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oodluck Jonathan Is the first Nigerian to emerge president of
the Federal Republic by defeating the entrenched Hausa/Fulani oligarchy in an
open political contest. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, notwithstanding the fact of his
birth and breeding in Zungeru in the north, spoke Hausa fluently and became the
symbolic leader of the fight against British colonialism for Independence of
Nigeria, could not penetrate the in-breeding Fulani oligarchy for electoral
acceptance. Again, Obafemi Awolowo, who earned the plaudits of everyone for his
development ideas which he put to practice even before Nigeria’s independence,
did not enjoy electoral success in the Fulani dominated north.
President Goodluck Jonathan
But Goodluck Jonathan, the man of providence, portrayed by
the Tinubu Press as an effete, provincial academic and politician with a boyish
cluelessness, took on the deeply entrenched northern traditional and political
establishment, creating a division rooted in public conscience and defeating the
entrenched northern politicians Ibrahim Babangida, Adamu Ciroma, Ango
Abdullahi, Abubakar Atiku and Muhammadu
Buhari in resounding electoral victories.
It is clear from the lessons to be drawn from this epochal
victory that the ongoing effort to browbeat President Jonathan to submit to
blackmail and surrender his constitutional right to re-election for a second
term particularly from the trenchant Hausa/Fulani north and the mischievous
Tinubu Press will amount to asking the victor to deny his historical accomplishment
and give away what was earned by the nation through the man of providence.
Freedom for Nigeria beckons from what was gained through the electoral victory
of Jonathan and this freedom is what is being asked of the man to throw away by
requesting him to foreclose his constitutionally guaranteed second presidential
tenure. This, my compatriots is tantamount to snatching defeat from the jaws of
victory.
The Hausa/Fulani north is as things stand today under the benign
benevolence of Goodluck Jonathan for regional security and economic progress.
Their elite will however not acknowledge this dependence nor will they want to
take supportive actions to sustain his regime for their own good. The deeply
ingrained sense of entitlement to political supremacy, patronage and economic benefit
against the larger interest of all other ethnic groups in the nation has
conditioned the Hausa/Fulani to become dependent, arrogant and unthinking of
the need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. For nearly forty years
of their pillage of the Nigerian economy including the license to allocate
other people’s resources to themselves, it never crossed their provincial minds
that all era must come to an inevitable end and that the ascendancy of Jonathan
signals the end of the age of ethnic supremacy and Hausa/Fulani dominance.
Ahmadu Bello
It is paradoxical that the Hausa/Fulani domination of Nigerian
politics and economy was not based on any superior indices, either of numbers,
skills, enterprise or military conquest but on a single day’s display of
bravado and Dutch courage in July 1966 when the northern political
establishment recovering from the January 1966 failed putsch, recruited
Northern Minority soldiers to decapitate their Commander-in-Chief, General
J.T.U Aguiyi Ironsi and complete an ethnic cleansing of Igbo officers in the
Nigerian armed Forces. From thence onwards until Goodluck Jonathan in 2010,
they sustained a succession plan which guaranteed that a Hausa/Fulani or their
crony occupied the presidency of Nigeria.
Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo and Ernest Shonekan are the
surrogates they used at different times. They needed the charm of Yakubu Gowon
to win over the international community particularly the British, and the
southern minorities to accomplish the routing of Biafra in the Civil War. Obasanjo
was the lackey they recruited to hold down the rambunctious Yoruba and the
south during the times of rebellion to their dominance. Shonekan was the failed
lap dog deployed to assuage the Yoruba over the betrayal of Moshood Abiola.
In the period of dominance, the Hausa/Fulani developed a
survival strategy that ensured that southern wealth was moved up North to
service the gluttony of technocrats, the pageantry of northern aristocracy and for
the development of Northern infrastructure. In 1969, the petroleum decree was promulgated
to place the control of the burgeoning oil wealth in the hands of Northern
Military officers who controlled the federal Military Government and allocated
the resources according to their whims. The 1969 petroleum decree changed the
economic relationship between regions in Nigeria and helped sustain even for
the oil producing states, a subsisting dependence on the federal government for
“allocations”, a reverse form of federalism not known anywhere else in the
world.
Import licensing, a diabolical practice introduced by the
Shehu Shagari Government in 1981 was enacted to subdue the business class and
put the lucrative import business under the control of President Shehu Shagari
and his kinsmen. Mahmoud Tukur, erstwhile Vice Chancellor of Bayero University
Kano and later Minister of Trade and Commerce became the point man. He was the
star of the Shagari administration, courted by the mighty and the lowly alike,
not for creating value to the economy but for issuing permits to import goods
of any kind into Nigeria. It is this process of pre-bended import licensing and
benefits allocations that created the Hausa/Fulani champions of business and
enterprise of today.
