Title: Ethnic Profiling and the Challenges of Inclusion in Nigeria: A Survey of the Literature
Author: Ibrahim Muazzam
Publisher: CITAD, Kano
Reviewer: Adagbo Onoja
Pages: 139
The tyranny of deadlines should not excuse some of us from locating Mallam Ibrahim Muazzam’s latest text as in the above title. The subject matter is too important and so creatively handled to merit a situated reading. In any case, it will be difficult to find a more competent handler of the sensitive theme than the ex-Bayero University, Kano political scientist, with particular reference to self-discipline, sense of balance and track record in documentation. In other words, this is the text the reader would find no manifestation of any chuwa-chuwa (mercantile) or mercenary attitude at all.
Mallam Ibrahim Muazzam in a previous picture
By way of homage to intertextuality, the review has to start with another text, this time David Campbell’s 1998 essay, titled “MetaBosnia: Narratives of the Bosnian War”. It is a very scatting review of nearly a dozen monographs that had been published on the Bosnian War. Campbell dismissed all of them for the ‘crime’ of reducing the complexity of the Bosnian War “to the banalities of ethnic essentialism”. In his view, they did this “in order to attribute responsibility to particular individuals or groups”. For Campbell, the authors, in doing so, became complicit in the constitution of realities they merely claim to describe”, a ‘crime’ they could have avoided committing if they followed a narrativising approach to historiography (P. 263).
Campbell’s essay came to mind as soon as one saw reference to cultural essentialism and collective singularity, aggravated by elite manipulation in both Muazzam and Prof Jibrin Ibrahim (who wrote The Preface to the monograph)’s take on what provokes ethnic profiling. Muazzam goes further in The Introduction to interrogate the possibility of a single social truth that ethnic profiling rely upon (P.13). It is a warning to the reader that the intellectual project of this text sees ethnic profiling as constructivism, thereby raising the question: if ethnicity is a category in banality as alluded to in Campbell, Muazzam and Jibrin’s scholarship of ethnicity, why was it able to underpin so much chaos in Bosnia, the pride of multiculturalists in Europe who loved showing off Bosnia’s diversity – Croatians, Muslims, Serbs and others?
It can be argued that this is the question Muazzam’s work under review responds to in his own way by focusing on ethnic profiling in Nigeria. Muazzam’s work is crucial because it isolates ethnic profiling as the provocation for the sort of violent ethnicity that could break a nation such as Yugoslavia, notwithstanding the banality of ethnicity. And if ethnic violence has been about the most thriving industry in Nigeria since 1999, then Muazzam’s monograph should be about the most welcome text today, considering the number of lives lost to so-called ethnic strife across Nigeria since then.
What Muazzam has done is condensing instances of profiling into 12 sub-themes, these being ‘Nigeria, the Nation State and the Emergence of Identity Politics’; ‘The Cultural Stereotyping of the Other’; ‘The Civil War Narrative, Lessons and Counter Narratives’; ‘The Igbo Question, the Nigerian State and Marginalisation’; ‘The Nigerian Question, Federalism and Restructuring’; ‘The Leadership Question in Nigeria’; The Resurgence of Ethnic Militancy and Separatist Movements’; ‘Sub-ethnic Identities, Organisations, Politics and Crisis’; ‘Ethnoreligious Conflicts, Citizenship and the Indigeneity Question’; ‘Fulanisation, Islamisation and Insecurity’; ‘Pastoralist/Farmers Conflicts and the Lands Question’ and, lastly, the ‘Conclusion’.
It remains to be seen if, like Campbell, Muazzam would be confronted with a serious question. MetaBosnia did come under attack, particularly from Colin Wight, then at the University of Bristol in the UK before moving to the University of Sydney in Australia. Wight raised epistemological problems with Campbell’s work, particularly why Campbell found quotations from the texts he was attacking to buttress his argument if, as Campbell argue, facts do not count but only narrativising. As fascinating as Wight’s attack on Campbell, it doesn’t have to detain us for the reason that a critical realist like Wight and a ‘dissident’ scholar like Campbell can never be reconciled. In any case, typical of any works by Campbell or any of the leading names in ‘Dissidence International Relations’ – Richard Asley, James Der Darian, John Agnew, RBJ Walker, Michael Shapiro, amongst others – MetaBosnia was a hit. That was hardly surprising, ‘Dissident IRs’ being the collectivity that had turned International Relations upside down in the post-Cold War. Only two other works compared in global popularity with MetaBosnia. These were Mary Kaldor’s New and Old Wars and Ole Weaver’s Securitisation theory, the theoretical blast from the University of Copenhagen before it was badly bashed on account of its radical conservatism. That was before Ole Weaver’s theory came face to face with critical appraisals.
