In the week of April 18th through 25th, 2001, the Nigerian
internet community received an ample supply of Bala Usman’s essay provocatively
titled “Ignorance, Knowledge and Democratic Politics in Nigeria." It is
the text of his presentation at a symposium at Bayero University, Kano, on
Tuesday, 17th April 2001. As he himself affirms in this much-publicized essay,
it is only a sequel to a longer document published in the same venue in the
internet at http://www.ceddert.com/.
Bala Usman acknowledged the following assistance in the preparation of
the earlier document: “In preparing this brief, we have benefited from the
support and assistance of our colleague Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, and our
staff, Sunday Jonathan and Garba Wada.” The authorship is thus Bala Usman’s in
the main.
Titled "The Misrepresentation of Nigeria: The Facts and
Figures,” the earlier essay was a frontal attack on the notion that the Yoruba
and Igbo had their own autonomous history, independent of Nigeria. It also took
a swipe at the claim that the Niger Delta had its own destiny to worry about.
The latter “Ignorance" essay took on the Urhobo of the Niger Delta. For whatever reason he embarked on this
course of action, this essay was an exercise in insults and ridicule of a whole
ethnic group that Bala Usman viewed as representative of the Niger Delta.
In both of these essays, Bala Usman marches on as a soldier
of truth. He does not hesitate about the veracity of his declarations -- from
the Hausa origins of the name “Yoruba" to the British invention of the
term “Urhobo" in 1938! He picks sentences and fragments of paragraphs from
Kenneth Dike, Ade Ajayi, J. Alogoa, Obaro Ikime, Onigu Otite, Ken Saro-Wiwa,
and many others to show that these authors, dead and alive, support his
campaign for the enthronement of the primacy of the Nigerian State. In this
wonderful campaign against the evil of ignorance, there is only one solemn
truth. It is that Nigeria owns all of us. No other entity matters. Bala Usman,
the Truth Master, even labels as fascists those who do not subscribe to this
idea of the supremacy and absolutism of the Nigerian State. Those who question
the right of the Federal Government to take the resources of their people are
accused of undermining the foundations of democracy in Nigeria! G. G. Darah of
The Guardian is declared the epitome of ignorance because he dares to suggest
that human existence in Urhoboland, in the Niger Delta, is up to six thousand
years of age. This brand of history is different from the modesty-infested
historiography that offers tentative truth-propositions.
I will leave it to Ade Ajayi, Adiele Afigbo, and others who
study Igbo and Yoruba histories to accept or contest the claims made by Bala
Usman regarding the Igbo and the Yoruba. But I will not wait for these
influential historians before I challenge Bala Usman on his ill-mission on
behalf of the Nigerian State. Let me state clearly my reasons for responding to
Bala Usman’s two essays, especially the latter piece in which he is so scornful
of the Urhobo and the Niger Delta. My reasons are four. First, I believe that
Bala Usman has employed a defective methodology of history, in which the role
of the British conquest of Nigeria is the only thing that counts. Second, I
believe Bala Usman has used historiography as a tool for mischief-making.
History is an ennobling discipline that empowers people's cultures. In Bala Usman’s
hands, however, history has become a tool for dividing people into their little
clans, instead of employing it as an intellectual implement for uniting
them. Third, Bala Usman is completely
wrong about the facts of Urhobo history. He is also wrong in his assumptions
about human existence in the Niger Delta. Yet he turns around to accuse Darah
and others of ignorance about the history of their own people. Fourth, and most
importantly, Bala Usman and his team of intellectuals are turning the Nigerian
State into a monster that is waging a war against the Nigerian people. These
are serious issues that can only be ignored at Nigerians’ peril.
THE TREVOR-ROPER SYNDROME:
THE ILLS OF IMPERIALIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
History can be a tool for intellectual mischief-making.
