|
Katsina Aristocracy, Southern Governors and Nigeria-By
Adagbo Onoja Newsdiaryonline
Sat Feb 19,2011
The
North-West segment of the process of internal healing in the
People’s Democratic Party, (PDP) and, by implication, the
country was bound to be of national significance. But beyond the
mystique of the North-West as the main provider of Nigerian
leaders if we take Ahmadu Bello, Murtala Mohammed, Shehu Shagari,
Muhammadu Buhari, Sani Abacha and the Umaru Yar’Adua sampler, no
one anticipated that the significance would lie with the Katsina
aristocracy. It turned out an unpardonable underestimation of
the aristocracy that Al-Maghili, the Arabic Philosopher cum
Historian and contemporary of Nicolo Machiavelli had in mind
when he wrote his treatise on rulership with the same title as
Machiavelli’s but not in the same cynical sense as Machiavelli’s
The Prince. In the end, it was the Emir of Katsina,
Alhaji Kabir Usman’s dosage of home truths administered directly
on the fourteen governors who converged on Katsina from the
South-East, South-South and the North-West on February 13th,
2010 that was most substantive.
Notwithstanding the unobtrusive manner in which the governors
arrived Katsina, the impact of their visit, based on what the
Emir of Katsina told them, will reverberate from Kaduna to
Abuja, extending to Lagos, Enugu and Jos and then to the White
House and the British House of Lords, these cities and locations
being the operational headquarters of the shareholders of the
Nigerian project at the moment. This is because of the way the
emir called history to the help of his royal advisory on
Nigeria, addressed to fourteen visiting governors viz Ibrahim
Shema of Katsina State, Peter Obi of Anambra, Rotimi Amaechi of
Rivers, Liyel Imoke of Cross Rivers, Godswill Akpabio of Akwa
Ibom, Ikedi Ohakim of Imo, Martins Elechi of Ebonyi, Theodore
Orji of Abia,`Sullivan Chime of Enugu, Patrick Yakowa of Kaduna,
Usman Dakingari of Kebbi, Mahmud Aliyu Shinkafi of Zamfara,
Magatakarda Wammako of Sokoto and Sule Lamido of Jigawa.
Both
governors Shema, the host and Peter Obi, the Deputy Chairman of
the Nigerian Governors Forum said to the emir that the governors
saw it as a duty to move Nigeria forward. The governors from
the South-South have been moving round, discussing Nigerian
brotherhood especially as the country moves towards the general
election in April. They couldn’t have come to Katsina in that
context without foregrounding their agenda with royal blessing.
Responding, the royal father said a kind of smoke is approaching
Nigeria. Said he, “one hears
that this person has been killed here and there. There is
fighting here and there. However strong a country is, it cannot
develop without peace and security. Peaceful co-existence is
very paramount. If people live in fear, are unsafe in their
houses and on the road, then how can we get out of this
situation?” he queried no one in particular.
Nigeria,
he said, is loved by God because, in Rwanda, there
are only two basic cultural identities and they cannot stay
together peacefully. This was his own reference to the Rwandan
Genocide in 1994 which he described as an unhappy situation the
world over. “That is why our colonizers are surprised and are
wondering how Nigeria still exists as a sovereign
country with over 250 diverse groups who have been able to
co-exist. We must maintain this nation”.
Contemplating this, he expressed happiness with the decision of
the governors to cement inter-group relations. “Right inside me,
I am very happy with this visit. Your visit is needed and
timely. We are hundred per cent behind you. We will pray for
you. I assure you of our prayers to ensure that this country
stays in peace and as one country because it is only when the
country is at peace that governors and emirs can be at peace.
So, praying for the success of your meeting is a duty for us”,
he assured.
But
beyond the assurance of praying for the success of the efforts
of the governors, the emir problematised the Nigerian crisis in
terms of the question of how to quench the smoke before it turns
into fire. And he placed the job of quenching the smoke on the
shoulders of the political leaders. But he also identified how
they can go about this. First is by being grateful to God for
giving them the privilege to be leaders. But, for His Majesty,
gratitude to God for that privilege is not by political leaders
raising their hands in prayers to God but by putting the masses
first, by serving the Talakawa. “Even by the time we were in our
mother’s wombs, God already destined each one of you and I to be
what we are today. To serve him is to serve the people. We
should look at what is worrying the masses so that you will
resolve at your level how to serve the masses. That is how to
thank God”.
This was
a radical view of praying when connected with the emir’s belief
that the education and wealth and power the political elite have
as governors, ministers or legislators is not for them to go and
enjoy but to serve the masses, to stand firm for them.
He was actually saying
that the disconnection between governance and popular welfare is
the missing link, the crux of the crisis.
