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Those
who might have no ideas about the nature
and character of opposition politics in
Jigawa State and the agenda of its
godfathers which some surrogate writers
pretending to be Lamido praise-singers
are now carrying out may not be in a
position to appreciate this disapproval.
But the godfathers in question have an
objective of re-constructing and
representing Sule Lamido in a way that
accords with their own existential
radius. The project consists of many
tactics but the strategy is to entangle
the man and his regime in their journey
to nowhere. Hence they tirelessly
organise and publish fabrications,
expecting to be replied and made heroes.
Or, they attribute silly accomplishments
to the governor and arrange to
praise-sing him for that. The idea that
Lamido’s stand on zoning is a
praiseworthy defence of the North is one
such organized commendation.
There is
nothing wrong with speaking up for the
North or any other region depending on
the issue in question. Evidence abound
that, in the last three years in
particular, Lamido can speak for the
North in the most eloquent, strategic
manner unimaginable but not in a woolly,
exclusivist ethno-regional terms or in
the interest/defence of friendship, in
this case, former President Olusegun
Obasanjo. After all, the former
president’s relationship with his former
minister was never constructed on any
conditionalities but shared
signification.
The
opinion articles appearing in carefully
selected newspapers in praise of the
governor for what the surrogate writers
call his tough position on zoning and
which position they interpret to be a
courageous one unexpected from the
governor given his relationship with
General Obasanjo is the climax of this
ill-fated campaign since nothing that
Lamido has said on the debate ever since
can be interpreted to be a defence of
the North or of any other region at all.
For the
avoidance of doubt, Governor Lamido’s
most comprehensive position on rotation
of power so far remains the interview
the governor granted ThisDay and
which the paper published on Wednesday,
June 23, 2010. In that interview, Lamido
challenged the PDP to seize the high
ground and relocate the debate back to
the party. This is not only to disallow
people who have no idea of the origin
and mission of the PDP and the debates
that brought it to be, the traditions
upon which it was anchored from hopping
into the arena and taking over the
debate but so also as to put Nigeria
first in the way the debate is resolved.
It
cannot be arrogance to describe this
institutionalist framing of the debate
as a certainly more distinguished
intervention than the current domination
of the debate by cheap, personal
opinions and claims. According to
Governor Lamido, this is the only way to
understand the sudden prominence of
someone like Chief Edwin Clark. In here
also falls the paradox whereby almost
all the ‘Sai Jonathan’ voices now,
including some of the founding fathers
of the PDP, are the same people who
stormed out of the party in 2007 on the
ground that Obasanjo was imposing Umaru
Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan on the
PDP and that there was no internal
democracy and so on and so forth? And
Lamido’s question is whether Jonathan
would have been in the Villa today if
someone had not “imposed” him? Hence
Lamido’s conclusion that it is only the
party that is collective enough,
aggregate enough to retain or do away
with rotational presidency, taking into
consideration the historicity of the
principle.
That
reference to historicity is a reference
to the fact that Nigeria is an archtype
of the deeply divided society and there
is, therefore, the need to, at all
times, appreciate this in relation to
the federal therapies such as the
abolition of regions and continued
creation of states to counter perceived
domination, the Federal Character
principle, the quota principle, the
zoning formula in recruiting political
headship at various levels in the
country. And that it should be noted
that Nigeria was, until recently, seen
as one of the most viable of the seven
Federal states that came out of Africa
in the 1950s solely on account of the
introduction of these therapies at a
time when most African countries were
reeling under single party dictatorship.
In
contrast to such African story of the
privatization and personalization of
power, the Nigerian power elite has
always been conscious of the imperative
for the reification of the federal
ideology before it was too late. And
that, in fact, the reification of the
federal ideology was supposed to be the
raison d’etre of the NPN as developed by
its intellectuals like Adamu Ciroma,
Chuba Okadigbo, Ibrahim Tahir and so on.
It was for the reason of inducting the
average Nigerian in all nooks and
crannies of Nigeria into Nigerianity
that President Shagari was advised to
have his eyes and ears in every state of
the federation and which he did in the
form of Presidential Liaison Officers.
Typical of the NPN, they couldn’t
explain the point behind the idea and
the whole thing was discredited by
opposition propaganda.
In all,
we can modify Lamido’s institutionalism
insisting on the relocation of the
debate back to the PDP but we cannot
fault the idea that it is only the party
that can adopt and market President
Jonathan, if it so decides,
institutionally. No ethnic group or
region or individual, no matter how
great, can do that. And this came out
very well in Lamido’s ThisDay
interview in question where he was
aghast about any region, be it North or
South-South or any other cleavages
coming out to negotiate the locale of
the presidency over and above the PDP.
As he put it, this is not acceptable
because President Jonathan can and
should only be Nigerian son, a Nigerian
President of Ijaw origin, not an Ijaw or
South-South President of Nigeria.
I find
it implausible that this argument by
Lamido can, in any way, be a defence or
attack on any body or any part of
Nigeria. I can only see it in the
context of a previous argument of the
governor where he said the rotation
debate may be full of hot air but,
nevertheless, a debate on how to make
Nigerians out of Nigeria. For him, it is
not a terrible thing to say that the
debate on whether or not President
Goodluck Jonathan should interrupt the
rotational sequence (in Nigeria,
rotation can only be interrupted, not
abrogated) between the geo-political
axes can be called a debate bordering on
making Nigerians out of Nigeria. After
all, was that not the kind of thing the
Italian nationalist, Massimo d’Azeglio
is reported to have said after the
Risorgimento in respect of Italian
identity viz, “We have made Italy, now
we have to make Italians?” In our
context, the presidency is the most
potent symbolism for making Nigerians
out of Nigeria.
The only
difference is that, in the case of
Nigeria, it has not been lucky to have
the presidential leadership (I said
leadership, not a leader) of dedicated
nation-builders. Instead, the politics
of power-for-profit has robbed the
country of the subjective factor,
(leadership) that could have brilliantly
converted the objective factors into
Nigeria’s greatness in a transformative
sense. That is how we came to the
present condition where All the King’s
horses and all the King’s men are having
serious problems putting Humpty Dumpty
together Again’, to use that sign tune
of Afro-pessimism.
Putting
Humpty Dumpty together again is clearly
going to be such a Herculean task if we
take just the pitch, the opportunism and
the crassness in the framing of this
debate so far. We have conducted the
debate in a manner that has simply
manufactured more evidence for
Afro-pessimists and their argument that
by reason of poverty and the violence of
our politics, we can not move in a
democratic direction? Or that it
amounted to political blindness to have
expected democracy to prevail in Africa.
Of
course, Nigeria will have democracy and
Afro-pessimists will be shamed but for
now, we cannot escape reflecting on why
Nigeria is perpetually in turmoil in
spite of its wealth, natural and human,
and its ‘natural’ leadership of Africa
and the Black World, conferred on it by
the wealth and her demographic stature.
Just how could “the largest
concentration of Black people under one
government in the history of the world”
be such an embarrassing case study in
self-mismanagement? Unless if the
present incoherence of Nigeria is the
eve of the phenomenal transformation
everyone expected of Nigeria ever since
her birth, Lamido’s is something worth
reflecting upon.
Onoja
works in Government House, Dutse
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