For Chief Sunday Bolorunduro Awoniyi, CON, Aro of Mopa and Chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum,
last Saturday, December 11, must have been one of his most memorable days. For, on that day the Northern leadership, as well as hundreds of ordinary Nigerians, gathered in the Lokoja Township Stadium, in his native Kogi state, to celebrate the exemplary qualities that, by universal consent, have today made him probably the most worthy legatee of the Sardauna.
Two words, spoken by the Guest Speaker of the occasion, the inimitable orator, Alhaji Maitama Sule, the Danmasanin Kano, just about summed up the essence of the civic reception for Chief Awoniyi. The chief, said the Danmasani at several points in his speech, is Danladi (the Hausa equivalent of Sunday) Dansardauna. The Danmasani was, of course, not the only one to extol the virtues of Chief Awoniyi as a worthy successor of the Sardauna. Others, like the Chairman of the occasion and the celebrant’s classmate at Barewa College, Zaria, former head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, and Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, former Head of State and the celebrant’s minister when he was the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Petroleum, told several interesting anecdotes about his humility, integrity and hardwork, among other virtues.
Close watchers of the chief may recall that soon after he was dragged, kicking and screaming, into chairing the National Executive Council of the Arewa Consultative Forum late last year, Chief Awoniyi gave one of his most definitive press interviews to ThisDay. “I am”, he told the paper, much to the apparent consternation of its correspondent, “a Northern Yoruba Christian.” (ThisDay December 20, 2003). The introduction to the interview by Kola Ologbondiyan – not to talk of his angle of questioning of the Chief - spoke volumes about why many a Southern politician as well as Southern journalist often found the chief a rather awkward personality to handle. “Chief Sunday Bolorunduro Awoniyi, the Aro of Mopa,” said ThisDay’s correspondent in his introduction to the interview, “recently emerged the Chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), viewed in the south as a rabid Hausa-Fulani/Muslim organisation.”
Obviously pressmen like Ologbondiyan, himself apparently Yoruba from his name, cannot understand what business an Awoniyi has with ACF as the socio-cultural organisation encompassing the North, much less even leading it.
However, if those who find the phenomenon of a Yoruba Christian leading the north rather awkward, do so, it is not because the fact in itself is awkward. Rather it is because they simply would not let anything get in the way of their stereo-type of the north as a region where you fulfilled your potential or realized your ambitions only if you were Hausa-Fulani-Muslim.
Chief Awoniyi obviously never allowed this stereo-type to get in his way or affect his self-esteem as a minority. In the days of the Sardauna, he told ThisDay, “there was no discrimination at all as to what appointment, posting or promotion you are assigned. I have everything to be grateful for the north. The north did not do anything against me. I was a northerner and benefitted from being a northerner.”
Earlier in the interview, he had told the newspaper that the region offered an opportunity to everyone who was a northerner, particularly in the field of education. If for example, you passed the entrance examination to Barewa College, the then premier institution in the region, you were admitted without any discrimination, he said. “The number of students from Kabba Province and from Kabba Division”, he added, “bore no relationship whatsoever to our size in number.”
After his education, he went on, “I joined the northern Administrative Service and worked all over Northern Nigeria. How can I pretend that all these never happened just to satisfy some narrow ethnic view point?”
That there are serious divisions in the north today leading to even more serious ethnic and sectarian violence in the region, is because, unlike Chief Awoniyi, too many beneficiaries of Sardauna’s liberal policies have engaged in self-denial. For some inexplicable reasons many of these beneficiaries who have clearly done extremely well for themselves politically, professionally or otherwise, but who have done little for their own people, seem to believe they could have done even better for themselves if only they belonged to the “right” tribe and the “right” religion. Somehow they always forgot that there were many of their peers who belonged to the “right” tribe and the “right” region, but did not do as well as themselves.
This self-denial, needless to say, has provided ready ammunition against the north for those who mistakenly believe its unity, because of its numerical superiority over other regions, is a permanent obstacle to their political ambitions and/or political agenda.