But the
shocker was still to come. The audience was to learn from the
emir the revealing bit about the historicity of the national
question in
Nigeria
and the response of some sections of the Northern faction of the
Nigerian ruling class to that. His story could also be called
the Katsina contribution to managing the national question based
on the resistance of the emirate to British colonial mischief of
playing one group against the other in the 19th and
20th centuries in all the places such as Cyprus,
India and Kashmir, etc where the British have also been.
It is the
story of how his forefathers, which must be a reference to
Muhammadu Dikko, the first post-colonial emir of Katsina,
resisted British strategy of Sabon Gari for non-Muslim migrants
into Katsina and Tudun Wada for Muslim migrants into Katsina.
And that is why there is none of the typical
Sabon
Gari Township
in Katsina till tomorrow. Katsina, unlike other major
predominantly Muslim townships in the North is spared this
colonial feature. This story illustrates two things.
The first
is how it reconfirms British origin of ethnicity in
Nigeria
through the policy of divide and rule. The second is how it
speaks of Katsina which, as the intellectual hub of the
pre-colonial North, could afford such independent mindedness on
a key issue as cultural integration as early as the 1900s.
Katsina
resistance to British aparthood accords with the contradictory
nature of an evil project like colonialism since it was also the
same British who selected the Katsina environ to host the Katsina Teachers College,
the incubation centre of the Northern arm of the potential
Nigerian ruling class. After Katsina College came Barewa
College and then the Middle Schools in
Katsina Ala,
Keffi, Bida, Ilorin and Maiduguri, established as finishing schools
where students from various segments of the North were processed
or groomed, academically and politically.
Subsequently, the ruling class that emerged therefrom was, in
the words of Professor John Paden, a cohort, a distinctly
regional faction of the Nigerian ruling class, its distinction
lying in a psychological cum cultural attachment to something,
whatever it was they were told in these schools. This shows when
they fought as can be seen from the relationship between Aminu
Kano and the Sardauna or the Sardauna and Joseph Tarka. In other
words, they fought their differences as brothers, not as
external enemies.
This
cohort began to disintegrate with the military intervention in
politics and their own politics of self-reproduction,
characterised by the ideology of hierarchy and command in which
the culture of debate and negotiated space were alien. With much
of the voices suppressed and so many interests loosing out in
that climate of arbitrariness, hate ideologies began to surface.
One such hate ideology was the Hausa-Fulani category and the
divisiveness this brought about in the multiplicity of ambition
for counter hegemonic politics within the North, the climax of
which is Jos of today, if we must give an example.
But it is
a truth that must be told that finding answer to social crisis
through micro-nationalism in the North or anywhere else, will
remain an invitation to permanent violence because no ethnic
group in the North now has the cultural capacity to enthrone and
sustain any hegemony beyond its own local area. So, the rising
micro-nationalism in the North today will not solve any problems
if one follows the example of
Georgia
in the defunct
USSR
or any other place for that matter. At the national level, the
lesson of Obasanjo politics in Yoruba land should also be
instructive in this regard. Obasanjo has demonstrated to the
Yorubas that Nigeria is a reality and anyone
group that wants to rule must learn to move out of
self-imprisonment in micro-nationalism to court other groups and
players in the Nigerian family instead of finding comfort in
emotionally intoxicating ‘We-Them’ Inkhata style separatist
politics.
So, the
current resort to micro-nationalism as a critique of extinct
hegemony can only be a part of both foreign and domestic agenda
of breaking the North. But breaking the North is breaking Nigeria when we contemplate, for instance, the
impossibility of having the flow of population into
North/Central Nigeria today towards the East or towards any
other part of Nigeria. The example of Katsina in
the management of integration should, therefore, be worth
pondering upon even though it does not quite fully address the
distinction between citizenship and indigene ship around which
contemporary conflicts in the North have been framed.
At a time
of inter and intra regional, ethnic, cultural and religious
smoke and hatred as we are passing through in Nigeria today, we need a layer of power with
symbolic import to come out and insist on Nigeria. As a layer of power, the
governors are well positioned to operationalize what the Katsina
emir had said about an approaching smoke and the urgency of
quenching it with particular reference to curtailing violent
politics and violent conflict about which the Nigerian state is
too overwhelmed and too disorganized to comprehend, much less
resolve them. Add to those the issue of the welfare of the
masses.
Interestingly, one could observe incredible outward rapport
among the governors from my own distance. Apart from Sule
Lamido’s own expansive interactive repertoire with which I am
familiar, I took particular note of Kaduna Governor, Patrick
Yakowa, translating for his Enugu State
counterpart what the emir was saying in Hausa before the Wazirin
Katsina, Dr. Sani Lugga, translated the emir’s intervention for
those who do not understand Hausa. Only time will tell how far,
how fast and how skillfully the governors can go.
Onoja is Media
Adviser to Jigawa State Governor
|