Lord Lugard
The Coloniality of Ethnic Profiling in Nigeria
A key point the perceptive reader will notice from Chapter One is the characterisation of ethnic profiling in the country as a colonial project. The colonial authority, we are told in this text, needed a divide and rule strategy to keep the natives under control. In this case, the colonialists had, obviously, done their homework well by preparing the minds of the national audience in characterising Nigeria as being too diverse an entity to escape diversity conflict. The fear of anti-colonial currents in India, what is now the DRC and Egypt had taught the colonialists the imperative of divide and rule strategy in managing Nigeria.
Before anyone knew it, ethnic groups had taken colonial profiling as home truth. Those profiled to be superior or warrior groups, cowards or trouble makers or people who cannot be trusted and so on could not see through the colonial tricks. As such, those who were profiled in terms of cultural distinctiveness went away with ethnic pride while those profiled differently nursed their wounds. Colonial ethnic profiling were not that inherently effective or accepted everywhere but it went far. Before anyone could say colonialism, the Igbos and the Yorubas were at war on the pages of The West African Pilot and the Daily Service. It went up to where both sides went to the local markets to buy up all available machetes (P 16). With Zik and Awo alleging each ethnic group’s plan of dominance, nobody was even in the mood to trace which quarters the profiling were coming from.
The fabrication of fault lines took a regional turn too in the narrative of the North-South dichotomy or what has passed into the ‘predominantly Muslim North versus mainly Christian South’ binary projected in metropolitan media even when neither the North nor South of Nigeria is monolithic in any identity sense (P.18).
Exceptions
But the review took note of an exception somewhere. It was The Ijebu Weekly Echo which articulated and remained committed to pan-Nigerian approach and deadly against tribalism’ (P.16)
The Ijebu Weekly Echo was not the only one exception. Some scholars such as Eghosa Osaghae took the position that there can be no pure ethnicity and the hassles are, therefore, not worth it. Dr. Okoi Arikpo also did although Osaghae had not advanced his argument at the time Arikpo was waging against ethnicity. As early as at 1960, Arikpo had argued that Nigeria is not an accident or “an arbitrary block of land chopped off the surface of tropical Africa” but a “cultural melting pot” from which the most virile cultural complex was in gestation (P. 19). The interesting observation would be why the Okoi Arikpos were not the ones who became the national leaders. The answer may not be far-fetched. Hugh Clifford, the colonial governor replied Arikpos in the land by ruling out the possibility of welding into one, united nation “self-contained and mutually independent native states separated from one another as many of them by great distances, by difference of history and traditions and by ethnological, racial, tribal, political, social, religious barriers…” (P 19). It is the sort of unschooled, ahistorical argument one reads in many Nigerian newspapers even till today notwithstanding the elaborate documentation of such contacts by some of Nigeria’s most brilliant historians viz Onwuka Dike; Billy Dudley; Emmanuel Ayandele; Gabriel Olusanya; Emmanuel Alagoa; J C Anene; Anthony Asiwaju; Bala Usman; Onigu Otite; Adiele Afigbo and several others. Yet, it is partly the precolonial contacts and subsequent cultural fusion that have made dismembering the country difficult in spite of all such ambition and plans.
Zik of Africa, cut to size by the colonial machinations
‘Imaginative geographies’
The monograph is full of interesting reminders in the rest of the chapters, two of which most potential readers are sure to find interesting. In Chapter Two which focuses on ‘The Cultural Stereotyping of the Other’, the author lists stereotypical portraits of the big three ethnic groups on each other. The average Southerner, reports late top Historian, Obaro Ikime, in a 1969 study, looks at his northern counterpart as a ‘Gambari’, a herdsman and a nincompoop (P21). The Igbo-Nigerian is seen as selfish, ubiquitous, avaricious and unscrupulously competitive while the Yoruba is cowardly, untrustworthy, cunning, diplomatic but self-seeking and full of tricks (P. 22).
These are what Edward Said would have a national level application of imaginative geographies, particularly the foundation of Fulanisation as laid many decade ago by colonial officials and missionaries who privileged the “Fulani as a strong man, a born ruler and a fighter” (P.22). Interesting that the ‘born to rule’ tag thrown at Fulanis today was a construction by a colonial officer called Miller in a 1949 work (P.22). But the stereotyping could go down to much lower level as that between Ijebu and Ibadan around 1948. The feud was such that Ijebus in Ibadan had to form the Native Settlers Union of Ijebu Immigrants and Chief Awolowo having to forward a protest to the physical and figurative targeting (P.23). Even the Ibadan People’s Party was understood to be a reaction to Ijebu leadership of both the AG and NCNC. The 1958 riots following the death of Adelabu in an accident assumed the ethnic dimension, warranting calling in the military involvement (P. 24).