Indeed, it has been so for most of the years in which imperial history has been
written. Imperial history belittles all previous historical experiences in
order, quite deliberately, to enhance its own presence. Conquering other people
is an aggressive act that offends their inherent sense of justice. It is in
order to create some measure of justification for imperial acts of conquest
that imperial historians strive to invent the illusion that all pre-imperial
times were also pre-historical. The moments worthy of historical epochs are
said to begin with imperialism. This was as much the case with Roman
imperialism as it was with English and British conquests and imperialism in
Ireland and Africa.
It was not by accident that the principal apostle of the
campaign for establishing the notion that Africans had no history, except the
history of Europeans in Africa, was a British scholar of Roman imperialism.
Regius Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, for a long time now a distinguished member
of the House of Lords, was the man who was writing about the Roman Empire when
he veered off, unprovoked, into a spiteful attack on the notion that Africa had
any history worth studying. His infamous words deserve to be recalled:
Undergraduates, seduced . . . by . . . journalistic fashion,
demand that they be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps, in the future,
there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or
very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is
largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America . . .
Please do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that men existed even in dark
countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture,
interesting to sociologists and anthropologists; but history, I believe, is
essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too (Trevor-Roper 1965:
9).
It is a strange piece of irony that a man who has
self-consciously worn the progressive label all his life may end up as a
disciple of imperialist historian Trevor-Roper. No matter however one cuts it,
Bala Usman is telling us in his two essays that the Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw, and
Urhobo -- his principal examples -- had no histories until they were created by
British imperialism. His words hauntingly parallel Trevor-Roper’s and will
probably cause Kenneth Dike to turn in his grave. He says,
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.”
This campaign aimed at undermining the autonomy of the
history of Nigerian ethnic nationalities is especially painful and puzzling in
the case of Bala Usman who has spent a
robust intellectual life (apart from his political writings, such as the essays
under review here) arguing for the vastness of not only the history of the
Sokoto Caliphate but of that of his own ruling dynasty in Katsina. It is intriguing
that what he challenges about his own people is the wrongful coupling of Hausa
and Fulani as one compound ethnic group. But it would be foolish to argue that
the Hausa people who produced the Kano Chronicle had no pre-British history of
their own. Clearly, the Hausa had a splendid history. Nor can anybody argue
that the Fulani and Kanuri, who signed a peace treaty in 1812, had no history
before the British arrived.
So what is Bala Usman’s point? Is it not to show that the
rest of us had no history before the British arrived? His words make it clear
that all the history that counts in contemporary Nigerian affairs is the
British conquest. In strong approval, Bala Usman says, "The British did
not conquer the pre-colonial polities of Nigeria only to leave alone their land
and minerals. They took full control over these, as the sovereign power."
What an apologia of British imperialism in Africa!
METHOD AND MISCHIEF IN BALA USMAN’S
DENUNCIATION OF PRE-BRITISH HISTORY OF NIGERIA
Usman was not merely making declaratory statements in order
to uphold his campaign that British conquest of Nigeria offers the paramount
definition of the history of southern communities. He carefully chose examples
to demonstrate his point. Missing from his discussion are any Northern ethnic
groups, such as the Kanuri, Tiv, or Jukun. Nor has he gone after every Southern
Nigerian ethnic group. He has chosen his examples most carefully. First and
foremost, he trains his mischief-making at the Yoruba, the ethnic behemoth of
the South. He was less aggressive with the Igbo. Then he goes after the Niger
Delta with especial vehemence. Inside the Niger Delta he chose to ridicule the
Urhobo. There is ample guile in the historical method of Bala Usman’s mischief.
It is a political craft that he has perfected to a brilliance.