Fulani
It is public knowledge how the Hausa/Fulani also used ethnic
control of federal power to leverage the commanding heights of the economy and
allocate resources and benefits to their kinsmen. The allocation of 87% of all
oil blocks - the underpinning reason for the dog-fight for the presidency in
2013 - in the South-South oilfields to Hausa/Fulani and Kanuri is a vexatious
case in point. So also is allotment of certain federal posts to only their
kinsmen, another irksome issue open for ethnic contention, particularly the
headship of Customs and Excise and certain Federal Ministries and Agencies.
Boko Haram is not an unprecedented phenomenon in Northern
Nigeria but a replication of the same Islamic fundamentalist revolutions and
ferment that swept through the Western Sudan in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. One of these Islamic Champions was a Fulani cleric named
Usuman dan Fodio who led the conquest of the Hausa Habe dynasties and the
violent takeover of their empires across what was once Hausa land. It is this
historical conquest of Hausaland and Oyo that make the Fulani believe that
Nigeria is their conquered territory and their ethnic inheritance.
Boko Haram in Procession
Boko Haram’s present day practices are a reproduction of the
overwhelming brutality that attended that conquest. Contributing least of all
Ethnic Nationalities North and South of Nigeria to the national Purse, the
Hausa/Fulani maintained a political and economic control far beyond their
productive or military capabilities. They took covert control of the Armed
Forces and maintained a glass ceiling preventing non-Hausa/Fulani officers,
particularly the Igbo and southern minorities from rising to significant command
positions.
For instance in August 1982,fearing the coming together of
the Progressives and foreseeing the clear possibility of Shehu Shagari losing
in the pending presidential election of 1983, the Hausa/Fulani establishment
met in Kaduna and recommended to Shehu
Shagari the retirement of the General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the strategic
1st Division, Kaduna and the promotion of five named Hausa/Fulani
officers to Generals to forestall power falling into the hands of “infidels” in
the eventuality of a coup de etat and the toppling of Shagari’s Government.
Thus Alani Akinrinade was forcefully retired and Muhammadu
Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha, Muhammadu Jega and Garba Wushishi were
promoted to Generals. A coup did happen to remove the deeply unpopular Shehu
Shagari and the NPN government in December 1983 but it was a palace coup
dominated by the strategically promoted officers which as planned, did not
change the ethnic hold on power by the Hausa/Fulani.
An obverse side of the choices available to Goodluck Jonathan
in the fight over 2015 presidential election has not been properly considered
by anybody particularly the people determined to pull the entire nation down to
secure the Aso Villa. What if Jonathan decides not to run for re-election and
refuse to deploy the massive goodwill and resources of the presidency to
support PDP, the ruling party? Can the denizens of the ruling party hope to
sustain their present slippery hold on power after the 2015 elections? PDP will
explode and the resulting fragments will be minority parties or junior partners
in existing parties with no commanding presence or capacity to contest a
presidential election.
This is the major reason the seven rebel Governors in PDP
cannot move in to their pre-registered political party PDM. If the All Peoples
Congress (APC) wins the Presidency by any chance, can a Bola Tinubu, Atiku
Abubakar, Ango Abdullahi, or even Adamu
Ciroma live with an intemperate and bigoted Muhammadu Buhari for four years? Will
the Yoruba continue to allow Yorubaland to be used by Tinubu and his Afenifere deserters
to pursue an Islamisation agenda? To every right thinking Nigerian, Goodluck
Jonathan holds the vital aces required to hold Nigeria together post 2015.
Why do we hold that the Far North owe a world of gratitude to
Goodluck Jonathan? Because we believe to be true that If President Jonathan for
mischief, want of resources or any other reason scales down the deeply
sabotaged military operations against the Boko Haram in the North, the forces
of darkness as represented by the Terrorists will be unleashed on the entire Far
North and the Northern political, traditional and religious establishment will
be overrun and replaced by persons and institutions that hold allegiance to
Boko Haram under a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. Can whatever will be left
of the northern establishment live with that?
Boko Haram is a Frankenstein’s Monster created by a Northern
elite implacably infuriated by the loss of power to a minority politician,
never mind that Jonathans people have been supportive of the political
interests of the north and are the owners of the bread basket which sustains
the entire Northern Region. Now the Boko Haram monster has grown beyond the
capacity of the Northern irredentists to manage and are now poised to eat up
its creators and replace the establishment with its own implacable and
irascible kind.
Goodluck Jonathan in the Presidency embodies and holds the
hopes and aspirations of all previously denied and sidelined ethnic peoples in
Nigeria and they watch keenly the macabre dance that is going on to seize the
Aso Villa and make it a permanent abode of the Hausa/Fulani. It will be
foolhardy for any group in Nigeria to make little of the determination of the
Peoples of the South-South to hold on to their chance at the exercise of
presidential power for the public good and the rebirth of the Nigerian nation.
Basil Okoh
