Professor Ben Nwabueze Chairman, the
Patriots; Project Nigeria Movement; and Igbo Leaders of Thought has said that
President Muhammadu Buhari owes it to the Nigerian people to admit that the
divisions tearing the country apart are caused by his actions and utterances.
Professor Nwabueze in Press
statement said: ‘In an Interview with the Vanguard dated Monday, October 16
2017, Chief Emeka Anyaoku said: “Since the 1967 Civil War, I do not think this
country has ever been as divided as it is now.”
‘This statement, coming from a man
known for his unstinted objectivity on matters of public affairs, represents
the undeniable truth about the situation facing our country today. There are
separatist agitations for the Republic of Biafra, Niger Delta Republic and
Oduduwa Republic. There is the Notice issued by the Arewa Youths Coalition to
Ndigbo to leave the North by 1st October 2017.
There is the menace of Fulani
herdsmen rampaging the whole country, killing and maiming innocent people and
destroying their farms and properties. These divisive events are pushing
Nigeria to the brink of disintegration. ‘To these must be added the divisive
turn or course the issue of Re-structuring is taking. Instead of a principled
approach based on its merits and demerits as it affects the whole country as
one entity, Re-structuring has divided the country into North and South,
according to how it is perceived to affect the interests of the North, or, as
it is put in a report in the Vanguard of 15 October, 2017, in order to “ensure
that the North is not shortchanged” by Re-structuring. The interest of the
North in the matter is defined to be to keep it (i.e. the North) “united”
within a united Nigeria.
The interest of the North, said
Governor El Rufai of Kaduna State, is not Re-structuring, but to “address the
dual challenge of poverty and deficiency in education in the region”. In his
own contribution, even former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar said : “The North
has nothing to fear [from Re-structuring] because we have the land, we have the
population and we have the resources. The North has nothing to fear because oil
will soon become history.” It is indeed lamentable that a matter touching on
the vital interests of the whole country as one entity is being viewed and
treated as a matter in which the interest of the North predominates and
overrides everything else. But the critical question, which disquietens me
deeply, is as to why the division along the lines mentioned above is occurring
just at this time, during the 2½ years rule of President Buhari, and why they
had not occurred at any other time during the 46 years since the end of the
civil war in January 1970. This is a question the Presidency appears never to
ask itself, as it should.
It (i.e. the Presidency), busies
itself instead in self-justification and self-praise and in issuing stern
rebukes and threats of repressive action against those who threaten the unity
of the country. The President constantly regales us with the hackneyed talk
about the unity of the country not being negotiable, forgetting that the unity
of the country is yet to be created by the coalescing of the over 300 ethnic
nationalities comprised in Nigeria into one united nation. The game of
self-justification and self-praise in which the Presidency constantly engages
itself precludes self-examination, without which there can be no
self-correction. President Buhari owes it to the Nigerian people to admit that
the divisions tearing the country apart are caused by his actions and
utterances; he should now begin the process of self-correction which involves
the making of amends for his misguided past actions and utterances. His actions
and utterances under reference manifest a pre-determined
Islamisation/Northernisation Agenda with the war against corruption serving as
a cover.
The existence of such Agenda is not
something conjured up just to discredit him; on the contrary, it is an
irrefutable fact. His commitment to the Islamisation Agenda was heralded in a
speech at a seminar organised by the Supreme Council of Sharia in Nigeria in
August 2001 where he (Gen Buhari) publicly declared that he was committed to
implementing Sharia law all over the country. The Islamisation Agenda was a
significant factor in the APC presidential primary for the 2015 election.
The voters at the said primary, the
majority of whom were moslems from the North, wanted a presidential candidate
whom they could confidently rely upon to implement the Sharia agenda, and so
voted overwhelmingly for Buhari as the man to be relied upon for the job,
giving him 3,430 votes, as against 954 votes for Atiku Abubakar, also a Moslem
but not a diehard Islamist like Buhari. His position as a fervent apostle of
the Islamisation/Northernisation agenda was re-affirmed in a speech he, as
President-elect, delivered before an audience of exclusively prominent Northern
Moslem leaders on 2 May, 2015 at Queen Amina Hall, Ahmadu Bello University
(ABU), Zaria. “I charge you”, he said with the ardour of a zealot, “to join me
as we build a new Northern Nigeria in a generation ………the best investment we
can make in the North is not finding oil in the Chad Basin……..we will start
with one local government in each state until we get to every school in all of
Northern Nigeria……. To achieve this, I have secured a Northern rehabilitation
fund……..to rebuild the North after the devastation of Boko Haram insurgency……
Join me my brothers and sisters and let us finish the work our forefather,
Ahmadu Bello, started.”
