At last, big voices are being heard publicly in a common position on the burning insecurity crisis in the North. From the Igbos who felt they were targeted to the Northern elders, monarchs and even the Senate, it is a clarion call for amnesty for Boko Haram. This is contrary to the tactic of trying to influence the powers that be from behind-the-scene. Now, they are all forced to tell the world that Nigerians have rejected the divisive interpretation of Boko Haram as an inter-religious conflict rather than a social conflict.
This is a welcome trend although it should have come immediately Gordon Doff published his piece “Nigeria: Targeted for Destruction” and which some Nigerian newspapers re-published in late 2011. That publication and the earlier scenario analysis by an American college of experts speculating outright collapse of Nigeria gave the Nigerian power elite sufficient hints about difficult times ahead. Every attempt has been made to downplay the American scenario building on Nigeria but everything since then has pointed in that direction as for some people to conclude that it is either a prelude to a pre-existing American script to escort Nigeria out of History or it is the product of a scientific scenario building experts.
Either way, Nigeria has been a harvest of variants of insurgency for a long time: from OPC in the S/West to resource nationalism in the S/South, to the kidnapping in the S/East and then Boko Haram. And then it came to happen that Nigeria would assemble in leadership at several levels people with very serious cases of lack of clarity, lack of technocratic capacity, lack of individual and collective sense of alarm and, above all, a sense of power which prioritises state mischief? This cannot be accidental.
Then consider such little but significant developments such as the advert that appeared about the same time of GEJ’s ascendancy in Daily Sun (I cannot recollect the date from where I am writing) to the effect that the mistake of 1914 should be corrected in 2014. Similar other sentiments have been emphasised such as the undue emphasis on Lugard putting 100 years as when the union can be re-negotiated. All these ignored the fact that whatever Lugard had in mind by putting that 100 years have been overtaken by the Nigerian civil war. By that war, Nigerians had re-negotiated the union and agreed that an ideology of building is bound to be more successful and worthwhile than an ideology of separatism and destruction. In other words, Lugard’s 100 years had been overtaken even before it was due.
Added to this background of fragility is a General Elections scheduled for 2015 circumscribed by no consensus other than the sadism of office seekers for whom national survival is a non issue. Hence a struggle for office against 2015 which is not being informed by national interest but love of office for its own sake at a time when 95% of Nigerians are angry, for both genuine and artificial reasons. The situation is such that a little spark from the least expected quarters can light a Rwanda type inferno without the central government being able to do anything until there might have been unacceptable damage. There is no one who is not afraid of this scenario in Nigeria today because the question is, by what means would the 5% who are happy control the 95% who are unhappy and could do anything?
What is clear now is whether the 2015 prediction was an American script or a scientific exercise, it cannot be dismissed or downplayed anymore for two reasons. The Americans themselves are taking a serious view of similar analysis about her terminal decline by the same National Intelligence Council, referred to as the centre of strategic thinking in the US. Two, the testimony of our own retired military leaders is that we are in the middle of a civil war.
So, the change of tactics from quiet diplomacy to public stance by the emirs, northern elders, Igbo leaders marks an important response to state collapse. The Nigerian state has so lost its mystique that only alternative voices from certain category of individuals and groups can save the situation and it is journalistic responsibility to keep identifying and pressurizing such individuals and groups to call Nigeria to order so that we can manage to arrive at the electoral 2015 intact as a nation.
…David Attah: A Task for David Mark
I am prompted to write this by a newspaper opinion piece I read recently by Chief David Attah, the bed ridden Benue born ex-Chief Press Secretary to two former military heads of state. The piece made Senate President, David Mark’s comments that many African countries are anti-Nigerian at heart the object of analysis. It was absolutely a subject fit for analysis but coming from Chief David Attah whose medical condition I know, it set me thinking. Could he have written to attract Mark’s attention to his condition? Without asking the chief, I know in my heart of hearts that he couldn’t have written to attract anybody’s attention or support. Chief Attah is not above begging but it is not in accord with his spirit of man to approach begging by writing about anybody to draw attention. He will not change the walking steps of his fore fathers just because fire is approaching. In other words, he must have written strictly on the basis of the merit of the subject matter.
But for the Chief David Attah whom I saw last October to still be able to write that piece means that he still has a lot to offer this society and his rehabilitation is a matter of urgent national importance. National importance because Chief Attah rose to the peak, professionally and politically, including being a legislator. Above all, he obviously has the most colossal impact on Idomaland and the Middle Belt in terms of the home boy who went on to operate at the national radius by breaking into the media empire called Daily Times from the north in those days. His column, “Thinking Aloud” in Nigeria Standard subsequently must have been the source of inspiration for many journalists from the area today. Apart from someone like Aliyu Akwe Doma, former governor of Nassarawa State, nobody in that stretch of Nigeria can claim cultural authenticity as David Attah.
The point now is that he is down, medically and socially. He is all alone. He needs attention/money to pay his way and live well. That makes it squarely a task for a David Mark for the simple reason that this is not local clinic affair but a medical cum social restoration package for a man who deserves no less. As the highest political office holder from Attah’s ethnic group, his state, his geo-political unit and his region, that task is no one else’s than Mark’s. It is doubtful if there is anyone else who has that capacity to lead the process because it involves reaching out, it involves the Nigerian State and it is about mobilizing resources. It cannot be headed by a local operator because many non-Benue indigenes are already involved. All these imply that Mark has to come in with the symbolic authority of his office to galvanise resources.
When we do this for Attah, it is not a favour but recognition of his own very fundamental contributions, among them, inspiring a whole generation into a particular profession and thus becoming a leader even if he is not acknowledged for that. Secondly, it is not a favour exclusively for him but a tradition that has also been extended to all others.
And I will give a recent example in which I am most familiar. When some professionals rose from our ethnic axis trying to reduce Mark’s radius to a local champion last year, some of us wrote that it was wrong for them to diminish him and that his trajectory in Nigerian politics as a Middle Belter who rose to No. 3 position is the same trajectory pioneered by Gowon and T. Y Danjuma in terms of playing the harmonizer of diversity. And, although we would keep pointing out that Mark is too slow in transiting from a soldier to a politician, we always reckoned with the stabilizing role his being No. 3 is playing in Benue politics in the sense that it has blunted Idoma sense of marginalization, symbolically. Within this context, it is Chief Attah’s turn to benefit. Or we would all have difficulty mourning him should he go to his ancestors this way.
He will not live one minute beyond the H-Hour God must have allocated to him by the theology of pre-destination but since we do not know God’s time, we can only do our best for a man who is still making his own contributions even from his sick bed, especially in bridge building. An example: the organiser-in-chief of the launching of his biography in Makurdi earlier this year is a Tiv guy. And it was at the launching that Colonel Lawan Gwadebe made such a moving speech on Chief Attah. This is the point here!
So, it is time for Senate President, David Mark to rise along with all the governors, senators, legislators, ministers, board members and local government chairmen produced under Attah’s chairmanship of the PDP in Benue few years back to this task. After all, this is what all the Holy Books enjoins us to do by being our brother’s keeper. We have to prove that it is not a mere saying.
