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Who Is Dividing The North? By Lasisi Olagunju

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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?….”

Strictly Personal

African Union must ensure Sudan civilians are protected, By Joyce Banda

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The 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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Strictly Personal

Economic policies must be local, By Lekan Sote

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With 32.70 per cent headline inflation, 40.20 per cent food inflation, and bread inflation of 45 per cent, all caused by the removal of subsidies from petrol and electricity, and the government’s policy of allowing market forces to determine the value of the Naira, Nigerians are reeling under high cost of living.

 

The observation by Obi Alfred Achebe of Onitsha, that “The wellbeing of the people has declined more steeply in the last months,” leads to doubts about the “Renewed Hope” slogan of President Bola Tinubu’s government that is perceived as extravagant, whilst asking Nigerians to be patient and wait for its unfolding economic policies to mature.

 

It doesn’t look as if it will abate soon, Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power, who seems ready to hike electricity tariffs again, recently argued that the N225 per kilowatt hour of electricity that Discos charge Band A premium customers is lower than the N750 and N950 respective costs of running privately-owned petrol or diesel generators.

 

While noting that 129 million, or 56 per cent of Nigerians are trapped below poverty line, the World Bank revealed that real per capita Gross Domestic Product, which disregards the service industry component, is yet to recover from the pre-2016 economic depression under the government of Muhammadu Buhari.

 

This has led many to begin to doubt the government’s World Bank and International Monetary Fund-inspired neo-liberal economic policies that seem to have further impoverished poor Nigerians, practically eliminated the middle class, and is making the rich also cry.

 

Yet the World Bank, which is not letting up, recently pontificated that “previous domestic policy missteps (based mainly on its own advice) are compounding the shocks of rising inflation (that is) eroding the purchasing power of the people… and this policy is pushing many (citizens) into poverty.”

 

It zeroes in by asking Nigeria to stay the gruelling course, which Ibukun Omole thinks “is nothing more than a manifesto for exploitation… a blatant attempt to continue the cycle of exploitation… a tool of imperialism, promoting the same policies that have kept Nigeria under the thumb of… neocolonial agenda for decades.”

 

When Indermilt Gill, Senior Vice President of the World Bank, told the 30th Summit of Nigeria’s Economic Summit Group, in Abuja, Federal Capital Territory, that Nigerians may have to endure the harrowing economic conditions for another 10 to 15 years, attendees murmured but didn’t walk out on him because of Nigerian’s tradition of politeness to guests.

 

Governor Bala Muhammed of Bauchi State, who agrees with the World Bank that “purchasing power has dwindled,” also thinks that “these (World Bank-inspired) policies, usually handed down by arm-twisting compulsions, are not working.”

 

What seems to be trending now is the suggestion that because these neo-liberal policies do not seem to be helping the economy and the citizens of Nigeria, at least in the short term, it would be better to think up homegrown solutions to Nigeria’s economic problems.

 

Late Speaker of America’s House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, is quoted to have quipped that, at the end of the day, “All politics is local.” He may have come to that conclusion after observing that it takes the locals in a community to know what is best for them.

 

This aphorism must apply to economics, a field of study that is derived from sociology, which is the study of the way of life of a people. Proof of this is in “The Wealth of Nations,” written by Adam Smith, who is regarded as the first scholar of economics.

 

In his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of “The Wealth of Nations,” Andrew Skinner observes: “Adam Smith was undoubtedly the remarkable product of a remarkable age and one whose writing clearly reflects the intellectual, social and economic conditions of the period.”

 

To drive the point home that Smith’s book was written for his people and his time, Skinner reiterated that “the general ‘philosophy,’ which it contained was so thoroughly in accord with the aspirations and circumstances of his age.”

 

In a Freudian slip of the Darwinist realities of the Industrial Revolution that birthed individualism, capitalism, and global trade, Smith averred that “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principle in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasures of seeing it.”

 

And, he let it slip that capitalism is for the advantage of Europe when he confessed that “Europe, by not leaving things at perfect liberty (the so-called Invisible Hand), occasions… inequities,” by “restraining the competition in some trades to a smaller number… increasing it in others beyond what it naturally would be… and… free circulation of labour (or expertise) and stocks (goods) both from employment to employment and from place to place!”

 

Policymakers, who think Bretton Woods institutions will advise policies to replicate the success of the Euro-American economy in Nigeria must be daydreaming. After advising elimination of subsidy, as global best practices that reflect market forces, they failed to suggest that Nigeria’s N70,000 monthly minimum wage, neither reflects the realities of the global marketplace, nor Section 16(2,d) of Nigeria’s Constitution, which suggests a “reasonable national minimum living wage… for all citizens.”

 

After Alex Sienart, World Bank’s lead economist in Nigeria, pointed out that the wage increase will directly affect the lives of only 4.1 per cent of Nigerians, he suggested that Nigeria needed more productive jobs to reduce poverty. But he neither explained “productive jobs,” nor suggested how to create them.

 

In admitting past wrong economic policies that the World Bank recommended for Nigeria, its former President, Jim Yong Kim, confessed, “I think the World Bank has to take responsibility for having emphasized hard infrastructure –roads, rails, energy– for a long time…

 

“There is still the bias that says we will invest in hard infrastructure, and then we grow rich, (and) we will have enough money to invest in health and education. (But) we are now saying that’s the wrong approach, that you’ve got to start investing in your people.”

 

Kim is a Korean-American physician, health expert, and anthropologist, whose Harvard University and Brown University Ivy League background shapes his decidedly “Pax American” worldview of America’s dominance of the world economy.

 

Despite his do-gooder posturing, his diagnoses and prescriptions still did not quite address the root cause of Nigeria’s economic woes, nor provide any solutions. They were mere diversions that stopped short of the way forward.

 

He should have advocated for the massive accumulation of capital and investments in the local production of manufacturing machinery, industrial spare parts, and raw materials—items that are currently imported, weakening Nigeria’s trade balance.

 

He should have pushed for the completion of Ajaokuta Steel Mill and helped to line up investors with managerial, technical, and financial competence to salvage Nigeria’s electricity sector, whose poor run has been described by Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of Africa Development Bank, as “killing Nigerian industries.”

 

He could have assembled consultants to accelerate the conversion of Nigeria’s commuter vehicles to Compressed Natural Gas and get banks of the metropolitan economies, that hold Nigeria’s foreign reserves in their vaults, to invest their low-interest funds into Nigeria’s agriculture— so that Nigeria will no longer import foodstuffs.

 

Nigerians need homegrown solutions to their economic woes.

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