This was coming from a
President-elect who, in his Inaugural Speech, designed to charm and beguile his
listeners, said : “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody”? His actions
under reference consisted in the main of appointments to strategic positions he
made since assuming office as President on 29 May, 2015. Of the altogether 31
such appointments, 24 (or nearly 80%) go to Moslems from the North, 7 to the
South, distributed 4 to the South-West, 3 to the South-South and nil to the
South-East.
To underscore the strategic nature
of the 24 appointments, they include Secretary to the Government of the
Federation (SGF), National Security Adviser, Chief of Staff to the President,
Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), Chairman, Independent Electoral
Commission, Managing Director, Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Group Managing
Director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Inspector-General of
Nigeria Police Force, Director, Department of State Security (DSS) and most of
the top offices in that Department; Chairman, Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission (EFCC); nearly all the Service Chiefs – the South-East was again
excluded from the appointment of the Service Chiefs. The Northernisation Agenda
is further carried into action in the recent appointments to 15 top offices in
the NNPC, distributed 10 to the North, three to the South West, two to the
South-South, and Nil again to the South-East.
The Islamisation/Northernisation
Agenda, as it is faithfully being implemented by the Buhari Federal Government,
shows that Government to be a government for one section of the country, the
North, to be precise. It is not the all-inclusive government that Nigerians
desire. These appointments, the concentration of 80 per cent of them in the
North and the total exclusion of the South-East from them, is an affront to
justice, social justice and equality in the administration of government. The
concept of equal treatment needs explanation. The concept is predicated upon
our common humanity as living human beings, with a soul, the ability to
breathe, think, speak, move about and to act, and a capacity for emotions and
sensations. Every human being feels pain, anguish and happiness, and is endowed
with a conscience that enables him to judge between right and wrong, and to
form beliefs, just like everyone else.
The differences which undoubtedly
exist between individuals because of differences in physical, intellectual and
will power are only differences of degree, which leave unaffected our basic
common human nature. Because of our basic common human nature, all citizens
have more or less the same need for the security of their person and property,
for justice in their dispute with others, for peace and order, for happiness, the
good life and for welfare care generally, for obedience to the laws on the part
of all, and the protection of their basic human rights. The rationale for the
state to treat all citizens equally arises partly from our common humanity as
human beings with the very same basic needs noted above, and partly from the
need to avoid the incidence of unfairness in the administration of government,
except where such is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society.
If the state is the product of a
social contract, then, all citizens should count equally in relation to it. In
this view, a democratic state is an organization in which the relationship of
all members to it is on equal terms, whether it pertains to the conferment of
rights, the imposition of obligations, the security of lives and property, the
administration of justice, the distribution of social amenities or the exercise
of legislative and executive power generally. The importance of justice in
human society is perhaps best illustrated by considering the feelings aroused
in us by injustice. Whereas justice is a cold virtue that evokes no feeling,
injustice or unfairness arouses intense fury in us, as we get heated up and
indignant about it.
“Indignation, which is the
conceptually appropriate response to injustice, expresses, as its etymology
shows, a sense of not being regarded as worthy of consideration. Injustice
betokens an absence of respect, and manifests a lack of concern.” Lucas, On
Justice (1980), p.7. For this reason, the occurrence of injustice, especially
if it is on a wide scale, immediately puts the “unity and coherence of society
under strain.” Lucas, op. cit., p. 4 Justice is thus rightly regarded as the
“bond of society,” Lucas, op. cit., p. 18, the “cornerstone of human
togetherness.” Oputa, Lecture on Justice. It is the condition in which the
individual can feel able “to identify with society, feel at one with it, and
accept its rulings.” Lucas, op. cit., p. 1.
