Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
With the battle for the soul for Nigeria already on as we approach 2027 the further we can look back the better we might navigate through some conflicting narratives.
The title of this 2-part intervention is mostly inspired by a social media posted at 5.55pm on 20 Apr 25 by a certain Sarki@Watspapping as follows;
“Arewa elders and politicians never form coalitions to end insecurity, poverty, Almajiranci or the millions of out of school children in the North.
But the moment they lose power, they suddenly remember how to unite and form a coalition not for the people but to snatch power back.”
Following is not a wholesale endorsement nor even a complete rebuttal of Sarki@Watspapping but an attempt to expand the discuss.
Three questions nonetheless arise as follows: First, is the North like a electoral dinosaur oblivious of its own extinction under the current triumphalism of “Emi lokan” or is it Lagosisation of Abuja?
Secondly, has prolonged power since national independence been the bane of sustainable progress in the North?
Third, when will the political North perform a meaningful SWOT Analysis on itself beyond cyclic power grabbing without any particular development agenda?
No answers shall be provided here to these very pertinent. It is just food for thought for present-day legatees of Arewa to chew.
In the interim, a benign digression to Zaria where poignantly in 1951, Jam’iyyar Mutanen Arewa established in 1949 was renamed the behemoth Northern Peoples’ Congress.
In 1983, the duty post from where Major Al Mustapha Jokolo was catapulted to become the ADC to Major General Muhammadu Buhari when he became Head of State.
In 1985, from where Major D.E. West then commanding officer of 341 Self-Propelled Artillery Regiment was implicated in the Vatsa Coup plot.
And in 1986, the initial contact point between Captain Nimibibowe Harley Empere (first from left) in the attached picture and Captain Sowaribi Victor Tolofari at the Military Police Officers Basic Course.
The common denominator between the subalterns being the Major Saliba Mukoro, one their instructors who eventually became the moving spirit and a prominent escapee of the April 22 1990 coup attempt named after Major Gideon Gwaza Orkar (second from left) in Nigeria’s political lexicon.
While others in the picture include Captain Parebo Dakolo (center also a Zaria based officer), Lieutenant Nicholas Odeh (first from right) and Lieutenant Cyril Ozoalor (second from right), Tolofari by a whisker escaped the hail of punitive bullets of a Kiri-kiri firing squad that cut down all of those in our 35-year-old photograph taken at the Victoria Island NAF Officers’ Mess venue of the Major General Ike Nwachukwu-chaired court martial.
In his 2004 book Tolofari who had earned a doctorate in exile writes on the recurrent topic of discussion among the Niger Delta trio at Zaria nearly 40 years ago as ranging from lopsided resource allocation against their natal region, other national problems including the army’s lack of respect for meritocracy.
Another prominent escapee and most senior plotter of the 1990 putsch albeit not its leader, Lt. Colonel
Anthony Gabriel Nyiam grandstanding 10 years later; “It got to a stage that if you were in the Army, you have to speak Hausa. What I’m saying in effect was that there was a general acculturation of other people who have superior culture.”
While Orkar and Nyiam were both based in Jaji near Zaria as they put finishing touches to their plot: how did Hausa become the lingua franca of the Nigerian Army they were serving in?
In 1863, John Hawley Carter (1829-1885) the British colonial governor of Lagos established a militia of 30 men called “Glover’s Hausas” recruiting 10 more thus “the Forty Thieves” soon to be renamed “Hausa Militia” eventually “Hausa Constabulary” which formed the nucleus of not only today’s Nigeria Police but the Nigerian Army;
“Although British officers marvelled at the martial qualities of their Hausa soldiers, some of their names indicate that not all were ethnic Hausas.
Lugard pursued a two-pronged policy of maintaining Hausa as the army’s official language while simultaneously trying to recruit other martial races from non-Hausa areas, then teaching them to speak Hausa.” -Siollun
Why?
“Lugard was a military man, who had a military understanding of language’s utility. Language was a code. Lugard’s officers needed to understand the enemy’s code while denying the enemy the ability to understand their own. This military consideration dictated the use of Hausa as the language of conquest and administration.” – Phillips
Hausanization refers to the process of adoption, spread and influence of the Hausa language and culture on other ethnicities.
It is a concept similar to Arabization or Westernization albeit only across the Sahel in general and northern Nigeria in particular.
Ibrahim Badamasi Lambu in his must-read seminal entitled Hausanization of Nigerian Languages (2019) establishes;
“Interviews with various tribes, like Yoruba, Igbo, and Efik, reveal the strong influence of the Hausa language and culture in their daily activities.”
Whither the influence of those “who have superior culture”?
The recent assertion by the Benue governor, Revd. Fr. Hyacinth Alia on the attackers bedevilling his state is therefore instructive;
“They don’t speak like we do. Even the Hausa they speak is one sort of Hausa.”
Westermann makes an important clarification in that respect; “It is often been said that Hausa is rather the name of a language than of a people or tribe, and it is the fact that many of the tribal groups who speak Hausa as their only language to-day and are described as Hausas have little or nothing in common in respect of their ethnological origin.”
