It is in the nature of life that an individual, a city, an institution, a country or a state can be hit by a tragedy. It could be a plague, an epidemic, outbreak of civil war or war from outside, natural disasters like earthquake, flood, Tsunami, etc. These things happen and they must be terrible realities for every society that experienced it. But because the penalty for being alive is to continue to solve problems as they come, the response developed to each and every such tragedy is often more important issue than the reality of any particular calamity itself. This is why the argument here is that the absence of a uniquely Northern response to the security challenge it is facing is much worse than what General Danjuma has called a civil war.
The call for such a constitutive elite action last week by General Danjuma is evidence that there have been no such actions before now even as the North imploded long time ago when it started experiencing one terrifying carnage after another, each worse than the previous one. In other words, the insurgency dimension is only the current stage of the progressive implosion which only lack of conceptual innovativeness will make anyone deny that the North is in the middle of a civil war. If the fear, grief, anxiety, tension, the suffering and the general unpredictability that define life across the North today does not constitute a state of war, then we have a problem with meaning making.
Let us make it clear though that it is not the responsibility of the Northerners or any other regional elite for that matter to find solutions to outbreak of a post election violence, a violent ethno-religious conflict or insurgency in the region. That responsibility is squarely that of the Nigerian state which must pick the drop of a pin anywhere within the territorial canvass of Nigeria. So, when we talk of the responsibility of Northerners in the case of the security crisis, we are only saying that they could complement the centre informally either as the most direct victims and/or as conflict actors in themselves. One wouldn’t know the information President Jonathan has about Boko Haram that made him to go and be formally tasking the Borno Elders with undermining Boko Haram without putting such tasking in context.
This caveat notwithstanding, there is something of a major failure in elite politics that the North has not been able to rise in unison to isolate or alienate sources of insecurity. Why hasn’t that happened in the North since the April post election violence in 2011? Why has not there been a serious meeting attended by the Vice-president, the Senate president, the Speaker all of whom are Northerners, ACF chieftains, the leading retired generals, the leading emirs and chiefs, top politicians, all the Northern governors, kingpins of CAN and JNI and even potential presidential candidates like Atiku and Buhari? I have in mind an open session, not elite back channel contacts, from which a communiqué with a populist, crusading tone and, therefore, a conscientizing effect on the populace will leave no one in doubt what the problems are, what are to be done and who are to do them. That brinkmanship has sadly been missing, suggesting a regional elite whose internal divisions is such that it cannot rise above it even in the face of an emergency or which is bereft of what is to be done.
The South West just did it in the June 12 struggle. It is true that the South West is not as culturally heterogeneous as the North but it is even truer that brinkmanship was their saving grace, not absence of cultural or identity pluralism. For, there was substantial opposition and indifference to June 12 struggle. We saw that in many places in our participation in that struggle as NANS activists but those opposed were overwhelmed and the South West was seen as speaking with one voice once the active elements brought the youths and the middle class into unison and proclaimed the object of uprising.
Instead of such a serious session, we have been treated to a routine condemnation of each and every attack by Boko Haram by those who have 24 Hour security protection to be that ‘courageous’. Where it is not such ‘courageous’ condemnation, it is either General Danjuma warning that crisis is looming or General Abdulsalami calculating the cost of the insurgency in the North or IBB assuring that the country will not break up even when it is empirically on the verge of that.
It is frightening that this type of session has never been held because it suggests that whether the North is in power or out of power, the region is in trouble. It is also frightening because it shows the region cannot rely on the elite which would be such a tragedy as elite provide leadership for every society. What do you do with an elite that lacks the capacity for self and social regeneration?
The answers are already coming in several challenges to the echelon of the elite in the North, including some people writing books to show how evil these senior citizens have been and, by implication, posing themselves as alternatives. Of course, we reject that sort of Machiavellianism because it goes against the after-snuff wisdom of our elders that if you kill the mad men in your own village, you will have no mad men to fight for you if under attack by madmen from another village. But it is important to note that the challenge to an ineffectual elite and its status quo can also come through intellectual insurgency as much as the violence of an insurgency group.
It is against this background that General Danjuma’s call on these elite to come together is interesting and instructive. The hope is that this time, it will be a coming together that will not romanticize Northern unity but move the agenda to a rapid de-agrarianisation of the North as a matter of regional emergency. It is time to rupture the agrarian political economy in the North and move it into a productive economy as the lasting answer to the current sense of identity and violent conflicts in the region. Otherwise, we would spend billions and all the energy devising strategies of fighting violence with violence but without getting out of it for years.
A programme of de-agrarianising the North can be a complicated one. In Jigawa State in 2007, the first summit planned by the Lamido administration was an agricultural summit to critique existing models with the Jigawa specificity in view. This was to precede the Talakawa Summit and provide the framework for its outcome. Schisms in government killed the agrarian summit and even the Talakawa Summit was almost killed but for the governor’s stubbornness. By the time the Talakawa Summit took place, there were no models of agrarian transformation in which to locate the outcomes. The rest is now history. This story, I am sure, is the same in many other states in the North. So, instead of bold agrarian transformation programmes given the agrarian character of the entire Northern Nigeria, you have governors advertising skills acquisition centres as achievements, saying nothing about an agricultural strategy linking the grains belt of the North-West to the fruit basins of Adamawa-Plateau-Benue axis to the fish bowels of Kwara-Kogi axis to the transnational markets around Borno in a productive chain. You wonder what they discuss in the Northern Governors’ Forum if not such grand strategies.
That means that the meeting that is required for Northern survival now must be a meeting of people who can call spade a spade with particular reference to the kind of political leadership at the centre and at the level of state governors which can rapidly re-invent the North. This is because it is good governance that brings peace and security, in the North and anywhere else. Such a meeting cannot be an all comer affair. I think we have passed that level now. It has to be a conclave of the TYs, of people who are not desperate for anything again, people who have some prestige to lose should the North crash on their head, people who need another opportunity to give something to Nigeria through the North before they board their last flight to heaven or wherever. If the conclave fails as far as coming out with an agenda that automatically becomes a clarion call for all, then the North may not have seen anything yet in the current onward journey to pre-history.