An unjust society cannot maintain
its unity and cohesion, because it cannot arouse in its members a strong enough
feeling of loyalty and allegiance. Injustice not only alienates the
individual’s loyalty, what is worse, it also arouses him to disaffection. An
individual, denied recognition by society, cannot but feel alienated and disaffected.
“Justice,” wrote James Madison, fourth President of the United States, “is not
only the end of government, it is the end of civil society. It ever has been
and ever will be pursued until it be obtained or until liberty be lost in the
pursuit.” James Madison, The Federalist, No. 25, ed. Clinton Rositer (1961).
Unjust action by the state as between the racial, ethnic and religious groups
comprised in it (i.e. the state) is of far greater concern. This is because of
its tendency to generate greater bitter resentment and to provoke more violent
social conflicts than unjust treatment of individuals. By concentrating in the
North nearly 80% of his strategic appointments and by excluding the South-East
completely, a feeling of alienation, of not being wanted, may have been created
on the part of those so disadvantaged or excluded.
A feeling of alienation may grow
into that of disaffection or disloyalty. The recrudescence of the widespread
agitation for the revival of independent Biafra may not be unconnected with the
feeling of alienation generated in the agitators by the exclusion of the
South-East Zone from President Buhari’s strategic appointments. By thus
excluding Ndigbo from these appointments and thereby alienating them from
President Buhari’s Federal Government, every Igbo man and woman feel at heart a
Biafran, much as they passionately love Nigeria and want its territorial
sovereignty preserved, and maintained over them – i.e. Biafra existing in the
heart and mind, but not in actuality or in a physical sense.
The entire Igbo race of over 50
million people scattered throughout the whole length and breadth of the country
might just as well be proscribed as Biafrans!! In the face of the exclusions of
Ndigbo from appointment to the strategic offices mentioned above, and the
feeling of alienation from President Buhari’s Federal Government thereby
created in them, the much-talked-about assignment to them of four ministerial
portfolios – Foreign Affairs, Trade and Commerce, Science and Technology, and
Labour and Productivity – pales to relative insignificance, if it does not
border on an irrelevancy. Coming back to the all-important question of the
unity of the country.
The issue is confounded by the
illegitimacy of the state in Nigeria, as in nearly every other country in
Africa, owing to its origin as an imposition by an alien imperial power, whose
authority to rule is thus not derived from, or backed by, tradition, convention
or myth accepted and respected by the people over whom it exercises rule. Karl
Maier, in his book, This House has Fallen : Midnight in Nigeria (2000), p. 7,
has rightly described it (i.e. the Nigerian state) as “the bastard child of
imperialism”. To legitimise it is one of the primary and daunting tasks of the
President of Nigeria. President Buhari is hereby assured of our support should
he ever decide to embark on that role.
A readily authentic means of
legitimation is by a constitution, deriving authority as the supreme law of the
land, from the people, in whom is reposed the sovereignty of the country with
its constituent power, a constitution adopted at a Referendum. A constitution,
made in this way, launches the country on a new beginning, bestows much-needed
legitimacy on the state and unity on the country, and serves as a medium for
the implementation of Re-structuring. Re-structuring is after all about how to
strengthen and nurture unity of the country.
Apart altogether from the issue of
legitimising the state, the recent incident of parents rushing to the schools
to collect their children because of the rumour that the Nigerian Army might
administer immunisation to them against monkey pox casts a shadow on the
legitimacy of the Federal Government and its agency, the Nigerian Army, in the
eyes of these parents. The operations launched by the Army in the South-East
and the South-South States, and the unfortunate names given to the Operations –
Operation Python Dance and Operation Crocodile Smile – create in the minds of
the people of those States, especially the unsophisticated masses, an image of
the Army and its employer, the Federal Government, as a python and a crocodile,
out there to devour people, and from which therefore their children must be
kept away.
The message, the practical
significance, of the incident is clear : the people need protection, but the
protection they need is not protection by the Federal Government of President
Buhari, but protection against it. Lastly, I urge dialogue and, as an ultimate
step, the setting up of a Peace and Reconciliation Commission, as has been done
in 23 other countries of the world.
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