Okello Oculi
11 March 2008
opinion
General Theophilus Danjuma (Rtd) characterised the conference organised by the "LEADERSHIP NEWSPAPERS' as a "Lazarus" affair because its participants had been invited "to perform a miracle, the miracle of raising the dead-- the dead industries in the North".
He chaired the conference; delivered a pace-setting paper; steered the draft of its communique through a raucous amendment ritual, and gave the closing speech at its end. A striking theme of his closing remarks was the combative notion that the development of Northern Nigeria ,in general, and its re-industrialisation, in particular, must be fuelled, immediately by a resolve to "name and shame" leaders whose activities and policies bring retardation and harm to the North. This theme of directing critical reviews at the North's leadership in a search for development in general, and re-industrilization of the region, in particular, is interrogated here.
To this effect, a start can be made from examining a critique made by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, on February 2, 1994, at a conference in Kaduna on the theme: "The State of the Nation and the Way Forward". Obasanjo had taken as an issue of critical concern a statement credited to Alhaji Maitama Sule in which functional specialties were attributed to each of Nigeria's three largest nationality groups. To the Igbo group he was reported to have atrributed the national burden of undertaking the country's commercial enterprisesto their highest levels because trade and money-making ran in their blood. The "Yoruba race" were to assume responsibility for the country's diplomatic missions because they show a tallent for exploiting the art of telling lies. The Hausa-Fulani, he is said to have claimed, have natural talent and flare for undertaking leadership tasks.
In European political thought, the Greek thinker Plato, is credited with this recommendation for the organization of people is a society according to the jobs their natural endowments make them most usefully fit for. It is a view that, over the years, has received damning criticism from various angles. President Obasanjo, on his part, rejected its application to Nigerian affairs because it permanently shuts out certain ethnic groups from assuming leadership over the country . It does so on the sole grounds of their belonging to a particular ethnic group. Although he did openly liken that Platonic formula to the doctrine of racial discrimination in apartheid South Africa (against which Nigeria had committed enormous resources and diplomatic exertion to combat and eliminate from the face of southern Africa), its echoes were there in his angry rejection of it.
Obasanjo could have usefully gone further to engage his Kaduna audience to a closer examination of cultural echoes in Maitama Sule's notion of leadership as a societal burden. Within Hausa-Fulani traditions of social engineering, Plato's formula seemed familiar Peasant farmers, as a matter of necessity, faced the hard muscular labour of breaking soils to plant crops ; harvested, processed it products(including grinding and threshing); while in the nomadic sector millions had over centuries herded livestock in rain and sun over vast distances. There were those in society who carried arms for war in the service of the aristocracy. The class that assumed leadership positions stood apart from theabove burdens but owned plantations on which slaves and tenants laboured and produced food for them to consume, often without a sense of obligation to ensure that they shared yields with other groups in society.
Obasanjo's further examination of Alhaji Maitama Sule's notion of the burden of rulership being the preserve of those classes that Obasanjo was competing and arguing with, might have led into interesting socio-political territory. Within the framework of the history of Nigeria's federal bureaucracy, for example, it has been reported that the late Mallam Liman Ciroma once expressed deep regret that his generation of Northern leaders may have failed those coming after them by treating them to accelerated promotion to top positions in the federal civil service, parastatals and other public institutions, including banking. By so doing, they denied these youths benefits of those rigorous demands that had been made on them, as civil servants ,by British colonial practice by which one sweated one's way up the promotion ladder through slow, systematic, examination-based climbings. As an officer went up,he or she learned the art of tossing ideas against the brilliance and insights of other officers as files travelled along corridors and lanes of power and decision-making. However, due to a novel haste of "catching up" with officials from the Southern part of Nigeria, (through the device of rapid promotions of young officers from the North), the tested developmental merits of the slow and sweat-filled British road, was denied these beneficiaries. New psychological stresses were introduced as these inexperienced Northern officials were often made to head departments and sections in government ministries ;and give orders to those more experienced and knowledgable than them. More importantly, the dictum of working hard to deserve promotions was replaced by leaning heavily on who one knew among higher powers to help catapult one along.
It did not take long before maladies like that was reported by the late Major Yohana Madaki (Rtd). In a New Nigerian interview, Madaki complained ,with fermented bitterness, about selections of those sent for military training at Sandhurst; American and Indian military training centres, became increasingly based on an officer being related to a family tree in the Hausa-Fulani aristocracy. By 1999, classifying legitmate "northerness" between those from the so-called "core North" ,and the others ,became part of official political bargaining with Obasanjo over power sharing. This would be followed by panic-laced appeals for a retracing of steps ,by Northern elites, back to visions of a trans-ethnic, trans-religious Northern Nigeria that was once sketched out by Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. It could be surmised that the painstaking tradition of the British colonial civil service (by which civil servants and political leaders assumed responsibility for inventing paths for the progress of a complex British empire), had been abandoned at a very high cost to Northern Nigeria.
By way of contrast, a comparative glance at biographical profiles of leading members of the academic clan in Northern Nigeria seems necessary. An obvious fact ,in the last four decades, has been the high visibility of "a season of migration" from academia to government jobs and politics. Like the rivers Niger and Benue, there has been very limited backward flows. The migrants ignored, (and were allowed by cultural and political leaders to ignore), the necessity of writing globally commendable text books in fields such as tropical medicine, engineering, mathematics, architecture, agriculture, economics, etc. At a rather mundane level, the challenge of inventing machines and teasing out new products out of agricultural products through industrial processing remains,glaringly lacking. Chemists and engineers remained publicly unchallenged to meet their potential missions and emulate their imperial peers elsewhere. African-Americans readily boast that "peanut butter" (or pounded fried groundnut paste), was invented by a black man. Northern Nigeria, as a major groundnut producing ecology, is yet to create its local academic heroes in this field. Even a suggestive honorary degree to the legendary women who invented "kuli kuli" ( a cake from groundnut paste), remains ignored and its symbolic value wasted. The same goes for the shea-butter tree. It grows in a vast belt from Senegal through Burkina Faso , Mali, to Northern Nigeria. I do not recall any exciting discourses about scientic explorations of secret powers in its fruit by scientists at Ahmadu Bello University. I have since learnt that the Japanese companies make millions out of it for manufacturing money-spinning cosmetics and various other pharmaceutical offsprings. This should get priority attention.
Oculi is Executive Direcctor, Africa Vision 525 Initiative
To be continued tomorrow
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