There was territorial tension in Nigeria last week. Like in the famous fable where animals gathered in the forest to delineate their individual boundaries, last Tuesday, Northern Nigeria regrouped in Kaduna in aid of its territory. Western Nigeria Awurebe music lord, Late Ibadan, Oyo State-born Dauda Epo Akara, has the patent of a folklore that captures this fictional animal gathering. Epo sang about a quartet of animals comprising Lion, Fox, Cobra and Tortoise which can be extrapolated into a human gathering. It was a power show and territorial delineation. The animals did not only gather to flex muscles but to have a mutual understanding of the power in their pouches. In a July 17, 1995 article published in the Nigerian Tribune, authored by late Dr. Omololu Olunloyo, ex-governor of Oyo State, the famous mathematician and politician looked at that same fable from a power calculus prism. Ace columnist, Dr. Lasisi Olagunju, in an Olunloyo memorial symposium recently, uprooted the folklore from the archive and situated its essence.
Each of the animals was embittered by past territorial usurpation. As they complained, they also criminalized any further attempt to take one another for granted. This they curated in form of taboos, the irreducible minimum of their tempers’ elasticity, a violation of which would bring the beast out of them.
For Cobra, he could tolerate his head or even the back being stepped upon in elementary power duel. However, anyone who trod on his tail in power contestation should be ready to meet Asarailu, Muslims’ angel of death. Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) Board Chairman, Bashir Dalhatu, would seem to represent the Cobra in the folklore. Like a reptile ready to sting with its deadly venom, Dalhatu spat out the north’s grouse. President Bola Tinubu, he said, had underdeveloped the north. Rising insecurity, poor infrastructure, declining agricultural support, neglect of education and healthcare of the children of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, were the president’s 26-month infractions.
In territorial politics, the north has always been unexampled of the two old Nigerian regions. Highly savvy and purposeful in its romance of power, the north acts like the proverbial hollow-eyed whose tears stream out in a long course. The north’s entitlement, said Dalhatu, was its demographic contribution to Tinubu’s emergence. What gave Tinubu the temerity to trifle with Ahmadu Bello’s progeny who gave him 64 per cent of the total votes that crowned him?
Convened at the instance of Uba Sani, Kaduna state governor and one of Tinubu’s political sidekicks, the undisguised raison d’être of the gathering was to dissolve mounting perceived undercurrents of the north’s dissatisfaction with the Tinubu government. In the last 26 months, the children of the Sardauna of Sokoto have bickered in ones and groups. The North, they claimed, has been severely marginalized in federal allocations, project execution, and key appointments. Of greater fundament, they complain, is the ravaging pestilence of insurgency. Don’t our fathers say, before the Sòbìyà, a guinea worm parasitic infectious disease, becomes a painful wound is the appropriate time to call for its doctor, the Olúgànbe?
Fox, Lion and Tortoise were also at The Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation (SABMF)-organized event which drew participants from across the 19 Northern states and the FCT. For these three animals, their anger and prognosis for stopping further territorial hurt was without equivocation. Fox spoke next. It was abominable for his deadly face to be looked at by anyone, he said. It was then the turn of the Lion to speak. If anyone impugned this animal’s dignity, reputed for scarifying his victims without a scalpel (akom’o ní’là láì l’abe), the recompense was bloodbath for the transgressor, he spelled the word audibly. Tortoise told the conferees that he was aware of his own bitchy ugliness, especially the amoebic shape of his splintered carapace, but it was not the remit of anyone to mock him. Epo Akara put it more succinctly. Anyone else could haggle the price of the dye in the hands of a traditional dry-cleaner but not a bed-wetter, he sang. Anyone who engaged in such body-shaming would have to endure a “very lethal punishment” from him.
Chairman of the Northern Elders’ Forum (NEF), Prof. Ango Abdullahi, for that moment, became one of the animals. He was angry about recent relocation of key Central Bank departments from Abuja to Lagos, a move he condemned as “suspicious and divisive”. He equaled the so-called marginalization of Northern Nigeria as a threat to Nigeria’s unity and development. Abdullahi told the president that there was a growing number of out-of-school children in the north, a figure he put at 80 per cent of Nigeria’s estimated 20 million out-of-school children.
“If just half of the N15 trillion national budget were allocated to education, we would have no child out of school. That money would provide schools, teachers, and equipment,” he said, with a further criticism of the state of infrastructure in the North. “You can’t talk about national development when a whole region remains disconnected,” he said. Like the animals proposing condition for armistice, Abdullahi proposed the allocation of N7.5 trillion each to education and roads in the North.
Amity reigned in the animal kingdom after this “Memorandum of Association”. It was the same peace that reigned after, I reckon, this same northern bloc met Tinubu before the 2023 election. What must have given the Abdullahis and Dalhatus of the north the weapon to show this kind of entitlement? My guess is that there must have been a breakdown of agreement between them and Tinubu. Not long after the animals signed their own Memorandum, a rupture soon came. One fateful day, Tortoise, with his wobbly weight and unsightly limbs, walked into the gathering of his colleagues. His gait immediately provoked laughter among them. Miffed by this rank rupture of a gentlemanly agreement, Tortoise, notorious for his trickster traits, reached for his pouch of trickery. He immediately hid himself behind a twig of trees not too far from the animals. From there, he dug his limb into the soil and spattered loose soil on the fur coat of Fox.
Angered, Fox spat on the Lion whom he wrongly believed was responsible for this. Lion roared, his mane fluffing in indescribable fury as the whole forest shook in a seismic burst. He then charged at Fox who he assumed was responsible for breaking this taboo. In the pandemonium that ensued, Lion and Fox mistakenly stomped on the tail of the Cobra, breaking his spinal cord. As a last minute revenge, Cobra spat his venom which immediately temporarily blinded the two. The fight was so intense that both Fox and Lion inflicted fatal wounds on each other’s jugular. In no long a time, the bodies of the three giants of the forest lay in a heap, in a mutually assured destruction.
In the folklore told by the trio of Epo Akara, Olunloyo and Olagunju, the eventual tragedy of the quartet was similar. Olagunju explains the tragedy thus: “As to cause of death, Lion died from a fatal snake bite, Fox from being torn to pieces by His Royal Majesty, the Lion, whilst Cobra had his vital backbone crushed in the scuffle. The battered tortoise hobbled away quite amused but not before having his back shell broken when the lion squashed it, in a mad rush after receiving a snake bite.”
Since the 1914 amalgamation of the Southern and Northern protectorates by Lord Lugard, the two regions have worn their fatal flaws on their lapels. While the south, first port of call of white colonialists, took its Westernism to the extreme, the north prides itself in how it weaponizes its magisterial understanding of the calculus of power.
Why did Dalhatu, Abdullahi and other sons of Ahmadu Bello who railed at Tinubu last Tuesday feel they were entitled to their bile? The north always feels it holds the ace in Nigeria’s murky and voodoo demographic politics. Since 1866 when the first population census exercise took place in Nigeria in the Lagos colony, the 1914 census became the first census after the amalgamation of that year and the first to cover the whole of what is now Nigeria. The demographics were however done on account of estimates and tax records. The 1931 and 1941 censuses were stalled largely by a force majeure. While the 1931 count was disrupted by a twin manifestation of unrest in eastern Nigeria and the ravaging locust swarms in the north, the 1941 exercise could not be held due to World War 11. Others that have taken place include the 1962 and 1991 exercises. The May 1962 census was highly contested with both western and eastern Nigeria claiming that the figures were doctored. They claimed the result was based on negotiation and not enumeration.
In the words of J. P. Mackintosh in his The Struggle for Power in Nigeria (1965), “the Northern figures (showed) a rise of 300% (17.5 million to 22.5 million) while the East and West claimed rises of about 70%. The Minister in charge, a Northerner, decided to carry out a ‘verification’ which pushed the North up by 80%. When some of these facts became known, there was a political outcry and the Eastern members walked out of the House of Representatives. Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa took the census into his office and asked the Regional Officers to make a completely fresh count. When this was done (at the end of 1963) almost the same results emerged, with the North’s rise keeping pace with the figures claimed by the South.”
The crisis from the 1962 census was part of what eventually led to the military putsch of January 1966. The census that took place in 1973 was not published due to same allegations of falsification. The 2006 exercise happened to be the most recent.
