By Is’haq Modibbo Kawu
I got caught in the eye of a storm this week at the National Conference. Pure serendipity really! SUNDAY TRUST’s cover was an exclusive report titled: “NATIONAL CONFAB HIDDEN AGENDA EXPOSED”. The report had gleaned from a 102-page document entitled: “The National Conference 2014 Terms of Agreement of the six Geo-Political Zones”.

This innocuous document listed terms of agreement that included items like 50% Derivation for Oil Producing States; the creation of an additional 13 states in the country; Rotational Presidency and Governorship; cessation of Federal Allocation to Local Government Councils. The exclusive report said the authors of the report were enticing delegates with bribe money and new states. I was worried because I didn’t know some “Terms of Agreement of the Six Geo-Political Zones” were in the works.

Of course I am not naïve about developments. Delegates had been meeting since the commencement of the National Conference. Southern delegates, who mainly agitated since the 1990s for a National Conference, had prepared very elaborate platforms to canvass.

They also built a Southern alliance and also made spirited efforts to drive a wedge into Northern solidarity by reaching out to Jerry Gana’s Middle Belt group. A National Conference, in that sequence of agendas, seemed always targeted against Northern Nigeria.

The Conference, too, was overwhelmingly skewed in the South’s favour. The North has therefore been wary of agendas against it with an intrinsic vulnerability, but nevertheless determined to secure its position. I know the depth of feelings on all sides, as I consciously try to reach out to all Nigerian compatriots. My attitude was always that, yes I am Northern, but I represent a Pan-Nigerian organisation, the Nigerian Guild of Editors.

I left home early on Monday because we were to discuss the report of my Committee on Political Parties and Electoral Matters. But I was confronted by DAILY TRUST’s lead story: “Confab Secretariat Lobbies Northern Delegates”. The nut and bolt was that Deputy Chairman, Bolaji Akinyemi was “at the forefront of consultation with Northern delegates to convince them to accept a new constitution”.

The story added that: “Akinyemi is acting at the instance of the Presidency whose political operators inside the conference are already working purportedly to actualise its agenda under the platform of Unity Forum convened by Senator Ibrahim Mantu”. The report similarly alleged plan “to empower President Jonathan to come up with a new national constitution”.

I saw a trend from the report in SUNDAY TRUST and the cover in Monday’s DAILY TRUST. I therefore made up my mind to raise a motion of urgent national importance, which I eventually did! I sought for the Deputy Chairman, Professor Akinyemi to defend allegations against him. That opened up a Pandora’s box!

In matters like that emotions overflow and a Masada Complex overtook the hall, with delegates becoming boxed into ethno-regional laagers. As individuals were forced by the circumstance to explain their roles in the document I referredto, it became clearer that meetings had been holding to secure consensus on divisive issues.

That was the reason Bolaji Akinyemi posited for holding meetings with various delegations, including the Northern. It was nevertheless clearer also that subterranean efforts are being made by sections of delegates, to nudge the conference into accepting a constitution, as an outcome of the National Conference with the important adjunct of a referendum to legitimise such a constitution.

But as in any such issue, the devil is in the details. And this is made particularly poignant by the fact that some of the Southern delegates had become giddy with the assumption that they secured a strategic victory, when Conference agreed to the establishment of state police.

These individuals boasted to their friends in the media that their next victory will be a new constitution and therefore needed the support of their media allies! When I moved my motion, I honestly didn’t quite realise the depth of pain it would inflict on those who had sworn that their constitution would be an outcome of the conference.

As we enter the home stretch, to borrow a description from athletics, it is clear that we are locked in the most difficult phase of contestation of the National Conference. From issues of local government excision from the constitution, generous ‘donation’ of an extra state to the South East while others must meet set criteria; the unending demand for resource control and the not-too-hidden agenda for a new constitution, we have arrived at the phase of bitter intrigues when the earlier emotional overflows will seem like child play.

The various delegations will stretch every sinew to be seen to have won victory against adversaries on the other side. This is because inter-elite rivalries in Nigeria are almost the continuation of old tribal warfare by other means. On all sides, the consensus building techniques which elite groups must learn, as the essential ingredient of nation building, has become increasingly the most difficult technique to learn here.

