By Adagbo Onoja
I am sure there will still be more of it, but since the charge is the same each time and since my response is also the same, it might be time to put this out, partly in deference to the ‘protesters’ urging it. Otherwise, Intervention doesn’t normally respond to criticisms of what it writes. The reason is simple: most published materials have as many interpretations as the number of readers. Very few write-ups enjoy consensus in a typical audience because reading is a biographical act. So, to which of the interpretations does a reporter respond?
How many Middle Belters are, for instance, undertaking a PhD on Lar’s Emancipation as a power resource, perhaps on MBF?
The overarching charge in this case has to do with the paragraph in a speculative story on the then impending formal entry of Prof Chris Kwaja into politics. The offending stuff goes as follows: So, is Prof Kwaja, like the late Chief Solomon Lar, storming the arena with a narrative that will make even his critics admire him or is he continuing in the tradition of grumbling and victimhood which degrades the Middle Belt, with particular reference to a clear statement of what it wants from Nigeria rather than escorting and fighting other people’s battles for them? It is anyone’s narrative and the demand on Nigeria the narrative embodies that ought to determine who is an ally or opponent of his main constituency, not fantasmatic recall of history or finger pointing praxis in an atmosphere of electoral democracy”.
The first surprise is that no one who has protested this paragraph recalls ever reading anything similar to this from me before, including the one who had protested something like that before. Until it was pointed out to him. His protest must be in 2011 because it was shortly after the meeting of Northern and Southern governors in Katsina State as part of deepening understanding over whether Dr. Goodluck Jonathan should or should not contest in 2011. By then I was still in Government House, Dutse and the protester typically thought that I was serving an obvious agenda until he found out that some of us are not constructed to serve any agenda. It turned out now that my friend has forgotten all of these until I reminded him yesterday (18/02/2026). It seems that people forget their activities or what they read in the media almost immediately afterwards.
Not only is this not the first time I have criticised the strategy of a fraction of the Middle Belt elite on the national question, I actually borrowed the language from a fellow Middle Belt activist who is very much alive, meaning that this campaign is not only not new, it involves others beyond myself, others who have published their opinion too. It has been our persistent critique of the strategy of a certain fraction of Middle Belt elite. It is something many Middle Belt leaders, including a very senior ‘man of God’ are aware of. In fact, the late Dr. Obed Mailafia called our sessions ‘seminar’ unlike the man of God who disagreed. It was also the subject of a conversation between a respected Middle Belter who passed away recently. In his own case, accepted my analysis but gave his own reason why it would not work. Neither he nor myself foresaw his passage and his suggestion that we kept it in view is now, unfortunately, dead on arrival.
It is against the foregone that I assert that there is nothing to subtract or to add to the paragraph in question in the Prof Kwaja story. Neither do we in Intervention have any special relationship with or influence on Prof Kwaja’s political project nor do we have the desire to have such a relationship beyond reporting him like any other politician. But we would be happy should he follow our analysis because any other route is wrong-headed and self-defeating. And how it is so is what I shall now provide.
There is nothing new about the hostility between the emirate North and the cultural Middle Belt, the two dominant identities in Northern Nigeria in cultural and religious terms. It is not Boko Haram and banditry which started it. Boko Haram, banditry and generalised insecurity only aggravated the relationship in the context of poorer quality of presidential leadership and governance in recent years. The Middle Belt has carried the burden of opposition to the emirate North which colonial power relations advantaged over it.
Senator Tarka, practitioner of radical populism
The oppositional politics could be said to climax with the late Senator Joseph Tarka’s entry. One singular move of Tarka was bringing in a candidate from a radical counterpart movement in Borno to stand election in Gboko, win the election and surface in the Northern House of Assembly or whatever it was called then to the shock of the Sardauna of Sokoto who didn’t know what to say or do. Beyond this, Tarka had a grand demand: the creation of the Middle Belt State.
Bargaining this demand was what took him to Chief Awolowo’s fortress in the First Republic. But, in 1979, he wanted the presidency. He considered that he stood a better chance of getting it in the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). So, he went to Chief Awolowo to explain and take leave of him. Although he didn’t get the presidency in the NPN then, he would have, at worst, been a powerful actor in the NPN if he lived longer. So, Tarka had vision and maneuverability. He was not stuck.
