Stopping Jonathan From 2015

 “This New Nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great grandfather, Uthman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities in the North as willing tools, and the South, as conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us, and never allow them to have control over their future” (The Sardauna of Sokoto and the Premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello in The Parrot of October 12, 1960)

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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 1^st 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