Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
“If you want to live like a Republican vote Democrat.” – Harry S. Truman, 33rd US President in office 1945-1953
Every big picture is made up of many small scenes. While the present-day front façade of Gidan Korau, named Kofar Soro (as earlier mentioned), might not necessarily encapsulate the proportions, grandeur, scale, or even the Baroque craftsmanship of its main inspiration, Buckingham Palace, they certainly both share the same architectural concept accentuated by centrally positioned balconies for occasional royal appearances.
A design parity in stately porticos albeit in varying grandiosity.
Was Dikko an avid modernizer or a self-serving political survivor who merely served as an adjunct to British imperial interests?
A diminutive man of steely resolve that enigmatic personality and quintessential Anglophile in his bid to import an Eton to his domain reportedly understood that;
“The elite of every successful society always forms the nucleus of citizens with the prerequisite education, ethics and capabilities operating in the political sphere and the public service, providing the great minds to build the nation and possessing the moral rectitude to always act in the public interest.”
It did not escape the emir’s attention that Eton was established in 1440 by King Henry VI of England – the kind of British Lion the Desert Fox perhaps saw in himself.
Little wonder the Katsina College legacy of “Yan Koleji” products reads like a colonial era and First Republic political who’s who of the North: Knights of the British Empire Ahmadu Bello, Tafawa Balewa, and Kashim Ibrahim, including Makaman Bida, Muhammadu Ribadu, and Aminu Kano of lesser nobilities, respectively.
Then, 4 leaders of Nigeria, namely Gowon, Murtala, Shagari, and Yar’adua.
Lest we forget three CJNs: Bello, Uwais, and Kutigi. These are just a few of many other eminent Nigerians of northern extraction, too numerous to recount here.
You don’t have to read Paul Turton’s Barewa Pride: The College in the 1960s from the perspective of the Cadet Unit Diary (2015) to realize why erstwhile Government College, Zaria was able to produce 4 army chiefs: Gowon, Katsina, Kazir and Danbazau including the most senior army officers from the erstwhile Northern Region that were all coincidentally wiped out of service on January 15, 1966.
They were in order of seniority: Maimalari, Mohammed, Largema, and Pam.
A microcosm of subsequent generations of other military, security, police, and other paramilitary brass that out of 15 army chiefs from 1966 to 1999, there was just one from the south, the rest northerners.
This is partly because the illustrious foundation laid by the Katsina College pedigree was painstakingly replicated in content and form, cadet units inclusive in 13 provincial secondary schools across today’s 19 states.
If so, how did the North embarrassingly arrive at the precarious crossroads of a longstanding existential crisis?
Prof. Attahiru Jega paints a true but dismal picture of elite failure in the North;
“Whether it is poverty, unemployment, insecurity, infant mortality, out-of-school children, poor girl-child education, or even early marriage challenges, everything you can think of, the terrible statistics always come from the northern part of this country.
“Our North at present is led by people poorly-prepared and ill-equipped to lead except for their ambitions for power and ill acquisition of fantastic wealth, leaving our people at the mercy of armed crime and unforgivable poverty.”
Jega ominously concluded back in 2021 then under former President Buhari’s watch;
“These days, we have leaders who are selfish, narrow-minded, and those who lack the intellectual capacity to lead Nigeria.”
Arguably, the chief reason why the North has consistently failed to implement mass and compulsory education. As Freire in retrospect describes the Katsina College pedigree thus;
“Oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”
“Group solidarity” is a key concept in English of what Abd al-rahman Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century North African scholar describes as “asabiyyah” in Arabic out of the pages of his magnum opus, Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (1379) – very invaluable in understanding what Ochonu describes as the “Hausa-Caliphate imaginary.”
This is because Ibn Khaldun maintains all elites regardless of background and composition the world have a propensity for aligning into cliques that form the basis for power struggles – forming platforms for popular participation situated at the margins of every given society in order to bring about change in leadership or dominate any existing one.
The emergence and eventual fall of the legatees of the Katsina College under various guises in Nigeria and the emergence of the current lords of the manor at the Villa is undoubtedly consistent with a recent review of Muqaddimah also known as Prolegomenon;
“New rulers are first considered barbarians in comparison to the previous ones.
As they establish themselves at the center of their empire, they become increasingly lax, less coordinated, disciplined, and watchful, and more concerned about maintaining their new power and lifestyle.
Their “asabiyya” dissolves into factionalism and individualism, diminishing their capacity as a political unit. Conditions are thus created wherein a new dynasty can emerge at the periphery of their control, grow strong, and effect a change in leadership.”
The teachable moral here is that power is a constantly cyclical phenomenon with the conditions of elite ascendancy and eventual failure all within.
For the North is currently out of power this translates into doing the needful in redeveloping focus, direction, and the capacity for the reinvention by its present generation across the board as its predecessors did back in 1966 which beggars a present-day pertinent question of:
How can the North save Nigeria when it can’t even save itself?
The historian Max Siollun has already adequately described for posterity “the apocalyptic and emotionally explosive debate” that took place July 29-31, 1966 at what was then 2nd Battalion Barracks now Ikeja Cantonment which paraded two sparring sides in that high-octane encounter.
The “Araba” (separation) proponents were led by the incendiary Lt. Colonel Murtala Mohammed alongside Majors Martin Adamu, Shittu Alao, Musa Usman, and Captain Joseph Garba.
Meanwhile, those against the dismemberment of Nigeria were led by the affable Lt. Yakubu Gowon and Captain Domkat Bali supported by Commissioner of Police MD Yusufu and Justice Mohammed Bello.
Countless other top federal civil servants from all parts of Nigeria including the Eastern Region and diplomatic community eventually joined the meeting (actually convened by Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, CDS) to dissuade the separatists of which the condescending Lt. Colonel C. Ojukwu as military governor of Eastern Region had made known his stand on the attempted secession, “If that is what they want, I agree. Let them go.”
Regardless of the magisterial disdain by phone from Enugu to Ogundipe an epic elite consensus to save Nigeria was eventually reached when, “Murtala suddenly turned to Gowon and told him, you are the senior go ahead!”
(See details of proceedings and dramatis personae pp. 118-123 Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria’s Military Coup Culture, 1966-1976 by Max Siollun)
The major impediment to reaching elite consensus is elite overproduction.
The arbiter according to Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in “Circulation of Elites” is that there should always be governing elites separate and distinct from non-governing elites in political dynamics.
He differentiated them between “Lions and Foxes,” as respectively represented by the Murtalas and Ojukwus on one side and the Ogundipes and Gowons on the other.
Truman’s metaphor is hidden in plain sight at Kofar Soro in Katsina.
Concluded.
