By Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
“The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
The concluding prayers of the ace columnist of Monday Lines in the July 29, 2024 edition of the Nigerian Tribune newspaper are instructively patriotic;
“May Thursday, August 1 meet us in peace.”
Before then the wordsmith had forecasted, “The August protest will come and go; the problem of Nigeria will remain.”
More significant is how he discerned, “People with the right oracle say actual protesters are the entity called the North. They say the aggrieved harbor the anger of the conned.”
This writer agrees with Dr. Lasisi an erstwhile Zaria boy that any form of protest is the continuation of the politics by other means.
How many Nigerians are aware that benign but poignant, ahead of the “Days of Rage” slated for August 1-10, the single most important political weapon north of the Niger and Benue is a transistor radio set?
This live political grenade is often portable and battery-powered with virtually every Arewa gentleman irrespective of the diverse and complex religious and ethnic fault lines owning one.
No tea seller’s table worth its brew is without discordant debates arising from different radio broadcasts. Little wonder Peggy Noonan, speechwriter to the 40th US President 1981-1989 in her memoirs affirms;
Protest
“TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.” – What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (1990).
Forget the “dogon turenci” of Seun Okinbaloye casting aside the incisive banter of the Morning Show crew on Arise TV or any scathing editorial analysis from the multifaceted “Lagos-Ibadan axis of the Nigerian press,” the bottom line is that voices behind the sharp microphones at the various Hausa services of both British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America (VoA) shape the political narratives for the North.
They are the ones that talk the talk. If they do not confirm anything in Nigeria – then it did not happen. And if they do not announce it – it did not occur. But if they say it happened – then it must have happened.
Other prodigiously talented albeit second-tier broadcasts in Hausa from Radio France International (RFI), Turkish Radio & Television (TRT), Netherlands Radio, and Germany’s Deutsche Welle (DW) would then steadily follow including a growing third-tier now from China Radio International (CRI) and Turkish Radio & Television (TRT) among other fledging outlets from all over the globe.
These foreign media houses were the chief mobilizers of the total of 5,346,404 votes the North gave President Tinubu on February 25, 2023, compared to the mere 3,206,969 votes from the South.
It was no different 24 years prior during the February 27, 1999 presidential election when the combined votes from the entire South West (Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Oyo, and Ekiti States) that Baba OBJ raked in was 1,092,196 votes compared with the 1,294,679 votes he got from Kaduna State alone. Whereas he got a paltry 143,564 votes in his home state of Ogun and 209, 012 votes in Lagos, he nonetheless raked in 983,912 and 964,216 votes respectively from Benue and Katsina States.
If so, why is the North “aggrieved”? Or even “harbor the anger of the conned”?
On Sunday, August 16, 2001, Alhaji Muhammadu Dikko (MD) Yusufu (1931-2015) declared to a prestigious audience at Yoruba Tennis Club at Onikan, “Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, you have asked me to give a lecture but I have decided to do something different. I have instead decided to turn the lecture into a dialogue on the current political realities of Nigeria.”
The onetime Inspector General of Police (IGP) between 1975 and 1979 put aside his lecture notes and then made a daring gambit to unruffle the feathers of his hosts, “There is something I do not understand about the Yoruba elite. I believe I am not alone.”
MD Yusufu asked his audience at YTC 23 years ago, “Why can’t you see that both Obasanjo and Abiola were successful in national politics because they saw themselves first and foremost as Nigerians?”
When Baba MD spoke 23 years ago “Restructuring” had not entered our political lexicon, he however alluded to such antics in his presentation.
That nonetheless begs the pertinent question if such was part of the package promised to those in the North who dared to commit political hara-kiri by defying former President Buhari.
While there is no evidence to link the present chief tenant at the Villa with the political kite flown by Dr. Akin Fapohunda under the guise of “A bill for an act to substitute the annexure to Decree 24 of 1999 with a new governance model for the Federal Republic of Nigeria,” no single issue has inflicted more incalculable injury to the popularity of Asiwaju among the main radio listening demography of Nigeria.
Harry Von Zell, a radio announcer that dominated the American airwaves from 1925-1975 maintains that;
“Radio is the most intimate and socially personal medium in the world.”
Mr. Zell outlived by decades Roosevelt’s iconic “Fireside Chats” on radio across the United States from 1933 to 1944 which Reagan resuscitated every Saturday during his two terms as President under the auspices of Ms. Noolan earlier quoted.
How did Mr. President’s handlers miss the dynamics of the deeply entrenched and far-reaching influence of propaganda through radio?
This is particularly as Prof. Alkasum Abba reminds us in his must-read Political Irrelevance on Quest for Restructuring in Nigeria;
“Here in the North (during the First Republic), an identity was built for us by the NPC Government around the idea of “dan Arewa” (a northerner) as against “dan Nigeria” (a Nigerian) and Hausa language was promoted to become part of our identity and distinctiveness in the federation of Nigeria. The effectiveness of the campaign of the Northern region Government was to such an extent that Southerners started seeing all Northerners as “Hausa people”, which persists till date.”
Interestingly, Prof. Shima Gyoh adds;
“When I assumed duties in Lagos as the Director-General at the Federal Ministry of Health in 1984, the Minister, Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, twice asked me when I came to the office wearing babban riga, “Today is not Friday, why are you dressed for the mosque?”
I am a Christian from Benue State, and Ransome-Kuti was the very man that nominated me for the job!
I was to realize that many Southerners, knew more about far-away England than the next-door North of their country.”
See details in Fulanization of the North by the South by Prof. Farooq Kperogi
Little wonder onetime military officer, Sowaliri Tolofari in his disjointed book, Exploitation and Instability in Nigeria: The Orkar Coup in Perspective (2004) claims there has always been a longstanding “Hausa-Fulani domination by northerners” in Nigeria mentioning General Yakubu Gowon as prime example.
Tolofari who risked his life in a futile endeavor to “excise” parts of Nigeria led the assault on Ojo Cantonment during the Orkar putsch escaping into exile had written his book nearly 30 years after Gowon left power. Yet, the former Military Police officer could not properly establish the identity of a one-time Army chief and military Head of State!
Indeed;
“A false analysis of the Nigerian condition grounded in weak data and the rapid decadence of the love of truth resulted in a widely believed myth of Northern domination.”
– 54 Years After: British Secret Files on Nigeria’s First Coup (2020) by Damola Awoyokun
How can we as Nigerians fill the vacuum of perennial political distrust between the North and South?
The answer to the question dates back to the colonial era as the British governor of the Northern Region 1952-1957, Sir Bryan Sharwood-Smith reveals in page 259 of his 1969 memoirs;
“Militant nationalism requires an enemy, and we, the British, were not the “enemy.” The “enemy” lay beyond the Niger in the persons of the political leaders and their followers who desired independence for Nigeria before the North was ready, in order, the North was convinced, to dominate the whole.”
Why hasn’t therefore occurred to discerning Nigerians that foreign radio stations have consistently reinvented the same narrative under various guises?
This includes in the last few decades;
“The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.” – Milton Friedman (1912-2006) Nobel Prize winner in 1976 for Economics
Would there have been any “Southern lady of means” living off customs duties without the collapse of the Trans Saharan trade route when the Lagos-Kano rail link was completed?
While both sides of the Restructuring divide have been unwittingly blindsided, it must however be reiterated that the Fapohunda prescription is anathema to a generality of the North.
If so, why can’t a middle ground be explored amicably by all sides of our national divide?
As Sir Ahmadu Bello (1910-1966) would say;
“The North is like a horse, if you are gentle with it, it will carry you far.”
