by Akin Osuntokun

Personally I cannot wait for the day when my sense of dignity will be enhanced by the knowledge that Nigerians no longer need to prostrate before the gods of the Niger Delta to get their daily bread; when I can call the bluff of Asari Dokubo, look him in his crude oil contorted face and tell him, to hell with you and your oil!

Columnists seeking honest and well-considered repartees to their write-ups will seldom be gratified by comments from the lot of online anonymous responders. It is clear that majority of the responses, often scurrilous and censorious, are motivated by individuals and interest groups who feel offended by the column in contention. In the same breadth and to a lesser degree, those who feel their patrons or causes complemented will flatter you to no end. Nonetheless, the saucy interventions can sometimes be entertaining and hilarious.

The most disturbing sub-category consists of those who reflect poor, very poor education and can hardly string together a grammatically correct statement and sustain a logical train of thought. It is bad enough to suffer the tyrannical outbursts of the emissaries of wounded or inflated partisan egos; it becomes outright insufferable to be lectured by ill-educated egomaniacs who presume to sit in judgment over what they do not understand and are incapable of understanding. If there is ever a justification for intellectual disdain, the provocation for such will be amply found in the pedestrian nastiness of these educationally challenged censors.

At the other end was a senior colleague, who is no longer with us on planet earth. To put it mildly he was a self-adulating intellectual. ‘We intellectuals know ourselves’ was his preening trademark refrain. He would entertain observations on his writings only by those he considers intellectually sophisticated enough to qualify for the ‘admission by membership only’ of his fan club. To his fawning admirers whom he deems intellectual inferiors, he would exclaim in mild rebuke ‘you mean you understood what I wrote! Unfortunately or fortunately, he did not live long enough to experience the irony of how the quantum development leap of ICT has spawned a large unbecoming spectacle of imprudent display of garbled language and wilful ignorance.

It is not all bad. There has been the occasional sublime rejoinder and others of compelling wit. I laughed at myself the other day when I came across a one liner riposte to an advocacy I prefaced with a ringing revolutionary quote from Frantz Fanon-“in relative opacity each generation must discover its mission, fulfil or betray it” and this guy, dripping with sarcasm, reminded me “after chopping with obj”! Of decidedly less comic relief utility is the departure point for today’s topic and it goes “Akin and the arrogance of Yoruba intellectuals, someone like Akin believes that anyone who is not a personal friend is hawkish and regional as such not worthy of Nigerian presidency.” I don’t think the writer of this post will ever win the prize for communication arts but sadly it is typical enough. He was making reference to my standard presidential materials from the North namely Nuhu Ribadu, Aliko Dangote, Dangiwa Umar and lately Kashim Imam, all of whom, as he rightly observed, are my friends. ‘Regional and hawkish’ was my characterisation of Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso and for which reason I do not fancy him as the president of Nigeria Show me your friends and I know who you are says the adage.

As far as public personae goes in the context of Nigeria today I don’t think they come any better than the select individuals I identified as worthy potential presidents. I have nothing personal against Kwankwaso or any other presidential aspirant on who I have offered a critical opinion. And nobody can accuse me of inability or unwillingness to substantiate any position I take in the public domain.

Of them all I have related with Umar longest. He has a unique virtue within the context of our cleavage ridden, overly self-centred and immediate gratification driven politics. He is self-critical, sacrificial and governed by enlightened self-interest. In the annulment of the 1993 presidential election, Umar found an opportunity to express an inherent defiant and rebellious streak looking to serve a higher social or political purpose. It is how he had chosen to play the aristocrat — he is a Fulani prince from Gwandu. The French call it noblesse oblige — ‘benevolent, honourable behaviour considered as the responsibility of persons of high birth or rank’. And it comes with a cost. It was the reason he didn’t progress beyond the rank of a colonel, he risked and lost his commission for crying more than the bereaved.

Umar may not have articulated his internal struggles and motivations as such but he is striving to reinvent the engagement of the North with the rest of Nigeria on a philosophical platform that is less beholden to the increasingly unsustainable logic of hegemonic political dominance. He sees the annulment of the 1993 presidential victory of the late Chief Moshood Abiola as the worst strategic political blunder and deems the North guilty by association. He believes the persistent political difficulties of the North is owed to the road not taken on the outcome of the 1993 presidential election and sees the handiwork of nemesis and retribution in its dwindling political fortunes.

