
history.
This Northern togetherness is the result of
history—even if at times it is bitter history—
and the adroit politics of Sir Ahmadu Bello
and his lieutenants. Detractors of the North
have, not infrequently, forgotten that the
peoples of the North have a history and a
pre-colonial culture that have gone beyond
village living and its people did not overnight
get transformed from hunting-gathering to
democratic republicanism.
Professor Ben Nwabueze, whom Moham-
med Haruna last week said ‘is arguably
Nige-ria’s best constitutional academic
lawyer,’ is unfortunately remembered in
some places as the most academically-
decorated person to occupy the office of the
minister of education in Nigeria, but, by the
time he left, the least successful minister of
all those who sat on that seat. And we can
now see why.
In the paper, apparently armed with
unassailable facts and, to him, impeccable
authority, he gave the nation the benefit of
his intervention on the Boko Haram
phenomenon. And it is lecture time.
‘A far more grave threat to the unity of the
country than the demand for power shift to
the North, is the current Boko Haram
insurgency which, as is generally believed,
is sponsored by some political, traditional
and religious leaders from the North in
pursuance of an agenda aimed at promoting
northern domination and the supremacy of
the Moslem religion in the affairs of Nigeria,’
he said.
And his authority for such a weighty pro-
nouncement was because a ‘stark
revelation of this was given in an interview
with the Sunday Vanguard newspaper by
Chief Tobias Michael Idika, President of
Kano State Chapter of Ohanaeze Ndigbo
who is also President-General of the leaders
of the ethnic communities resident in Kano...
[and who blamed] northern politicians as
well as the northern traditional and religious
leaders for the Boko Haram crisis’. This is
supposed to be an informed analysis by a
professor of constitutional law.
And from such a pedestrian treatment of
Boko Haram even for a non-professor, he
jumped straight into the issue of the control
of the nation’s security apparatus under
General Sani Abacha, hoping, no doubt, to
conflate the two in readers’ mind and prove
an Islamic agenda.
He quoted extensively from His Holiness
Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah’s Witness to
Justice to buttress his argument: “The
General had, in furtherance of that design,
appointed Major Hamza Al-Mustapha as the
Chief Security Officer to the Head of State;
Alhaji Ismaila Gwarzo, as the National
Security Adviser; Brigadier Gen. Sabo as
the Director of Military Intelligence; AVM Idi
Musa as Chief of Defence Intelligence;
Alhaji Ibrahim Coomassie as the Inspector-
General of Police; and Alhaji Zakari Biu as
the head of the newly created Counter
Terrorism Agency, which was assigned “the
responsibility of keeping watch over
enemies within who might be collaborating
with enemies without to destabilize the
nation.”
While clearly, this cast has, by whatever
measure, flouted the nation’s federal
character and even the Northern character,
but it cannot be used to prove the
Islamisation thesis, which is actually only a
figment of the imagination of some people
who think, because they read newspapers,
they are also good analysts. From their
names, you will assume they are all
Muslims; but AVM Idi Musa, the chief of
defence intelligence for General Abacha
and the lynchpin of his security network is a
Christian.
And in any case if, under Abacha, Nor-
therners had dominated the leadership of
the nation’s security service, did they, by
any chance, give the nation an admission
list into the nation’s security training
institutions like the one we saw recently,
which failed to respect any kind of
character?
And the professor seemed to be interested
in installing negative quota system in
regional political and social development.
He doesn’t just want to empower the South,
he wishes to dispossess the North. If the
North has ACF and the South has no similar
forum, ACF becomes an instrument of
national disunity that has to be
countervailed.
‘Before July 2012, the South as a single
entity had no organisations corresponding
to those existing in the North – no one pan-
southern organisation to countervail those in
the North,’ the professor said...‘The
formation of the Southern Nigeria Peoples
Assembly (SNPA) in July 2012 is thus a
significant development.’ It is therefore quite
clear that what he called a significant
development is not at all about bring
national unity or the national closer to a
front: it is, in his own words, ‘to
countervail...the North.’
Nwabueze is not happy that non-Hausa
people in the North speak the Hausa
language, which he took pains to remind
them is not indigenous to them—and, by
now, it is almost turning and settling into full-
fledged ethno phobia. Of course the Hausa
language is not indigenous to many
Northern tribes, but it is the most-widely
spoken language in the country today,
because of the accommodation and
assimilative nature of the Hausas and the
simplicity and user-friendliness of their
tongue. The professor is apparently
unhappy about this and about the fact that
though tribe and tongue have differed in the
North and in spite of the greatly trying times
the region is going through, people in the
North still stand in tortured brotherhood.
If the professor and others like him are really
interested in forging national unity, as they
always say, the fact of Northern unity should
have been a welcome development. All they
needed do was to replicate it in the South
and lo! you are all there. But, no, they have
to break up the North in order to unite
Nigeria, and what this means is beyond
administrative state creation; what they want
is to break all the ties that bind—cultural,
social, sociological, linguistic and religious.
And you cannot but stand in respectful awe
of their vacuousness.
Nwabueze is apparently also unhappy that
‘the idea of one “Northern Nigeria” has
persisted as an entrenched fact of life, even
after it (i.e. Northern Nigeria) has ceased to
be a governmental entity, with a firm hold on
the thinking and vocabulary of the ruling
elite and political class in that part of the
country, conditioning their attitudes and
views in the matter of the management of
the social, political and even economic
relations between the two segments of the
country.’
But if the fiat with which the regions were
created is not acceptable to Nwabueze,
because it was one act of gerrymandering
by British colonialism, he should have
proceeded to the logical end of that
argument—that Nigeria itself is an act of
gerrymandering by British colonialism,
which should now, therefore, be dismantled.
QED