Tarka’s person and politics so fascinated the late Dr Yima Sen who though a Marxist, wrote copiously about him, a creativity he couldn’t advance further probably because of the interpretive stiffness of the Marxist establishment in Nigeria. I also caught the Tarka bug when I learnt from Prof Mvendaga Jibo whose interview opened Intervention in 2016 that the corruption allegation against Tarka was politically informed. It was a story crafted in anticipation of power struggle when the military was to disengage from power in 1974 before General Gowon changed his mind. Prof. Jibo has a book to that effect, meaning his claim is not gossip. Today, Tarka’s stature even in death is Kilimanjaro high in the Idoma part of Benue State, for instance. That is all traceable to the story that he persuaded a particular Idoma man to offer himself as the first elected governor of Benue State. The storyline is that it was the Idoma man who declined, to Tarka’s chagrin. So, the Tarka imaginary is such a highly elevated one in popular consciousness as to have a fantasmatic pull for a Marxist.
The late Chief Solomon Lar obviously learnt a lot from him in terms of a model of politics. He arrived in politics with a frame game of Emancipation. Some of his opponents criticised him, reading the Emancipation Agenda along cultural and religious lines. But the critics were playing politics because a text such as Lar’s doctrine of Emancipation is incapable of a singular meaning. Instead, it has as many meanings as many people who read it. It is the meaning of it which became commonsensical that prevails.
Like every other empire in history, the Sokoto Caliphate had a status quo to defend. Subsequently, it had to contend with the NEPU revolt, for example. NEPU was actually an assemblage of protesting ethno-cultural groups all over the Caliphate, radicalised by the Sawaba Declaration and the activism of its leading lights, particularly the eight pioneers.
So, leaders such as Aminu Kano, Tarka and Lar were sending a message to all oppositions to the Caliphate: anything less than a radically progressive political agenda when confronting the status quo is an exercise in trying to overcome the retrograde with the retrogressive. Such an agenda will not work because grievances and strategy are two different things. Any and every status quo gives way only when radically deconstructed to unveil the beatific promise of the radical alternative. That is how Aminu Kano, Tarka and Lar succeeded but not others.
And this is why it is never clear why the MBF, for example, is fixated. So fixated that it doesn’t see the unwritten point that, by the principle of zoning, Nigeria does not quite know the Middle Belt. It knows the North and the South. Only a complicated negotiation of concessions across the country can produce a presidential candidate of Middle Belt origin, for instance, unless some people are still believing in their own arithmetic. It is a process in which the emirate North will be important. Unfortunately, awareness of this doesn’t ever feature in the rhetoric of the MBF, again very much contrary to Tarka or Lar’s maneuverability. You cannot get power by endlessly recalling history and blaming those who would be a huge part of voting you into power. It doesn’t make strategic sense. What makes sense is a narrative that states clearly what the Middle Belt wants and on the basis of which supporters and antagonists of the Middle Belt cause will become clear and then the bargaining of that demand on Nigeria. That was Joseph Tarka’s strategy. He stated his demands categorically: the creation of Middle Belt State.
Not only are MBF leaders and their intellectuals not learning lessons from these examples, they are also not taking lessons from things happening before their own eyes. They learnt no lessons from when the imperative of power took then citizen Bola Tinubu from the Southwest, past the Middle Belt to negotiate terms with Buhari or the Northwest in 2015. It shows that politics is about negotiating accommodation, not unhelpful rigidity.
Before Tinubu, there was the Abiola re-narrativisation of Yorubas in Nigerian politics. Abiola’s narrative was a challenge to Chief Awolowo’s efforts and approach. Chief Abiola ruptured Chief Awolowo’s narrative with an approach which favoured Yorubas entering and occupying the centre. Initially, he was seen as kowtowing to the Caliphate or something like that. Although Abiola did not wear the crown, he prepared the ground for Obasanjo’s second coming. Obasanjo has been followed by Prof Yemi Osinbajo and now Bola Tinubu since 1999. 2027 and after could still be the Yoruba moment in Nigerian politics, all thanks to Abiola.
That is politics, not the unhelpful rigidity of the MBF with which they undermined the prospects of someone such as Prof Jerry Gana who could have been a very formidable Middle Belt material for presidential power. He couldn’t because the Middle Belt Forum (MBF)’s brand of politics undermined him, denying him the advantages of his good educational pedigree, professorship in a first generation university before IBB brought him to limelight, unique opportunity to construct a cross-cutting national base from the traditional authority to business to culture to academia to religion and what have you as MAMSER boss, high degree of public spiritedness, his standing in progressive politics, his spectacular prediction of June 12 almost two decades before it happened, his servant leadership in all the processes of forming the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and his uncommon longevity in government.
