The Itse Sagay-Ezeife combo
The 2017 Wole Soyinka Annual Lecture Series which held in Benin City was peopled by the same group of veteran conference-goers; they were there to trot out the same inchoate arguments and ideas about the latest obsession of the political elite – restructuring, in all its many variants. Prominent among the speakers at the lecture […]
The 2017 Wole Soyinka Annual Lecture Series which held in Benin City was peopled by the same group of veteran conference-goers; they were there to trot out the same inchoate arguments and ideas about the latest obsession of the political elite – restructuring, in all its many variants.
Prominent among the speakers at the lecture were a former and the current governor of Edo state, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole and Godwin Obaseki respectively. The perennials at such gatherings were also there – Professor Itse Sagay and Dr Chukwuemeka Ezeife among them. While Adams Oshiomhole and governor Obaseki were pitching for Nigeria, the tag team of Sagay and Ezeife were, well, pissing on, and trashing a section of the country, in the old good-cop, bad-cop routine.
Making the case for restructuring, Prof Sagay patronisingly implored the North to support the endeavour, pointing out that the region would benefit most: restructuring would enable the North to begin livestock ranching in place of cattle herding. Accept restructuring and you will be able to have your ranches! For good measure, he berated the northern elites who “are so used to proceeds of oil that they have abandoned the things that make them great as a region.” Now, in the time since the restructuring debate erupted, this may be the first time some flesh has been put on some of the ideas that comprise the issue. Previously, it has mostly been bland statements about how, with restructuring “component units will be able to develop at their own pace” even as it “engenders competition.” All this very much in sharp contrast to the clear road-map Chief Philip Asiodu presented recently for achieving both devolution of power and economic development.
Nigerian elites from all regions have long caught the bug of dependency on “proceeds of oil” as the professor put it, not just the northern branch of this social stratum – and no elite group in Nigeria has excelled in service to the people on whose behalf it supposedly operates in the national arena.
The call for a return to the 1963 Republican Constitution will resonate the more if it means its wholesale adoption, not cheery-picking aspects that suit and discarding those that don’t.
Dr Ezeife was at his belligerent best as, in a language more associated with Kanu and IPOB, he laid out “the consequences” for the North if it fails to agree to restructuring – Nigeria’s break-up and the region’s descent into extreme poverty. That prospect seems to give him vicarious pleasure.
Ezeife’s fixation with British rule over Nigeria is inexplicable, it lasted just half a century while we have been on our own now longer. One of the results of colonial rule in Nigeria was the moulding of the Igbo into one people, something they wouldn’t have achieved without that outside stimulus. Nigeria’s break-up will affect all regions and all peoples, Igbos as much as northerners. They will lose the lebensraum the present Nigeria affords them. There is little likelihood of a Republic of Southern Nigeria emerging from the ruins, and Igbos cannot expect a resurrection of Biafra in the area that constituted the defunct Eastern Region; it’s hardly imaginable that peoples of the Niger Delta would welcome a new embrace, after fifty years of being on their own.
One other observation: in president Obasanjo’s first term in office there were vibrant opposition parties in office in various states, notably the Western region, the birthplace of the restructuring campaign where Afenifere’s party the AD was in control. It was to be expected that members from that zone, all AD, would push that agenda in the National Assembly. They didn’t, neither did members from the Niger Delta push for the review of the revenue allocation formula. The South East was quiescent under President Jonathan. A charge of hypocrisy is not out of place in these circumstances.
Discussions on national issues invariably run into troubled waters principally because southern politicians reflexively assume a position of righteousness, project that theirs are the only views, deny other stakeholders the right to hold differently and fulminate endllessly against them for so doing – to the point of indulging in crimen injuria. This practice began within the first year of the start of political interactions between northern and southern leaders. In 1953, their opposition to Chief Anthony Enahoro’s rushed motion for Nigeria’s independence in 1956 earned northern leaders vulgar verbal assault from pre-arranged groups of thugs at all railway stations from Iddo, to the border with Ilorin. To add salt to injury, southern politicians decided to follow them to the North to further abuse them in their home territory – the reason for the Kano riots of that year.
Nigeria’s pressing problem is not its political structure per se, but in the conduct of politicians and some of the intelligentsia who trawl its fault lines, pretending concern for their “own.” but in reality seeking personal gain therefrom. Unfortunately for the country there doesn’t seem to be an end to this dissimulation.
Usman wrote this piece from Kaduna.