I will leave the Yoruba to defend themselves. But it is
noteworthy that Bala Usman chose Bolaji Akiyemi as a spokesman for the Yoruba,
making mincemeat from his weak presentation of the Yoruba case. Even his
detractors must acknowledge that Bala Usman’s campaign against the integrity of
the history of Yoruba has masterful cruelty in it. It questions the origins of
the name "Yoruba." As far as Bala Usman is concerned, that name was
an imperial donation from the North. I am intrigued by Usman’s argument on this
score. Note his words well. He says,
The fact is that, the earliest record we have of the use of
the very name "Yoruba" was in the Hausa language and it seems to have
applied to the people of the Alafinate of Oyo. This came from the writings of
the seventeenth century Katsina scholar, Dan Masani (1595-1667), who wrote a
book on Muslim scholars of the 'Yarriba.' But it was from a book of the Sarkin
Musulmi Bello, written in the early nineteenth century, that the name became
more widely used. The Bishop Ajayi Crowther, the Reverend Samuel Johnson, and
his brother Obadiah Johnson, among others, came, in the nineteenth century, to
widely spread this Hausa name to the people who now bear it, in their writings.
So what is Bala Usman’s proof that the name
"Yoruba" is an "Hausa name"? It is so, to repeat, because,
he says, "the earliest record [sic] we have of the use of the very name
'Yoruba' was in the Hausa language" -- from the writings of a man born in
1595! But in fact the name Yoruba was used by a Timbucktu theologian, Ahmad
Baba, who was already a distinguished scholar long before Dan Masani was born
in 1595. Moreover, Ahmad Baba (1556-1627) wrote in Arabic, not in the Hausa
language. Ahmad Baba was captured along with other Songhai intellectuals by
Moroccan Arab invaders of Songhai in 1591 – four years before Bala Usman’s Dan
Masani was born -- and was taken to the Maghreb. On his return from captivity,
Ahmad Baba complained bitterly, saying
Muslims, Arab or African, were not supposed to be enslaved, as he was: "The Muslims among [the Blacks], like
the people of Kano, Katsina, Bornu, Gobir, and all of Songhai are Muslims, who
are not to be owned. Yet some [Muslims] transgress on the others unjustly by
invasion as do the Arabs, Bedouins, who transgress on free Muslims and sell
them unjustly" (see Hilliard 1985: 162).
But in further argument with Arabs, Ahmad Baba allowed that non-Moslem
Blacks, on account of their lack of faith, could be enslaved. Among these were
the Yoruba. Ahmad Baba's infamous words were as follows:
Those who come to you from the following [sic] clans: the
Mossi, the Gurma, the Busa, the Yorko, the Kutukul, the Yoruba, the Tanbugbu,
the Bobo are considered non-believers who still adhere to non-belief until
now.... You are allowed to own all these without questioning. This is the
ruling about these clans, and Allah, the Highest, knows and judges (please see
Baba c1622: 137).
These words were penned when Bala Usman’s Dan Masani was a
teenager. There is no evidence whatsoever that Ahmad Baba knew of the Yoruba
through the Hausa or the Fulani who, like Dan Masani, spoke and wrote the Hausa
language.
I have gone into this
matter of the allegation that the name Yoruba was an Hausa derivation because I
can see no evidence for it. Of course, if it is repeated frequently enough, it
will become the "truth." Let those, like Bala Usman, who shop it
around, come up with a better proof than the incorrect allegation that it first
appeared in an Hausa writing. My second reason for delving into this matter is
that Bala Usman has sought to humiliate the Urhobo by alleging that their name
was given to them by the British in 1938, using another version of the insult
he hurled on the Yoruba. As I will demonstrate later, his allegation about the
Urhobo name is even more vacuous than his proof of the Hausa origin of the name
"Yoruba." But first, I must turn to the strangest theory from Bala
Usman, namely, why the Niger Delta does not belong to Niger Deltans.
SO WHO OWNS THE NIGER DELTA?
Bala Usman has now moved beyond General Olusegun Obasanjo’s
Land Use Decree of 1978 to offer reasons why Niger Deltans do not own their
lands and waters. His answer is straightforward. The Niger Delta belongs to the
State of Nigeria. By that he means the Federal Government of Nigeria. This
self-professed democrat offers two reasons for his arguments on why the Niger
Delta does not belong to Niger Deltans. First, by right of conquest, it ceased
to belong to its owners and was taken over by the British conquerors who then
handed it over to the Nigerian State at Independence. His second reason flows
from his unique theory of the geological formation of the Niger Delta. The
waters and debris that form the natural wealth of the Niger Delta come from up
North. We will consider these theories from a man who says he is fighting for
Nigerian democracy, in reverse order.
