Articles

Disenfranchising the North through the National Identity Card scheme

by
Ibrahim Ado-Kurawa B. Sc (HONS) M. Sc Zoology (Applied Entomology) ^[1]
Acting Director Research, Institute for Contemporary Research (ICR) Kano and General Editor Weekly Pyramid The Magazine
(ibrahimado@hotmail.com)
Kano, Nigeria
© 2001

Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa with largest concentration of black people in the world is undergoing a great political transformation triggered by a well orchestrated campaign by a particular section of the country namely: the press of Southwestern region, which is dominated by Yoruba tribalists. After they have settled down as the new "masters of Nigeria" their most important task now is to disenfranchise their main rivals, the northerners, whom the Yoruba now regard as their enemies, and refer to as "Hausa-Fulani" whenever it suits them. The reason for this is may not be unconnected with the fact that this "new enemies" of the Yoruba are the largest in population with the most illustrious history being the successors of pre-colonial tropical Africa's undoubtedly largest and most prosperous state. They are also the only group that had an active civil society in pre-colonial Nigeria when it was virtually non-existent in other parts of Nigeria^[2].

To comprehend how this situation has come to pass it is necessary to explore briefly the history of the various peoples residing in the area known today as Nigeria with particular reference to geography as articulated by the Annaliste School^[3]. This is because Chief Richard Akinjide one of the leading ideologues of Yoruba supremacy recently claimed that in all of West Africa the coastal areas have always been more populated than the hinterland! And earlier a leading Yoruba tribalist writer who is patronized by the western European literary and human rights groups arrogantly claimed, "The anomaly is that the south is not only better educated and more populous (although the 1991 census had this the other way round)…"^[4], may be he conducted his own census that determined which region was more populous. The minds of southerners have since been conditioned into believing the false information that Southern Nigeria is more populous than Northern Nigeria. The propagation of this falsehood became more glaringly apparent with the weird and improbable figures bandied about by the Yoruba dominated southern press.

Geographically speaking Nigeria encompasses a wide range of flora and fauna from the Sahel and Savannah regions to the North, to the high, cool plateaus of the Middle Belt to the equatorial forest and mangrove swamps of the coastal regions. Throughout West Africa, it is the Sahel and Sudan Savannah areas, which have usually produced the great states of the region. This Savannah region was essentially one of intense competition where weaker tribes were pushed into the Forest region whose ecology provided refuge to these weak peoples as observed below by one of the leading geographers of Nigeria:

The stronger groups were to be found in the Sudan Savannah while the Guinea Savannah is located south of it just before the forest zone. The Guinea Savannah was also a refugee zone for weaker tribes because of its complex topography with protective hilltops. The Sudan Savannah peoples of West Africa produced sub-Saharan Africa's greatest achievements in statecraft. All the early states and great empires of West Africa were located in this region for example Ghana, Mali, Songhay and Borno. The Sokoto Caliphate, which was the largest, most complex in organization and the most prosperous state in pre-colonial tropical Africa was also in the Sudan Savannah^[6]. "The impetus toward large state building" later in the forest region with the rise of the great Benin Kingdom and Alafinate of Oyo "was probably brought from the north and east toward the end of this thousand year blank period" of the stateless history of the forest region^[7]. In fact Philip Adler in his monumental World Civilizations: Comprehensive Volume part 3; Equilibrium among polycentric civilizations 500-1500 C.E. Chapter 19: Africa to the Fifteenth Century, did not mention any forest state in West Africa, his key identification terms in that chapter were: "Bantu, Berbers, Ghana, Great Zimbabwe, Mali, Mansa Musa, savanna, Swahili, Timbuktu"^[8].

The arrival of the Europeans to the African scene for slave trade initiated the process of an economic power shift to the coast in the forest region but it was a slow process that took centuries because in the pre-colonial times the Sokoto Caliphate was as already noted the most prosperous state in tropical Africa. The coastal areas provided the slave forts and one of the most powerful forest Kingdoms the Alafinate of Oyo was a great slaving polity trading in Muslim slaves and for that reason it was obliterated by the Jihad movement of Shehu Usman Danfodio. Humphrey Fisher has argued that one of the reasons of the jihad was the enslavement of free Muslims by renagades. He documented beyond reasonable doubt the objection of the jihad leaders to the enslavement of free Muslims^[9]. Missionary academics^[10] committed to the indictment of th Muslim leaders refused to consult this paper, that of Meyers^[11] and the eyewitness account of Staudinger^[12].

