By Ochereome Nnanna
The perceived intention of President Goodluck Jonathan to run for president in 2011 has provided an excellent test for what has been trumpeted as a traditional alliance between the Southern minorities (especially the Ijaw) and Northern Nigeria. Since May 5, 2010 when President Umaru Yar’ Adua died and Jonathan was sworn in, the question arose as to what the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) should do with its zoning policy.

While some Nigerians feel that the emergence of Jonathan from the South/South zone amounts to a “supernatural” zoning that should not be disturbed by his being prevented from contesting the 2011 poll, many Northerners insist that since the South held power under the zoning arrangement for eight years, justice demands that Jonathan should step down for the North to conclude its turn.

I am not comfortable with a situation where the constitutional right of a person to aspire to any elective office is sacrificed on the altar of zoning which is an internal political arrangement in a political party. It looks clumsy, even dirty.

I don’t think the operators of any other democracy in the world will understand the logic of it. We have to ask ourselves what national interest will be served by this desperation on the part of some Northerners for power to remain in their region? After dominating the political landscape through military and civilian dispensations, the nation has made very little progress in any direction in 50 years of independence.

The North itself has remained mired in abject poverty, with many developmental indices far below national average. Only a few privileged individuals in the top echelons of the public service, traditional institutions and the political establishment have “done well” for themselves and their families.

I am of the view that in eight years of the Obasanjo presidency, there was more development in the North than at any other time before 1966 because the governors had more access to funds (derived from the riches of the Niger Delta) to work with.

It is important for our Northern compatriots to realise that there has been a dispensational change from the period when a section of the country held the rest in thrall because they were used by the departing colonial masters to continue the Indirect Rule after independence.

After the civil war, the June 12 saga and the Niger Delta struggle, Nigerians are no longer in the mood to live under sectional domination. This country now belongs to all of us equally.

Any attempt by anybody to return Nigeria to the dark days when a section of the country acted with the absolute impunity of a conqueror will backfire.

I expect Northern leaders to be a little less selfish and desperate to return to Aso Villa and give their support to Jonathan, at least for the simple reason that he comes from a zone of the South that has always supported the North’s political aspirations. In their own bid to chart a separate political direction from their Igbo majority neighbours, Ijaw political leaders, Chiefs Harold Dappa Biriye and Melford Okilo, founded a party that supported the Northern Peoples Congress’ (NPC’s) effort to form the first indigenously led government in the 1950s.

Without the support of the Southern minorities, Biafra would have successfully seceded from Nigeria and the North would have been just another Niger Republic. Also, it was with the support of Rivers and Cross River State in the Second Republic that the North-dominated National Party of Nigeria (NPN) was able to win the 1979 elections.

Ijaw leaders have often talked about their “traditional alliance” with the North. Looking closely at this alliance, one will notice that the only “gain” the minorities have made from it is that they have succeeded in undermining the Igbo in the three-cornered battle of wits among the three majority ethnic sections. In the process, they got many of their sons and daughters given plum jobs over time, without the real developmental dividends that touch on the lives of the common person being addressed.

On the other hand, the North has led in the pillaging of the resources of the Niger Delta without any meaningful attempt to put back anything in terms of infrastructural development. It is a great irony that the two “traditional allies”, who have worked together for power, harbour the most underdeveloped grassroots in the country. This was what led the Niger Delta youth to take up arms and demand for “self determination” and “resource control”.

If the “traditional alliance” were genuine, one would expect, now that for the first time in the history of this nation an Ijaw man is president of Nigeria, the North will reciprocate the support it has received from the Southern minorities by leading the way for the election of Jonathan in 2011. According to dogs, “fall for me, let me fall for you, that is the proper way to play”.

“Scratch my back, let me scratch your”, that is how friendship or alliance endures. But a situation where an ally always expects the other to help him to retain power and when he gets there he only dishes out the crumbs (jobs) to his partner does not seem to me a genuine alliance. It is more like a master-servant relationship.

And I say that in today’s Nigeria, nobody is interested in being a servant to any fellow Nigerian. We have all arrived. We have all earned our place as first class citizens. The “traditional alliance” that in the past produced first, second and third class Nigerians is dead.

If Northern leaders would not support Jonathan to lead this country and contribute his quota to its development because of age-old ethnic and sectional fundamentalism among its hawks, let them sponsor candidates and let the Nigerian electorate choose.