IS THE NORTH A LIP? Category: Friday column Published on Friday, 19 July 2013 06:00 Written by Adamu Adamu In His infinite wisdom and mercy, God gave us two ears and one tongue so that, it is said, we should listen twice as long as we speak. As long as the law in this dictum is obeyed, welfare of Northern society was assured; but people departed from justice-and they opened their mouths wide. In the past, even recent past, through pain and pleasure, the North kept a stiff upper lip of goal-directed taciturnity; now it only boasts what someone calls a garrulous volubility. And as Pascal once said, “All men’s [and women’s] miseries derive from [their] not being able to sit in a quiet room alone” and be silent; and that greatest misery, as Bahaushe had time and again found out, was to allow the tongue that is in this mouth to slit the throat that is beneath it. Shi wannan baki da kake gani, shi kan yanka wuya. As a general rule, silence is always golden, but of course not when it is resorted to in the face of the commission of injustice or faced with preventable societal deterioration, in which cases silence automatically changes colour-from golden it becomes yellow, tail-between-legs-yellow. Even at the individual level, only in silence can one hear one’s soul; and only then can society itself shut out everything and listen to itself and develop that kind of trust that leads to confidence and balance. And today, there is injustice and there is social breakdown but of the type that cannot be put right by mere noise. The Northern citadel has been under sustained attack by Southern politicians, from Chief Obafemi Awolowo to Chief Bola Ige, and Northern politicians, from Chief Solomon Lar to Professor Jerry Gana-an attack that has chipped away its countenance to beyond recognition; and yet a multitude is making so much noise in celebration of its beauty and authenticity. But at a press conference on Wednesday, Professor Ango Abdullahi stated the Northern position, and in the process may have flouted the law of silence. Of course Professor Abdullahi is one of the best university administrators, and one of the truly educated and cultured -and most useful-public intellectuals that the North has produced; and one of its principled and most consistent politicians. And by his side as he said those things sat Alhaji Sani Zangon Daura, an elder who said it like it was, and will certainly say it like it is. I quote the professor at great length below, hoping that this will be the last time something like this will need to have to be stated in public. While everything he said there is true, it is not every truth that must be uttered. Among many other things, the professor said: We are now saying that since there is no considerations of morality and so on, the North is going to insist that the presidency comes to the region, whether on the basis of rotation or on the basis of voting power; and we have the voting power to make sure that power comes back to the North. It is not correct to say that North is not as assertive as people think on 2015 presidency. You know, here in the North, we have certain traditions that are sometimes misread as weakness. The fact that we don’t come out shouting in abusive language and so on, does not mean that we don’t have deep-rooted concern for ourselves. This is not true. “All of us here are members of the ACF, and if you look at other parts of the country that are making noise, they are small enclaves, perhaps, they may not be bigger than Kaduna State. Looking at the history of diversity and our style of governance, make us to behave slightly differently from the others. “But I want to make it absolutely clear to you that ACF and all these other groups that have emerged in the recent past, we are all talking about the same thing. “We are committed to northern interest; there is no question about it. If you haven’t heard the succession plan clearly loud enough, [hear it now] that the North is determined and it insists and it will be insisted and affirmed that the leadership of the country will rotate to North in 2015. I am making that very clear to you on behalf of all of us, ACF in front because they have been the oldest group, the Middle Belt group had been very active and strong and all of us are likely to have this very firm common agenda.” “Accepted that every part of this country should feel part of the leadership, and this is the basis of acceptance of rotation of power between the North and the South which was what happened in the constitution conference I attended, many of us attended. This is the basis of the rotation between the North and the South… The agreement was that the President should do four years and rotate it to another zone for another four years. But when it was time to rotate, the then President Obasanjo begged the North to allow him do eight years before the power could shift to the North. All of us were present, we all agreed with him. He was the first person to sign the agreement, not knowing that he had third term agenda in mind. Jonathan who was then the deputy governor, representing the Governor of Bayelsa State, was in that meeting and he signed as number 37. You can find [it in] the document.” Clearly, the North is in disarray and it is unlikely to go anywhere near the Promised Land if it continues to talk more than it acts. And this total, systemic societal rot occasioned by a ‘me-only-ism’ that has led to all this cacophony of sometimes even incoherent noises shouted on behalf of the region is probably beyond ordinary everyday remedy to mend: it has eaten so deep and has now reached desperate proportions for which only desperate remedies will be efficacious. Only a real revolution in the thinking and psyche of the people in the North can change matters. Perhaps it was in order to ignite this revolution that General TY Danjuma,Jarmai Zazzau, offered a reminder of that great disappearing value. This is the time for elders to be circumspect and temperate in their utterances; it is not in our character as northerners to talk too much. We need to think more, pray more, plan more, work harder, relate better, and talk less,” he said. “Battles are better fought and won through wisdom and strategy [more] than through inflammable pronouncements and political tantrums.” Instead of these nauseating tantrums, the North should today concentrate on ensuring justice and the integration of its peoples until they accept that they have one destiny; develop an elite consensus about the parameters of the political system and about the rules and codes of political conduct so that winners and losers are able to view and accept politics as a positive-sum game. To make this meaningful, the elite should deal a crushing blow to the suffocating centralisation of power that has made governors demigods and uncreative despots. These elite should allow democracy and its pluralism to ensure popular participation and inclusiveness; and entrench a regime of the rule of law that will ensure an acceptable level of the law and order situation that alone can solve the security challenges that have defied this government. In the end the elite consensus should draw up a comprehensive development blueprint for the transformation of the region that the new regional consensus should accept, endorse and force on governors to have to implement. However, power must come to it-at the Federal and state levels-in order for it to be able to do and coordinate all this; but power will only come to it if it gets its act together and plan well for its aftermath. While at it, the North must find a way of dealing with those who abuse, misuse and manipulate religion for political gain and for unconscionably setting our people against each other. And if there is indeed a consensus of the elite, it should prove possible to deal with the issue of election rigging; though this should have been taken care of if and when they accept participation leads to a positive-sum-game in which everyone in the end benefits. The North is the cement that holds Nigeria together; and the current of negative flux within the polity is just a reflection of the unravelling in the mortar that is the North. The country has been an ungrateful beneficiary of its sacrifices though it has also been victim of the ineptness and failures of the leaders provided by the region. But the North must be saved even from itself, because that is the only way to save Nigeria even if the Southern elite, its greatest beneficiaries, are not aware of this. The issue therefore, then as now, is not whether, as Professor Abdullahi revealed, there is a document signed by now reluctant signatories; the issue is whether its content can be enforced. And for enforcement what is needed is not just population or even the registered power to vote; the question is whether that power will be used.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 09:58:15 +0000
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