A contribution to the symposium on, “Good Governance in
Nigeria: The Legacy of Mallam Aminu Kano,” Organised by the Centre for
Democratic Research and Training, Mambayya House, Bayero University, Kano,
Tuesday, 17th April, 2001.
This contribution to the symposium is limited to drawing
your attention to the important, but largely neglected, relationship between
ignorance, knowledge and democratic politics. Drawing your attention to this
relationship is relevant to the theme of this symposium and may raise awareness
with regards to one of the obstacles to the building and the consolidation of a
democratic system of government in Nigeria.
Democracy is built on the equality of citizens; the freedom
of these citizens to associate with one another for the realisation of their
ideals and the defence and promotion of their interests; and the freedom of
these citizens to choose between the different political platforms of various political
parties and candidates, and see to the actualisation of the platforms they have
voted for, if their choices win. This is only possible if the citizens are well
informed about their country, their governments, their circumstances and the
various interests contending in the various parties. To put all this in a very
simple way, this, requires knowledge.
Without knowledge, the association, the citizens enters into
is one based on irrational, but no less powerful, instincts of fear, greed,
envy, fascination, or, hatred. This is because the citizen entering into this
association has no rational basis for assessing whether, or, not it serves his,
or her, interest and promotes and defends his, or, her, ideals and principles.
Without knowledge, the exercise of the democratic right to
choose lacks a stable and rational basis and, therefore, does not enable the
citizen making the choice to make the party and the candidates accountable.
In short, democratic politics is not possible when the
citizens who constitute the electorate are ignorant about the basic elements of
the country, its economy, its political system, and its position in world
affairs.
Ignorance is not the same as illiteracy. Knowledge is not
the same as literacy, or, even the same as the acquisition of educational
certificates, or, academic ranks. Some of the most highly literate Nigerians,
and the most highly educated, by virtue of their certificates and ranks, are
some of the most ignorant over many crucial areas of natural and human existence
and over our national life, like our geography, history, economy and politics.
The person whose legacy this symposium is addressing is an
outstanding example of a profoundly knowledgeable man, who did not get any high
educational qualifications, or eminent academic ranks. He was, and has remained
to all of us, the mallam, the teacher, the learned one, because his life and
his politics were imbued with the quest for knowledge and the dissemination of
knowledge.
His house, before he moved to Mambayya House, and Mambayya
House itself, was not only a place where politics was a daily affair and the
centre of all activities, but, was a place where people went to learn, about
religion, science, culture, language, Nigerian politics, economics, world affairs
and almost everything else.
Moreover, this learning was not being disseminated by Mallam
Aminu Kano, his colleagues and his disciples, just for the sake of it, but for
political action. Mambayya House, where this new research centre of Bayero
University has the fortune to be located, was the place where, throughout
Mallam’s residence there, the dissemination of knowledge and the struggle for
democratic emancipation in the country were integrated. It is often said that
the main achievement of the NEPU led by Mallam Aminu was to teach the talakawas
to say “No” to their oppressors and their deceivers. But Mallam, and the party
he led, did not just teach them to say “No” to injustices and oppression. They
taught them first to say “Why”. For, they only said “No” after asking “Why”.
They did not just say “No”, blindly, like donkeys.
This questioning, is, from my very limited experience of his
style of discourse, one of the most distinctive features of Mallam Aminu Kano’s
interaction with people.
It is this spirit of inquiry; this permanent search for
knowledge and this daily concern for its dissemination to awaken the
overwhelming majority of the people to their condition, rights, duties and
potential, which, in my view, are some of the most important aspects of his
legacies, which this country badly needs now if its democratic system is to
survive and grow.
The Politics of Ignorance
Right now, in Nigeria, the freedom of political association
and the exercise of the democratic right to choose freely in all elections is
being denied to tens of millions by ethnic, sub-ethnic, regional, and sectarian
religious organisations. They are loudly insisting that Nigeria is made up of
ethnic, regional and religious groups which are monolithic and all those who
belong to them have a common interest and have to act politically together,
making all those who do not agree with this type fascist politics, traitors,
who are liable to be ostracised and violently dealt with.
