Lack of vision, sense of mission and willingness to serve the people altruistically, the political heads of our state governments have wrought great havoc on the idea of northern Nigeria. Consequently, the people are left at the mercy of brutal geopolitics of threats, intimidation, power covetousness, restructuring, resource control and misrepresentation of historical reality. This is the context that is slowly and steadily dawning upon the people of northern Nigeria. The truism of the dictum that he who controls the economy ultimately controls the politics of a nation and everything existing in-between is now sinking in the people. In the type of federal structure we are operating, governors are the most critical political agency responsible for steering both state and society in any direction, desirable or undesirable. If things go well or sour in any of our states, we should get hold of the governors to account. The buck stops with them.
The most important indicator to the direction things are assuming can be seen in the current politics of restructuring and resource control, which fills the spaces of public discourse in both mainstream and social media in Nigeria. Right from the time it all started from the 1980s, the North seems to be ambivalent about it or, at worst, unwilling to allow the political structures inherited from colonial administrators to be tinkered with by those calling for restructuring. The North is of course behaving as if Lord Lugard has appointed it to be the permanent custodian of colonial legacy in Nigeria’s postcolonial history. The people of the North and their leaders must learn to come to terms with realities of the moment. Nigeria of yesterday is not Nigeria of today. Assumptions and prejudices of yesteryears are no longer applicable to contemporary realities. There’s then the need to change approach and tactics to geopolitical contests and modes of politicking.
Attempts at far-reaching political restructuring have earnestly kick-started with the total abandonment of the parliamentary system for a presidential one with the fashioning of the rigorously debated 1979 Constitution. Clearly, this was the bid that saw to the inauguration of second republic with the emergence of President Shehu Shagari as the first democratically elected executive president of Nigeria. Even those efforts that were made, were apparently done at the behest of military regimes that have ruled Nigeria successively with the cessation of hostilities after the Nigerian civil war. Since then the clamor for “true federalism” has continued unabated by people that think the restructuring would assume the shape of their imaginings. This therefore means the clamoring for true federalism is a euphemism for resource control and political restructuring of Nigeria on the basis of a clearly defined agenda of the some vested political interests of a section of the country irrespective of the feelings of the other section of the country, especially those sections that appear to be opposed to restructuring.
My advice to northern governors is for them to prepare to gird their loins so that they can come to terms with the evolving political and economic realities in the country. In a corporate world that is no longer ruled by whims and caprices of political leaders, sound ideas, creative thinking, instrumental knowledge and innovation for economic growth and technology are reigning supreme in advanced countries of the West. Capitalism cannot survive without those fundamental driving principles. The market and its voracious commodification processes and profit motive are today the ultimate determinants of the direction state and society assumes. That is what globalization is all about; that is also the new brutal reality mediated by corporate capitalism. This neoliberal creed does not recognize the logic of any age-old system of values, ethics or morality other than what it brings forth on its own terms. Whether we like it or not, that’s the selfish credo governing social structuring of nations and regions of the world. In the strictest sense of a popular dictum: he who has knowledge has power; indeed he who has knowledge has everything.
To be able to come to terms with what is at stake as the second decade of the 20th century is about to come to an end, northern Nigeria, no matter how its diverse peoples perceived its constitution, is the entity in which they eke their existence. Therefore, its leaders must come together to address its mounting problems. We must embark on far-reaching structural reforms, not the kind of reforms advocated by global capitalism. Indeed there are so many things that need to be done to revamp our weak social arena. First and foremost, we must aggressively pursue education reforms. Apart from the urgency to address falling standards of education in our schools and colleges, infrastructural deterioration, poor staffing and lack of personnel motivation are also the other militating factors.
There is the need to review the curriculum in all subject areas for the purpose of making the system of education more functional. Our education system must be geared towards servicing and attaining our development goals. In this regard, education must then be made relevant to the essential needs of society. Good education has a multiplier effect on social life in its totality. By all parameters of evaluation, education can serve as the linchpin of all aspects of development. Our governors must therefore spearhead transformation in this critical sector. In fact, leaders that have reached where they are now by dint of public education have no right whatsoever to criminally neglect public school system to the sorry state it has found itself now.
To underscore the significance of qualitative social development, the strategic role of agriculture cannot be realized without a viable system of education. It is only education that will facilitate the introduction of more efficient yields through newer and better farming techniques. Although agriculture is the mainstay of northern Nigerian economy, the vast majority of our unenlightened farmers would never be able to realize its potentials and value chains without some modicum of functional education. We must stop paying lip service to alternative sources of revenue because we are enjoying the flow of petro-dollars from oil. The agricultural sector in northern Nigeria has been completely neglected as a result of our thoughtless reliance on oil economy. The discovery of oil in Nigeria and our total reliance on it as the only source of revenue has indeed led to gross neglect of all other sectors of the economy.
There is no excuse for the people of the North with the vast land and volume of rainfall we are experiencing year in year out. Land, as the saying goes, is wealth. Recent example to showcase the potentials of our agricultural economy is by the Kebbi state government. The state government experiment with rice production and export of goats to Saudi Arabia is a case in point. My own argument here is simply that agriculture must be linked to industrial production. Our industrialization takeoff point must be agriculture based. Thus, mechanization of agriculture must go hand in hand with industrial processing. We cannot enjoy the value chains of our agricultural resources without taking agriculture to the next level in which we purposefully processed the commodities we produce from our farms in corresponding industries. We will definitely lose the value chains if we solely rely on selling primary produce the way we are doing now. This is where visionary and responsible leadership matters greatly.
Beyond agriculture, there is the abundance of other natural resources that we are currently not seeing. It is imperative to do just that considering our continuous consumption habits of fossils fuels. We are indeed living in a world in which there is a growing consciousness of environmental pollution, ozone layer depletion and climate change that have been caused by the quantum of carbon monoxide emissions in the atmosphere by all categories of combustion engines. The major culprit in environmental problems is fossil fuels and dangerous chemicals that have polluted the air. However, the extraction of carbon fuels from a particular section of Nigeria and the country’s almost total dependence on such unsustainable sources, as number one source of federal revenue, is not healthy for the economic wellbeing of Nigeria.
That is to say, the predominance of the political economy of oil is also not healthy for Nigeria, a country endowed with other untapped natural resources. Northern governors should do themselves a lot of good by buckling up to face the task of serving the people selflessly and diligently on the basis of sound ideas. They must stop behaving like an ostrich with its head buried in the sand, as they pretend there is no existential threats to the region from the kind of geopolitical contestations for control of power and resources. Agitations for resource control are for real, and have come to stay in Nigeria until such a moment when acceptable and more equitable revenue sharing formula is fashioned out through the inevitable political restructuring. The only way out for northern Nigeria is to look inward with the view to harnessing and developing its own God given resources.
The other issue that must be attended to is peaceful co-existence between our communities in the region. There is just no way for any meaningful social development insofar as the kind of acrimonies, ethno-religious conflicts and communal crises that have been dotting our states would be allowed to continue. The governors should desist from fuelling the fault-lines that are persistently causing disharmony in society. They should be sincere, honest and forthcoming in addressing problems militating against the progress of northern Nigeria. Our governors should do well to recall that northern Nigeria is a very diverse environment with different ethnic groups, cultures and religions. In the first republic, these fault-lines were delicately handled to the extent that all and sundry had to develop sense of belonging to the region despite their cultural diversity, plural identities and religious differences.
Mr Liman is professor of Comparative Literature and Popular Culture at Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria
