Strictly Personal
Who Is Dividing The North? By Lasisi Olagunju
Published
2 years agoon
Speaking at a book launch in Kaduna Thursday last week, Prof Ango Abdullahi, leader of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), accused some unnamed persons of engaging in destructive campaigns to destroy the north. “I have to state here that we are witnessing some of the crudest and most unproductive campaigns to create divisions between Hausa and Fulani people, and create distances between Christians and Muslims in the north,” he said, and promised that “these contemptible attempts will fail.” He hinged his optimism of victory on what he called the campaigns’ lack of “support in history going back centuries, or in the recent past.” The north, he said, may differ in faith and ethnicity, but “history, geography and our experiences in living as Nigerians have created roots and bonds that cannot be destroyed by desperate political gambits.”
Do not dismiss Ango Abdullahi’s cries; he has his reasons. For many in the north, W.H. Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ is their day’s opening and closing glee: There, clocks have stopped ticking; pianos are silenced, drums muffled; there is at least a mourner in every home. The public doves of the north are in black; rural terror and urban bandits have put out the stars; they have poured away the ocean, packed up the moon, and dismantled the sun. Whether Muslim or Christian, farmer or herder, Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’ tolls the knell of their toil. It is their song of dispraise. The owl has been long out unchallenged; birds of death fade the glitter of their landscape; they brown the greenery. It is ghastly, the people are tired but the end is not yet.
A silent debate is going on in Hausa/Fulani northern Nigeria. It is challenging a status quo that has dominated lives and living in that corridor for almost 220 years. Ango Abdullahi’s screech flowed from this reality; it was timely and his fears real but the etiology he ticked and the prognosis he chose are very wrong. He did not mention names but his choice of words suggests his oracle sees southern politicians holding long knives and seeking to divide the north to win the coming presidential election. The oracle is wrong. The death of the kola nut is right inside its lobes, not anywhere else. The Fulani north fed the tiger’s tail to their dog, should they now wonder why the big cat is on the prowl? The Hausa are seen in television documentaries accusing the Fulani of ruining their farming lives; the Fulani are seen boasting and accusing the Hausa of destroying their nomadic existence; the federal government of the north wines away in ethnic insouciance.
Ango Abdullahi thinks “desperate political gambits” from outside the north are behind the ethnic and religious rumblings in the north. If you are close to him, tell him to ask the marabouts of Maradi why the scales are falling from the eyes of the oppressed and why the ancestral falcon no longer listens to the call of the feudal falconer. If things are falling apart and the centre no longer holds, the discerning will lower his eyes to see the nose. William Butler Yeats’ lyrical poem, ‘The Second Coming may be a 1919 masterpiece, but it speaks to the 2022 realities of the poor north, the larceny of the elite, and the crocodile tears of the elders. Yeats’ muse tells him that history stammers and, with every stutter, every repetition, the gyre, the spiral, and the vortex widen. The northern privilege gapes at anarchy as it unfurls, stark naked; the poet sees the monster as it is “loosed upon the world.” But what is the antidote? None. The only message the prophet is given is that “some revelation is at hand.”
That ‘revelation’ is now. When the children of slaves start dancing ‘Buga’ and the feudal vassal is asking questions and demanding answers from the liege lord, then there is every reason for the men at the top to be afraid. That is what is happening between ethnic and religious groups in the north. It is the reason Ango Abdullahi spoke in Kaduna last Thursday. The central question that rankles there is: The Uthman dan Fodio Jihad of 1804 which overthrew the Hausa kings, was it driven truly by religious piety or by politics of ethnic supremacy and hegemony? There is a frantic effort to kill the question and defuse the bomb. Descendants of the displaced are talking about their paradise lost and it is not funny. They stalk the thrones; palace spies and guards also stalk them. Mallams and more Mallams are daily speaking out against rupturing the peace of their graveyard. The discourses are in Hausa language and it is a back-and-forth thing that ends up uploaded on Facebook. Fortunately, Facebook’s translation tool works near-wonders and I use it to follow comments and trends. Could those asking the subversive question be truly from the Muslim north or they are heathen ghosts wearing the fur skin of the faithful? Are they politicians outside the north seeking to profit from the autumn of a region at sea? From Ango Abdullahi’s charge and the videos of the Mallams that I watched, it appears that many in the conclave still live in denial of who the enemy is. The enemy is the victim – the north itself, not anyone else.
Who is dividing the north along ethnic and religious lines? The down people may lack eloquence, but they are not necessarily dumb. They nurse their peppered children and see children of the rich being pampered with pepper soup. A certain Bello Turji, Zamfara’s decorated bandit warlord, looked into a reporter’s camera and triumphantly announced that he had lost count of the number of people he had killed. The people he killed belonged to the other ethnic side and he said so with cavalier calmness. There is Ado Alero too, a numero uno bandit who also confessed on camera that he had killed as many as the sands of the desert. The state did not go for him; it went for the channel that made it possible for us to hear him. Then we heard that the confessed killer would be given a chieftaincy title. Everyone, including his victims, said, no, it was not possible. But he was, indeed, so turbaned in broad daylight; and nothing happened. Nothing happened to the two kingpins except that the state government announced that Turji, the mass murderer, had become their partner in fighting killers.
There was a lady called Deborah Samuel who was murdered and her corpse burnt at noon in her Sokoto school compound. She was a northerner; her killers were northerners too. The murderers were not seen wearing masks; they video-recorded themselves celebrating their chilling feat. They showed no fear because they were goats of the king; they could eat any yam in any barn. And it is logical; you do not have the king and have fears. Where are the killers of that lady? They are not in jail; they are not in court; they are in freedom. Their victim is buried deep somewhere in an unmarked grave; her parents and siblings are displaced to the south. The police announced last week that they were still looking for her killers. What would the victims say other than that the north’s official flies are taking sides with their ethnic sore?
So, who is dividing the north? Those dividing the north are the religious scholars who approve of murders and teach terror to the young. A 37-year-old Jigawa singer, Mukaila Ahmadu, last week used a pestle to kill his father, then his mother, because of religion. He had no regrets and he told the world so with defiance that was out of this world. The enemy is the ideology that inspired that man to run mad. The enemy is the religious school that is inspiring a million others to kill and maim.
Ango Abdullahi also spoke about history. The history I read does not support his optimism. He should go back and read the history of his north: war, subjugation, poverty. Those are the keywords and they appear in every chapter.
We should be involved in preventing a bigger explosion in the Muslim north – bigger than what we’ve seen so far. The first time there was a convulsion there (1804-1808), everywhere else in most of Africa lost their peace. The Uthman dan Fodio jihad ruptured clan and family ties across swaths of land beyond what history could ever record. Historians say the ripples of the jihad “stretched 1,500 kilometers from Dori in modern Burkina Faso to southern Adamawa in Cameroon and included Nupe land, Ilorin in northern Yorubaland, and much of the Benue River valley.” They add that from the savannah to the Red Sea, the Fulani war of faith altered the course of history while “providing inspiration for a series of related holy wars in today’s Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, and Sudan.” Yorubaland, where I come from, owes its first era of political convulsions and bitter divisions and recriminations, directly and indirectly, to that epoch. It created enemies at home and foes abroad. It constructed the alleys of slavery and slave trade for those described by Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, as Arab predators and European destroyers. It produced an era when it was pure suicide for an Ijesa to be seen in front of Bashorun Ogunmola’s compound in Ibadan; it was also self-murder, at that time, for an Ibadan person to be caught passing by the homestead of Sodeeke in Abeokuta. But that era is long gone in Yorubaland. It would not have gone if the leaders had done what today’s northern ostriches do, burying their heads in the sand while injustice reigns across their land.
The bandits of the north filed out mainly from one ethnic hole. They have reportedly been joined by ISWAP terrorists. Their victims are of other ethnicities. Yet, both sides have been around each other like two friendly rivers, herding, and farming, for hundreds of years. And both poles are mainly Muslim and you ask why the war? This is not the first time that that question has been asked. The question came up in 1805 when dan Fodio’s jihad attacked Kanem-Bornu (present Lake Chad area) and was decisively repelled. The Muslim inhabitants of the attacked area were shocked that their supposed brothers-in-faith were killing them and destroying their lives. In a series of letters written by an Islamic scholar, Muhammad al-Amin ibn Muhammad al-Kanami (El-Kanemi) “to the Fulani ulama and their chiefs,” the jihadists’ religious mission and credentials were thoroughly questioned. He accused dan Fodio of killing fellow Muslims in pursuit of land, gold, and glory. The other side also replied giving reasons for their campaigns. Some historians are certain of nine such letters: One from El-Kanemi to dan Fodio; two from dan Fodio to El-Kanemi; one from El-Kanemi to dan Fodio’s son and successor, Mohammed Bello, and five from Bello to El-Kanemi. The central issue in all the letters is why the dan Fodio people believed they were more qualified than others to define who a Muslim was, who deserved to die, and who should be enslaved. I quote from El-Kanemi’s first letter to dan Fodio:
“The reason for writing this letter is that when fate brought me to this country, I found the fire which was blazing between you and the people of the land. I asked the reason, and it was given as injustice by some and religion by others. So, according to our decision in the matter, I wrote to those of your brothers who live near to us asking them the reason and instigation of their aggression, and they returned me a weak answer, not such as comes from an intelligent man, much less from a learned person, let alone a reformer. They listed the names of books, and we examined some of them, but we did not understand from them the things which they apparently understood. Then, while we were still perplexed, some of them attacked our capital, and the neighbouring Fulani came and camped near us. So, we wrote to them a second time beseeching them in the name of God and Islam to desist from their evil doing. But they refused and attacked us. So, when our land was thus confined and we found no place even to dwell in, we rose in defense of ourselves, praying to God to deliver us from the evil of their deeds, and we did what we did. Then when we found some respite, we desisted, and for the future, God is all-knowing….Tell us, therefore, why you are fighting us and enslaving our free people. If you say that you have done this to us because of our paganism, and it is far from our compound. If praying and the giving of alms, knowledge of God, fasting in Ramadan and the building of mosques is paganism, (then) what is Islam?….”
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Strictly Personal
Budgets, budgeting and budget financing, By Sheriffdeen A. Tella, Ph.D.
Published
2 days agoon
November 20, 2024The budget season is here again. It is an institutional and desirable annual ritual. Revenue collection and spending at the federal, State and local government levels must be authorised and guided by law. That is what budget is all about. A document containing the estimates of projected revenues from identified sources and the proposed expenditure for different sectors in the appropriate level of government. The last two weeks have seen the delivery of budget drafts to various Houses of Assembly and the promise that the federal government would present its draft budget to the National Assembly.
Do people still look forward to the budget presentation and the contents therein? I am not sure. Citizens have realised that these days, governments often spend money without reference to the approved budget. A governor can just wake up and direct that a police station be built in a location. With no allocation in the budget, the station will be completed in three months. The President can direct from his bathroom that 72 trailers of maize be distributed to the 36 states as palliatives. No budget provision, and no discussion by relevant committee or group.
We still operate with the military mentality. We operated too long under the military and of the five Presidents we have in this democracy, two of them were retired military Heads of State. Between them, they spent 16 years of 25 years of democratic governance. Hopefully, we are done with them physically but not mentally. Most present governors grew up largely under military regimes with the command system. That is why some see themselves as emperor and act accordingly. Their direct staff and commissioners are “Yes” men and women. There is need for disorientation.
The importance of budget in the art of governance cannot be overemphasized. It is one of the major functions of the legislature because without the consideration and authorisation of spending of funds by this arm of government, the executive has no power to start spending money. There is what we refer to as a budget cycle or stages. The budget drafting stage within the purview of the executive arm is the first stage and, followed by the authorisation stage where the legislature discusses, evaluates and tinkers with the draft for approval before presenting it to the President for his signature.
Thereafter, the budget enters the execution phase or cycle where programmes and projects are executed by the executive arm with the legislature carrying out oversight functions. Finally, we enter the auditing phase when the federal and State Auditors verify and report on the execution of the budgets. The report would normally be submitted to the Legislature. Many Auditor Generals have fallen victim at this stage for daring to query the executives on some aspects of the execution in their reports.
