Those who have their ears to the ground, and listen hard enough, can hear the convulsions already. Like fish out of water, northern Nigeria simply can’t imagine political (and socio-economic) life without federal power in a Nigeria that has, then and now, primarily been defined by regional politics.
There is a convoluted historical dimension to this constant political and economic anxiety in the North when the reigns of federal power are controlled from down south of The River. The historical contexts from which sprang the birth pangs of power shift in the past have changed, but the fears they elicited have remained, even as new contemporaneous factors have emerged that inform the familiar pangs of today; and are therefore, not to be dismissed either.
Yet, both in the past, and in the present, the challenge for northern Nigeria has always been how to fashion out a way to endure and in fact thrive during those lean years when federal power must shift to the South—in order to at the very least preserve the union for which everything else depends, if for no other reason.
But before the analysis, first the problem. In an article rather appropriately and perhaps presciently titled “The Four Pillars of Tinubu Presidency” barely six weeks ago on these pages, I said even though it was still early days yet, Tinubu’s presidency will be built on four pillars, the fourth of which, to recount briefly, was that “Tinubu’s government will still be a mainstream Yoruba government”, where many of the key posts will be in the hands of his most trusted advisers, many of whom would naturally be of Yoruba extraction.
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The government’s major policies too, I said, would tend to be those that will benefit the formalised private sector of the economy, which, no coincidence, also happens to be from the South generally, and the South West more particularly. I said all of these on June 19, when Tinubu was barely three weeks in office. But I claim no credit if some of those predictions are becoming clearer by the day. In fact, as I advised earlier, the political moment calls for response, not reaction.
The signs of this northern anxiety under Tinubu’s government are already clear, what with Malam Nasir El-Rufai’s humiliation during the nomination process, the perceived regional undertones of the ministerial portfolios, and the government’s initial approach to the military coup next door. Add to these the massively debilitating effects of the government’s major policies so far, and the fact that there are reportedly more than 50 probes currently going on at the National Assembly, all of them digging into various aspects of the previous administration.
However well-intentioned the government’s position on several of these issues, they have served only to exacerbate distrust and anxious feeling in the North that a government they worked rather hard to help bring to power is fast turning against them and their own. The actual truth of all this may be more complicated than expressed here or perceived by many, but in life, and especially in politics, perception is just another reality, with as much force as fact, if not more so.
Now, how is the growing political anxiety in the North to be understood and what is to be done about it? For answer, we must have the history.
In the beginning, that is, on the eve of political independence in the latter part of the 1950s, northern Nigeria did not in fact want to be part of Nigeria because the leaders then were acutely aware of northern disadvantages in the levers of power in a modern government: a strong bureaucracy, western-educated and professional middle class, means of mass communication and agenda-setting, advanced private capital and business, a strong intellectual base regardless of the ideological direction, trade unions and a strong unformed cadre in the military, police and other security forces.
The Northern Region, as it then was even before political independence in 1960, stood greatly disadvantaged in nearly all of these areas of modern government. The Eastern and Western regions, by contrast, stood greatly advantaged in nearly all of them, and indeed, almost exclusively controlled some of these sectors at the time (and even today).
Out of the real fear of total domination by the South in a political culture that was deeply influenced by regional politics, the North wanted out in order to build these things for itself at its own pace and in its own government, rather than being forced in a hapless competitive political union.
But somehow, the British managed to convince the northern leaders to stay in a federal union that granted wide regional autonomy but also ensured that population, which advantaged the North both during elections and in the number of parliamentary seats, would determine political leadership every time. If your population can gain you federal political power ahead of your rivals, then you can use that power to mitigate your weaknesses in the economic, social and cultural spheres.
Thus, for northern Nigeria, federal political power was for collective self-protection within the wider Nigerian union in which the South was both economically and culturally dominant, at least during the first republic, and I would say, for much of the military years. This was almost religiously understood by the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) then led by Sardauna and his peers and associates, and was reflected in the government’s northernisation policies of the time, crudely so as some of them were.
Whether in the regional government or at the federal level, the strategy was largely the same: use political power to build other complementary forms of power (economic, intellectual, military, administrative, etc,) for northern Nigeria.
This over-arching political agenda for northern politicians of the First Republic, was, by and large, carried through by even the military governments that followed up to, I rather say, the 1980s or so. For all intents and purposes, northern interests were given as much consideration during the Gowon administration as much as they were during the First Republic, both within the northern region and later, states, and in a federal government headed by General Gowon, and to a lesser extent, all the way down to the 1980s.
Over time, however, there was a weakening of this agenda, of course. As the old northern region gave way to more and more “states”, as the older generations of “northerners” who breathed the political and policy air of “northernisation” gave way to those who did not, in both the North and in the rest of the country, and as several other influences began to manifest, the original idea of northernisation itself began to weaken in politics and general public discourse. It also began to recede in public policy. Where previously you had policies on federal character, educationally less developed states, and so on, that helped to advance this northernisation agenda as outlined here, you would struggle to find their equivalents in Nigeria’s federal government of the past 30 years.
Most importantly, a northernisation agenda based on collective self-interest began to be replaced by a more individually self-interested version of it. Where previously federal political office—either through the ballot or by other means—was primarily to advance collective self-preservation in the name of “One North, One Nigeria”, from at least 2003 to date, in my view, political office has tended more towards self-interest and self-aggrandisement, even if the rhetoric has remained the same.
But how has the South, to the extent that it existed and still exists as a political entity within a federal Nigeria, reacted since the 1960s to date? And most importantly what are the implications of this newer version of northernisation under this government and beyond? Well, let me say keep a date, as usual.
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