Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Nigeria: Boko Haram, poverty, Jonathan and the game of musical chairs

Dear Professor Segun Ogungbemi,

Of course I am and was aware that you are from the North as that's the first surprising point that you made in the letter that I referred to, in which you said,

"I am from the north and it is not true that the north can boast of holding to power at the centre as stated by Prof. Abdullahi."

I was initially surprised because both your names, your first name Segun and your surname Ogungbemi are unmistakably Yoruba names and even after having made the probable location of your birth clear (Kwarra?) I still concluded that you are a Yoruba man just like me - no matter from what part of the Diaspora you shed your first tears or whether or not your umbilical cord is buried in the Sokoto, Borno or the more liberal Kaduna area.

But jokes aside that's one of the problems of Nigeria's and indeed Africa's regional and tribal politics: you may be born, bred and buried in the North alright but your name proclaims you Yoruba. So which bona fide Hausa man is going to take your self-proclaimed Northern identity, seriously, just because you maybe grew up in that environment? It certainly didn't save the Igbo traders, many of whom were born and bred in the North when the pogroms against the Igbo were perpetrated just prior to Biafra seceding as a safe haven for the Igbo people!

Of course, my dear professor, there's no doubt that you are eminently, even pre-eminently qualified to contest the presidential elections as a Northerner who would also sweep the Yoruba vote – there's no doubt about that, however, sweeping the Igbo vote with a name like that, would be quite another matter – as the South of Nigeria is divided between the South West and the South East, literary feuds Soyinka & supporters vs. The ascended Achebe & his fans, whilst in politics proper it's eternally  AWO vs. ZIK – has always been – to the extent that we can quote imperial Kipling symbolically, that

You asked "Is democracy based on rotation?"

In my view, acceding to the rotation role playing politics in Nigeria is in the national interest of peace & prosperity and to allay both the fear and lessen the ever increasing tensions based on a perceived imbalance between the North and the South in terms of development, education, and that this perceived injustice that's the main cause of the abject poverty in the North will be more easily righted by a Northern president. Nor do I think that the rotation system agreed upon by the PDP as an internal matter, a compromise of understanding, is in any way "undemocratic"

So, I am making a point in favour of – at this time - anointing a Northern as the presidential candidate for the PDP, most likely with a Southern running mate.

It's easy to see without looking too far that if that does not happen then Goodluck Jonathan's next logical option will be to retire a few more Northern Generals in the Nigerian military, to pre-empt a coup.  Of course, this is standard practice: In their time, Babangida and Abacha played it safe by retiring scores of Yoruba generals and other Yoruba top military brass.

As to the question of whether or not a Northern president will uplift the North, here is your answer below, but your answer does not solve the perceived injustice or the current poverty in the North – or take away the North's motivation to capture/ re-capture the presidency.

Your views on this:

"The educational backwardness of the north as it is known today is not the kind that anyone can be proud of. You don't have to have a northerner as president to make life better for all northerners. Any Nigerian who becomes president of the country can do that. Let the leadership of the north since 1966-2013 show the scorecards of their achievements. For 38 years the north had ruled this country and nothing to show for it, particularly in the north. What have the masses gained from the period they had ruled the country? I think that should be what Ango ought to be concerned about and not that the north will hold on to power come 2015 as long as they want on the basis of their numerical voting power. 

Obasanjo was in power for 11 years altogether as military head of state and civilian president of Nigeria. Were the Yoruba better off than when Yar'Adua was President of Nigeria? The Yoruba will tell you that they were worse off under the leadership of their kinsman."

You are surely overlooking the patronage that a Yoruba would receive when his kinsman is in power, ditto for the Hausa, the Fulani and of course the Igbo, and therefore, all the more reason for them to fight for their folks to be at the helm of the big business, so that at least a few kobo, more than a dollar a day should trickle down.

In one of his interviews Muhammadu Buhari talks about the elite and later on goes on to identify himself with that elite. This suggests to me that a Northern candidate usually comes from the elite – others say that "the Kaduna mafia" is part of it.

My impression is that Goodluck Jonathan is not from "the elite" – if anything is very much from the grassroots albeit nothing like my old icon, Michael Imoudu. You ask yourself the question, is Goodluck Jonathan the best that the system was able to deliver to Nigeria?

Finally, this democracy business (crazy-demo Fela calls it) by which the winner takes all – as happened in Egypt where the losers wanted to "share" power. In Nigerian terms Id' say that the losers also want "their share"

Please excuse some of my stray observations.

Yours sin-cerely,

dreary Cornelius

http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/