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Jigawa @ 20: A Clash of
Narrativity
By Adagbo Onoja
Newsdiaryonline Tue Aug 30,2011
As almost everyone
knows, on August 27th, 1991, the Federal Military
Government of Nigeria created seven new states. Jigawa is one of
those states, meaning that on August 27th, 2011, it
clocked 20 years of age. The 20th anniversary was too
auspicious to let go without looking back at History. And so,
the top elite gathered to do just that on Saturday, August 27th,
2011 but in a very reflective manner by asking an intellectual
to lead the discussion.
Of course,
intellectualizing Jigawa at 20 automatically meant interrogating
the ideology of state creationism and whether it is ever worth
it in Nigeria.
This, of course, implied interrogating the associated issues of
marginalization, cultural autonomy/‘self-determination’,
federalism, revenue allocation formula, balanced development,
etc.
It was bound to be
a huge debate especially if the lead discussant is someone like
Bayero
University, Kano Professor
of Law, Mohammed Tabiu who is not a stranger to stubbornness if
you remember how he stuck to his guns at the Human Rights
Commission years back. And so, he came to the lecture raising
questions instead of the cheap option of having the answers. In
the age of constructionism, there are only questions, there are
no answers. It is those who claim to have answers who find
themselves asking the question: what went wrong OR where did I
go wrong? By raising questions, Tabiu was, in a way, accepting
the argumentation that “there is no fact in history which is not
a judgment, no event which is not an inference”.
And this was
illustrated by the debate around the simple question of whether
Jigawa
State was a product of
conscious agitation or not. This threw up two camps, each sure
it was correct. On the one hand were the guest speaker, Governor
Sule Lamido and Umaru Zamdam, the first SSG of the state. On the
other hand was Dr. Junaid Mohammed, the Kano based, Russian
trained medical doctor turned politician.
As far as Junaid is
concerned, neither the creation of
Kano nor Jigawa
was a product of a conscious agitation. In fact, for him,
Kano
was created in spite of
Kano
people. This is in the sense that the Aminu Kano led agitation
for a Kano
State, was, for him, more for
flamboyance than real agitation. Accepting though that Kano had
issues to settle with the then Northern region, Junaid said the
old Kano State was created in 1967 because states were being
created for those who had agitated for it in the Middle Belt and
in the South and there had to be new states in the upper North
too.
His opponents
challenged him immediately. Alhaji Umaru Zamdam, the Chairman of
the occasion and one of those who fought for Jigawa to be
created said that they felt that
Kano
was too huge to remain a state and should be divided into three.
Governor Lamido backed him, saying they started their agitation
for Jigawa State
in 1980. “We felt Kano
was too huge and had become a one city state. So, we were
fighting for self-actualization”.
Since the governor
was the last to speak, Dr. Junaid had no opportunity to fire
back. But it was not necessary either. The sharp exchanges only
demonstrated the problems of History writing, what made people
like Carr to say that the historian the approaches ‘the facts’
like fish on a fish monger’s slab, “collects them, takes them
home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to
him”.
There is no way
those who were directly involved in the agitation for the state
and those who were only remotely associated with it will tell
the same story. But what emerged from all the account is that a
state emerged on August 27th, 1991 which was named
Jigawa but whose make-up was, in the words of Lamido, somehow
amoebic. It was shapeless in so far as the two dominant
components of the emergent state felt differently about it.
The first dominant
component comprises the seven local governments of Wudil,
Gaya, Birnin Kudu, Jahun, Sumaila, Dutse
and Kiyawa LGAs. These were the original agitators for a
Jigawa State but when it was created, Wudil, Gaya and Sumaila found themselves left behind in the old Kano while the four others found themselves in Jigawa
State
with Hadejia, Kazaure and Gumel emirates, each of which had
different demands as far as state creation was concerned. It was
the reaction to this that explains the protests that greeted the
new baby within the first four days of its creation while the
reality was still being imagined.
But if we follow
scholars like Anderson, all identities are constructed. That
is why he calls an entity like a nation an
imagined community. A nation is just a discursive consciousness
just as a state or a local government and so on. It is a
controversial argument but an argument worth our attention given
the way Jigawa pessimism has given way to the current Jigawa
optimism or Jigawa essentialism.
Lamido defines Jigawa optimism thus, “Jigawa is gradually
becoming
Nigeria’s reference point.
There is no better testimony for this than our human resource
exports”. And he would go on to demonstrate this by reference to
the woman and young man of Jigawa State origin who are Education
Minister and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in Nigeria
respectively today, saying that by the testimony of the Minister
of State, Dr. Nurudeen Mohammed before the Nigerian Senate
showed that the agenda of producing new human specie from Jigawa
is achievable.