The lesson from the pattern of alignments in the recent past is that no section of the country can go it alone. Alignment and negotiated accommodation is inescapable. Hegemonic narratives constitutes the coin for that negotiation anywhere else in the world. Going about blaming those who managed to canvass their own self-understanding into hegemony at the expense of developing and operationalising own narrative is poverty of politics, not radicalism or fighting the status quo.
The way forward for the Middle Belt is to get out of that self-imprisonment so as to unfold into the centre of Nigerian Politics. Whether it can find its own Abiola to lead this process is a different thing but, even then, it cannot do this without, first, stopping the culture of apriori definition of antagonists based on a sense of victimhood which degrades rather than elevates. There is absolutely nothing wrong in Hausa-Fulani, Yorubas, Igbos, Ishekiri, and whoever else developing a narrative of Nigeria from its own interest. And benefitting from the outcome of such hegemonic move. That, in truth, is the most scientific definition of politics. There is nothing more in politics than hegemonising one’s narrative. The worrisome question is: where is the Middle Belt’s narrative of Nigeria today and the Middle Belt’s place in it?
The creator of the Yoruba moment in Nigerian politics
In any case, there is something strategic in that as it is when the Middle Belter is in power that the country feels so secure because, having nowhere to go, the Middle Belters do not bargain with Nigeria by threatening balkanization. In fact, there is a common analogy within the Nigerian establishment that Lord Lugard has lost the credit for modern Nigeria because the Nigeria that exists today is no longer the Nigeria that Lugard created. The Nigeria that Lugard created expired with the Biafran challenge. What exists today is what Providence gave General Gowon the historical opportunity to, along with his colleagues in the armed forces, put together. As I said in the report on Kwaja, anyone who reads late Prof Jonah Elaigwu’s Gowon’s Nigeria: Excerpts of Interviews With General Gowon will develop a new and better appreciation of Gen Gowon in the light of the totality of his grasp of the intricacies of leadership and power. It must be the same appreciation that made Ali Mazrui to conclude that Gowon is the father of modern Nigeria and it was not a patronising statement.
The challenge for the Middle Belt is to unfold and replicate the Gowons in its midst, stop antagonism in favour of agonism. Agonism means that we recognise that there are people, groups, tendencies, ideologies with which ‘we’ do not agree but whom we do not have to eliminate from the polity to be what we want to be. Agonism does not dispense with the ineradicability of conflict and radical differences in the society. What it does is to come to grips with it, partly out of the realisation that the self always implies the Other.
Why does the Middle Belt have to contain antagonism? Why not the Caliphate or any other of the Middle Belt’s opponents in Nigeria? The onus is on the Middle Belt because it is the one protesting loudly, almost at the expense of acquiring and developing power resources by which to articulate an irresistible narrative of Nigeria from a Middle Belt perspective. That the Caliphate may not be protesting loudly may not mean it has not its own frustrations with Nigeria. Like others, it must certainly have its own fears. While it is not the Middle Belt’s business to mind the Caliphate’s fears, it is Middle Belt’s business to master the Nigerian political environment beyond Facebook expletives. Policy is not about expletives but about drawing up a regional self-understanding which can outline the specificity of the development challenge in the area, thereby making clear the areas of intervention by diverse array of actors – INGOs, funders, investors, transnationals, Philanthropy, governments and so on.
However we understand the Middle Belt – cultural Middle Belt, geographical Middle Belt, just another region of Nigeria or whatever, it has many blessings as well as burdens arising from its location in Nigeria. Harnessing both the blessings and burdens into an awesome outcome requires more than a rule of the thumb level of thinking or infatuation with an unchanging sense of history. Every other group’s strategies for survival depends more on what it insists upon or demands rather than what it complains about.
Those who may think that others have no business in how the Middle Belt is articulated have got it all upside down. The diversionary tactic of throwing labels at critics of poor articulation of the area will no longer work. The point is that there is no way those who have been on the barricades in the various struggles for development across Nigeria as activists will overlook the Middle Belt which has, for instance, one of the most sprawling and most embarrassing ghettos in modern day Nigeria – Marraraba and Masaka adjoining Abuja. And that is just one example!