That it is mistaken to see northern unity as necessarily a threat to the political ambitions of “outsiders” for national leadership can be seen from the fact that on two occasions at least – in the presidential elections of June 1993 and February 1999 - voters in the region, unlike their compatriots from the other regions, voted overwhelmingly for someone not their own. General Ibrahim Babangida may have cancelled the results of the June 1993 elections, but those who want to blame the north for the cancellation should always remember that the General did not consult the voters in voiding the elections and that among the few he did consult and who apparently encouraged him, there were several non-northerners, including the officer and gentleman who famously remarked that Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the putative winner of the elections, was not the messiah Nigerians were waiting for.
That officer and gentleman, in case you don’t know, was none other than President Olusegun Obasanjo. Two weeks ago he once again demonstrated his antipathy towards northern unity when he denounced the Northern Peace Conference initiated by the northern governors in the wake of the May Plateau State ethnic and sectarian crisis. Responding to a charge by Governor Saminu Turaki of Jigawa State, speaking on behalf of himself and his colleagues, that the President tried to sabotage the conference which held in Kaduna for two days from December 1, the president was quoted by ThisDay (December 4), as saying “A Forum of Northern Governors is sure to give rise to a corresponding Forum of Southern Governors with all the potential of re-awakening regional rivalries and loyalties to the detriment of national cohesion.” The President, in effect, then urged Turaki to call it off. The Northern Governors’ Forum, he said, should “reconsider the merit of this regional initiative vis-à-vis the clear need for strengthening our national unity.” This reaction was reportedly signed by the president’s Chief of Staff, Major-General Abdullahi Mohammed.
As if to reinforce the president’s objection to the conference, his Senior Special Assistance on Media Affairs, Mrs. Remi Oyo, followed with a statement dismissing Turaki’s allegation as “false”, but re-affirmed her boss’ “misgivings and reservations about gatherings which tend to polarise the country between the north and the south”. Her boss, she said, has no apologies “for placing national unity above all other sectional, group or individual interests”.
Fine words. Unfortunately, they have all too often been contradicted by practice. For example, it was strange, wasn’t it, that a president who always said he has no truck whatsoever with ethnic organisations would meet in the Villa for four hours in November 2000 with the leadership of the Yoruba Council of Elders, according to The Comet (a pro-Obaanjo paper if ever there was one) of November 16, 2000. Indeed, the word that made the round at the time, in case Mrs. Oyo never heard, was that the YCE was jointly created by her boss and the late Chief Bola Ige, to loosen Afenifere’s stranglehold on Yoruba politics. At that time the president regarded Afenifere as hostile to his political agenda.
Apart from the president’s suspected links with YCE, wasn’t it also strange that the same federal authorities who once declared the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) a criminal organisation, would provide it with police protection not too long ago when it held a mass rally in Lagos at which it threatened to attack any legislator who supported the moves to impeach the president ahead of the last presidential elections?
Wasn’t it also strange that when the South-South met recently in Calabar to, among other things, demand for the presidency in 2007, the presidency never wrote to its organisers not to meet? On the contrary, didn’t all the ministers from that region attend the rally, presumably with his permission, and did the NTA not cover it live for over four hours, even if it was for a fee?
One could go on and on, but this would merely obscure the more important point that regional or even ethnic organisation on the one hand, and national unity, on the other, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Depending on what they do and how they relate to each other, their existence can even strengthen national unity.
Last Saturday, Danladi Dansardauna used the occasion of his civic reception to remind one and all that the whole cannot be united if its parts engage in internecine wars. And that in any case, the success of ACF as the only regional organisation which, unlike Afenifere, or the YCE, or Ohaneze, is both multi-ethnic and multi-religious, can only strengthen the unity of Nigeria and promote its development.
Even then the Dansardauna has never entertained any illusions about what he or the ACF is capable of. “Even if Sardauna of Sokoto were to come back to life today,” he said in the Thisday interview in reference, “he will not be able to replicate what he built in those days… There are, however, certain ideals of public office conduct and performance that don’t change such as care for the common man, integrity and probity in office… These we can endeavour to replicate.”
It is difficult to understand why anyone should consider such an agenda as a threat to national unity. It is even more difficult to understand why any move to bring about peace in any part of this country should be considered a threat to national unity.
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