The territorial politics that happened in Kaduna last week is the type the north has always used to transform ethnicity into an identity. It does this for the sake of aiming to gain political power. The weapon of actualizing this is demographics. This was hoisted a few weeks ago when the rump of CPC in the APC hoisted a nebulous 12 million votes with which it hoped to whip Tinubu into line. Since the British began attempts at a nationwide population census, it had always faced the accusation that it planned to favour its northern quisling ahead of the south. The south claims that the whole population exercises in the north is a sham, buoyed by the amorphous Purdah system where enumerators are forbidden from entering delineated harem homes wherein is written “Baa siga, gidan aore ne” – entrance barred because it is inhabited by married women. Accusation of sudden inflow into Nigeria of nationals of Niger, Chad and contiguous countries surrounding the north is also rife in enumeration time. The aim of doing this is to bloat population numbers for the sake of securing more government funding and political representation. It led Azuka Nwachukwu to conclude, in his ‘Politics and Census in Nigeria: Challenges and the Way Forward’ that, “falsification of population census result, religion rivalry, ethnicity stimulation and fluctuation of period of conducting census serve as a controlling force against accuracy of population census figures.”
Since 1999 when the 4th Republic commenced, as each election cycle is afoot, the north takes Nigeria into inter-ethnic tensions while hoisting the primacy of its ethnicity. This politicized ethnicity made Goodluck Jonathan run from pillar to post to satisfy the region in 2015. It was all to no avail. Jonathan flew to Sokoto to establish the nomadic school. I doubt if that school ever functioned till today. His fatal nudge was to think education was the problem of the north. He was wrong. Continuation of a feudal hold on the Talakawas is it. Jonathan brought on board his government elites of the Ahmadu Bello’s progeny. It failed to rouse the region in his support. The north was rather obsessed with bringing its most vacant-minded son to administer Nigeria. From 2015 to 2023 of Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, he kept on nourishing that same barren path of prejudicing northern elite ahead of rescuing northern children from ignorance of Almajiri. The result is the metastasis we have today of insurgency. The roam-abouts of yesterday have come of age, equipped with burning fury against their elite captors.
I agree absolutely with Kaduna State governor, Uba Sani, that it will be unfair for the north to blame its backwardness on Tinubu. From July 28, 1966 when it took over power, except for the accident of history that produced Olusegun Obasanjo in 1976, northern leaders have consistently and woefully failed to provide a future for the north. It was the lack of the will to combat the vermin of roam-about, born-trowey children – apologies to Mrs. Patience Jonathan – that birthed and energized the incubus of Boko Haram and allied insurgent activities in the north. How can Tinubu be victimized for this? On this violence affliction which the north brought upon Nigeria, this country has spent trillions of Naira of annual budgetary allocations, as well as martyred thousands of its soldier children, in service of decades of this elite fatal flaw.
I am interested in knowing how northern son, Buhari, fared in taming insecurity in his eight years rule, as compared to Tinubu’s two years, to warrant Dalhatu’s blame. Dalhatu’s allegation is that, under this government, “the North remains under siege, with insurgent groups multiplying and attacks becoming increasingly deadly.” How much of Dalhatu’s “widespread violence — including massacres, bombings, kidnappings and cattle rustling” which he said “has crippled economic and social progress across the region” did Buhari tackle? What was the percentage of Buhari government’s funding of agriculture, education, infrastructure and healthcare, and implementation of policies that promote equitable development across the country? When Buhari sat in Aso Rock for eight years picking his teeth, how much of this territorial politics did the north play? Only statistics can trump the mashed potato of rhetoric and impassioned arguments of the north.
Like the intense fight of Fox, Lion, Cobra and Tortoise and its attendant mutual infliction of fatal wounds, the north’s card of politicized ethnicity has a potential of a mutually assured destruction. As the bodies of the three giants of the forest lay in a heap, the moment Tinubu finds a way round the north’s territorial politics, he will, like Tortoise, though bruised, walk away from its self-inflicted wounds. When some of Ahmadu Bello progeny’s brown-noses argue that since 1999, the north has spent less years in the Villa than the south, as rationalization for the region to again be in office in 2027, they make one want to puke. It is a self-serving argument. The question to ask is, is the period from 1966 to 1999 no longer part of Nigeria’s history? In other words, did Nigeria start in 1999?