This politics is built on the dissemination of ignorance
about how Nigeria and its people have come into being. It is the Yoruba Race,
the Ijaw Nation, the Igbo Nation, the Urhobo Nation, the Hausa-Fulani Nation,
etc, etc, who are said to be the original building blocks which are said to
have agreed to come together to form Nigeria.
But all this is only politically potent because it is based
on ignorance and the entrenchment of hostility to knowledge, which has come to
riddle Nigerian politics and allow racist and fascist politics, deeply hostile
to democracy, to flourish.
Anybody who has read the scholarly writings that have come
out of the University of Ibadan from the early 1950’s knows that there has
never been and there is nothing like a Yoruba “Race”. Anyone who is familiar
with the works of Professor Kenneth Dike, one of the greatest academics of the
20th century, knows that there is nothing like the Igbo nation. These, like the
Hausa-Fulani, Ijaw, and the other nationalities of Nigeria, came to be formed
in the course of the formation of Nigeria in the 19th and 20th centuries, as we
have brought out in the Ceddert publication, The Misrepresentation of Nigeria:
The Facts and the Figures.
The Example of G.G. Darah
The degree to which ignorance has replaced knowledge and
this ignorance is used to promote racist and anti-democratic politics in
Nigeria, is most clearly illustrated over the claims made about the Urhobo and
the petroleum resources they are supposed to possess, by Dr. G.G. Darah.
Here, the claim coming from a prominent Senior Lecturer in
the Obafemi Awolowo University, now Chairman of the Editorial Board of the
Guardian Newspapers, is what will be cited. In an interview published in the
Sunday Punch of 3rd January, 1999, on page 3, Dr. G.G. Darah, said:
I come from
an area of Urhoboland… the Federal Government makes N41 billion a day
from the
oil produced in that place… we are asking for a hundred per cent because
after all
in America where this thing is exploited, your farm if they find this oil,
government
has no business with it. The Federal Government is rampaging our land…
That land
is Urhoboland. And Urhobo people were there before Nigeria was founded.
Nigeria is
only 87 years old. We have been here for 6,000 years.
Such statements on an important issue, by a person with such
high educational qualifications like Dr. G.G. Darah, who, moreover, is a
leading public opinion leader, as Chairman of the Editorial of the Guardian
Newspapers, can only be the product of a culture of ignorance which flourishes
in a political environment hostile to knowledge.
Almost everything Darah said here is not true, or, is very
misleading. From the figure of N41 billion obtained by the Federal Government
per day from the oil drilled from “his area”, the Federal Government would be
earning $106 billion (one hundred billion U.S. dollars) per annum from that
area alone! That is calculating the naira at the current black market exchange
rate. This is more than fiction, or, folklore, these are just hallucinations,
flourishing in a political atmosphere riddled with ignorance.
The Urhobos of America
As for what operates in the United States of America, if
Nigeria were like America, the owners of the land with oil would not have been
any natives who have been there for 6,000 years, like the Urhobo are said to
have been. The owners would be the Anglo-Saxon, German, Dutch, Scandinavian,
Italian and other European colonists who wiped out the native American-Indian
and conquered the territory driving out by brute force the Spaniards, the
French and the Mexicans. If Nigeria had been America, there would have been no
Urhobos to collect any royalty. The few left, like G.G. Darah, would have been
in poverty-stricken native reservations, like the few American Indians left,
are.
But even if this genocide had not happened, any legal
arrangement granting ownership of land and minerals to individuals, on a
freehold basis, as in the USA, would have left the land with oil deposits in
Urhoboland in the hands of families like the Akenzua royal dynasty of Benin,
whose claims in that area are extensive, and with merchant families like the
Ibrus. The Urhobo people would be nowhere under laws providing for the freehold
ownership of land, but shall be even more firmly subordinated to the
plutocracies, who, Andrew Onokerhoraye say, are in charge of their polities.
In any case, the tax, and rating, laws of the state and
federal governments of the United States, make the whole picture more complex.
A simple comparison with Nigeria is grossly misleading and only takes advantage
of the ignorance and the slave mentality which has been reduced to the level of
believing that everything done in America is better and should be copied by
everybody, oblivious of the significance of the genocide, slavery, violence and
native reservations, which have produced America, and still shape its society
and economy.
