Of Ambode, Buhari, and Aliko Dangote

ON Thursday, May 25 this year, a gang of gun-men invaded the Lagos State Model College, Igbonla, Epe and kidnapped some of the students. Today makes the 39th day that the hapless boys have been in captivity and a newspaper cartoon appropriately, I suspect, portrayed Lagos State’s Gov. Akinwumi Ambode snoring at his desk while demonstrators carrying placards tried in vain to draw his attention to the plight of the “Igbonla Six.” Can this be the case of another Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned? Add the cases of the Badoo cult’s mindless and dastardly killings in the Ikorodu axis of the state and you begin to wonder if there is no orchestrated plan afoot to shoot down this otherwise high-performing governor and make second term a daunting task for him. “Chibok girls” was the banana peel that tripped ex-President Goodluck Jonathan; the “Igbonla Six” or our own ‘Chibok boys’ may as well become the Nemesis of Ambode. We will return to this narrative later but, first, the Ramadan message of ailing President Muhammadu Buhari that has drawn the flak of many Nigerians.

My sympathy goes first and foremost to my professional colleague and Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Sheu, who has been made to carry the can on this issue. I do not at all envy the duo of Garba and my other professional colleague in the same boat with him, Femi Adesina, Special Adviser to the President on the same Media and Publicity turf. Not only are they working for a man who has little understanding of, and scant regard for, the nuisances of the media, these are also not the best of times for every Presidency staff. For Garba, who is (was?) an Atiku Abubakar man, an Atiku who, reportedly, has never stopped oiling his political machine and is at this time on the prowl, these are especially testy times. Garba has to bend over backward to prove his loyalty to Buhari; whether he was the one who suggested the Ramadan-message-in-Hausa-language gaffe or it was imposed on him is, therefore, immaterial. Rather than blame Garba, I will push the blame where it rightly belongs – with Buhari – and I have a plethora of reasons.

From the very first time he rudely broke into public consciousness with the military coup of December 1985, Buhari has always been a pro-North person. His second-in-command in that regime was another Fulani/Northerner from Ilorin – Tunde Idiagbon. The Buhari/Idiagbon regime was dominated by Northerners – just like the current Buhari presidency. The Buhari military regime put ousted President Shehu Shagari in cosy house arrest while it carted away his deputy, Igbo man Alex Ekwueme, into prison. Most of the politicians likewise given sour-grape treatment by the regime were of Southern extraction. That regime allowed 53 suitcases belonging to an Emir to enter the country after the borders had been closed in the midst of Naira change. It also carried out a demeaning search on the home of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. The three youth who were executed via retroactive decree – Barthlomew Owoh, Ojuolape and one other – were from the South. The two Guardian newspaper journalists sentenced to jail via the obnoxious Decree 4 of 1984 – Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson – were Southerners. Buhari as chairman of the Petroleum (Special) Task Fund favoured the three zones of the North while the South-East got the least. He has carried on with the same formula as civilian president in appointments as well as in the allocation of resources in the 2016 and 2017 budgets.

We were the ones who erroneously thought Buhari’s leopard had changed its spots. I cannot remember any important interview granted by Buhari that was not on the BBC Hausa Service. As Patron of the Fulani herdsmen, he came down south to engage a South-West governor. “Your people are killing my people,” he was reported to have said. Buhari never made any pretence at being a Nigerian or nationalist. He is unrepentantly Fulani and an irredentist Northerner. Since we made him president, it has been to our chagrin. He is a Northern president lording it over Nigeria. His goal – and passion – is to give the North advantage. And when we say “North”, we mean the Hausa/Fulani; the other ethnic groups in the North are used only to make up the number. We have heard that clear message in ongoing pogrom in some parts of the North.

Buhari was reported to have said at the Emir of Katsina’s palace: Where do “they” want to push “us”? They are the “us” and we are the “they”. Truth be told, Buhari is not part of us. He belongs to them. His “I belong to nobody, I belong to everybody” statement was a ruse aimed at solving a particular headache – Tinubu – so as to free him to serve the interests he had always unabashedly served. His 95 per cent and 5 per cent dichotomy has been widely reported. Unfortunately, Buhari is not alone in this. Say I am wrong but I believe – and the facts and history support this – Buhari is representative of a vast number of Hausa/Fulani who occupy the political space called Nigeria. For them, the Fulani Jihad of the 19th Century remains a continuous and continuing process. For them, too, conquering the entire political space called Nigeria is a task that must be done. We ignore or trivialise this at our own peril.

