Adeniyi, Adamu Ciroma and Tony Elumelu

Dialogue With Nigeria BY AKIN OSUNTOKUN

The ramifications of the recent public engagement between Tony Elumelu and a graduate trainee of the United Bank of Africa, UBA, go beyond a controversial public encounter to the sociocultural disparities inherent in the amalgamation of Nigeria. Many years ago, Segun Adeniyi of the Thisday fame, dropped by my office looking quite distraught. He did not wait for me to inquire of him what might have gone wrong. He had gone to see the late Malam Adamu Ciroma, a ranking functionary of the Nigerian power elite.

But first, a word on the fascinating and colorful public career of Ciroma who was somewhat a permanent fixture in the corridors of power in Nigeria since the era of the late Sardauna of Sokoto and Premier of the Northern region, Sir Ahmadu Bello. He had the reputation of a disciplined and credible public figure and proudly wore the tag of an unapologetic ideologue of Northern Nigerian supremacy. Never mind that he studied history at the University of Ibadan and was married to a Yoruba lady. He was one of the first generation highly educated Northerners which made him and others like him a highly prized commodity in a milieu where such attainment was in scarcity. He belonged to a peer group of bright young adults whom Ahmadu Bello recruited and groomed for political leadership on the platform of the ascendant conservative wing of the Northern political establishment.

At the sudden and premature exit to the great beyond of Bello, the young proteges, who doubled as the vanguard of Northern Nigerian intelligentsia rallied to fill the vacuum created by the loss of their patriarch and morphed into a mythologised powerful Northern nationalist pressure group which came to be known as the Kaduna mafia. One aspect of Nigerian power politics in which the Northern region was lacking, was publicity and propaganda. In response, Ciroma was tapped to become the Editor of the then newly established ‘New Nigeria’ newspaper at which commissioning, Bello articulated the rationale for the newspaper’s establishment with the jibe that if you do not blow your trumpet, others will not blow it for you because they are busy blowing their own trumpet.

In manifestation of the regime of the norm breaking privileges bestowed on the mafia by their rumoured subsequent mentor (military head of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo), was the appointment of Ciroma, with a background in history and journalism, as the Governor of the Central bank. At the time of Adeniyi’s visit, he was the Minister of Finance in the civilian administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo. On being ushered to the presence of Ciroma, Adeniyi prostrated full length (a reverent Yoruba obeisance to elders). Shockingly, the Minister took offence and lashed out at the journalist to get up, as he didn’t know or care to know what his prostration was all about. Prior to this, he had taken umbrage at the appointment of a Yoruba, Olowolayemo (who had spent his entire public career in Borno state) as Secretary to the Borno state government (in 1979) in his unique pithy remonstration, “the Yoruba secretary to the Borno government should hurry home to the Yoruba country where he belongs”

At the personal level, my mother used to call my uncle, Jide Osuntokun, who was much junior to her in age, with the endearment “my dear”. It was a decoy to avoid falling foul of the Yoruba tradition which forbids the wife of your brother to call you by name. So my mother’s friends took a cue and started calling him “dear mama Tinu”! (dear of Mama Tinu) , Tinu being my eldest senior sister.

There are two cumulative pertinent cultural backgrounds to the universal understanding of the engagement between the young lady and Tony Elumelu. One appertains to the distinctive sociocultural disparity inherent in the amalgamation of Nigeria. The amalgamation was derived from the fusion of the Eastern, Northern and Western protectorates and they corresponded to the dominant linguistic groups of Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba respectively. One of the unintended consequences of the indirect rule policy of the British colonialists was that it served as an indication of the varying cultural predisposition of the three societies, to Westernization. The more socio-culturally egalitarian and liberal the ethnoregional group was, the greater the potential of their cultural assimilation to the secular Euro-America ethos of modernization.

According to the pundit of colonial rule in Nigeria, Margery Perham, “The Hausa have their large and historic city states and their Islamic traditions of law and discipline. The Yoruba have their happy and fertile marriage of aristocratic and democratic principles and of urban and rural societies. The Ibo, lacking in society cohesion, supply their egalitarian outlook and their intense individual vitality”.

Richard Sklar elaborated “The Ibo culture magnifies the value of individual achievement and they are famous for their exceptional receptivity to change. A trait shared with the Yoruba whose amenability to modernisation was further indicated in their unique proclivity for urbanisation. He noted “Probably the proportion of urban dwellers in Yorubaland is higher than among any other people in tropical Africa. In 1953, nine of the eighteen cities in Nigeria with populations exceeding 50,000 were predominantly Yoruba communities of pre-commercial origin. Government was a communal interest and at some point every adult had a say”. On the other hand ‘emirate rule exemplifies the principle of clientage, defined by M. G. Smith as “an exclusive relation of mutual benefit which holds between two persons defined as socially and politically unequal…. The Northern leaders claimed for their region an exclusive character and the British policy of indirect rule protected the authority of the Muslim princes who feared that the impact of the more democratic South would erode their authority’

From the Nigerian profile sketched above, it can be inferred that the group most amenable to liberal ideological assimilation was the Igbo followed closely by the Yoruba while the least amenable was the Hausa-Fulani. A measure of the cultural liberation and mobility of the Igbo is the anecdotal remark that there is no nation on earth without the presence of an Igbo person. Indeed, it is a documented fact that they are the most culturally mobile sub national group in Nigeria.

I do not know the ethno-nationality to which the young lady in question belongs but it is highly unlikely that she is from the Northern region. Cultural mobility and secular egalitarianism have also been given fillip by the phenomenon of globalisation or the Western biased unipolarity postulation of the thesis of “the end of history” by Francis Fukuyama, symbolised by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990.