The Northern Region being the largest in size and population contributed more poll tax revenue to the federation account of Nigeria during colonial rule. The population of the North was never in dispute then because it was directly linked to the size of contribution to the government, rather than allocation from government. For example in 1943:

Head XII of the Estimate of Revenue for that year showed the following:

GENERAL TAX

Despite its lion share to the Federal Revenue, the North was a deprived region because such revenue was used in developing the other regions by providing infrastructure to facilitate exportation of raw materials. For example in the same year the National government's expenditure on education was thus:

Revenue from the Northern Provinces contributed to the building of Lagos and the hydroelectric power station at Kainji, the initial source of energy for the industries of the South West. With the largest and most heterogeneous population the North was more sophisticated politically and it produced the first leaders of independent Nigeria. The Muslim majority helped to produce the Prime Minister of the Federation but the non-Muslim Northerners were not left out in the Federal cabinet^[15].

The tax figures shown above clearly illustrate the bankruptcy of Akinjide's hypothesis. This is because does it mean that in about fifty years the population of the north has stopped growing and the south has overtaken it? This can never be possible because unlike the average southerner most northerners are polygamous. Consistently the north has remained more populous since the pre-colonial period up to the present republic. But Yoruba tribalists are committed to depopulating the north on paper there are currently orienting the mindset of the public on the pages of newspapers so that by the time they conduct the population census and manipulate its results it will become acceptable. Northerners must resist this paper genocide.

Lagos and other parts of Southern Nigeria became favored by the new economic arrangement with ports located in the south. Their cultural proximity to the Western World gave them an advantage over the predominantly northern Muslims. The Southerners accumulated capital over this period and after the civil war came the oil boom. The Yoruba tribalists through the help of their patriarch Chief Awolowo were better placed to reap the maximum benefit. Northerners, "held the horn of the Nigerian cow" and the Yoruba tribalists "milked the Nigerian cow". The Yoruba tribalists and some of their Northern minority allies succeeded in installing religious bigotry and intolerance. With a firm control of the economy Yoruba tribalists charted their project of snatching political power from the North having edged out their only rivals in the South, the Ibos through deception. It must not be forgotten that during the crisis leading to the Civil War, Chief Obafemi Awolowo who was "a committed federalist" gave signals that if the East goes its way the West will also secede. "Indeed, Ojukwu, who led the Igbo secession, counted on Western "solidarity" when he declared Biafra independent"^[16].

The Yoruba dominated print mass media spearheaded the attack for snatching political power from the North. The prominent manifestation of this attack became more obvious from the 1980s onwards. Military misrule of which, many Yoruba political actors from Awolowo to Babatope were principal participants, provided the Yoruba with the seemingly legitimate basis for action especially with the Western world's insistence on "democratic" succession. The Yoruba dominated press harassed the Northern political elite into conceding i.e. zoning the presidency to the Southwest to allow a Yoruba who had a record of fairness in public service to become president.

The Yoruba tribalists control the economy and by the extension the press, just like the Jews in the USA^[17]. In addition they now control political power in Nigeria. Thus at the moment they seem to appear as the most powerful black tribe or is it "race" in the world. Power shift from the savannah peoples of the North to one of the forest tribes is now complete, it essentially began with the economic shift triggered by European colonization and the creation of Nigeria, facilitated by the policies of the governments they entrenched. The complexities and ironies of history are such that a tribe of the forest region has now assumed political power over others including those with older political tradition, for the first time in about one thousand years of statehood of the savannah peoples. Some of the Niger-Congo tribes of Nigeria in fact never experienced statehood until the arrival of the Europeans.

The Yoruba tribalists will struggle as much as possible through conspiracies it must not be forgotten that they had earlier deceived the Ibos. The current ID card fracas is one of the hypocrital strategies of the Yoruba tribalists through which they hope by disenfranchising majority of the Northerners. The Yoruba tribalists have also cultivated the friendship of some Northern minorities from the "Middle Belt" whenever expedient. Thus we are now witnessing the germination of the seed of Islam phobia sown by the missionaries, who capitalized on the weakness of these Guinea Savannah peoples. The liability of these two allies is their inability to absorb the universality of the Christian ideology hence they have remained imprisoned in their respective tribal shells.

