I am writing this article mainly for the benefit of Southern
Nigerians who have never been to the North, and mostly have a warped and
inaccurate view of the North. I have been driven to write this out of
my many personal experiences, and those of friends and family, as has
been shared with me. This is mainly an educative piece about what
Northern Nigeria is in reality; a complete, holistic picture of this
region.
To make this piece a simple read and easy-to-follow, I am going to write it around 5 common perceptions about the North and debunk them:
Religious Perception: The general belief held by most
Southerners about the North is that the region is not just mainly
Muslim, but wholly Muslim. Whenever I meet someone from the South and
introduce myself, I am correctly placed as a Christian. But once I am
asked my state and I say Borno State, the next question becomes, ‘Are
you a Muslim?’ This is despite my name being a very common Biblical
name, Mark, which is the second Gospel. Matter of fact, I have been
asked that question while attending a church programme, with a Bible
conspicuously held in my hands. You could imagine my surprise at that
question. This has also been the experience of a lot of friends with
common names such as ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Daniel’, etc.
To start with, out of the 19 Northern states, at least 5 have a
majority Christian population: Plateau, Adamawa, Nassarawa, Taraba and
Benue. At least 6 more have at least 40% Christian population. These
states include Niger, Gombe, Kaduna, Kogi, Kwara and either Borno or
Bauchi. That then leaves only Kano, Kebbi, Katsina, Jigawa, Sokoto, Yobe
and Zamfara as having Muslim populations above 60%. How then are we all
seen as Muslims?
This misconception could be excused when the person has an Arabic
name, as there are many Northern Christians who bear names such as
Jamila, Habiba, Halima, Sadiq, and Yunusa and so on. But when the person
has an obvious Christian name and is even attends church services, you
really begin to wonder.
Ethnic Perception: Another common perception of the North is
that we are all Hausa. My usual response to this is to borrow the
logical argument of Simon Kolawole, the Editor-in-Chief of THISDay
Newspapers. In an article in which he attempted to educate his largely
Southern readership base about the North, he went thus:
“If out of the estimated 250 tribes in Nigeria, we can say that the
South-West is mainly Yoruba with a few other tribes around Badagry area,
the South-East wholly Igbo and the South-South being most diverse in
the South with about 40 tribes, that still leaves the remaining 200
tribes in the North.”
How then are we reduced to one single ethnic group, Hausa? It is only
the North-West that is close to being homogenous, mainly Hausa and
Fulani, but with still some minority tribes in the Zuru area of Kebbi
State and the multi-diverse Southern Kaduna. The North-East and
North-Central is filled with tribes, many of whom I have never even
heard of. For example, Adamawa State is so diverse that the largest
ethnic group, the Fulani, is just 3% of the entire population. In my
home state of Borno, there is a local government so diverse that from
one village to another, you are likely to meet an entirely different
ethnic group. The number of tribes there are so many that we just
address the people as ‘Gwoza people’, after the name of the local
government.
Even though we all speak Hausa as a lingua franca in order to
communicate amongst ourselves as trading partners over the centuries,
that doesn’t make us Hausa people as much as communicating English
doesn’t make you and I English people. As a matter of fact, in the
North-East, Hausa people are a minority and virtually non-existent in
the North-Central region.
Intellectual Beliefs: Now, this is one belief that whenever I
am confronted with, it takes me a great deal of self-control not to flip
out and lose my temper. Times without number, when I tell people I am
from Borno State, I am asked how come I speak such good English. What
the hell? What am I supposed to speak? Arabic? The general expectation
is that someone from the North is not supposed to be this learned, this
well-spoken and articulate in English, this knowledgeable. I remember
when a friend asked me if my mother went to school, and the surprised
look on his face when I told him that my mum earned her masters’ degree
over 20 years ago. There was also a time when my dad met someone at the
Lagos International Airport and they got talking. When my dad told him
his profession, the man, in a fit of surprise, exclaimed, ‘I didn’t know
that there were professors in the North’.
I admit the fact that the North lags behind the South educationally,
especially the North-West and the North-East. But this is not due to our
inability to comprehend what we are being taught, but rather due to the
incompetence of leadership in the region to give education its premium
importance as a form of human development. We, like every other human
being on the face of this earth, can excel when given the opportunity. Talent and intellect abounds everywhere. Opportunity, however, does not.
I personally know of many Northerners who have excelled nationally and
internationally. Daily, the story of young men like Ahmed Mukoshy, who
is born, bred and schooled in Sokoto, and yet, rose above his
environment to become one of the emerging forces in IT in this country
in his early 20s inspires me. This is just one example among many that I
could cite but for the lack of space.
