The Eggon constitute an ethnic group largely found in Nasarawa State. They are a diverse but culturally homogenous people, numbering around 200,000 or more, as of an estimate in 2016. Their native language is the Eggon Language, which most Eggon people speak in addition to Hausa and English languages which they speak by virtue of their interactions with most inhabitants of Northern Nigeria, and as a result of colonisation.
The Eggon have, in recent times been in the news for a number of reasons, key among which is aggression expressed either in terms of physical confrontations with neighbouring ethnic groups or law enforcement agencies, all in a bid to achieve territorial expansion and or wrest political power.
The most recent event that brought the ethnic group into the limelight were the 2023 governorship election and the protracted litigation that accompanied it. The point needs not be stressed that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), initially, declared the sitting governor, Engr. A. A. Sule, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, as the winner of the election. This development was trailed by a series of unabated and sustained street protests mostly orchestrated by the Eggon who, over the years, have vigorously propagated the notion that they are demographically the dominant ethnic group in Nasarawa State, and that political power should naturally and automatically rotate to them.
Although the protests metamorphosed into celebrations when the Electoral Petition Tribunal overturned the decision of INEC, and thus declared David Emmanuel Ombugadu winner of the election in a two against one verdict, the protests resumed in earnest consequent upon the verdict of the Appeal Court and ultimately, the Supreme Court all of which turned out to be decisively in favour of the sitting governor.
This recent aggressive action of the Eggon is not the first. For almost eight years, from 2011-2019, when Umaru Tanko Al-Makura held sway as the governor of Nasarawa, the state was virtually reduced to a battlefield, principally due to the activities of an Eggon group called Combats, under the spiritual leadership of the Alkyl. It was a dark moment of some sort in the history of the state that in budgetary terms, security had to be over-prioritized almost to the total abandonment of key developmental sectors. An unprecedented heinous crime against the Nigerian state was carried out when the Ombatse massacred close to 100 policemen and state security service operatives.
It is on record that way back in the 1970s, when Chief Solomon Lar was governor of then Plateau State, the Eggon, in pursuit of their expansionist agenda, recklessly invaded Lafia, in a bid to not only ransack the town and effect a leadership change through deposition of the then emir. Their illogical argument then was that they, as opposed to the Kanuri, constituted the original indigenous inhabitants of the town.
Sadly, these serial and frequent conflicts, which at times degenerate into violent conflagrations between the Eggon nation on one hand and some of the neighbouring tribes on the other, is what has, over the years, come to unfortunately define and portray the Eggon. Thus, while in the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties the strategy deployed by the Eggon in the course of pursuing their expansionist agenda was essentially rudimentary, in subsequent years the tribe has, especially with the advantage conferred by education, population explosion and other aspects of modernity, come to appreciate the necessity to upgrade their strategy, and make it relatively refined.
The manner in which the Eggon tribe proceeds in recent times with the prosecution of its agenda, no doubt attests to this assertion of its seeming resolve to embrace the ballot box as a more appropriate mechanism. Thus, the 2019 and 2023 governorship elections and the protracted litigation that accompanied them, coupled with the high level of desperation displayed by the Eggon represented a clear testimony of their readiness to perfect their strategy in pursuit of their mission.
The Eggon represents, in terms of demography, the most widely spread ethnic group in Nasarawa State, a phenomenon which also forms the basis of an existing notion shared not only amongst them but by a reasonable percentage of members of other ethnic groups, that they (the Eggon) are a preponderant percentage of the almost three million population of the state. Though Nasarawa Eggon Local Government constitutes their largest single settlement, pockets of Eggon tribe are located in almost all the remaining 12 local government areas in varying proportions.
This peculiar dispersal in terms of population settlement that defines the Eggon tribe vis-a-vis other ethnic groupings in Nasarawa State, derives largely from two factors: their relatively late arrival and settlement in the state, as well as their major pre-occupation, which is agriculture; all of which dictate that they keep, on a perpetual basis, grabbing additional lands in response to population explosion and challenges related to agricultural production.
The implications of these two factors suggest that in a bid to continuously push for additional land, the Eggon would eventually and inevitably come into confrontation with other ethnic groups, whose legitimate lands the former might encroach on. This means that from the word go, there already exists potential seed of discord between the Eggon on one hand and their neighbouring tribes on the other.
Yet, another dimension to the ethnic equation in Nasarawa State, is the relative advantage that the Eggon enjoy in terms of Western education, which meant that, first, they dominate the state civil service structure, and secondly, they also dominate in each local government where they reside, especially at the middle and lower cadres of the local government service.
It was, of course, majorly in response to this phenomenon that in 2000 the administration of then governor, Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, enacted a law that restricted civil servants under the employment of the Local Government Service Board, to the confines of their various indigenous local councils. This, in effect, implied that all the Eggon, who were serving in local governments other than their own i.e. Nasarawa Eggon Local Government, had to be redeployed to their original Local Government Service. This law profoundly impacted the Eggon ethnic group; as their Local Government Service became heavily over bloated.
As with the issue of state and local government services, where the Eggon had once enjoyed a position of relative hegemony, so was also the issue of land ownership and related matters, which have remained a recurring decimal in defining the relationship between the Eggon nation, on one hand, and the remaining ethnic groupings in the state, on the other.
In a bid to secure a solid and adequate settlement for itself and keep on expanding in almost all directions, majorly in response to the dictates of agricultural production, which to date remains the major preoccupation of majority of its natives, the Eggon have inexorably driven themselves into perpetual conflict with about every other ethnic group one can imagine.
These were the circumstances, which obviously propelled the Eggon political and business elite to consider as strategic, the acquisition of political power as a necessary precondition for pushing through its agenda. However, realising the unviability of deployment of force as an option in its overall political strategy to achieve power as a means to an end, the Eggon nation, apparently, leveraging on its demographic superiority, decided to change tactics, as exemplified in its sponsorship of a credible candidate in both the 2019 and 2023 governorship elections, albeit without success.
Now, given the existing state of affairs, it seems the most contemporary and relevant issue confronting Nasarawa State revolves around how to decisively address the challenge of intermittent conflicts with ethnic groups. This is particularly pertinent for it to be able to galvanise members of other ethnic groups to support the aspirations of its people to lead Nasarawa State.
Ibrahim wrote from No. 43, Liberia Road, Federal Low Cost, Malali, Kaduna
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