The North Must Be Careful —Kanayo Esinulo   

Kanayo-Esinulo

Perhaps without knowing it, the political North has been attracting some resentment to itself from a large fraction of the South. This can be perceived or felt in conversations and other exchanges. The dominant discussions at bus stops, social gatherings, among students and political actors in the South-South are that pay-back time has arrived, and the North must not make any mistake about it. “The timing, in my view, is divine and if the North does not want to pay her political debts to us, we will teach them one popular proverb of the people on the water side,” was how a former commissioner in Bayelsa State summarised it for me in Port Harcourt a week ago. Although this general feeling of “the North is taking us for granted” is all over the place in Port Harcourt and Yenagoa, the same degree of resentment is gaining ground in the South-East also – particularly in Awka, Owerri and Enugu, where few days were spent in the course of gathering materials for this story. “We are not interested in the series of meetings in Kaduna and elsewhere in the North, it has come to the South-South by divine intervention and there is nothing the North can do about it. Millions of meetings cannot stop this momentum,” was precisely how a retired school principal in Enugu, now politician, saw the unfolding events.

What really does ‘pay-back time’ mean to people in the South-South, I asked out of curiosity? It was at Choba near Port Harcourt that a university teacher I met at a popular ‘scholarly joint’ told me pointedly that the North has been taking advantage of ‘this zone’ in their struggle for power with the other major ethnic groups, and our elders consistently obliged them. During the Nigerian Civil War, “they used us against the Biafran struggle. We got nothing for supporting them against our brothers and immediate neighbours”. In 1979, he continued, the area voted for the National Party of Nigeria, NPN, headed by Shehu Shagari and dominated by the North. Again, he insisted the South-South benefited nothing from that partnership. In 1992, “this region went for the National Republican Convention, NRC, because the North convinced our elders that that was the party good enough for us. In 1999, the region took to the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, believing that with the North backing Olusegun Obasanjo, victory was assured and South-South stood to reap from it”. Then, by way of conclusion he said with some touch of regret: “We have always supported the North in their political projects, and the pay-back time is now. They must be careful, otherwise there would be no Nigeria for them to continue to milk, dominate and exploit.” You needed to see anger and rage in its raw form.

If the theory making the rounds in Port Harcourt is true, then the argument that zoning should continue as is being canvassed by “the old political school in the North” may be weakened. There, most political actors insist that the North has held political power in Nigeria for 39 years since independence. And in all these years, so the theory goes, “the North has been rotating power not with the South as such, but with General Olusegun Obasanjo and Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.” Each time the North ‘conceded power to the South’, and it often sounds as if it is their divine right to govern Nigeria forever, it has always chosen who to hand over to. In the two instances when this has happened, different as they were in circumstances, they have always preferred Obasanjo – the man they can trust or do business with. Today, the old political school in the North is angry and disappointed with Obasanjo, often describing him as a sadist. Without these casual Obasanjo intrusions, it could have been ‘northern rule all the way’ since 1959. I recall that since the North did not choose or anoint General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi in January 1966, he had to be quickly killed, and they did that so brutally on 29 July 1966. Since then, it has been a political relay game exclusive to the North – from Yakubu Gowon to Murtala Muhammed to (Obasanjo) to Shehu Shagari to Muhammadu Buhari to Ibrahim Babangida to Abdulsalaami Abubakar to (Obasanjo).

True, nothing has seriously threatened the North’s hold on political power since 1959 like Biafra and the militancy in the Niger Delta region. In the two situations, they were revolts against injustices and inequity perpetrated by the northern ruling class. The revolt in the western part in 1964/65 derived from the same northern desire to dominate the political space. Obafemi Awolowo had to be kept away in Calabar prison for Sir Abubakar Tafaa Balewa’s government in Lagos to be comfortable and secure. It has been political bazaar for the North. Two factors have worked in their favour though: the preparedness of the military wing of the northern elite to come to the rescue of northern politicians from the consequences of their misrule – examples are in December 1983 and June 1993. The second factor is the availability of recruits from the South-East, South-South and only recently in the South-West, who are ready to betray their people and accept to be glorified errand boys for northern politicians, willing agents of feudal order. These political contractors, jobbers and opportunists are always in abundance in the South. They accept crumbs for their betrayal while the Alhajis share oil blocs. But when in November 2004, Obasanjo became his own man and began to assert himself somewhat, the North did not like it one bit. The gradual dismantling of the myth around northern political invincibility began. The young men in the Niger Delta soon started their own, by first questioning the ‘wisdom’ of their elders in allowing the area to be underdeveloped so brazenly by a succession of Nigeria’s visionless administrations – predominantly headed by northern military and political elite.

The emergence of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan as Nigeria’s President should, therefore, in my view, be seen as partly divine and partly a product of an accident of history.  It is good news that the progressive wing of the political North is beginning to accept that Jonathan has the right to run for the highest office in the land in 2011. The simple truth is that zoning does not allow for the best to emerge and this country now needs its first eleven.

If Jonathan eventually declares his intention to contest, some level of sanity would have been introduced to our politics because that would mean a deserved dirge for zoning and all it represents. But if Alhaji Tanko Yakassai and his gang of old school northern politicians persist in their diatribe that “it is still the turn of the North’, then the new thinking and the new awareness that has seized Nigeria and capturing, in its wake, a new generation of politicians in the North, the Yakassai school would very soon be made totally irrelevant and obsolete and deservedly consigned to the dustbin of history. This country can no longer continue to be dragged backwards by eccentrics and feudal overlords whom history has since left behind. Nigeria needs to be extracted from the claws and stranglehold of rickety 19th century politicians whose ‘contributions’ have brought us so much misery, hopelessness and underdevelopment. God is on our side. History is on our side.

Tags:  Biafran, Kanayo-Esinulo, National Republican Convention, Shehu Shagari, South-South