A new budget should contain the objectives and achievements of the preceding budget in the introduction as the foundation for the budget. More appropriately, a current budget derives its strength from a medium-term framework which also derives its strength from a national Development Plan or a State Plan. An approved National Plan does not exist currently, although the Plan launched by the Muhammadu Buhari administration is in the cooler. President Tinubu, who is acclaimed to be the architect of the Lagos State long-term Plan seems curiously, disillusioned with a national Plan.
Some States like Oyo and Kaduna, have long-term Plans that serve as the source of their annual budgets. Economists and policymakers see development plans as instruments of salvation for developing countries. Mike Obadan, the former Director General of the moribund Nigeria Centre for Economic and Management Administration, opined that a Plan in a developing country serves as an instrument to eradicate poverty, achieve high rates of economic growth and promote economic and social development.
The Nigerian development plans were on course until the adoption of the World Bank/IMF-inspired Structural Adjustment Programme in 1986 when the country and others that adopted the programme were forced to abandon such plan for short-term stabilisation policies in the name of a rolling plan. We have been rolling in the mud since that time. One is not surprised that the Tinubu administration is not looking at the Buhari Development Plan since the government is World Bank/IMF compliant. It was in the news last week that our President is an American asset and by extension, Nigeria’s policies must be defined by America which controls the Bretton Woods institutions.
A national Plan allows the citizens to monitor quantitatively, the projects and programmes being executed or to be executed by the government through the budgeting procedure. It is part of the definitive measures of transparency and accountability which most Nigerian governments do not cherish. So, you cannot pin your government down to anything.
Budgets these days hardly contain budget performance in terms of revenue, expenditure and other achievements like several schools, hospitals, small-scale enterprises, etc, that the government got involved in successfully and partially. These are the foundation for a new budget like items brought forward in accounting documents. The new budget should state the new reforms or transformations that would be taking place. Reforms like shifting from dominance of recurrent expenditure to capital expenditure; moving from the provision of basic needs programmes to industrialisation, and from reliance on foreign loans to dependence on domestic fund mobilisation for executing the budget.
That brings us to the issue of budget deficit and borrowing. When an economy is in recession, expansionary fiscal policy is recommended. That is, the government will need to spend more than it receives to pump prime the economy. If this is taken, Nigeria has always had a deficit budget, implying that we are always in economic recession. The fact is that even when we had a surplus in our balance of payment that made it possible to pay off our debts, we still had a deficit budget. We are so used to borrowing at the national level that stopping it will look like the collapse of the Nigerian state. The States have also followed the trend. Ordinarily, since States are largely dependent on the federal government for funds, they should promote balanced budget.
The States are like a schoolboy who depends on his parents for school fees and feeding allowance but goes about borrowing from classmates. Definitely, it is the parents that will surely pay the debt. The debt forgiveness mentality plays a major role in the process. Having enjoyed debt forgiveness in the past, the federal government is always in the credit market and does not caution the State governments in participating in the market. Our Presidents don’t feel ashamed when they are begging for debt forgiveness in international forum where issues on global development are being discussed. Not less than twice I have watched the countenance of some Presidents, even from Africa, while they looked at our president with disdain when issues of debt forgiveness for African countries was raised.
In most cases, the government, both at the federal and state cannot show the product of loans, except those lent by institutions like the World Bank or African Development Bank for specific projects which are monitored by the lending institutions. In other cases, the loans are stolen and transferred abroad while we are paying the loans. In some other cases, the loans are diverted to projects other than what the proposal stated. There was a case of loans obtained based on establishing an international car park in the border of the State but diverted to finance the election of a politician in the State. The politician eventually lost the election but the citizens of the State have to be taxed to pay the loan. Somebody as “Nigeria we hail thee”.
