What the North needs now
Sixty years after Sardauna, northern Nigeria is at the crossroads again. Nigerians who still remember the immediate aftermath of the brutal killing of Sardauna and other leaders in a military coup in 1966 or those like me who have read a bit about it can feel a striking similarity between that period and now. Anyone […]
Sixty years after Sardauna, northern Nigeria is at the crossroads again. Nigerians who still remember the immediate aftermath of the brutal killing of Sardauna and other leaders in a military coup in 1966 or those like me who have read a bit about it can feel a striking similarity between that period and now.
Anyone can feel it in the current sense of despondency and confusion throughout the northern region. You can feel it in personal conversations between any two or northerners at home or in the streets. You can also certainly feel it in the mockery, the insult, the tirade and the toxic and dangerous narratives of other Nigerians against the North and its peoples in both the mainstream and social media in recent months.
Above all, however, that the North is at the crossroads right now is evident in three more concrete situations in the region. First of all, four of the five (or six) conflicts that make up the major armed security threats in Nigeria right now are in the North. The Boko Haram insurgency, long splintered into several factions, continues to fester, kill at will and wreak havoc not just in Sambisa Forest at the tip of the North East but also from time to time in the neighbouring areas.
Bandits and criminal kidnapping gangs roam quite freely and flexibly across rural parts of about seven northern states: Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Kwara, and in recent news, Kano. In Benue and parts of Taraba and Nassarawa states, clashes between farmers and herders over land and water result in armed attacks and killings that are generally reprisal in nature. The rise of a virulent identity politics over who is indigene and who is settler intersects roughly but not exactly with religion in Plateau and Kaduna states to ensure that these parts of the northern region remain intermittently on the boil.
In between these four major conflicts, sundry criminals and criminal economies involving all shades of Nigeria continue to have a field day through a lucrative traffic in small and light arms, abductions for ransom, drugs, persons, information, official intelligence, and dangerous rumours on social media that have turned the northern region into a giant flashpoint. With the slightest push at any moment over the past 15 years or longer, any one or more part of northern Nigeria is in flames. Unfortunately, national news coverage of these trends distorts the reality rather than capture it accurately and contextually, which worsens and obfuscates the situation for both the government and the public alike.
In other words, the stability of Nigeria, and its continuing viability as a single country, depends in large parts on the extent to which we are able to resolve these conflicts in the northern region. Whatever happens in the North or involves northerners elsewhere reverberates across the entire country, either directly or by implication, even if this is a fact some of us in Nigeria love to hate.
Yet, these conflicts and the criminal economies that support them are more a symptom of three deeper problems in northern Nigeria today: the crisis of identity, the collapse of leadership and governance at the regional and state levels, and the extinction of civil society.
Since 1954, when the Nigerian federation took hold as a formal structure for the country, and some form of self-government commenced at the regional levels, up to say 2004 (in my view), you could say with confidence and clarity who was a ‘northerner’ and who was not in Nigeria. You could not say so with as much confidence and clarity today. The problem is not that there has been a demographic change or that the northern land has moved to some other place. The problem is that there has been a profound change in the politics of identity, that is, in the way people conceive themselves and are conceived of by others.
In the 50-year period of my estimation, all northerners conceived themselves as northerners, and were in turn conceived as such by other Nigerians. No one thought Gowon or Shagari as anything but northerners. Joseph S. Tarka and Aminu Kano were fierce political rivals of mainstream northern politics who campaigned vigorously for minority rights in terms of class (Aminu Kano) or religion and ethnicity (Tarka), and often entered into political alliances with southern politicians based on political ideology. Yet, none of them disputed their identities as northerners in the way many people do throughout the North today.
What changed are the riots and associated conflicts that followed the “introduction” of Sharia in many northern states in the early 2000s, the collapse of political ideology as the primary definer of political identity in Nigeria and its replacement by religion, the rise of extreme competition over religion in national politics, the dominant but false framing of the Boko Haram insurgency as anti-Christian plot by all northern Muslims, and the intellectually lazy and factually inaccurate tendency to view all other conflicts in the North through only a religious lens, etc. All of these tendencies have made the previous single northern identity uncomfortable or unacceptable for many, while the ensuing crisis of identity, in turn, feeds into and intensify the national impacts of any conflicts in the north.
Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, the more some things change, the more they stay the same. The pan-northern identity has simply refused to go away. All the other identities fashioned to replace it, among them, Muslim North, Christian North, Far North, Middle-Belt, etc, simply still do not have as much force or effect as the North, northern, northerner. The pan-Northern identity predates Nigeria itself and is not based on religion and ethnicity, but on a shared culture, history, and geography. You may succeed in carving up Nigeria by religion or ethnicity, but Northern Nigeria simply cannot be carved up along those lines.
We arrived at this state of affairs in the North because of our dwindling fortunes in the quality of leadership and governance, and a corresponding collapse of northern civil society properly defined. This collapse of leadership in government and civil society is both symbolic and real. At the symbolic level, the North does not have a generally acceptable pan-Northern regional body to speak on its behalf either at governmental or civil society levels. There are good candidates, of course, not least the 19 governors, Northern Governors Forum (NGF), the Arewa Consultative Forum, the Northern Elders Forum, the traditional leaderships, etc.
However how effective are all these today in terms of not just speaking up for the North and its people, when it matters, but also as problem-solving institutions? We cannot generalise, but the evidence is still clear that things are only getting worse, not better.
The result is of all these is that Northern region is conveniently viewed either as a single entity or as separate entities by many in national politics for their own self-interested ends. When the late President Buhari appointed Babachir Lawal as the Secretary to the Federal Government in 2015, many kicked against it because they thought the position should have gone to another southerner in order to “balance” ethnic composition at the senior levels of government.
What mattered to those critics at the time was that Lawal is another northerner like Buhari, Bukola Saraki, and Yakubu Dogara. The fact that both Lawal and Dogara are Christians, and that Saraki is Yoruba was mute. Also, when it suited him in 2023, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu courted the Muslim votes in the North that offended the Christians. Today, as an incumbent, he is doing the opposite for the 2027 election. Either way, the North and northerners as a whole are losers, other than for a few crumbs here and there, as Tinubu’s attitude to the federal government of Nigeria is by now very clear. What, then, is the way out?