But Jigawa optimism
is not the entire discourse. Tabiu’s questions were still
relevant. That is, viewed against the justifications for
agitation for a state in Nigeria – cultural autonomy,
marginalization, rapid development, share of national
commonwealth, has Jigawa been worth it? In other words, 20 years
after, how has it fared? Has it enjoyed better autonomy? Has the
state had leaders who have been more concerned about the well
being of the people? Has having own state led to better
governance, more resources, faster development, better
infrastructure, better standard of living? Above all, who is
going to answer these questions and answer them correctly?
These questions
meant a transformation of the whole event from its
Jigawa-centricism to a discourse of state creationism in Nigeria, an
early warning to those fighting for their own state now. It is
even more instructive that Professor Tabiu courageously
disqualified all those who gathered in the ultra modern venue of
the anniversary from answering the questions, saying that they
are the same people who have held the reins of power and their
answers might be obvious. It would be a case of one sitting in
Judgment in his or her own case.
Then he attempted
answering them. Refraining from a categorical answer, he said it
is possible that not as much progress has been made but some
progress has certainly been recorded. “Look at Dutse, the state
capital; look at this hall; look at the housing estates and what
my visiting European friend said the day I took him to one of
the estates; look at what this government did at the College of
Advanced Legal and Islamic Studies. What we asked them to do in
5 years, they have done it in 1 year. When the Rector called me
as Chairman of the visitation panel to say they have got this,
got that, I couldn’t believe it”.
Having proved his
thesis, he went on to identify the challenges. He identified
four viz unity and oneness; culture of planning and continuity;
justice and accountability and social empowerment. Of these, I
will take only the last as the most substantive issue.
He had a well laid
out argument. Jigawa State
has a 90% level of poverty, he said. This means 90% of the
population live below poverty line, especially in the area of
health. The state government is so conscious of this it
organized a Talakawa Summit as a qualitative methodology of
capturing the cutting edge of the phenomenon of poverty with a
view to developing the most appropriate policy responses.
Thereafter, there have been a number of interventions such as
skills acquisition centres, social welfare for the physically
challenged and other such layers of the under privileged, free
education for girls.
Again, he came to
the courageous conclusion that these interventions have not been
on the scale that could move people out of poverty. He is right
but this is not just true of Jigawa but all of Nigeria what
with the incredible infatuation of the policy mill with old
answers instead of raising new questions about policies, models
and approaches.
Tabiu’s magnum opus
was his message of making agriculture the centre piece of
empowerment. It is too obvious that it needs no elaboration
except the problematic example he gave in terms of the model to
follow. The Chinese, he said, have done well for themselves by
investing in Agriculture. That is a problematic model for
anywhere in Africa, not to talk of any state in
Nigeria.
China
is ruled by ideologically coherent elite, guided by a rooted
political party with strong women, youth and other wings, with a
thinking arm, with well developed cadres, all of which enables
the party to push its policy options through the entire society
with success guaranteed. What has our great party, the PDP or
even the next major party, the ACN, got in those terms? Almost
nothing! Great, popular policies here by say a state government
can be messed up by paying someone to rubbish it in the
newspapers. Sule Lamido was strong enough to push the Talakawa
Summit through in the same Jigawa State
but after that, what happened?
The second
criticism of Tabiu’s model was the point by Dr Junaid Mohammed
again that no state outside the oil bearing states in Nigeria
today can sustain any transformative intervention/investment in
Agriculture within the framework of the current revenue formula.
Otherwise, he accepts Tabiu’s strategy of making Agriculture the
centre piece of anti-poverty politics.
Lastly, this was a
point nobody made at the anniversary but which I will now take
the authorial advantage to make. A UN agency has said that
Jigawa’s PCI has over shot that of Kano
and Kaduna, two of the most
strategic states in Northern Nigeria. Only a UN agency can say this since Nigeria does not
have the capability to measure PCI at the state level yet. Since
nobody has challenged this, we take it as the correct state of
things for today.
The question is,
why do people still say that Jigawa is still the poorest state
of the federation? Poorer than Osun, Enugu, Benue and some of
these other lumpen states across the country? Is it still on the
basis of school enrollment, television sets, savings profile,
etc which the CBN used to arrive at that misleading finding? In
what way is a state where the poorest of the poor peasant family
can boast of at least 5 cows, many goats and chicken, (meaning
milk and protein) be the poorest? Has anybody talked to the CBN,
the Federal Office of Statistics or whatever it is called now,
five or so years after the CBN made its declaration on Jigawa?
Without denying Governor Sule Lamido the propaganda value of the
poverty rating of Jigawa, it is time to challenge the analogy
that Jigawa is the poorest state. Happy 20th
anniversary to Jigawa!
Onoja, of Govt House,
Dutse is reachable via adagboonoja@gmail.com
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