Let me ask you this question: How many Northern Muslims believe there are true Muslims in the South? How many Northern Muslims will allow southern Muslims lead them in prayer? Northern Muslims generally have their reservations about Southern Muslims. We all know this, even if we do not accept it is right. I have travelled widely in the North and see no basis for the holier-than-thou attitude of many Northern Muslims in their dealings with their Southern counterparts – but that is a story for another day. So, if a Buhari Ramadan message is directed at Muslims, real and authentic Muslims so to say, why should Southern Muslims expect that they are part of the audience? Read Ola Rotimi’s “The gods are not to blame” – the bastard-child behaving as true-born! Didn’t the history books speak of “Hausa Bakwai” and “Banza Bakwai”? And why should the “they” expect Buhari to send them Ramadan message when the message is to the “us”?

The language chosen was never a mistake; it was appropriately chosen. Language, for those who care to listen, is more potent than guns in the process of acculturisation. The moment the jihadists adopted Hausa as lingua franca, they imposed it everywhere they went. Look around you in Nigeria, every institution dominated by the Hausa/Fulani – they impose Hausa as the lingua franca; be it in the armed forces, the Presidency, amongst the other tribes in the North, name it. Poor you if you allow your own language go into extinction. You will become worse than a conquered people. The Igbo are doing better than my own Yoruba in this regard. A revolution is needed in Yoruba land that will halt the ruination of Yoruba cultural heritage and survival by the avalanche of private schools where “vernacular” – that is what they call our mother tongue! – is prohibited. Prohibited in school and frowned on at home, Yoruba as a language will soon go into extinction. Our Western orientation will soon sound our death-knell. We need to teach Yoruba language, culture, tradition, and history from kindergarten to University level. We must make Yoruba the official language of our governments. Our leaders must be proud of the language and speak it – like Buhari has done of his. In this wise, we must learn useful lessons from the Hausa/Fulani. We may have more Western education and paper qualifications than them but truth be told, they are much more literate and relevant to their own society than us. They advance the interests of their own people and society; we neglect and imperil ours. Learn from the Indians; Pakistanis, and the Oriental people generally: They are no fools when they hold tightly to the language, traditions, and cultures of their ancestors.

To return to Ambode: What is his government doing about the Igbonla Boys? What steps have he taken to arrest the menace of the Badoo cult? I said it repeatedly here years back that the South-west must braze up to arrest the activities of cult groups. Now it would appear the chicks have come home to roost. There is no denying the fact that our military-imposed unitary federalism ties the hands of state governors who are chief security officers only in name because they have no control in the real sense of the word over the security forces operating in their domain. Nevertheless, Ambode must heed the time-honoured wisdom of our people: wa woroko fi s’ada. He must improvise to get the problems of incessant kidnapping of school children and Badoo killings arrested. Goodman-governor, roll up your sleeves and use all available means at your disposal to solve these twin menace – OPC, Neighbourhood Watch, local hunters, Juju – just anything. A drastic problem requires a drastic solution.

Last word: Richest man in Africa, Alike Dangote, was quoted as describing the Arewa youths who issued a ‘quit-the-North’ ultimatum to the Igbo as inconsequential and should, therefore, be ignored. While he is right in saying they are inconsequential; he is wrong in saying they should be ignored. As the Yoruba would say, the drummer that is beating the drum for the “iromi” that is dancing on top of the river is under the river. Some people who are consequential are the ones remote-controlling the Arewa youths. Lest we forget, such so-called inconsequential people have caused so many religious crises and mayhems in the North in which an uncountable number of consequential people have lost their lives and property. Finally, when the inconsequential people troop to the streets in October to enforce their “fatwa”, will Aliko or his children enter the street to restrain them? A stitch in time, they say, saves nine. The “quit-the-North” order, however, is an evil master stroke which has exposed the underbelly of the Igbo. They cannot have their cake and eat it. They cannot dominate Nigeria economically and still have Biafra. They have got to choose.