The ID card project is the first strategy that will be used by the Yoruba tribalists to ensure that the north becomes depopulated on paper before the next census. Already, Lagos State's "Chicago" Governor, Bola Tinubu has set the stage for this claiming in January that Lagos now has 15 million people when as at last count in 1991 its population was 5,725,116 while Kano (excluding Jigawa) was 5,810,470^[18], therefore in ten years Lagos population has almost tripled and the Northern population is stagnant? May be the "Chicago" governor conducted population census recently.

The Yoruba tribalists are committed on they desire to use the ID card for future elections. This is because with their firm control of all organs of civic registration they hope to manipulate the exercise so that the North will have fewer voters thus permanently denying its peoples the chance of "winning" any future presidential elections. The Minister of State for Internal Affairs who is a stooge in the scheme of things has asserted that there is no going back on using the card for elections. According to him the aim of the card is to distinguish Nigerians from aliens. But this is a farce because an alien could easily go and register and get the card just as many have got the Nigerian passport. The identity card can never succeed because there is no standard residential addressing system in Nigeria. The local government councils are constitutionally responsible for this addressing system. They are the competent authority that should identify their citizens, for the card to succeed the local government councils must be the issuing agencies. The Federal Government should only supply the materials and staff that will carry out the clerical work as they have been doing in other civic registrations such as births and deaths. This is if at all the Yoruba supremacist dominated federal government is interested in the success of the scheme and not in the elimination of their rivals?

In most of the organized world identity cards have never been election requirements. Only in countries manned by dubious leaders such as Ivory Coast and Zambia. Alassane Outtara has been denied contesting election in Ivory Coast because according to the authorities his mother was not born in that country, never mind the fact that he was born in that country and he has even served as its prime minister. The reason is that if Outtara is allowed to rule, political power will shift from the Southern Christians who are the minority to Northern Muslims who are the majority. In Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda the man who led the country to its independence has been disenfranchised because his father was born in another country, never mind the fact that Kaunda was the first president of that country.

This is the level of irrationality in some African countries and it is what the Yoruba tribalists want to import into Nigeria. It may sound farfetched for the "civilized" analyst of political events. But it is quite credible when one considers that a key Yoruba minister in today's federal government is so beclouded by his hatred of the Northern "Hausa-Fulani" that he prescribed genocide for them in one of his weekly newspaper columns. This is the irony of Nigerian politics. Here is a man who called for genocide on the pages of newspaper and he is rewarded with a powerful ministerial portfolio even his Yoruba brother commented thus:

Reading of an African writer and politician referring to a group somewhere as the Tutsis of some place insults the gruesomeness and the horror of what happened in Rwanda in 1994^[19].

This minister is also in full support of the atrocities of OPC (Oodu'a Peoples Congress) the Yoruba terrorist organization, the Chairman of his party, AD (Alliance for Democracy) acknowledged that he once said "even though OPC is an anarchist organization but that however they have a Yoruba proverb that says "when you have a mad dog or a dog infested by rabies, you don't remove all its teeth because one day you may want him to BITE YOUR NIEGHBOUR" that is a minister of the federal republic"^[20].

The phenomenon of this genocide advocate turned minister exposes the hypocrisy of Western patrons of Nigerian politics who have consistently pretended to be supporting democracy and peaceful co-existence of peoples and tribes all over the world. They should not in anyway support a government that not only harbors a genocide advocate but has gone to the extreme by making him one of its pillars. This is because the same western governments sanctioned Austria because of the presence of Nazi sympathizers in its government. Or does it mean they support genocide anywhere except in the West? The Austrian politicians are not as despicable as this Nigerian minister who called for a Rwandan like scenario in which 75% of the Tutsis were wiped out^[21].

If the Northern political leaders allow the ID card election project for the short-term selfish interest as they did in their senseless un-negotiated power shift^[22]then the Yoruba supremacists will win again and the North will be obliterated politically. So, what is a little genocide on paper, for ideologues of Yoruba supremacy in government? The ID card is a much more benign form of genocide if it gets to pass, that is?