Transformation in budgeting should commence subsequently at the State and federal level. Now that local government will enjoy some financial autonomy and therefore budgeting process, they should be legally barred from contracting foreign loans. They have no business participating in the market. They should promote balanced budget where proposed expenditures must equal the expected revenues from federal and internal sources. The State government that cannot mobilise, from records, up to 40 percent of its total budget from IGR should not be supported to contract foreign loans. The States should engage in a balanced budget. The federal government budget should shift away from huge allocations to recurrent expenditure towards capital expenditure for capital formation and within the context of a welfarist state.
Sheriffdeen A. Tella, Ph.D.
Strictly Personal
African Union must ensure Sudan civilians are protected, By Joyce Banda
Published
4 weeks agoon
October 25, 2024The war in Sudan presents the world – and Africa – with a test. This far, we have scored miserably. The international community has failed the people of Sudan. Collectively, we have chosen to systematically ignore and sacrifice the Sudanese people’s suffering in preference of our interests.
For 18 months, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have fought a pitiless conflict that has killed thousands, displaced millions, and triggered the world’s largest hunger crisis.
Crimes against humanity and war crimes have been committed by both parties to the conflict. Sexual and gender-based violence are at epidemic levels. The RSF has perpetrated a wave of ethnically motivated violence in Darfur. Starvation has been used as a weapon of war: The SAF has carried out airstrikes that deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure.
The plight of children is of deep concern to me. They have been killed, maimed, and forced to serve as soldiers. More than 14 million have been displaced, the world’s largest displacement of children. Millions more haven’t gone to school since the fighting broke out. Girls are at the highest risk of child marriage and gender-based violence. We are looking at a child protection crisis of frightful proportions.
In many of my international engagements, the women of Sudan have raised their concerns about the world’s non-commitment to bring about peace in Sudan.
I write with a simple message. We cannot delay any longer. The suffering cannot be allowed to continue or to become a secondary concern to the frustrating search for a political solution between the belligerents. The international community must come together and adopt urgent measures to protect Sudanese civilians.
Last month, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan released a report that described a horrific range of crimes committed by the RSF and SAF. The report makes for chilling reading. The UN investigators concluded that the gravity of its findings required a concerted plan to safeguard the lives of Sudanese people in the line of fire.
“Given the failure of the warring parties to spare civilians, an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians must be deployed without delay,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, chair of the Fact-Finding Mission and former Chief Justice of Tanzania.
We must respond to this call with urgency.
A special responsibility resides with the African Union, in particular the AU Commission, which received a request on June 21 from the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) “to investigate and make recommendations to the PSC on practical measures to be undertaken for the protection of civilians.”
So far, we have heard nothing.
The time is now for the AU to act boldly and swiftly, even in the absence of a ceasefire, to advance robust civilian protection measures.
A physical protective presence, even one with a limited mandate, must be proposed, in line with the recommendation of the UN Fact-Finding Mission. The AU should press the parties to the conflict, particularly the Sudanese government, to invite the protective mission to enter Sudan to do its work free from interference.
The AU can recommend that the protection mission adopt targeted strategies operations, demarcated safe zones, and humanitarian corridors – to protect civilians and ensure safe, unhindered, and adequate access to humanitarian aid.
The protection mission mandate can include data gathering, monitoring, and early warning systems. It can play a role in ending the telecom blackout that has been a troubling feature of the war. The mission can support community-led efforts for self-protection, working closely with Sudan’s inspiring mutual-aid network of Emergency Response Rooms. It can engage and support localised peace efforts, contributing to community-level ceasefire and peacebuilding work.
I do not pretend that establishing a protection mission in Sudan will be easy. But the scale of Sudan’s crisis, the intransigence of the warring parties, and the clear and consistent demands from Sudanese civilians and civil society demand that we take action.
Many will be dismissive. It is true that numerous bureaucratic, institutional, and political obstacles stand in our way. But we must not be deterred.
Will we stand by as Sudan suffers mass atrocities, disease, famine, rape, mass displacement, and societal disintegration? Will we watch as the crisis in Africa’s third largest country spills outside of its borders and sets back the entire region?
Africa and the world have been given a test. I pray that we pass it.
Dr Joyce Banda is a former president of the Republic of Malawi.
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