I find it outright disgusting whenever people claim that if not for
federal character and ‘zoning’, no Northerner would be able to compete
in this country. Last week, I was shocked when a friend said only 10% of
Northerners in the Federal Civil Service deserved their places on
merit, and went on to add that if he had not known me personally and I
were to get a job with the Federal Government, he would believe that I
did not earn it on merit. The most ridiculous one I encountered was when
earlier this year, former Minister of Finance, Dr Mansur Mukhtar was
appointed a World Bank director. Most of the commentators on the 234Next
article announcing this achievement for this Nigerian and Nigeria made
the ludicrous assertion that the appointment was done to please the
North, that Dr Mukhtar did not merit it. Little did they know that Dr
Mukhtar had worked at the World Bank and the African Development Bank,
prior to his heading Nigeria’s Budget Office on the invitation of the
then and present Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and former
World Bank Managing Director, who also recommended him for the post of
Finance Minister when she rejected former President Umaru Yar’adua’s
invitation to join his government. What is even worse is that they did
not care to know: their minds were already made up and could not be
confused with the facts.
Geo-Political Beliefs: Another common belief among Southerners
and most especially spread by Southern newspapers is that the entire 19
Northern states act and think as one when it comes to issues of
Northern politics. This is one of the biggest untruths about the North.
Whenever Northern Nigeria is mentioned, the people of Benue, Kogi and
Kwara states do not feel it refers to them. Geographically, they are
part of the North; politically, however, they and the entire Middle-Belt
act independently. This can be clearly in the last elections where
President Goodluck Jonathan won in 7 Northern states, even against his
strongest opponent, General Muhammadu Buhari, who is a Northerner. This
was something I am sure a lot of people in the South, save for the
political savvy, did not see coming.
One common sight of this perception being entrenched by newspapers is
when politicians of Northern extraction speak on national issues. I
have innumerably seen a washed-out Northern politician, without any
influence or popularity speak regarding an issue, and the next day,
newspapers carry bold headlines saying, ‘North rejects this’ or ‘North
plans to do that’, quoting the same washed-out politician as speaking
for the entire North. I have rarely seen a Bola Tinubu speaking and
being quoted as the mouthpiece of the entire Yoruba ethnic group, or a
Chief Edwin Clark for the Ijaw people. Methinks this is a way of selling
newspapers by capitalizing on the image of the North as one single,
political force which moves in a particular direction all-together
Cultural/Social/Economic Belief: Admittedly, as people of the
same region, we share a lot in
common culturally and socially in the
general terms: our mannerisms, modes of dressing, traditional titles
(apart from paramount rulers with the exception of emirates), etc.
Despite that, the Jukun in Taraba and the Kataf in Kaduna are very
different in the specifics, as even the Bura and Marghi people of
Borno/Adamawa States. To pick the attitude of one ethnic group in the
North and attach it to all the others, is to put it mildly, a very
short-sighted way of knowing and understanding the people of Northern
Nigeria.
Another belief in the South is that the entire North is but an empty
land mass with nothing but trees. I remember the controversy of the 2006
census when Kano State was said to have a slightly higher population
than Lagos State. Many of my Southern friends called it ‘an
impossibility’. In the words of one of them, ‘Lagos is so populated that
when you throw grains of rice into the air, they wouldn’t land on the
ground, but on people’. However, they all forgot to factor in land mass,
because Lagos State is a much smaller state than Kano State, and hence
has the highest population density in Nigeria, hence making it look as
though it was way more populated.
There are cities in the North that have been thriving economically, such
as Kano and Kaduna. As a matter of fact, Kaduna State was adjudged by
the World Bank in the year 2009 as the best place to do business.
Lastly, the most retrogressive belief about the North in the South is
that the entire North is a hotbed for violence. As much as we have had
more than our fair share of ethno-religious violence, there are many
states that have never experienced one, including states such as
Zamfara, and others as Nassarawa and Benue.
I have not written this as a criticism of the people of Southern
Nigeria, but rather, in the hope that this will be an enlightenment of
the South about the North. It amazes me when I see that despite the fact
that we have been a country for almost a century, yet, a lot of people
down South know little or nothing about their fellow Nigerians in the
North, but know about Europe and America.
I have also realized that we as Northerners have allowed others to
say our story for ourselves, hence have given it distortions, deletion
and generalizations. What has happened over time is what the writer
Chimamanda Adichie, in her TED talk in March 2009, at Oxford, England,
describes as ‘the danger of the single story’, where a single story of
the North as a region of poor, illiterate, lazy, Hausa Muslims who do
nothing but connive to lord over this country politically and kill
Southerners’ has been repeated so much that it is seen as the truth.
This is the kind of stuff that creates stereotyping, which in her words,
‘not that it is untrue, but that it is incomplete’.
This is one reason I still see the significance of our NYSC scheme,
choked with problems as it may be. We need to know each other more. Let
us override this stereotypical mind-set and seek to learn about each
other with open minds and seek the complete story that gives a holistic
picture of our country.
by Mark Amaza
source: markamaza.wordpress.com
