A NORTH WITHOUT PEOPLE

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
J.K Gailbraith, 1969.

The Governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima says the north of Nigeria will be inhabitable in five years if the current security situation is not addressed. Actually, the details of his remarks dealt more with the dangers he sees in the creeping alienation which is breeding lawlessness, crime and impunity particularly among young people. The rich and the privileged are no longer safe, and young, unemployed (and unemployable) persons now grab whatever they can, and they target the wealthy and the powerful with pronounced venom. This, the Governor says, is the result of poverty. He says if in five years time, the leaders and the wealthy and the privileged in the north do not address poverty and insecurity decisively, nobody will stay or live in northern Nigeria, because it will be profoundly unsafe to do so.

It is instructive that the Borno State Governor who sees the destructive power of violence crime and poverty daily, made these remarks when some members of the National Working Committee (NWC) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) visited him to sympathize over the virtual siege under which citizens of the State live. If his visitors whose party runs three-quarters of the nation had flown to Maiduguri and then drove to the Government House, they would have observed the tragic consequences of the prolonged damage and garrison existence under which citizens of Maiduguri live. Between Boko Haram insurgents who live and operate almost at will from within its communities, and security forces who act as if the entire population is the enemy, the once thriving economy of Maiduguri has shrunk beyond recognition. Poverty will obviously highten. Bitterness will feed the insurgency. It will fight with sustained vigour, hoping that the strong-arm tactics of the state will tilt the balance of public sentiment in its favour.

If the PDP bigwigs had driven to Borno State capital from a neighbouring State, they would have seen even more damage to the economy and the social system which is making people even more desperate. If they started from, say, Kaduna, they would have left a city which lives with fear and uncertainty. Its many checkpoints have not stopped frequent attacks, and they are becoming more daring and spectacular. If they drove through Kano, they would have seen evidence of the panic and pain under which the BUK community lives, the long faces of parents, colleagues and friends who lost loved ones recently, and many more checkpoints. They would have seen burnt-out and demolished police stations, and maybe even a few demolished residences where security forces say they encountered Boko Haram insurgents. If they drove through Bauchi and Gombe, they would have seen fear and suspicion on every face, and alert security men and women who are anxious to know who is the enemy and who is the friend. They would see that banks now close up around 2 or 3pm; markets are haphazard, people cannot park in church premises when they go to worship; all police and military facilities are heavily barricaded, and all motorcycles have to be pushed past checkpoints.

If they drove up through Kano to Yobe, they would have left hundreds of families from the south in the process of relocating, or fiercely resisting the pressure to move, from families down south. In Yobe State, they may have stopped to offer sympathies to the people of Potiskum who were recentlyvictims of a massacre, and who rose up in protest against what they alleged was security connivance or indifference. They would have heard, if they saw the Governor there, that the town was promptly placed under curfew as a result of the protests. If they visited the Governor, they would have heard similar lamentations regarding the state of insecurity and its linkages with poverty as they heard from Governor Shettima.

There are serious issues, however regarding the lamentations of governors over poverty and insecurity arising from Boko Haram activities in the north. To single out poverty and blame the current state of insecurity on it is fallacious and dangerous. Poverty has predated Boko Haram, and is quite likely to survive it. To create the impression that you will solve the threat of Boko Haram by throwing money at it is shortsighted and self-serving. Certainly, the levels of poverty, boosted both by large-scale corruption, inept and insensitive governments and massive demographic changes taking place in the north, are unacceptable. If crushing poverty and hopelessness arising from total lack of opportunities were the sole fuel of Boko Haram, half of all young Muslim northerners will be Boko Haram insurgents; or they would have created their own versions of the insurgency. Addressing poverty is likely to limit the appeal, attraction and sympathy for Boko Haram among the young, but it is wrong to think policies which should routinely and specifically improve infrastructure, quality of education and reduce corruption should be pursued only as a strategy to fight a religious insurgency which appears well-funded to continue to threaten the Nigerian State.

The Governors in the north which Governor Shettima says will lose its people in five years time are responsible for much of what the north is today. Many of them say they inherited massive problems, and they have no resources to solve them. May be so, but this is not an excuse the people in the north will accept. Governments in the north mean a lot to the vast majority of the people. The failure of governments to build and equip schools and recruit teachers literally means that millions of children will not receive any education or acquire skills. Many parents who cannot send their children to modern schools send them to almajirci schools. This way, they are at least assured that they may grow up as good, even if poor Muslims. Rural roads transform economies. Rural health centers transform quality of lives in villages. Investment in infrastructure creates jobs. All these are the businesses of governments. When they do not do them, citizens who are already crippled by poverty are unlikely to do or provide them.

Northern leaders also need to be careful about the manner they rise to like Boko Haram insurgency with the poverty they should fight. They are not likely to get much sympathy and the huge amounts they think they will get from a national leadership and a people which blame them for creating or sustaining the conditions for the emergence of the current levels of poverty in the first place. Secondly, they create the false impression that Boko Haram’s mission is all about bread and butter. This insurgency speaks a different language, and it is important that it is engaged in the language it speaks. It raises fundamental questions at the ideological and political level, and northern governors know only too well that it is at this level that an affective engagement will occur.

But the Governor of Borno State is also wrong in his assumption that the north will have no people in five years. It will certainly lose many of its affluent citizens, who will move to safer areas with their wealth and families. But its 90 million citizens will stay put, quite possibly in worse conditions, if the governors do not do something dramatic and genuine to arrest the decline engendered by poverty and violence. Northerners also need to read between the lines: their governors and other leaders are likely to jump ship in five years time, if the environment, for which they have full responsibility, does not improve. There will be people in the north by 2017, but they are likely to be more desperate and more threatened, unless the federal and especially northern governments move from lamentations to action.