The Urhobos of Nigeria
As for the Urhobos being there before Nigeria, this is just
laughable, if it is not so much part of the anti-democratic campaign of
peddling ignorance to make for the rise of fascist political organisations in
Nigeria. In the first instance, Obaro Ikime, Onigu Otite, and others, who have
closely collected and studied Urhobo oral traditions, have brought out that
even according to these traditions, the autonomous Urhobo clans were of diverse
origins. They were of Benin, Ijo and Igbo origin. The Udu clan, which G.G.
Darah himself wrote about 20 years ago, came into the area in groups at
different times and from disperate sources, including a group from Benin. The
Ewreni clan claims that they migrated from a village called Enene Elele in
Igboland. The Ughweren clan, on the other hand claims both Ijo and Benin
origins.
That is as far as the oral traditions, which an eminent
scholar of folklore like G.G. Darah, somehow finds convenient to set aside and
fabricate some monolithic Urhobo nation going back six thousand years!
As for the name Urhobo, G.G. Darah must know that the name
only came into use significantly after the political agitations crystallised by
the article in the Daily Times, edited by Ernest Ikoli, of 13th June 1934 and
the reply of 19th June 1934. Before then, a common identity for the clans that
came to be called Urhobo barely existed. As Obaro Ikime observed on page 67 of
his 1977 study of the life and times of Chief Mukoro Mowoe:
In the 1930’s and 1940’s the Urhobo as a people, a group
distinct from their neighbours… were
very much in need for identity. The history of the preceding three ecades had a
major role to play in this challenging need for identity. Identity required a
focus, a rallying point, leadership; Mukoro Mowoe provided that rallying point,
that leadership.
In fact, it was the political activities of people like
Mowoe which produced the Urhobo as a distinct nationality, not six thousand
years ago, but within the context of the politics of colonial Nigeria, as the
specialists on the subject have made very clear, but as G.G. Darah wants to
cover up, taking advantage of the widespread ignorance of our history which is
very crippling to our political development.
The emergence of the Urhobo as a nationality took place
within Nigeria and one of the major steps towards this was the Government
Notice No. 1228 published in the Nigeria Gazette No.49, Vol.25 of 8th
September, 1938 which with effect from 1st October, 1938 changed the name of
Sobo Division of Warri Province to “Urhobo Division.”
But even after that, the issue of who is Urhobo and who is
not, remain a political issue, as is illustrated by the question of the
position of the Isoko, which there is no need to go into here.
But then G.G. Darah may be talking of six thousand years of
the Urhobo language. If he is, which of the dialects of the South-Western Edoid
dialects is he referring to? Is it the Agbarho dialect or the Uzere dialect?
When did these separate from the mother Edoid cluster to become a distinct
language, homogenous enough, and sufficiently cohesive, to define a
nationality, four thousand years before Christ? In fact, were there any
inhabitants in that area in that period, given what is now known about the formation
of the Niger-Delta and the climatic changes in this part of West Africa?
It is clearly playing on public ignorance to claim an Urhobo
people, or, nation, going back six thousand years. There is no evidence
available to support this claim. Elements that came later to form the
nationality called Urhobo, produced within colonial Nigeria, most likely were
to be found in various form and combinations much further north? But, all that
is still subject to further research and inquiry.
Conclusion
The sorts of claims made by G.G. Darah are now being thrown
around all over the place, taking advantage of the ignorance blocking public
knowledge of what we actually are, where we are coming from, where we are going
and where we can reach in this 21st century. State Governors of many of the
northern states, and the other non-oil producing states, being part of this
network of ignorance, are also throwing around meaningless claims about solid
minerals and agriculture. Instead of studying our geology, ecology, history,
economics, and constitutional and legal development, they resort to the same
cheap politics of claiming sovereign rights for their states where they have
none.The blind confronts the blind and the country’s politics sinks into a
welter of baseless tribalist and racist claims at the beginning of the 21st
century. Anti-democratic organisations using the fascist political tactics of
intimidation, using the threats of and the use of violence flourish in this
political contest based on ignorance.
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