Phone call to Morocco

It all started with a newspaper story that said the Moroccan King Mohamed VI snubbed President Goodluck Jonathan and refused to answer his phone call. Moroccan royal palace said Jonathan was trying to use their King to win over Muslim voters ahead of general elections in Nigeria. It looked like that because the next day, […]

It all started with a newspaper story that said the Moroccan King Mohamed VI snubbed President Goodluck Jonathan and refused to answer his phone call. Moroccan royal palace said Jonathan was trying to use their King to win over Muslim voters ahead of general elections in Nigeria. It looked like that because the next day, the Foreign Ministry in Abuja insisted that a phone call actually took place between President Jonathan and the King. It said Jonathan lobbied the King to support Agriculture Minister Adesina’s bid to become the next president of the Africa Development Bank.
Now this claim really enraged the Moroccans. Their Foreign Ministry swiftly recalled its ambassador from Nigeria saying, “Morocco confirms in the clearest and strongest terms that there has never been a phone conversation between King Mohammed VI and the president of Nigeria.” It repeated the accusation that its King was being used to curry favour with Nigerian Muslim voters and it said something about Nigeria’s hostility to Morocco’s territorial integrity. This was a veiled reference to Nigeria’s diplomatic recognition of Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic [SADR] despite Moroccan claims on its territory. And then came the final twist in the drama. President Jonathan admitted that he never spoke to the Moroccan King nor told anybody that he had a telephone conversation with him. His spokesman Reuben Abati said Jonathan was “shocked, surprised and highly embarrassed by the controversy that had erupted.” He blamed the Foreign Ministry for saying he spoke with King Mohamed and ordered an investigation to fish out and punish the officials who issued that statement.
It occurred to me all the while that both the Nigerian president and the royal palace in Rabat vastly overestimated Morocco’s capacity to influence events in Nigeria. On Jonathan’s part it sounded like old-fashioned name dropping. The Foreign Ministry officials who rushed to say that the two men did discuss on phone thought they were helping out because Jonathan’s level of electoral support is particularly low in the Muslim North. They apparently thought that Jonathan would curry favour with this constituency if he is seen to be on chummy terms with a Muslim King in the far Northwest corner of Africa. The Marocs thought so too, thinking that a phone conversation with their king could turn things around in Nigeria’s elections. Well, both sides are dead wrong on this matter.
The first problem is that Morocco hardly registers in the religious consciousness of Nigerian Muslims. I think the closest it came to influencing things around here was when the Almoravids swept down from Morocco and helped pull down the Ghana Empire nearly 1000 years ago. Morocco is best known these days for its red Fez cap and Titus tinned sardine. Some Nigerians also think of it as the gateway to Europe after a trek across the Sahara. Maybe we helped them a lot in the 1960s because the singer Ali Dansaraki used to say in a song, “Da ’yan Morocco da ’yan Algeria, rigimar da suke tuni sun bari. Sir Ahmadu Bello yatai ya hana su.” That is, Sir Ahmadu Bello settled the hot quarrel between Morocco and Algeria.
Association between Northern Nigeria and North Africa has been on the wane since the Sardauna’s passing. The late Premier actively promoted this relationship. He substantially adapted the penal code from Sudan and North African countries when the departing Brits told him in the 1950s that we must codify our laws rather than administer justice directly from the holy books. Sardauna sent many committees to study various aspects of law, education and cultural life in Sudan and North Africa. He was a regular visitor to Saudi Arabia and was closely connected to the Saudi King Saud ibn Abdul-Aziz, known here as Masa’udu.
For all those reasons Arabia and North Africa registered well in Northern Muslim consciousness in those days but much less so today. Still, Jonathan would score a bigger point with Muslim voters if it is known that he spoke on phone to Saudi King Salman ibn Abdul-Aziz, current Guardian of the Two Holy Mosques. Never mind that the discussion would probably center on OPEC issues and oil prices. Whether that will translate into votes however, I am not sure.
It is not every Muslim ruler that would impress folks in the North. If Jonathan were to speak to Sheikh al-Makhtoum of Dubai, many folks would read commercial rather than religious meaning to it. People here hardly think of Dubai as a Muslim country but as a huge open-air market. Certainly, Sudan registers more in Northern religious consciousness than Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia because a lot of Sudanese Muslim scholars have lived and worked in the North.
Now, when you read between the lines of the angry Moroccan Foreign Ministry statement you get a feeling that the main issue is not Jonathan as a person but Nigeria’s lack of support for Morocco’s desire to annex Western Sahara. This is an old issue which has vexed our foreign policy since the mid-1970s. When Morocco and Mauritania first tried to grab Western Sahara when the Spanish colonialists withdrew in 1975 it was a dilemma for us because Mauritania was a founding member of ECOWAS. Its first president Mukhtar ould Daddah was close to General Yakubu Gowon. Daddah paid a high profile visit to Nigeria in 1974; I was one of the schoolchildren that lined up the streets in Sokoto when Gowon took him to see Sultan Abubakar III.
The Western Sahara issue boiled over during the Shagari era. The US government lobbied African leaders to boycott the OAU Summit in Tripoli in 1982, which Muammar Gaddafi was hosting. There were fears when the summit opened that a quorum would not be achieved. Shagari did not go and when local media pressed him, he said his plane was on standby at the airport and he was waiting for a quorum to be achieved. The late Dele Giwa sarcastically asked how a quorum could be achieved if everyone remained at home. In fairness to Shagari, his position was not as ridiculous as it sounded because his Foreign Minister, Professor Ishaya Audu, was already in Tripoli and had registered Nigeria’s attendance.
Anyway, that summit flopped but Shagari was so stung by internal criticism that he spearheaded the diplomacy that led to the reconvening of another summit in Libya. However, just before the second summit opened the OAU secretariat admitted SADR as a full member. Morocco and its allies then boycotted the summit and it again failed. Now, a year before those events Morocco’s King Hassan sent his son Crown Prince Sidi to deliver a letter to Shagari. I watched on NTA News as the 16 year old prince stood up to deliver the letter but Shagari remained seated. That boy is now King Mohamed VI and Arabs are known for blood feuds.
 President Jonathan should however not worry because the Moroccans cannot possibly like General Muhammadu Buhari more than him. Afterall, it was the Buhari regime and its Foreign Minister Professor Ibrahim Gambari that recognised SADR in 1984 and Morocco responded by withdrawing its ambassador from Lagos.
You see, President Jonathan, contact with such leaders could be a political double-edged sword. In 1981 President Shehu Shagari invited Pope John Paul II to visit Nigeria. It pleased Roman Catholics in Nigeria but some Muslim clerics took exception to it. In Sokoto that day the late Sheikh Sidi Attahiru Ibrahim drove around town in his Peugeot 504 station wagon saying through a loudspeaker that any Muslim who welcomed the pope had committed shirk. Maybe it is good afterall that you didn’t speak to King Mohamed.