|
When General Gowon Came to Dutse
By Adagbo Onoja
Newsdiaryonline Sat Dec 10,2011
Gov Lamido of Jigawa State chatting with General Yakubu
Gowon and Alhaji Muhammadu Sunusi, the Emir of Dutse when the
two golfers visited Govt House, Dutse
The notice of General
Yakubu Gowon, aka Jack, coming to the Government House, Dutse,
the capital of Jigawa State
last Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 was as short as it
could ever be. Some of us were summoned off lunch in Dutse’s
equivalent of Transcorp Hilton for a function which turned out
to be good, old Jack visiting Jigawa’s sanctuary of power. Which
journalist would not want to encounter a man of History like
Jack? Here is someone who, were he to elect to open his mouth
today, could unleash a verbal bomb that is bound to challenge
all existing discourses of
Nigeria, being the most
authoritative embodiment of Nigerianity arising from having
presided over and predominated in the most concrete threat to
the Nigerian state ever – the Nigerian Civil War.
But no one hears him
speak on that. Not that casually. Only the University of Ibadan came closest to achieving that but
not exactly so. There is, however, a way in which the Nigerian
Civil War tends to define Gowon, almost successfully suppressing
every other thing about him, be it his political personality,
his marriage and family life, his military career, his
leadership and tribulations after exit from power, his
intellectual sojourn at the University of Warwick in the United
Kingdom, his Guinea Worm eradication campaign, his Nigeria Pray
movement or his elder statesmanship.
That he was in Dutse
last Tuesday for a golf tournament was news to some of us. But
it was golf that brought the General to town and in the course
of which he called on the Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido that
afternoon. From where I stood as General, sorry, Governor Sule
Lamido entered the room, I could hear General Gowon ask, how are
you doing, guvnor and Lamido saying to him, “Fine, Sir”. Then I
also heard him say he learnt the governor was away in Sokoto and
to which Lamido responded by trying to give the General a run
down, how opponents wanted to run their great party, the PDP,
out of town by manufacturing and marketing poisonous rumours
that President Jonathan was about punching Governor Wammako to
political stupor and so on and so forth and how he was sent to
make it brutally clear that nothing like that was in the offing.
It was at this point the rest of the conversation became
exclusive even though I could hear Lamido sending yabbis in the
direction of the Emir of Dutse on his turn out in Khaki, T-Shirt
and the facing cap as we hurtled out of the room. Mister
Governor was saying that General Gowon, being a soldier, could
always turn out in Khaki but not the emir! This yabbis generated
a powerful laughter in the room. As the unwritten rule in this
matter goes, you don’t laugh where ‘Generals’ are laughing if
you are not a General. General Gowon is a General. The Emir of
Dutse is also a General, being the highest ranking traditional
ruler in the room that day. Lamido, on his part, is not only a
General of the Talakawa army but, as he says, he could not have
been less than a General today if his parents had allowed him
join the army like some of his classmates such as Alwali Kazir
and co. So, that room was filled with Generals and ‘Generals’.
However, as the Emir of
Dutse, Alhaji Muhammadu Sunusi, led General Gowon and Colonel
Zakari Maimalari, (rtd) and two others into the governor’s ante
room, it was not the golf side but the Jack enigma that appealed
most to me. Although Shakespeare warns us against reading a
man’s construction (inner stuff) in his face, I can surmise from
my brief greeting session with him when the Emir of Dutse
introduced me to him and while we all waited for the governor to
enter that Gowon is not a cloak and dagger soldier. One could
say that he is a tempered soul. Everything about him tends to
correspond to that quotation in Professor Isawa Elaigwu’s book
aptly titled “Gowon” viz “…we are quelling a rebellion, not an
external enemy….The responsibility for healing the nation’s
wounds in the future lies with us, not any foreigner. So, let us
not forget why we have gone to war – to keep
Nigeria
one”, (p. 113).
But from the point of
view of the Sociology of power, only a full length book, the
type the late Dr Ibrahim Tahir wanted to do on General Obasanjo,
can fully deconstruct General Gowon. This is because
deconstructing Gowon is deconstructing
Nigeria
and, by implication, Africa.
General Obasanjo has, characteristically, said the truth and the
whole truth behind the Nigerian Civil War- that is that it was
caused by struggle for control of oil, presumably among
sub-nationalist interests, the Nigerian state and foreign energy
security interests. Don’t forget Nixon’s declaration at some
point that the United States
would “intervene militarily to ensure the continuation of oil to
western countries” in a clear response to the fear that “Nigeria
might use its oil as a political tool in its relationship with
the United States”.