Thematic Sampling
In Chapter Six which is on the leadership question, there is a position of Alison Ayida, Super Super Perm Sec on how Nigeria has not been lucky to get qualitative leadership befitting it. We also find an excellent recollection of the famous Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN)’s booklet on leadership imbalance during the IBB regime (P. 49). What Takena Tamuno, the late doyen of historical scholarship in Nigeria, had to say on Secret Societies as a factor in public power can be found on P. 52. And the book on the Ogboni fraternity as well as the tiff between AMORC and ECWA (P.53). There are hints of Okija Shrine and Ombatse on P. 54, many years before they happened. Yoruba Solidarity Forum (YSF)’s The Master Plan is elaborately mentioned on pages 54/55.
A few Nigerians will find their names mentioned, some for ridiculous statements they made on one theme or another while a few others for very positive things they have said sometimes back. On the list would include Odia Ofeimum, Reuben Abati, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the late Bola Ige, Dr. Abubakar Siddique Mohammed and the newspaper, Alaroye.
It is important that someone has documented much of these. It should be the nucleus of further works, hoping though it doesn’t become another typical Nigerian enterprise in the hands of all manner of survivalists.
What the monograph does is to show a high degree of ethnic stereotyping in the land. Two, many of them have sedimented and could undergird reckless actions. Three, so sedimented are many of them that people have forgotten their constructedness. Many people take the stereotypes as the truth and nothing but the truth. Four, there are external interests ignorantly as well as determinedly at work with these stereotypes. Lastly, Nigeria has neither the kind of political parties nor civil society with the systematic sort of practices that can counter profiling. If there were, they could undercut ethnic profiling through popular action for inclusivity.
Let’s take the stereotypes against each of three big ethnic groups, for example. Let’s assume that it is true that Igbos love money and can do whatever to get money, but is that the only thing they do? The Igbos who love money to a fault is also the cultural roots of Africa’s greatest spokesperson – Chinua Achebe. So, by which formula or arithmetic is Igbo’s love of money superior to the rehabilitation of the humanity of the black person by someone of Igbo subjectivity? The same goes for all other stereotypes about other ethnic groups, be it the figuration of Yorubas as deceitful people or Northerners as nincompoops, even with Northerners breaking records in Medicine and Mathematics in some of the best universities in the country years before now.
Or, using the ridiculousness of the Umuleri and Aguleri conflict in Anambra State, for example, against stereotyping. Even though both of them trace their ancestry to Eri, this sameness of ancestry could not offer a ground against carnage between the two brother communities as soon as experts in profiling took control in amplifying differences. And there are many other Aguleri versus Umuleri cases in the monogram. They may not be as striking as the ridiculousness of Aguleri versus Umuleri but are no less constructed. A well organised political party with a well-staffed Discourse Department can use these cases to ridicule ethnic stereotyping before they degenerate to violence.
The monograph does immense service to a limping Nigeria. Even if there had been no coloniality of ethnicity, the principle of positive self versus the negative Other which is definitive of inter-personal relations would still have been provocative of ethnic profiling. Now, it is made worse by Nigeria being colonised and therefore falling into the orbit of Western metaphysics. In Western metaphysics, a pair such as North/South implies inferiority of the South. That is the logic behind what women, blacks, masters/slaves and so on have experienced under Western civilisation. It arises from the crisis of metaphysics of presence in Western ontology which can neither understand nor accept fluidity, difference and diversity. The logocentric lens in Western outlook is frightened by difference and moves to crush difference anywhere and everywhere, thus bringing about imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and the culture of ‘everywhere wars’. Unfortunately, Western metaphysics is the ontological framework underpinning the educational industry up to this moment in Nigeria. While Western scholars across the world are doing so much to unmake the hegemony of Western metaphysics across the world, a huge percentage of African/Nigerian scholars are still locked up in Enlightenment modernism and its epistemology.
The last point to make here is drawing attention of the publishers to dissemination. Why shouldn’t there be a formal presentation of a text of this nature to the Bola Tinubus, Atiku Abubakars, Rabiu Kwankwasos, Peter Obis and all others aspiring to rule this country?
The monograph has coincided with the month in which another Muazzam – Prof Jibrin Ibrahim – is being celebrated at his 70th birthday. Both events – the monograph and the 70th anniversary – should be sources of joy. Sure, there would and there should be conviviality but just as there would be the sense of ‘Paradise Lost’ too because the country is simply not reproducing the Muazzams and the Jibrin Ibrahims at all. If at all, the number is so few and far between. To make matters worse, one doesn’t see the sense of urgency or the sense of danger in this from those who should be echoing it. And yet, there are supposed to be leaders. What a country!
