Still obsessed with the North-South divide

If anyone thought the chasm between the North and the South was narrowing, the war of words between the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE) and Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) a few days ago should disabuse their minds. On Tuesday, while responding to leaders of the northern women socio-cultural organisation, Jam’iyya Matan Arewa (JMA), in Kaduna, the ACF chairman Ibrahim Coomassie made a terse remark that Nigeria could not survive without the North. He offered neither proof nor expatiation, prompting the suspicion that the statement was not only at variance with the substance of the visit, but that it was the product of his residual and disgruntled irredentism.
According to Mr Coomassie, a former Inspector General of Police, “We all know that without the North, Nigeria can never survive. We still stand by it. But now is the time to walk the talk in the interest of our people.” He then adds, in the same breath: “Chibok girls are still missing. Now it has gone to Dapchi in Yobe State. What happened? Are we always going to be the victims? Boko Haram; see what they did to the Northeast. They have spread over to the Northcentral and even to the southern part of the country. Should we continue to be regarded in the negative side? No. We are leaders in our own right and we must exercise this responsibility for our people. Whenever there is crisis, women and children are always the major victims. Enough is enough. Enough of killings of our women and children, enough of kidnapping of our daughters and enough of destruction of our property.”
Except he was badly reported or misquoted by the reporters who covered the visit, there did not seem to be a connection between his declarative assertion of the North’s indispensability and his jeremiad against the same region’s serial misdeeds. It was not a Freudian slip that Mr Coomassie suggested that the North was indispensable to Nigeria’s survival; it is a dangerous and plainly unsubstantiated conviction rooted in the primordial and narrow worldview of the region’s elite. Had the former police boss limited himself to exposing the socio-economic and cultural contradictions in the region, and to asking for his visitors and every responsible Nigerian to join hands with the ACF to help redress the ills, he would have come across as a responsible and farsighted leader who is passionate about overthrowing the maladies that have arrested or stunted development in the deeply scarred region.
Mr Coomassie’s statement might not be shocking to his visitors or indeed most of the North, but he should have known that to many in the South, what he said was like a red rag to a bull. It was hardly surprising that two days later, the YCE secretary general, Kunle Olajide, took umbrage and fired a volley at Mr Coomassie. Said Dr Olajide humourlessly: “The newspapers reported the Arewa Consultative Forum as saying that Nigeria cannot survive without the North. Whatever was meant by that statement credited to the ACF chairman remains to be understood. However, I congratulate him for accepting that the North, as it is today, represents all that is wrong with Nigeria. The Northeast is ravaged by insurgency costing the country billions of dollars annually. The Northwest is home to religious crisis, and the Northcentral is ravaged by herdsmen of northern extraction. Collectively the North is home to all negative indices of the quality of life. Infant mortality rate is highest in the North.”
Not done, and still feeling provoked, the YCE scribe added: “Illiteracy rate is highest in the North and the number of out-of-school children is highest in the North. The poverty index in the North is high, while the twin evil bedevilling the North is feudalism and religious fatalism. It will not be out of place to say the North has in fact been dragging Nigeria down since independence. All sorts of mischievous phrases were coined  by the very tiny political/military elite of the North to give undue advantage to the North.” Clearly, northern and southern elites have very unflattering but differing picture of Nigeria and the tenuous existential chord that binds the beleaguered country together.
It would have been both fitting and helpful had Mr Coomassie offered a definable and rational basis for his assertion on the North’s indispensability. Perhaps he will still do so, if not now, maybe a little later. It would help to shed light on whether he was in fact suggesting that the country’s greatness would be advanced by a deft application of the North’s huge economic potentials; or whether he was implausibly arguing that Nigeria would be untenable without the North, and that the other parts of Nigeria, whether singly or collectively, could not hope to survive because of a lack of potential or resources. Short of second-guessing the ACF chairman, and risk getting it woefully wrong, the analyst must resist the temptation to expand his provocative assertion beyond its ordinary grammatical meaning.
It would be helpful if the North and the South, and the various peoples of Nigeria, overcame their mutual suspicions to strenuously forge a nation out of their disparate nationalities. There are immense possibilities in forging a country with a common objective, a centralising national identity, and a noble and inspiring continental destiny. So far, unfortunately, Nigerian leaders have neither shown the intellect nor summoned the will to build a stable and progressive country. But to suggest that one part could not survive without the other is not only sentimental nonsense, it is ignorant and self-serving. Take Nigeria’s three leading ethnic groups, the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, for instance. None is less populous than the topographically challenged Netherlands (Pop. circa 17.2m), or the small and semiarid Israel (Pop. 8.8m). Divided opportunistically along the lines drained by the Rivers Niger and Benue, the three former regions could hold their own admirably in the world. And should the country fracture along the expedient six geopolitical zones, they would still be able to hold their own in the world. And so whether three or six zones, there is little doubt that they would put their shoulders to the wheel and survive.
Mr Coomassie’s argument is unhelpful and jaded. It is not supported by economics, geography or politics. It is suspected that his narrow and prejudiced views are popular among many northern governors and possibly even the presidency. The facts, however, show that no region of Nigeria, including the North, would collapse should the country be dismembered. What Nigerian leaders should be preoccupied with, rather than holding on to and propagating tired narratives, is to identify and strengthen common grounds, and to help produce a new crop of leaders not hamstrung by old and diseased perceptions of Nigeria. Mr Coomassie’s views are provocative and futile, and Dr Olajide’s riposte two days later was also fierce and counterproductive. Both viewpoints are unfortunately representative of the popular view of the tenuousness of Nigerian unity and the impermanence of its borders. By a combination of deep prejudice and ignorance, Nigerian leaders have proved mystifyingly incapable of reversing such dominant views or mitigating their injurious consequences.
Admittedly, such trenchant and uninformed views do not amount to hate speech by any stretch; they are only dangerously anachronistic. After three major democratic false starts between 1960 and 1999, the Fourth Republic was supposed to offer the country a golden chance to make amends, rebuild the foundations of the country, and begin carefully, intelligently and synergetically to recreate a new nation from the diseased and aging one. Sadly, that hope has proved to be a chimera, especially with the older elite and unimaginative political, ethnic and religious leaders fanning the embers of mistrust and exploiting the issues and controversies that divide the country. But until Nigeria can find the right structure to guarantee balance and stability, and manage to put the right leaders in office, it would be nothing but platitudinous to speak glowingly and fondly of a crop of leaders destined to unify and lead the country to greatness.

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