From this perspective, a study of Gowon becomes a study of the
nation building instincts of the Nigerian elite in the immediate
post colonial period.
The interim conclusion
from analysis of fragmentary pieces is that Gowon had,
basically, one agenda which he managed in a way that satisfied
the leading elite groups but whose solidarity presaged that
success. In other words, we are talking of though a fledging
elite but one which understood the meaning of the concept of the
nation state and what it means to be faced with losing it, no
matter the internal disagreements there were between their
various fractions. Call it bourgeois nationalism if you like but
it was there in the idea of the Soviet alternative to
duplicitous western ‘allies’, for example, in the prosecution of
the Civil War. It was a major shift in Nigerian foreign policy,
virtually unthinkable before then. It demonstrated an elite
determined to bend the international system to its own will,
something which frightened all external interests, especially
the way Murtala aggravated their fears with his ‘Africa Has Come
of Age’ speech.
Before
the rise of Murtala, the Second National Development Plan was
the other major signal, particularly where its masterminds were
insisting on control of “the essential and growth sensitive
sectors of the country in the fields of commerce, industry, fuel
and energy, construction, transport finance and education”
because a government could not effectively plan what it does not
control. Arguing that the typical African public sector is an
inferior, junior partner in a game dictated by the global
strategy of modern international combines, the technocrats
advocated “for a nationally integrated and diversified economy,
the reduction of Nigeria’s dependence on imperialism to be
pursued through indigenisation, an increasing role for the state
in the regulation and control of the economy and an anti
neo-colonial foreign policy”
Outside interests certainly read these as dangerous flashes of
nationalism. It was such that by the
time Murtala was on the upswing, he was bound to clash with
whoever was President of the
USA. And that was what happened
with Gerald Ford over Angola
or Southern Africa in short. It
is not surprising that pro-communism featured in Murtala’s
‘sins’ in the subsequent coup because the Nigerian military
leaders were not seen as the typical conveyor belt African
soldiers in terms of their patriotism. It was bound to be reined
in.
That was the agenda of
the Structural Adjustment Programme, (SAP) strategy which
reversed everything in the 2nd National Development
Plan referred to earlier, abolishing the concept of national
development plan altogether. By the time SAP was operationalized,
it was not only the Naira that found its value by floating in
the foreign exchange market, every other reality did so, from
ethnicity to university admission to election to violence to
sex, what with the nudism or self-hawking sex everywhere in the
country now. It is an unprecedented commodification and
commercialization of values for survival.
With the subsequent
disappearance of the middle class which normally acts as the
shock absorber of the society, it was only a matter of time
before the instability Henry Kissinger said undermining the
middle class would translate to in Africa became a reality in
the poverty and hardship inspired search for meaning of life
which, in turn, weakened civil society and exacerbated conflicts
of ethno-religious, communal and even intra-communal sparks.
That is how SAP has been
such a master stroke in undermining nationalism in
Nigeria by external interests keen on
shedding off the rest of Nigerians whom they see as a burden on
oil in
Nigeria. It is the uniquely
Nigerian experience of what Peace magazine once called the
worldwide connection between oil wealth and the impossibility of
democracy in countries like
Nigeria and Indonesia or even Iran.
So, looking at
Nigeria
through Gowon, the main thing one finds is the gradual but
systematic decline of nationalism. Unlike during Gowon when the
elite had a collective sense of mission, the elite today are
dazed, unable to select and unite behind one of theirs to save
the nation. And so, while the ordinary Nigerians are
nationalists to the extent that they produce for the national
not local markets - as we can see from the garri, palm oil or
vegetable traders from the East and Mid-West going over to
Maiduguri and so on or the cattle rearers moving from the far
North to Port Harcourt, Ibadan and Lagos, the yam traders from
Abakiliki finding markets in Lagos and the far North - the elite
and their foreign patrons are consumed in debating fragmentation
and localisms viz true federalism, restructuring, fiscal
federalism, resource control, etc. The contradiction between
this elite agenda of division and separatism and the popular
agenda of oneness is what is at play today. Authorities like
Sheikh Ahmed Lemu think it will lead to a revolution. Nothing
can be farther from that. How can there be a revolution in a
country which has not a single revolutionary organisation or
even a patriotic nationwide front that can give political
direction to popular frustrations? We can only have anarchy,
resulting much less from ethno-regional and religious
differences as much from the probability that, having broken the
USSR, Nigeria might be the next out of the few other remaining
behemoth states such as India and Indonesia.
Th
This is the document referred to in the Witness
Statement on Oath of Clifford O. Kokogho as
“Exhibit
COK.2”
|
