By Olu Fasan

AS I was about to write this week’s column, the news came via Twitter that the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, had been dethroned. He was deposed on March 9, just over a month after he warned that: “If the North does not change, the North will destroy itself.” Sanusi’s dethronement is a subject for another day, but it chimes with the theme of this piece, namely: that the North has long been destroying itself and that the self-destruction has its root in a feudalistic system that makes social and economic progress impossible.

Truth is: if Northern Nigeria were a country, it would be classified as a failed state. Over 80 per cent of Nigeria’s poor live in the North. While the South is becoming more prosperous, the North is stuck in utter misery, experiencing, as the World Bank puts it, “a significant worsening in poverty and living standards”. For instance, the rate of severe poverty in Edo State is only 0.1 per cent of the population and 0.4 per cent of that of Imo State. But, according to the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, OPHI, the figures for Jigawa and Sokoto states are 68.5 per cent and 67 per cent, respectively.

But how did the North become trapped in such dire straits? Well, why do states fail? They fail because of wrong values, norms and institutions. And it’s the North’s warped cultural and doctrinal systems that account for its acute backwardness. Truth be told, the seeds of the North’s decline are embedded in its national psyche, in its feudalism and twisted religious beliefs.

Feudalism? Yes. While the South tends towards progressivism, the North is extremely conservative. Progressivism is based on the idea of human progress, of improving the human condition. But conservatism promotes entrenched privilege, feudalism and a static social order. Going back to the beginning of self-government in Nigeria, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe pursued progressive policies to liberate the minds of their people and enhance their social progress, but in the North, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello stoutly defended a static social order, where people’s social backgrounds were deemed to be destined by God and thus should determine their place in life. Social mobility was not the policy goal that it was in Western and Eastern Nigeria.

Progressive Northern politicians like Malam Aminu Kano opposed the feudalist system, but they were fought viciously and relentlessly by the conservative forces. Chief Awolowo was also a strong critic of feudalism in the North; he hated the fact that Northern leaders kept their people under bondage by refusing to educate them. He knew that education was the best escape route from illiteracy, ignorance and poverty, and he sowed the seed of learning in Western Nigeria, which is why the South West is as enlightened and developed as it is today. It is interesting that the Middle Belt, part of today’s North Central, where leaders like Joseph Tarka aligned with Awolowo and promoted progressive politics, is more developed than the strongly conservative core North where feudalism was deeply entrenched.

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The clarion call of the deposed Emir Sanusi was that the North should educate its children, warning that “the country is moving on” and that the quota system which the North feeds off, at the expense of the South, “must have a sunset clause”. But Sanusi was a lone voice in the wilderness. Educating peasants is incompatible with feudalism. Under feudalism, only children of feudal lords are educated; children of serfs are not. Who will be the “hewers of wood and drawers of waters” and, indeed, who will be the thugs and hoodlums in do-or-die political battles, if children of plebs are educated?

Someone said recently that the Almajiri children have become “ready-made raw materials for criminal activities”. But isn’t that what their sponsors want, an indoctrinated underclass that can be used to serve the interests of the feudal lords? Last year’s governorship election in Kano State was a fight-to-the-finish between former governor Rabiu Kwankwaso and the current governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, each with his cult-followers, the “Kwankwasiyya” and the “Gandujiyya”, who would kill and die for their masters. In 2011, over 800 people died in post-election violence in the North after the presidential poll. It’s easy to incite mass violence in the North because there are ready-made raw materials for such violence, thanks to the leaders’ self-interested, feudalistic preference for keeping their people uneducated and unenlightened! It’s one way the North is destroying itself!

But you also have twisted religious beliefs, which are by-products of feudalism, because religious indoctrination is a tool of feudal lords. One consequence of that is proneness to violence. Islam is a peaceful religion, but those causing havoc in the name of that religion believe that “if you kill, you will have a place in heaven”. For instance, Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is evil”, is killing in the name of religion. But who are mainly their victims, whose homes, villages, etc., are they mostly destroying? It’s Northerners’, of course. So, through perverse religious beliefs the North is destroying itself!

Another consequence of misguided religiosity is the practice of marrying many wives and having many children. The Quran says a Muslim can marry up to four wives if he can look after them. But Northerners have taken that as a licence to marry many wives and produce many children who, as former Emir Sanusi candidly said, “are left on the streets to beg for what to eat”! Recently, a Northern member of the House of Representatives paraded his four wives on the floor of the House and boasted that he had 19 children “and still counting”.

With the North’s population explosion, what a powerful political statement that the North is truly destroying itself!

Sanusi may have lost out for speaking out, but his warnings remain pertinent. The North faces existential decline. But unless it ends its feudalism, it will utterly destroy itself.

NOTE: My last week’s piece titled: “Why the West is treating Nigeria like a pariah state”,  quoted statistics in support of why it is  difficult to get a Schengen visa in Nigeria. The data was sourced from Schengen Visa Information Office website: https://statistics.schengenvisainfo.com/. 

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