Northern Generals’ anger at ‘North as Nigeria’s mortuary’

NORTHERN Nigeria is angry. This anger is not strictly borne from the unremitting, horrific spillage of blood on its soil. Rather, Northern Nigeria is angry because it has been rightly called by the name it gave itself.

Recently, the progeny of Shehu Usman dan Fodio – the 19th-century Islamic scholar and founder of the Sokoto Caliphate – have been losing their crème de la crème. Northern Nigerians are dying in droves, mostly at the hands of their own sons who have made the thick forests their comfortable abode. The most poignant recent tragedy is that of General Rabe Abubakar. He was murdered in captivity after being abducted alongside his wife near the Matazu area of Katsina State.

From an ancestry that historically valued the sacredness of truth, it is not surprising that the severity of that truth-telling is now blowing westward toward the North. Dan Fodio himself professed his belief in this sacredness, noting that truth is the ultimate moral compass and the only cure for the human conscience. In my own Yoruba culture, truth is equally revered. Elders acknowledge the difficulty of accepting the truth, expressing its harsh but necessary nature in a classic proverb: “Òtíto oro korò, sùgbọn bí a bá gbé itọ́re mì, a máa ṣe ara l’ore” (Truth is bitter, but if the recipient endeavors to swallow its acrid saliva, it will ultimately soothe the body). Ignore the recent traffic of men who, for political survival, queue behind their esophaguses; the elders’ wisdom remains undefeated.

Yes, Northern Nigeria is like a viper. Its rage mirrors the fate of the serpent in Yoruba folklore. Among my people, it is said that the viper is not destroyed by an external enemy but by its own offspring. The young, believed to grow within the mother, eventually tear their way out, killing her in the process. Hence the proverb: “Omo inú oká níí ṣe ikú pa oká” — it is the children in the viper’s belly that bring about the viper’s death.

Today, the North appears trapped in a similar tragedy. Much of the violence consuming it comes not from strangers but from sons it nurtured, tolerated or failed to restrain. Yet, that is not its deepest irritation. Its greater discomfort lies in the fact that the rest of Nigeria has begun to notice. The North is less troubled by its missing finger than by the witnesses counting them aloud.

This “viper thesis” was on full display at a press conference held in Kaduna last week by retired military officers and associates of the late Major General Abubakar. The officers – including Ambassador A. Mohammed Musawa, Air Commodore Yusuf Anas (rtd), Brig.-Gen. Maharazu Tsiga (rtd), Ambassador Ibrahim Usman Gafai, and Brig.-Gen. Abdulkadir Abubakar (rtd) – had unsparing words for Southern commentators. I suspect that their ire is specifically against Nigerian Tribune columnist, Lasisi Olagunju, who in a viral piece entitled “Northern Nigeria will soon kill Nigeria” showed that even in its infantility, a child should be able to differentiate the ewẹ and wè from each other. “Crime may indeed have no ethnicity, but that does not relieve us of the duty to identify the environment that breeds and sustains it. A desert does not cease to be a desert because it contains a few oases” he said. While no one can deny that insurgency and the violent crimes Nigeria faces today originated from the north, that its leaders pampered the criminals with religion and region hands is unassailable.

In his speech, Brig-Gen Abubakar lamented what he called the “selective outrage” of commentators who attribute Nigeria’s security challenges to the Northern region, calling such narratives divisive and counterproductive.

“These incidents of insecurity have attracted not only condemnation but also taken ethnic colouration, with some commentators blaming the northern region for all the ills of the Nigerian state,” he argued.

Abubakar’s outrage recalls the Yoruba tale of the giant pouched rat (Okètè) and its belated plea. It is a story told to whiplash laggards and underscore the perils of ignoring early warning signs. The proverb goes: “Òkètè gbàgbé ibosí, ó dé igbá alátẹ̀, ó káwọ lé’rí.”

(The giant rat discounted the need to call for help, and upon its arrival at the market stall, holds its hands up in supplicatory regret).

The tale of the Okètè is this: Long ago, during a severe famine, human farmers set traps across the animal kingdom. The Okètè, renowned for being notoriously stubborn and haughty, stepped into a hunter’s trap. Initially, the pain felt inconsequential. He had room to maneuver and an opportunity to cry out for help, but his pride blinded him. He believed his own strength would set him free.

After hours of struggling, his strength faded. By the time he realized the danger of his tardiness and finally cried out, the hunter was already standing over him. A swift machete blow sent the Okètè to the village market, where he was eviscerated, roasted, and hoisted for sale. Roasting on the iron gauze, his teeth clenched in deep sorrow and his rare legs curled upwards in a mark of ultimate surrender. The moral is clear: one must speak up at the outset of danger, not at its denouement when the consequences have stripped away any claim to morality.

In recent days, a viral letter addressed to the Northern elite – governors, commissioners, Hisbah boards, traditional rulers, and legislators – has been making the rounds. Written by a fellow Northerner, Dr Zainab Suleiman Buhari, and published in the Daily Trust, it delivered a bitter, hurtful truth that acts as Dan Fodio’s healing balm on the open wound of conscience.

A public health physician and advocate for child developmental science, Dr Buhari pilloried Northern governors’ retrogressive policies of spending billions on mass marriages.

Apart from pillorying northern governors’ retrogressive policies of paying billions of Naira for mass marriages, she told the North that its “street kid factory” culture – what former First Lady Patience Jonathan famously termed the “born trowey” phenomenon – is incubating the very statistics for crime, banditry, and terrorism Nigeria cries over today.

“Terrorism does not start with ideology. It starts with hopelessness,” Dr Buhari wrote.

“Boko Haram, bandits, cults – they do not recruit PhDs. They recruit boys who were ‘produced’ but never raised,” she further lamented.

At the risk of awakening the old ghost of the North-South dichotomy, Dr. Buhari was merely restating a warning issued more than six decades ago by Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

Renowned for his almost obsessive faith in the transformative power of education, Awolowo repeatedly stressed the need to expand educational opportunities across all regions of Nigeria. He warned Northern leaders that failure to aggressively embrace Western education would breed mass poverty, insecurity and social unrest. His political philosophy was the “development of the human mind”.

This, he held, would lead to the tripod of Nigerian-wide political awareness, economic progress, and social stability.

At the heart of Awolowo’s political philosophy was what he called the “development of the human mind.” He believed that an educated populace was the foundation of political consciousness, economic progress and social stability. For him, education was not merely a social service; it was the most potent instrument of nation-building. By 1955, he had fulfilled that in his Free Primary Education in the Western Region he administered.

Awolowo famously declared: “The children of the poor you fail to train will never let your children have peace.” Today, the prophet’s prophecy has caught up with all of us. The fief system of medieval feudalism inherited by the founding fathers of northern Nigeria, and reified over decades by successive Northern leaders, has come home to roost.

As Yoruba Sakara music sage, Yusuff Olatunji once sang, when the rain refuses to pour, the corn refuses to sprout and the yam refuses to flower, everybody pays the price – wives, concubines and their closet lovers alike.

Today, Northerners and Southerners are united by a common pain: the bite of the Salamo ant. For decades, these fierce insects were bred and fed on Northern Nigerian trees. Now they have multiplied beyond their grove and are sinking their sharp teeth into the flesh of the entire nation. Patience Jonathan’s “born trowey” children have matured into the terrorists and bandits ruling today’s jungles.