By Adagbo Onoja
There is an angle to resolving the phenomenon characterised by violence on the Plateau that has, however, not featured in the discursive formation around the latest round of the cycle of violence. The Sultan has blamed intelligence failure. Vice-president Shettima and his principal have privileged no escape route for the perpetrators. Northern Senators Forum insists the event must be comprehensively investigated. The Sothern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum stresses Hausa-Fulani complicity and calls for restructuring while for the Plateau State governor, Barrister Muftwang, it is lack of political will to deal with terrorism. The Senate is galloping with a bill on self-defence just as Inspector-General of Police Kayode Egbetokun is already investigating.
In all these, there is still no mention of the fundamental basis of the antagonism. Governor Muftwang and those who talk about land as being the issue in conflict may not be wrong but what is it about land that has so much fantasmatic grip on people as to make them willing to kill and be killed?
This is the question that has not been posed and without which Nigeria cannot resolve the Plateau killings. Plateau killings is just one site of it but Ife-Modakeke was another. Lagos is rapidly emerging too. Southern Kaduna remains the epicentre. And so on and so forth. Again, if Nigeria is not careful, something cataclysmic might be building up. And it might be worth illustrating the intensity of the grip of the inclusion – exclusion ideology frame that underpins the problem in question.
Warning first hinted in this document and later elaborated upon. So, why does Nigeria find it difficult to heed warnings until things reach explosive levels?
In the thick of the controversy on whether Dr. Goodluck Jonathan should contest the 2011 presidential election or not, governors of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) from the Southern part of the country went round to expand the conversation on the topic. As a staffer in the Government House, Dutse working with a PDP governor, I found myself entangled from the angle of communicating the conversation.
The conversation at the Palace of the Emir of Katsina was very interesting. Among other things, the Emir at the time said his forefathers rejected the advice of the colonialists to create ‘Sabon gari’ or new town for ‘strangers’ in the city. He said too that those who created Nigeria are still wondering how the country is still one. In other words, colonialists did not believe Nigeria would survive. They thought the whole place will quickly scatter because of the incongruity of the bunch of the assemblage. There were other things he said.
Journalists covered the conversation and what he said were not exclusively for the ears of the 14 or so governors. But I was not a conventional journalist in that, as the media adviser to then Jigawa State governor, Sule Lamido, I had a task of Governmentalising the event. Governmentalising the event simply means I must approach the story from an intertextual angle, thereby relativising the refusal of the Katsina aristocracy to oblige the colonialists’ preference for apartheid settlement pattern in incipient Nigeria. This was particularly so because when the marching order I got when I asked the governor if what the emir said was something the Government House media team needed to publicise, I can recall him saying yes because there was need to bring down the tension building up around Jonathan contesting the 2011 election. So, I went to work.
But the piece was soon to get me into trouble. An otherwise stable professor of Middle Belt extraction protested quietly to me. His point of departure is that inference that the piece was sort of showcasing the Katsina example as a plausible model for others to follow. The professor said it was a wrong-headed analysis on my part. This, he said, is because refusal to create Sabon gari in Katsina is not the same thing as non-Hausa/Fulanis claiming entitlement to land in any states in the Northwest but which he said the settlers around Plateau were doing.
It was not really a new position which I was just coming to but, coming from that rather quiet and rather scholarly minded person brought to the fore is the hardiness of feelings on this issue. And the issue is the settler/indigene ideology in Nigeria which, in the case of Plateau, is mediated by the Jassawa/Jankassa binary. It is thus not a bland struggle over land as materialists are telling us but a specific form of contestation driven by how the contenders situate themselves in relation to land. The implication is that the violence can be over anything, not only land. Was it not over whether pigs can be slaughtered in an abattoir or whether Burukutu can be sold in a particular market that caused similar killings in the past? So, this is an identity conflict and as identity is an ever shifting and elusive category, conflicts of this nature can be testy and difficult to manage. Interestingly, the Nigerian State which has complicated the problem by its contradictory practice of citizenship is at sea on how to handle it and is trying to escape through avoidance.
How did the Nigerian State complicate the issue? It did so by declaring indigeneity as the single defining criterion by which a person is qualified to be a minister. In other words, the defining criterion for, arguably, the hallmark of citizenship in Nigeria is being indigenous to the state the potential minister comes from. That means that, by putting that provision in the Nigerian Constitution, the Nigerian State is officially opposed to the status that settlers are claiming anywhere in Nigeria today.
In practice, however, every Nigerian leader and every government enjoins people to settle anywhere and go about their normal lives peacefully. Political leaders busy themselves appealing to people to learn to live together, closing their eyes to why they needed to make such appeals in the first case. It cannot be that people do not know how to live together peacefully until they are told to do so by leaders. This is the crux of the matter.
