In the past few weeks, Kaduna once again assumed notoriety. No thanks to avoidable conflicts that have left in their trails scores of the dead and wounded. Yours comradely does this reflection with heavy heart, albeit under a week long 24 hour curfew occasionally relaxed to be casually slammed back amidst mass hysteria on possible serial attacks . As a proud resident of Kaduna, my heart felt condolences to the victims of preventable and avoidable crisis. It is time there was a mass based non-partisan consensus building in Kaduna to put an end to serial conflicts that had turned an hitherto investment destination into ghettos of divestment, poverty and sheer criminality of varying hues from kidnapping to mob killings. To reinvent Kaduna, we need history which today is in huge deficit within the ranks of ruling elite in governance in Nigeria and within the ranks of the governed also. To fill this gap today, yours comradely finds very refreshing an abridged article by the two great Swedish professors, namely Gunilla Andre and Bjorn Beckman on the historic significance of Kaduna as Centre of development and power not the current mutually assured destructive violence. The article is in a book entitled Union Power in the Nigeria Textile Industry; Labour Regime and Adjustment (1999) . The received wisdom here is that there was once a developmental working (not a warring!) Kaduna state. All stakeholders must assiduously work together to bring back the old Kaduna state in which millions of youths would be gainfully engaged in factories as opposed to being willing tools for mass destruction due to idleness and mass unemployment.
Happy reading;
“Kaduna; A Centre of Bureaucratic Power
Unlike Kano, Kaduna was a product of colonial conquest. There was no pre-colonial urban setting. Kaduna was picked by Lugard, the colonial adventurer who conquered the north, as the site of the colonial capital, which in the first place meant a military garrison (Oyedele, 1987; Medugbon, 1978; Urquhart, 1977). A railway link to the south was central to the plan, again primarily for military, not any immediate economic, reasons. It was seen as a suitable location for military and political control. It was in open country where it would be possible to appropriate large blocks of land without much conflict with local communities.
Kano was deliberately avoided as it was thought that its people “would exert undue influence on the government “(Medugbon 1978, quoting colonial records). The colonizers judged that survival in this environment depended on their ability to accommodate pre-existing lines of authority wielded through the Emirate system.
Kaduna retained a key role in the system of colonial rule even after Lugard’s plans to retain it as the capital was abandoned in favour of Lagos. It remained the centre of colonial military power and the administrative capital of the north. As a colonial new-town it experienced a slow and orderly development, with spacious colonial town planning, government reserved areas, and township segregated on racial, ethnic and class lines (Oyedele 1987:154). The highly controlled development aimed originally at preventing the growth of a large native population “for reasons of economy sanitary efficiency and avoidance of local political complications” (Medugbon 1978, quoting colonial sources). After World War II, however, the city expanded in an increasing uncontrolled fashion, with an inflow of a wide variety of immigrant communities (Tita, 1979).
The northern bureaucratic elites with their strong roots in the emirate system used their new regional and federal standing to build up Kaduna into their own principal power base. Notions of the “Northern oligarchy” and, more conspiratorially, the “Kaduna Maffia” have been used to describe this power elite, or segments of it, usually for polemical purposes (J. Ibrahim, 1991:173 ff, Takaya and Tyoden, 1987; Yahaya, 1985). Being far behind in terms of capitalist entrepreneurship and class formation, they used state investments and alliances with transnational capital as a road to economic power and as a means to balance the more advanced bourgeoisies of the south. The northern modernizers were resentful of the way in which “the North” had been “virtually asleep” for much of the colonial period while “South” had been advancing commercially and educationally (Northern Nigeria, 1961:11). The marketing board system became a principal source of finance and the Northern Nigeria Development Corporation (NNDC), an investment and holding company, became the principal means (Helleiner, 1970). Its role in manufacturing was stepped up after a reorganization in the late 1960s (Northern Nigeria 1966; NNDC, n.d.). It was jointly owned by the new northern states after the dissolution of the old Norther Region. The NNDC operate a joint investment company, the NNIL, with the Common wealth Development Corporation from 1959 until 1978 when NNDC became the sole owner (NNIDL, n.d.). Federal investment companies, like NIDB, were directed to contribute to the regional redistribution of economic opportunities of which Kaduna became a principal beneficiary (Oyedele, 1987:428). The World Bank and its affiliate, the International Finance Corporation, were partners in this essentially state-capitalist development effort. Although committed to the promotion of private enterprise, these institutions had no qualms about joining with state capital in institutions which they saw as “trustees” for the emergence of private entrepreneurial classes. Foreign firms were attracted through generous joint venture financing and favourable management contracts with the state. They were provided with infrastructural facilities and a business environment which was not as developed and diverse as that of Lagos but which had the advantage of being politically more regulated and stable, in contrast to the more volatile southern cities with their uncontrolled expansion, bottlenecks and social disorder. Vast areas of land in Kaduna South (Kakuri) were reserved for manufacturing (Tita, 1979). Not least a dependable water supply was important to the textile industry. Kaduna was to be made the “Manchester of Nigeria”, according to Ahmadu Bello, the Northern Premier (Oyedele, 1987:480).
The Civil War (1967-70) brought an end to Kaduna’s formal status as the capital of the north. Kaduna thus fund itself reduced first to the capital of a North-Central State, one of 12 states created in 1967, later to that of Kaduna State, one of 19 states from 1976, a state which is finally lost its populous northern provinces to a new Katsina State in 1987 (for the state creation process, see Forrest, 1993:50). Yet Kaduna retained its position as the centre of federal economic, political and military-bureaucratic elite into which the traditional ruling classes has been partly merged.
Kaduna continued to be a main locus for large-scale federal investment with foreign participation during the oil boom of the 1970s, including the Peugeot automobile factory and a giant oil refinery. The status of Kaduna as Nigeria’s second industrial city was reinforced, not in terms of the number of factories where Kano continued to be well ahead, but in the size of state and transnational investment. Unlike the textile industries of Kano and Lagos which primarily had their basis in their own alliances and autonomous lines of finance, the Kaduna industry was a political creation depending on state investment and state inducement of large foreign capital.”
Issa Aremu mni