He is worried and exasperated at the wilful inability of the Northern political elite to come to terms with a considerably altered political power landscape and move on. Above all, he eschews the cheap hysterical resort to demagoguery, hypocrisy and cant in the conduct of political leaders. Said Umar: “I have always wondered at the fate of this zoning formula-had Obasanjo become incapacitated before the completion of his first term, would then Vice-President Atiku Abubakar forgo the opportunity to contest in 2003 and for a second term in 2007 since the Presidency was zoned to the South for eight years, starting from 1999?”

I’m not familiar with the social background of Professor Ango Abdulahi but a man who rose to become the vice-chancellor of a premier Nigerian university has led a life of distinction. It is not necessary to recall his notoriety in that esteemed position to make the point that he has defined for himself a role comparable to that of Asari Dokubo. It is the role of the pedestrian demagogue.

These are his testimonies “What we said was that Obasanjo was a beneficiary of the benevolence of the North, at least politically. When he became head of state, a Northerner could have been the head of state if he wanted at the time Obasanjo was offered the responsibility… Let’s even go back to the beginning. It is the North that developed the present day oil industry in this country. It is Northern money; Jonathan is a product of the North, whether he likes it or not… I just finished telling you that from 1914 up till the 1950s, money had to be brought from the Northern region for the Western and Eastern regions to balance their budgets. Go and check the records.”

If someone of the career accomplishment of Abdulahi chooses to play the demagogue there should be an irreducible minimum standard beyond which he should not fall in that identity. The condescending and patron-client relationship he recklessly evokes on former President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan is precisely the reason his imperial North is shrinking politically by the day. How dignifying is the citizenship of a country in which you have to be a ‘product of the North or a beneficiary of the benevolence of the North’ to aspire to become president? His hubris knows no bounds neither is it a respecter of the boundary between fact and fiction. ‘It is the North and Northern money that developed the oil industry’, he airily asserts. Pray which Northern money and what is Northern money by the way? Is this the stuff Professors and Vice Chancellors are made of?

I took up the challenge of going to check the records-as dared by Professor Abdulahi, on how ‘from 1914 up till the 1950s, money had to be brought from the Northern region for the Western and Eastern regions to balance their budgets’. Believe me it is a chore I would rather not undertake. I can use my time more profitably but people like Abdulahi should be unraveled and exposed so that the next time he fouls the air, Nigerians would know we are dealing with the reincarnation of Wada Nas.

My valiant efforts and discountenance of contrary overwhelming evidence notwithstanding, I searched in vain for any semblance of this superfluous historical revisionism. The closest match, in terms of the financial health status of the Northern and Southern provinces, I could get was ‘the annual report on the social and economic progress of the people of Nigeria, 1936-37 in the hansards of the Colonial government’. It speaks for itself.

“The totals of actual revenue and expenditure for 1936-37 of all the native treasuries together were GBP1453718 and GBP1477818 respectively (Northern provinces GBP913954 (revenue) and GBP985755 (expenditure); Southern provinces GBP539764 (revenue) and GBP492063 (expenditure) When you reconcile the revenue and expenditure profile of both group of provinces as highlighted in the consecutive figures corresponding to the North and South, the former spent more money than it earned while the traffic went the other way for the latter. The North had a deficit of GBP71905, while the South had a surplus of GBP47701.

In 1914, Lord Lugard wrote in his report on the amalgamation of Nigeria… ‘Southern Nigeria, on the other hand, presented a picture which was in almost all points the exact converse of that in the North. Here the material prosperity had been extraordinary. The revenue had almost doubled itself in a period of five years. The surplus balances exceeded a million and a half. And so while Northern Nigeria was devoting itself to building up a system of Native Administration and laboriously raising revenue by direct taxation, Southern Nigeria had found itself engrossed in material development’.

The wild claims of Abdulahi should be our strongest wishes and aspirations for the future. Any development that results in the North being able to underwrite the South will almost certainly have a dramatic impact on Nigeria’s economic viability. Personally I cannot wait for the day when my sense of dignity will be enhanced by the knowledge that Nigerians no longer need to prostrate before the gods of the Niger Delta to get their daily bread; when I can call the bluff of Asari Dokubo, look him in his crude oil contorted face and tell him, to hell with you and your oil!

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