It would not have been so sad if no one has drawn the attention of Nigeria to the dangers of privileging indigeneity in the Constitution. Although I cannot bet the second scholar who wrote the position with Bala Usman, (I stand to be corrected but this position is not the Minority report Bala Usman and Dr. Segun Osoba, his Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife counterpart submitted at the Constitution Drafting Committee in 1976 because my memory of the paper is a presentation at an event in Jos) but the point is that the two authors argued that by specifying indigeneity as a defining criterion for appointing ministers, the Nigerian State was inviting anarchy because it goes against the much less complicated alternative of a civic federalism. In a civic federalism, one is a citizen, first and foremost and can live in whichever part of the country s/he fancies. Of course, living in any part of the country implies entitlement to any and everything definitive of citizenship.
Gov Muftwang of Plateau State
I do not agree with the authors that any of the two is inherently superior. After 63 years of living with indigeneity, it might even be more difficult implementing the civic federalism framework now outside a socialist government that can use socialist criteria of redistribution to craftily subvert indigeneity. Other than that, civic federalism looks more problematic in the current chaos in Nigeria.
What I argue is the need to adopt one of the two and to enforce it vigorously. And this is doable and remains attractive till industrialisation hopefully breaks down the boundaries in our cultural world. The question of who or how indigeneity may be determined will still come up in some of the current battlegrounds but that is something that (discursive) linguists and historians can sort out easily.
It bears repeating that the genesis of Plateau killings is not struggle over land as many, including the state governor, Muftwang, believe. The problem is a contest of identity between the Jassawa and Jankassa. In other words, it is a problem between indigeneity and settlers and only a formal adoption of indigeneity or civic federation as the framework for citizenship can resolve it across Nigeria. Plateau killings arise when the Jassawa elements try to assert their self-understanding by linking up with ethno-religious and cultural resources inside and outside the state to rent mercenaries to respond to signals of being edged out. These are not what all those talking politics on Plateau killings are ignorant of. They all know it. It is, therefore, typical Nigerian power elite strategy of conflict avoidance when they talk of apprehending the penetrators. Where are they going to find the mercenaries who are usually rented to carry out the killings? It would thus be very interesting to see the IGP parade the real culprits.
This argument is what the discourses on the latest round of Plateau killings fail to bring to the attention of President Tinubu although I accept the difficulty of even him transcending being a politician to be able to do it. But the consequences of not doing it can make him complicit in preparing Nigeria for a date with anarchy of imponderable implications. Because all that is needed to provoke a bloodbath is some other cultural groups mobilising resources and mastering the art of renting renegade fighters or mercenaries. The country should not be let vulnerable to such a scenario. The key issue is that, now, it is Plateau but tomorrow, it may be somewhere else.
One of the most dangerous threats to nationhood is hard feelings against each other by nationalities. There can be no better illustration of this claim than how it played out in much of Eastern Europe in the immediate post-Cold War. A nation of hostile nationalities sits atop a keg of gunpower. Ethno-religious subtly or loudly hostile to each other is as dangerous to national security as a national military alienated from the citizenry that it has nobody to sing its heroism during a campaign involving it. It is assumed that the seniors in the Nigerian military, especially the Navy takes to damage control whenever officers, in particular, literally goes to war each time they have a traffic problem or minor squabble somewhere with one hapless set of citizens or another. They are creating problems for what they exist to do but without ever making the link. So, the sitting president needs to do something.
As president Tinubu is putting a small committee to work on deciding between indigeneity and civic federation, he should also be putting another star studded but even a smaller committee to take another look at the current configuration of the boundaries. Nigeria does not need to create new states but it needs to recalibrate many of the existing ones. Otherwise, we are also investing in explosive outcomes that may not take long to come. Many of the states today are badly composed. In the absence of an enforceable inclusiveness principle, everyone should be able to see the threat the composition embody. As things are in more than 12 of the existing 36 states, even the arguably most intelligent socialist politician in recent memory like Lenin would be overwhelmed in making them work, even minimally. That’s is how bad things are in those states in terms of inter-group relations and the possibility of development. Elite escapism may not resolve this. But a recalibration can and speedily as well as cheaply and without much animosity too.
It is a paradox that all the innovations and mechanisms put into nation building in the immediate post – independence have been lost. So lost that regulatory agencies in Nigeria have no idea of what it is for an agency to be called a regulator. This shows when they proudly announce every now and then that a sitting president has approved one thing or another for them. Regulatory agencies constitute the most laughable manifestation of the dawn of mediocrity and pedestrianism in contemporary Nigeria. How could a collapse be so total?