^[1]I am grateful to my Editor-in-chief Kabiru Mohammed who read the draft and made corrections and also to Dr. Abdalla Uba Adamu who connected me to the Internet.

^[2] International IDEA Democracy in Nigeria: Continuing Dialogue(s) for Nation Building published in Sweden p. 121

^[3] According to Ferdinand Braudel, one of the leading historians of this school, history corresponds to "three kinds of time: geographical, social and individual" because at least in part, history is determined "by forces external to man such as geography and climate" this discipline seeks to understand "an almost immobile history of man's relation with the milieu surrounding him". For more information see Gray, W. D. 1987 'BRAUDEL, Ferdinand' in Turner, R. (ed) Thinkers of the Twentieth Century London pp. 103-105.

^[4] Maja-Pearce, A. 1999 'Army Arrangement' London Review of Books 1 April

^[5] Mabogunje, A. 1976 'The Land and Peoples of West Africa' in Ajayi, J. F. A. and Crowder, M. (eds) History of West Africa vol. 1 Essex p. 5

^[6] Lubeck, P. M. 1986 Islam and Urban Labor in Northern Nigeria p. 12 and Illiffe, J 1995 Africans the History of a Continent p. 171

^[7] Gailey, H. 1970 History of Africa from the Earliest Times to 1800 New York p. 104

^[8] For more information see Adler, P. 1996. World Civilizations: Comprehensive Volume. St. Paul Mn pp. 220-229 emphasis mine.

^[9] Fisher, H. J., 1985 'A Muslim William Wilberforce? The Fulani jihad as anti-slavery crusade: an enquiry into historical causes'. Islam in West Africa Seminar SOAS 5th March 1985.

^[10] Especially Kukah, M. H. 1993 Religion, Politics and Power in Northern Nigeria Ibadan p. 2 where he cited his missionary brother Trimingham. Another missionary Father Kenny of the Dominican Order of Priests who was selective in his analysis. See Kenny, J. 2000 The Spread of Islam through North to West Africa 7^th to 19^th Centuries Lagos p. 217 note 79 where he cited Colvin, L. 1971 'The Commerce of Hausaland, 1780-1833' in McCall, D. and Bennett (eds) Aspects of West African Islam Boston, which is a paper on commerce instead of the specific paper on slavery in the same book, (see Meyers paper below) this is because Colvin indicted the Fulani and Kenny being selective had to use it.

^[11] Meyers, A. 1971 'Slavery in the Hausa-Fulani Emirates' in McCall, D. and Bennett (eds) Aspects of West African Islam Boston.

^[12] Moody, J. 1990 In the Heart of the Hausa States Volume 2 Paul Staudinger translated by; Athens pp. 73- 74 where he noted that pre-colonial Northern minority tribes used to sell their kinsmen into slavery.

^[13] Abba, A. 2000 (ed) The Politics of Principles in Nigeria: The Example of NEPU p. 5 Habib Raji Abdallah 'Lagos is a Nigerian Town' West African Pilot Tuesday, September, 28 1948 pp. 2-3

^[14] See Ibid p. 5

^[15] Danbazau, L.1993 Politics and Religion in Nigeria Kano pp. 37

^[16] Osaghae, E. E. 1991. 'Ethnic Minorities and Federalism in Nigeria' African Affairs 90: 247

^[17] The mass media in the USA is controlled by a powerful oligarchy dominated by the Jews for more information see Brewda, J. et al 1994 Assault on the Presidency Leesburg p. 24.

^[18] Maja-Pearce, A. 1999 From Khaki to Agbada: A handbook for the February, 1999 elections in Nigeria p. 123

^[19] Omotoso, K. 2000 'A Nigerian argument' The Guardian p. 49

^[20] Daily Trust Wednesday February 14, 2001 interview with Ambassador Yusuf Mamman, emphasis mine.

^[21] Kupperman, A. J. 2000 'Rwanda in Retrospect' Foreign Affairs Vol. 79 No. 1 January-February 2000 p.101.

^[22] See Ali Mazrui's interview in the Weekly Trust.