Bala Usman’s Theory of the Formation of the Niger Delta.
Imperialists have been known to be very creative in justifying their imperial
ambitions. But none can match Bala Usman’s imagination. According to him, Niger
Delta lands are only the secondary producers of oil and gas. The primary
producers of these products are up North from where the Niger and the Benue
drain farmlands, dead bodies, feces, etc., from which the minerals in the Niger
Delta are made. Therefore, quoting his words now, "those states of
Nigeria, upstream from the delta, in the Niger-Benue basin, should take
exclusive ownership and control of the river water and its sediments drained
away from them to form the delta and its hinterland, and demand their share
from the returns from the export of crude oil and gas in proportion to what
their vegetation, faeces, dead bodies, animal remains and fertile soil, generally
contributed to the making of these minerals for hundred of thousands, and even
millions, of years."
How does one argue against this bent of mind? And yet it
would be dangerous to say Bala Usman does not know what he is talking about. On
the contrary, he does. He throws up these incredible theories. If they are not
refuted, he insists that they should inform policies. If they are refuted
convincingly, he moves on to other areas. But always, he has the ears of the
powerful. So we must regard him as a spokesman for powerful interests in Abuja
and Northern Nigeria.
First, let us grant him his argument. By the same token two
consequences would follow. First, those countries from which and through which
the Nile River flows would lay claim to Egypt and its wealth. Uganda, even
Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia would lay historic claims to the resources of the
Nile Delta. But obviously, that is not Bala Usman’s intention. The dynamics are
different. Second, if his argument is correct, then the farmlands in the
Benue-Niger valleys that benefit from the flow of the Niger and Benue from and
through Guinea, Mali, Cameroon, and Niger should be claimed by those other
countries from which their fertility is derived. But of course, that is not
what Bala Usman has in mind. What he has in mind is the wealth of the Niger
Delta: how to distribute it in such a way so that his people will have the lion
share. Then Bala Usman, the Truth Master, will declare to the world that Niger
Deltans love democracy.
I think the rest of the country should understand that the
barely hidden goal behind this theory is to instigate conflict between the
people of the Benue Valley and the Niger Delta. Bala Usman will not be able to
show anywhere in the world where his theory has been tried out. He has no
scientific basis for his theory. His sole aim is to threaten the people of the
Niger Delta and then sow much confusion in the body politic. Bala Usman’s two
essays are laced with threats. Either the people he speaks for will have their
way or there will be chaos. In other words, this is an exercise in
intimidation.
There is no rationality behind these strange theories. If
Bala Usman’s theory had any credibility, then we should have oil and gas in
every delta region in the world. The
Congo drains much the same sediments from upland countries. How much oil is
there in the Congo Delta? Or conversely, why would there be any oil in the
Sahara from which debris from other regions are not possible? No, this is not a
rational theory. It is all part of mischief-making.
The Right of Conquest. Bala Usman is very angry at claims
"that the modern ethnic groups of Nigeria, like the Ogoni, the Ijaw and
the Urhobo, have some autochthonous sovereign rights over the land and minerals
of the Niger Delta and its coastal hinterland; and [that] these rights are
illegitimately being denied by the Federal Republic of Nigeria." But what
are his grounds for saying that these lands do not belong to these ethnic groups
or the state governments that run their affairs? Shamelessly, Bala Usman plays
one of his imperialism cards, again. Hear him: "Whatever sovereign rights
the governments of the pre-colonial polities of the Niger Delta and its
hinterland had, over the soil, water, and minerals of the area, were destroyed
by the British conquest." Bala Usman then goes into a recitation of
Lugardian decrees that sought to model the Amalgamation after the British
conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate and the rest of Northern Nigeria.
