If you’re curious about why Abdul’Aziz Yari, a newly elected senator and the former governor of Zamfara State, so fervently desired the position of Senate President, look no further than the election of Jibrin Barau of Kano North as Deputy Senate President of the 10th National Assembly and Tajudeen Abbas as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
The political squabbling between northern Nigeria’s political establishment and southern Nigeria’s is likely a conflict between conservative Nigeria and the pseudo-progressives, who are actually conservatives in cover.
In order to thwart any radical restructuring that President Bola Tinubu might have in mind after ceding the presidency to the South, the northern Nigerian political establishment wanted the staunchly conservative North-West Nigeria to lead the legislature.
Speaker Abbas, who represents Kaduna State’s Zaria Federal Constituency, will checkmate Barau if he can’t stop President Tinubu from winging constitutional amendments that don’t benefit northern oligarchs from a Senate led by southern Nigerian Godswill Akpabio.
As a result, Speaker Abbas, a great-grandson of a Zaria Emir of the Mallawa dynasty, will use his legislative hand to reclaim the presidential powers that the northern political establishment had appeared to concede to the South with one hand.
It’s straight out of Henry Kissinger’s rulebook, the main character in American diplomacy’s zero-sum game in which your loss is your opponent’s gain. Your oppressors are wealthy because you are poor, according to protest author Franz Fanon.
The 1999 Constitution of Nigeria states in Section 58, “The National Assembly’s power to make laws shall be exercised by both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and.. assented to by the President.”
Therefore, any southern Nigerian who believes President Tinubu will spring a radical constitutional restructuring from his political magic bag may want to reconsider their assumptions. It won’t be an easy ride at all for those northern political establishment insiders who openly acknowledge that they survive on political power-mongering.
In the legislative houses, presiding officers who might have an interest in the topics under discussion play the game of parliamentary subterfuge, according to Senator Ali Ndume of the Southern Borno senatorial district. He says, “The presiding officers handle things in a clever manner…. If they turn around, will Ndume or the person who will be critical be there? In the event that they are not present, he brings additional order papers. And it ends in that way.
This implies that whatever legislative chairpersons desire is likely to be passed into law. But they will also use the legislative processes of their respective chambers of the National Assembly to work around anything they believe is detrimental to their interests or the interests of their region.
That was Senator Ndume’s explanation for the hotly contested approval of the short-term Ways and Means loan from the Central Bank of Nigeria that Godwin Emefiele recklessly extended to President Muhammadu Buhari’s debt-loving administration’s conversion into a long-term loan. All it took was for a cunning Senate President to buy in.
Nicolo Macciavelli, who plays the political brinkman, famously said that the end justifies the means. President Buhari got his way, even as the compliant 9th National Assembly was coming to a close, despite the media’s cries and some lawmakers with a modicum of decency.
Godswill Akpabio, the former minister of Niger Delta Affairs, was once exposing the shenanigans of some lawmakers who were questioning him when the Chairman of the Committee exercised his prerogative to ask Akpabio to “Off his mic” and stop further lewd revelation about how lawmakers’ hands became entangled in the cookie jar of contracts at the Niger Delta Development Commission.
Section 9 of the Constitution specifies an unusually complicated procedure for amending it: “The National Assembly may… not alter the Constitution unless the purpose is supported by the votes of not less than two-thirds majority of all the members of each House,” despite the fact that neither northern nor southern Nigeria has two-thirds of the National Assembly’s membership.
Additionally, the amendment must “also be approved by the resolution of the Houses of Assembly of not less than two-thirds of all states,” despite the fact that neither northern nor southern Nigeria have two-thirds of the states in the federation.
However, in general, Nigerian politicians don’t consider or care about the country’s interests as a whole. They only consider what is in their own personal, racial, or regional interests. Please read the following account from Daily Trust columnist Dr. Farooq Kperogi if you disagree with this assertion:
Intriguingly, when I brought up (President) Tinubu’s (Jagaban) Borgu title with my paternal uncle a few days ago, he jokingly questioned whether (President) Tinubu was aware that he was evading the obligations his title required of him by eliminating fuel subsidies, which has increased the deprivation of border communities like Borgu.
Ancient Borgu, according to Kperogi, extended from what is now the northeastern Benin Republic (where Borgu State is located) to the present-day Baruten and Kaiama Local Governments of Kwara State; and Bagudo and Dandi Local Governments of Kebbi State.
Such sentiments, as reported by Kperogi, merely serve to demonstrate that some Nigerians may not be wholly of Nigerian orientation. Therefore, they might not always be watching out for Nigeria, their country, but rather for the interests of their ethnic nationalities, however far those interests may extend.
Recall President Buhari’s response when Dr. Reuben Abati and the Arise News TV reporting team questioned him about why he believed it was necessary to build a railway line from Kano to Maradi in the Niger Republic, which is unlikely to be financially successful.
Without even batting an eye, President Buhari informed them that he had first cousins in the Niger Republic. Everyone now recognises that his father was a Nigerien who allegedly travelled to Daura, a town less than 9 kilometres south of the Nigeria-Niger Republic border, to sell duck.
Therefore, in all practical senses, whatever the inhabitants of the northern Nigerian political establishment decide to be in the national interest becomes that interest. This is comparable to the saying by W.I. Thomas and his wife Dorothy, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
It may take a long time and a lot of effort to resolve the political space competition in Nigeria between the Judeo-Christian traditions of southern Nigeria and the northern Nigeria’s Islamic Middle Eastern orientation.
The architect of this confusion and unnecessary agony that Nigerians on the two cultural and political divides are going through is the first Governor-General, Lord Frederick Lugard, who allowed the two political cultures to grow pari passu in Nigeria.
Almost leading one to believe that Lord Lugard intentionally sowed and cultivated this dividing seed of strife in order to ensure that Nigeria will never advance and experience peace! As a result, Nigeria’s political landscape took on an ongoing shaky trajectory that oscillated between two steps forward and one step back.
If the President wants to prevent his campaign platform from becoming nothing more than empty words lost in the mists of time, he may need to actively cultivate those who may not fully understand that when everyone works together, everyone benefits. It may sound gloomy, but the restructuring of Nigeria has probably not reached creation day yet.