Adamu disagrees insisting that “Hausa is an ethnic unit” albeit “an assimilating entity” and the Hausa language is “a colonizing one.”
On the Hausa question some scholars argue that Hausa is increasingly transforming beyond a conventional ethnic group gradually becoming “a pan-ethnicity by subsuming peoples and cultures transforming them into Hausa or at least Hausa-speaking.” – Yusuf
While it remains to be seen how the recent jettisoning of French as an official language by the Nigeriens would spill over to Nigeria. This is because;
“Hausa is emerging as Nigeria’s only non-ethnic language, by which I mean it is spoken as a lingua franca by millions of people who are not ethnically Hausa.” – Kperogi
Yet, according to Usman and Abba; “The evidence available shows that there was no Hausa ethnic nationality before the 19th and 20th centuries,” adding that; “As for the Hausa-speaking people, not only do they have dialects which are barely mutually intelligible, but they have no tradition of common origin and such groupings are made of people of diverse origin including Nupe, Jukun, Gbagyi and Yoruba, even before the 19th century.”
In what might sound like melodious Kannywood music to Sarki@Watspapping’s ears Abati puts it rather point-blank; “Power is the oxygen that keeps the North alive.”
Despite Tremeane maintaining “it is almost impossible to say exactly what a Hausa is now, for he is admittedly a mixture of mixtures,” the need to establish the historical background of Hausanization cannot be overemphasized.
Back when the Sokoto Caliphate held suzerainty from 1807 to its defeat by the British in 1903 nearly 250,000 sq. km of Nigeria’s present-day 923,769 sq. km it was a conglomerate under it.
This was composed of a wide range of multi-ethnic kingdoms, entities and vassals coordinated from faraway Sokoto and its relatively nearby deputy capital of Gwandu.
The powers that be needed more than religion for effective communication, unity and control as Kukah in that respect notes “the factor for political ascendancy is language, and here we mean the Hausa language. The Fulani ruling class was quick to include this potent factor of mobilization in their political baggage.”
While Salamone further establishes a prior enabling environment in the North where “ethnic boundaries are permeable, and people, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, cross them. They do so in general either to maximize their opportunities or to minimize or neutralize threats,” how many Nigerians are even aware that the Hausa and Fulfulde languages do not even fall under the same classification?
“Fulfulde is closely related genetically to Igbo and Yoruba and to Ijaw and the Bantu languages. It belongs to the West Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo family of languages; the family to which all these languages belong. But Hausa is a member of the completely different Chadic family of languages and is much closer to Sayawa, Angas, Marghi and Bachama for example, than it is to Fulfulde and its Niger-Congo relations.” – Usman and Abba
It is against that background that it is not surprising deep seated ignorance of the process of “becoming Hausa” led to the failure of the plotters of 1990 as we shall later see in Part II.
Though Tremeane traces the origin of “Hausa” to the word “Habeshi” – “a term of contempt applied by Arabs to mixed races, and Hausa (ba-haushe) is a modification,” that notwithstanding during the First Republic under the Northern Peoples’ Congress;
“Here in the North, an identity was built for us by the NPC government around the idea of ‘dan Arewa’ (a northerner) as against ‘dan Nijeriya’ (a Nigerian) and Hausa language was promoted to become part of our identity and distinctiveness in the federation of Nigeria.
Also, songs like ‘Ku Tashi Ku Farka ‘Yan Arewa’ (Wake up Northerners) by the famous Hausa musician, Mamman Shata was significant in helping to mould Northern identity as against that of Nigeria.
In fact, the ‘kaftan’, the distinctive ‘Dipcharima’ cap, the flowing gown and even the turban were promoted to become part of the identity of Northerners in the Nigerian federation.
The effectiveness of the campaign by the Northern Regional government was to such an extent that Southern Nigerians started seeing all Northerners as ‘Hausa people’ which persists till date.” – Abba
Mercifully, the 1990 escapees Nyiam, Mukoro and Tolofari have lived long enough to witness the 2002 Supreme Court decision on the On-shore/Off-shore Dichotomy.
The moral here is that some of the major concessions they could not obtain kinetically through the barrel of the gun were eventually offered on a platter of political consensus.
Shouldn’t Nigeria’s crude oil and natural gas resources be more equitably shared between the North and Niger Delta region?
Agreed, Osuntokun’s notion of “the entitlement syndrome in the hegemonic North,” readily comes to mind here.
But take for instance; “In 2008, the allocation to Akwa Ibom state alone was N204.5 billion, which was more than the allocations of N176.2 billion to the 5 states of the South East and more than the N198.4 allocated to the six states in the North East while the six states in the North Central of the country also got N197.2 billion for the same year under review.” – Adeniyi
A 1958 report by the Niger Delta Commission (NEDECO) shows that the geological process and mineral composition found where the River Niger empties into the Atlantic formed through organic and inorganic matter drained predominantly from the North over time.
Another landmark study 13 years later puts it that; “The Niger Delta has been built up over thousands of years from sediments brought down by Rivers Niger and Benue.” – Alagoa
Continued in Part II