For the avoidance of doubt, let it be clearly stated that
the British colonization of Southern Nigeria did not include the alienation of
lands from their communities and even individuals. The British called the
colonized region Protectorate because the Imperial Government said it was
protecting its peoples and lands from hostile forces for the future benefits of
the "natives." In Warri Province, for instance, British colonial
officers leased lands from communities in signed agreements that were accepted
and respected by British courts, up to the Privy Council. Why would the British
lease lands from Southern Nigerians if they assumed that their colonization
included the alienation of lands and its resources? The British also signed
agreements, so-called "treaties of protection," with various
communities in the Niger Delta. Each of
them had nine clauses. None of these treaties talked of conquest nor alienation
of lands from these communities.
The picture that Bala Usman is presenting did cover what
happened in the Sokoto Caliphate and much of Northern Nigeria. There Frederick
Lugard conquered the Sokoto Empire and imposed on it a condition that was
merely repeating what its previous Fulani conquerors had put in place. The
Fulani conquest of the Hausa kingdoms in the jihad that began in 1804 concluded
with the alienation of Hausa lands by the Fulani State. Frederick Lugard
imitated the Fulani conquerors by alienating the lands in the North. Lugard’s
attempt to extend that regime of land alienation to the South was resisted
everywhere in the South during his Amalgamation ventures. And he abandoned it.
For instance in creating a Department of Forestry for the South, he fully
acknowledged and respected the communal rights over lands in the South. As
Lugard (1912-1919: 167) himself put it,
[When] "The Ordinance of 1917 . . . empowered the Government to
create forest reserves . . . [t]he rights of the natives who claimed communal
ownership . . . were safeguarded."
Bala Usman is stating the correct situation of what obtained
with the British conquest of the North. But that was not what happened in the
South. It is sheer revisionist history to impose retrospectively the land
situation in the North unto the South. It was under the regime of General
Olusegun Obasanjo in 1978 that the Northern land usages were imposed on the
South under military fiat. For that Olusegun Obasanjo will for ever have a
question to answer in Nigerian history. But even so, the land in the 1978 Land
Use Decree is vested in the states, not in the Federal Government of Nigeria.
Why should a self-styled democrat like Bala Usman be afraid of the powers of
local governments and the decentralization of powers over land rights to the
States?
The Niger Delta belongs to Niger Deltans. We have no share
whatsoever of Katsina. Bala Usman and his people should leave the Niger Delta
alone.
G. G. DARAH AND THE URHOBO OF THE NIGER DELTA
Bullies have a way of seeking to teach their victims
lessons. There is very little doubt in my mind that Bala Usman was deliberately
determined to teach Darah and his Urhobo people a lesson from the whip of his
pen. His venom was particularly toxic in a mean-spirited attack on Darah as an
ignorant man. And yet Bala Usman has tripped all over in stating facts about a
place he only knows by reading a few scattered books. Bala Usman’s knowledge of
Urhobo and the Niger Delta is essentially fragmentary and is entirely bookish.
If he were a humble man he would state his case with caution. Instead, he went
for the jugular.
To start with, Bala Usman thought he must ridicule the
Urhobo. Hear him: "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." One wonders where the ignorance lies. One wonders where fascism
lies. Or has fascism changed its meaning?
Bala Usman labours through a series of partial citations
from Obaro Ikime and Onigu Otite to prove his point that the Urhobo were not
there before Nigeria! There was nowhere any of these scholars said so. The
hardest evidence that Bala Usman could muster is a strange interpretation of
the redesignation of "Sobo" to Urhobo in 1938 by the British Colonial
Government. He says, "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.'" Far be it from me
to call a fellow academic an ignorant man, no matter however badly he has
offended history. But this is plainly ridiculous.
The British had enormous difficulties handling Urhobo names.
They changed Urhiapele to Sapele, Avwraka to Abrakar, Uhwokori to Kokori, etc.