Yet an incremental record of agreed successes that benefits all sections of the country should be the best way to moderate the vicious rivalries amongst our elite groups. A mutually assured destruction can never be the logic to pursue when there are so many contending issues that militate against nation building. But the home stretch is the scene to burn maximum energy, because all athletes, in our case the delegates, can see the tape they want to breast!

Yadoma Bukar Mandara: The future in the present

It was a few days to the opening of the National Conference, 2014, that I first saw a reference to Yadoma Bukar Mandara. Nasir El-Rufai had written a short piece for our National Collective internet group that he probably would only like to help manage the funds that would accrue to Yadoma from the National Conference, because she was going to be the youngest participant at the age of 23.

That kind of got filed away in my memory. And two weeks into the Conference, I met her for the first time at lunch. She was in the company of a group of younger members of the Conference, including Hassan Rilwan, who as Publisher of SARDAUNA magazine, has become a notable young Northern Nigerian entrepreneur, with interest in many other areas of business and is also quite articulate and personable. We had spoken and when she told me her name, I connected the face and person to the short piece from Nasir El-rufai.

She appeared to be shy, was   respectful, wore a ready smile and had a tendency to bow slightly in respect to people who tried to greet or speak with her. One day, when I did not have a car, she even offered me a ride into town; it was one service which she readily gave to many delegates, especially   the group of young people at the Conference.

In the weeks and months of the Conference, Yadoma Bukar Mandara has become one of the most popular delegates. This is largely because of her sense of responsibility which came to the fore so early and which seemed to have been readily harvested by the leadership of the Conference.

The young lady has been given various responsibilities which she has applied herself to with admirable dedication. The fact that she is the youngest delegate was noticed by all, and her surname was one that was readily connected with by many people who knew her father, the late Alhaji Bukar Mandara, a very colourful individual and certainly one of the most noticeable representatives of his generation in Borno and Northern Nigeria. He had built a remarkable network of relationships across Nigeria.

Alhaji Mandara used to be a regular visitor to my office, when I was Editor of DAILY TRUST, between 2002 and 2005. Yadoma is very fond of her father and tells whoever asked that she is the old man’s last child! There seemed to be an unspoken desire to be a true ambassador of her famous father and an urge not to fall below a standard that befitsher background. She ploughs into every assignment with a single-minded devotion, application, enthusiasm and a sense of responsibility which all who relate with her admire.

It is therefore no surprise that she is easily recognisable and is always in one group or other, or is being sought out for a conversation or is just greeted by all with a respect that reflects admiration for the way she carries herself!

When Committee work commenced, she was, not surprisingly, made the Deputy Chairperson of the Committee on the Environment. She had studied Environmental Biology at the University of Maiduguri, so her work in the Environment Committee fitted her background; but to be made a Deputy Chairperson of the Committee was an endorsement of her sense of responsibility and an opportunity to help further develop her leadership skills. By all indication, she applied herself to committee work with the same industry.

And when called upon to lay down the Committee’s report at the re-commencement of plenary, she shyly walked to the front of the conference, received a ringing endorsement in the deafening ovation which accompanied her.

It was vindication of the trust that the Conference leadership reposes in her, that she was also appointed member of a committee helping to find consensus on the divisive issue of Nigeria’s Land Use Act. Hajiya Aisha Ismail, who chairs the committee, spoke highly of Yadoma’s contribution to the work which the committee did. And to imagine that she turned 24 during the Conference!

As we come closer to the end of the Conference, I think that Yadoma Bukar Mandara is one of the standout individuals of the past few months. She is a representative of the best of Nigerian youth, helping to underscore the possibilities that Nigeria can tap into, if it gives young people the opportunity to learn practical leadership skills in the nation building process.

I have no doubts in my mind that this shy, unassuming and very respectful young lady has learnt incredible lessons about the complexities of Nigeria and the depths that we take our fault lines to amongst our elite groups. She would also have learnt consensus building and harvested friendships across regional, religious, gender, even demographic lines that will redound to her benefit in the future.

Yadoma Bukar Mandara is an expression of the future possibilities of Nigeria, being moulded in the social currents of the present. I think Nigeria will hear a lot about this young lady in the future. How proud her father, Alhaji Bukar Mandara would have been, to see his youngest daughter flower so early in life! And by the way, Yadoma has kept a running blog on the National Conference, since the commencement of the National Conference, 2014.