“There is no doubting the fact that the era of small things and small people has finally dawned upon us”–   John Buchan

Most discussions of the “National Question” invariably and instinctively boil down to one thing only – the “Northern Question”. This was particularly evident in the deliberations of the 2014 National Conference and most utterances around the restructuring debate that ensued ever since. The North looms large in the subconscious of the commentators like the spectre of a bogeyman from their worst nightmare, that is both threatening and frightening even in its seemingly prostrate and inert state, over-burdened by the apparitions of poverty, insecurity, retardation and imagined hopelessness.

With such phantasmagoric images appearing constantly before them, the commentators take to the public spaces with all sorts of reports about the “backwardness” of the North, and its debilitating impact on the “development” of the rest of the country, sitting on their progress like an incubus weighing heavily on their fortunes and hasty aspirations to achieve “modernity” whatever that means.

The debate on whether to introduce the Islamic Sharia system in the South-Western part of Nigeria or not, has apparently been turned into a North-South contest with warnings being shot towards the Northern region not to “export” its problems to the former. The purported closure of schools in four states in the region for the duration of the Ramadan Fast was quickly transformed into a “Northern” issue versus the rest of the country. Likewise, even before the starting bell is sounded, the contests for offices in 2027 have been turned into an affair of Northern determinism whose outcomes are not collective national affairs anymore, but contests between the North and the rest of the country. To that effect, statements of personal natures on power and politics in Nigeria recently attributed to the former Governor of Kaduna State and the former Special Advisor to the Vice-President respectively, have been taken out of their contexts and rendered into the contestations for power between the North and other regions.

Cartographic depiction of Northern Nigeria in some regional media outfits no longer represent it having the 19 states structure. Instead, the North is represented as a truncated spatial entity comprising only of the extreme North-Eastern and North-Western states, without its central states which have been excised with malicious arbitrariness from the region’s map. This is, of course, intended to create a mental and visual “reality” around the idea of the “Middle Belt” as a distinct and separate area from the North. The appointment of individuals, particularly of a certain linguistic affiliation from Kogi and Kwara states into key federal positions, is assessed from the perspectives of their belonging ethnically, spiritually and culturally to another region and not to the North, thus creating a mental dichotomy between the two regions in the minds of these people, in order to put them in a situation of making preferences when a decisive moment in the final determination of the “National Question” is inevitably arrived at. When one of such eminent appointees dared to remark that he was a “Northerner”, his remarks met with the ire of an habitual Northern-basher and inveterate columnist, who excoriated him for such an affrontry!

Several other instances can be adduced to demonstrate the fixation on the North in the determination and discussion of the structure and workability of the federal system in Nigeria, especially within the context of the so-called “National Question” discourse. Thus, the commentators have made it a pastime and indeed a stock-in-trade to blame the North for every setback that they experience even in their domestic affairs, thereby making the ever present genii in the kettle to appear at the slightest rub given to that magical object. Not contented with such a mindset, it has become habitual in some quarters to attribute their conditions to the preponderant “advantages” that the North has been allegedly enjoying to the detriment of other sections of the country, thereby contributing to their supposed marginalisation.

The word “marginalisation” is an oft-used term to describe all sorts of conditions in Nigeria, often to denote perceived grievances or cultivated imbalances in the regional antagonisms and rivalries that have sadly bedeviled this country. Amorphous organisations representing certain regional outlooks formed out of discontent and agitation against alleged marginalisation, frequently interject their views on national issues from the position of alienation of the “North” and the assertion of enclave prerogatives of dubious and questionable intent. The term marginalisation has also become the central idea or theme in the discussion of the “National Question”, which is nothing but a euphemism for political engineering and restructuring of the country along some preplanned state exercises designed to give preponderance of advantage to some sections over the others.

As far as any rational discussion of the matter is concerned, it has been difficult to establish an empirical basis for such claims other than the generalised use of the term to convey a feeling of disparity and dissatisfaction by one group or a part of the country against another. This essay is in fact an attempt to apply this concept as far as the North of Nigeria is concerned in terms of its current status and future prospects as compared to the rest of the country. Only in an era of small things and small people, will there be a trend that ignores the reality of the collective danger that faces a nation, and focuses singularly on driving enclave prerogatives instead.