Urhobo have tried hard to recover the original names. In 1938 Urhobo Progress
Union was able to prevail on the Colonial Government to change the corrupted
name "Sobo" to its original Urhobo. Urhobo thought that was an
important achievement. Instead, Bala Usman is giving the impression that the
British donated that name to the Urhobo! How very ridiculous. All other ethnic
groups in the Western Niger Delta were having the same problems with the way
British colonial officers brutalized their ethnic names. The Urhobo were the
first to succeed in changing theirs. But Ukwuani was corrupted by the British
to Kuale. The Itsekiri were variously called
Jekri, Jakri, and Jekeri -- until they changed to their correct name,
Itsekiri. The Izon have had greater difficulties. They have been called Ijo,
Ijaw, Ezon, and Izon. These are the cultural casualties of colonialism. Of
course, Bala Usman would not know these facts from the isolated books that he
reads about the Niger Delta.
If the Urhobo did not have a knowledge of themselves before
the British came, why would they resent the name that the British called them
and ask for a correction? Urhobo Brotherly Society and Urhobo Progress Union
dating back to 1931 never bore the name "Sobo." Shouldn't Bala Usman
do a little more exploration of Urhobo history before he so spitefully accuses
Darah of ignorance of the history of his own people?
The ethnic composition of the Western Niger Delta has not
changed since the Portuguese made their
first voyage through the shores of the Atlantic into the interior regions of
the Western Niger Delta more than five centuries ago. The same books of Obaro
Ikime (and those by Peter Lloyd and quite a few others) that Bala Usman has
apparently read are consistent in reporting what the Captain of the Portuguese
premier voyage to the Western Niger Delta reported. Apart from the Benin, in 1485 he identified two ethnic groups in
the region: "Jos" (for Ijaw) and “Soubo" (for Urhobo). The
Portuguese did not meet all the "clans" of the Urhobo that Bala Usman
now touts. They met only the Agbarha-Ame. But they did not so identify the
people they met. They knew them as "Soubo," probably a corruption
from the Benin word for Urhobo which is "Uhobo." The Benin knew the
Urhobo as a people for centuries before the Portuguese arrived in Western Niger
Delta in the 1480s. They did not need the Portuguese nor the British to tell
them who the Urhobo were. As a student of Fulani history, Bala Usman should not
be surprised that the Urhobo are called different names by different people or
that they call themselves a name different from what others call them. The
French call the Fulani "Peul" whereas the English call them Fulani.
The Fulani are called several other names in other regions of Africa. Yet they
are the same people.
If the Urhobo had a composite ethnic identity five centuries
ago, why would British conquest and imperialism dissolve it in the 1890s? I
daresay that it is the Trevor-Roper syndrome that governs Bala Usman’s
perception of the history of the Western Niger Delta. But that would not be
called ignorance. No, imperialists are never ignorant!
There are other accusations of ignorance that Bala Usman
mounted against Darah. I will handle two of these that especially exercised
Bala Usman. First, he says that Darah inflated the amount of petroleum that was
pumped under the aegis of the Federal Government from Urhobo lands. He incredulously
asked why the Federal Government would be making so little money if the figure
mentioned by Darah was correct. Is it possible that Bala Usman has never heard
of oil bunkering? Does Bala Usman really believe the Federal Government's
figures? Bala Usman is anything but naive. It is more likely that he has
decided to feign ignorance about the amount of oil pumped from the Niger Delta,
legitimately, or otherwise stolen by the exploiting companies, with collusion
from Nigerians, and also stolen by Nigerians themselves. Blessed are those who
feign ignorance for they shall be close to the seat of power in Abuja.
Bala Usman also chastises Darah for suggesting that the
Urhobo have been in the Western Niger Delta for some six thousand years. In a
very strange, but unexplained, view of the Niger Delta, he mysteriously asks,
"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?" What is he talking about? Science
and human history have established beyond any shadow of doubt that humankind
began in Africa, only a few thousand miles from the Niger Delta. Homo sapiens
is at least 200,000 years old on the African continent. He and she have
wondered all around Africa. There were no toxic wastes from Shell-BP and
Chevron to drive away humans from reaching the Niger Delta tens of thousands of
years ago. Sure, migrants may have joined aborigines of these lands. But it
makes no sense to imagine that humans were absent from the lands now occupied
by the Urhobo and other Niger Deltans many thousand years ago. If there is
anything to complain about, it is the mentality that timidly concedes age of
existence to Asia Minor, or the Middle East. Abraham and Noah; Moses and Jacob;
Jesus Christ and Mohammed; Jerusalem and Mecca: these are important instances
of the history of humankind. But they are not as old as the human experience on
the African continent. Nor are we in the Niger Delta prepared to rule ourselves
out of the African heritage. By the Grace of God, we are as old as humankind
gets.
SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Nigerian affairs have reached a point which calls for the
invocation of an olden distinction between the State and the Nation. A State is
the organization that runs the political affairs of a country, with its rulers
and its bureaucracy. The people themselves and their history and cultures,
their mores and ethical lives, constitute the Nation. When the social and
political affairs of a country are well managed by leaders who are responsible
and are respected by the people, there is a congruence between the State and
the Nation. In such circumstances, there is no need for a distinction between
the two.
Sadly, Nigerian affairs compel us to separate the Nigerian
Nation from the monster that has emerged as the Nigerian State. Increasingly,
the Nigerian Nation is being victimized by the Nigerian State. Indeed, in the
Niger Delta the Nigerian State is waging a war against a fragment of the Nigerian
Nation. The Nigerian State has stolen the lands and resources of the people.
With these resources, it now recruits foot soldiers in its immoral campaigns
against the Nigerian Nation.
Bala Usman’s two essays demonstrate that he is an important
recruit in Abuja's struggles against the Nigerian Nation. In his campaigns on behalf of the Nigerian
State, Bala Usman has emerged as a fearless defender of British imperialism
because, he argues, the Nigerian State inherited its powers from British
conquest and colonization of Nigerian polities and ethnic groups. How very sad!
As for democracy, its invocation has become very profitable
as a way of showing Jimmy Carter and the Americans as well as Britain's Tony
Blair that the Nigerian State cares about its people’s welfare. How can those
who designed and now support the theft of people’s lands through the instrument
of a Land Use Decree be called democrats? How can those who invaded and
destroyed Odi Town talk of democracy? There are those who will cut off a hand
from an Hausa peasant for stealing a goat for a decent pot of soup but then
turn around to turban public officials who have stolen billions of dollars from
public funds. They make a mockery of justice and destroy the foundation of
democracy. Indeed they are waging a war against human decency.
If Bala Usman wants to be counted among the ranks of the
Nigerian State's forces, that is his choice to make. But he should stop
parading himself as a defender of Nigerian democracy. The forces that he seeks to
promote are undermining democracy on a daily basis.
REFERENCES
Baba, Ahmad. c1622. "The Mi'raj: a Legal Treatise on
Slavery by Ahmad Baba." Translated and edited by Bernard Barbour and
Michelle Jacobs. Pp. 125-138 in John Ralph Willis, ed., Slaves and Slavery in
Muslim Africa. Volume I: Islam and the Ideology of Enslavement. London: Frank
Cass.
Hilliard, Constance. 1985. "Zuhur al-Basatin and
Ta'rikh al- Turubbe: Some Legal and Ethical Aspects of Slavery In the Sudan as
Seen in the Works of Shaykh Musa Kamara." Pp. 160-181 in John Ralph
Willis, ed., Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa. Volume I: Islam and the
Ideology of Enslavement. London: Frank Cass.
Lugard, Sir F. D. 1912-1919. Lugard and the Amalgamation of
Nigeria. A Documentary Record. Compiled and Introduced by A. H. M. Kirk-Greene.
London.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh. 1965. The Rise of Christian Europe. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
_______________________________________________________________
Peter Ekeh
Urhobo Historical Society
P. O. Box 1454
Buffalo, New York 14226
USA
Email: UrhoboHistory@waado.org
Fax: 1 (208) 361-9469
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