TheCable

When we celebrated the 24th anniversary of June 12 nearly two weeks ago, I was among those Nigerians who might have left deeply wondering how Nigerians graduated from a people who were willing to vote for you without caring what your religion or that of your running mate is, to a people that are sharply divided and their voting patterns only reflecting their mainly religious and ethnic sentiments over the last four national elections.

When then Presidential Candidate in the 2011 Elections, Muhammadu Buhari and his defunct Congress for Progressive Change party were said to have scored only 500 votes or so in the whole of Bayelsa State and only about 8000 votes in the whole of Enugu State, I was left not only shocked with the amount of unacceptability or possibly electoral irregularities that could have produced such results, but also with the amount of religious and ethnic factors that allowed such to thrive. In the 2015 elections, Goodluck Jonathan scored about 200,000 votes in Kano State, a bulk of which came from Christian dominated areas mostly settled by people from the South. Today, we ask where are those Nigerians that helped MKO Abiola, a man from Ogun State to defeat his rival Bashir Tofa not only in Kano, his home state, but also reportedly in units that constitute his backyard?

There is no doubt that over the last 24 years, Nigeria’s political space has been negatively transformed. The seeds of this somewhat contemporary transformation were probably sowed in the 2003 elections when some people employed all sort of electoral frauds tailored along strong and devastating religious sentiments, ethnic campaigns and sectional divisions to remain in power. The rest, they say is now history.

Though ethnic, religious and divisive sentiments has perennially been with us since independence, but their significance and impact on national life has varied from time to time and from dispensation to dispensation as we may compare between 1993 and may be 2015 for example. Today, we are again witnessing a period when national unity is being threatened by violence, hate speech, politics, quit notices and secession. Many believe that our country have never been this divided since after the Civil War or may be even before or during it.

The Federal Government under the initiative of the Acting President Professor Yemi Osinbajo have conducted and are still conducting series of consultative meetings with various groups of leaders and people of societal influence across the country to make sure that the situation is tamed and controlled. The presidency has met separately with leaders of thought from the North and the South East, traditional and religious leaders from the same regions as well as all 36 state governors. This is no doubt a big positive step to which even the opposition Peoples Democratic Party have commended.

In continuation of such consultations last Thursday, the Acting President deemed it fit to meet with Nigerian media publishers, editors and a handful of veteran journalists and writers which I was privileged to be invited. In that meeting, few attendees representing the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria, Nigerian Guild of Editors, Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, veteran journalists and two others were given the opportunity to speak before the Acting President was given the stage to lecture us on what I see as yet the best and most impressive speech I listened to this year. It was so not because, I didn’t had some few reservations about what the Acting President had said, but because the speech was so inspiring and wise that I wished every single Nigerian was listening to it at that particular time. Though I didn’t physically attended any of the previous consultative meetings, but I’ve noticed that unlike in them, Osinbajo spoke freely rather than read from a prepared written speech, except in few cases where he needed to glimpse at his tablet when reeling out some facts and statistical figures to support some of his arguments. Even then, he gave so many statistics without making any reference to that tablet.

The Acting President emphasized on four things that currently constitutes a threat to national unity; prejudice, politics, misinformation and carelessness, all of which he thinks the media have a role to play in neutralizing or promoting. Nigerians, Osinbajo had said, have built up and subsequently consumed by a series of negative thoughts over a long period of time and they only see and understand events base on such established negativities. He said some strictly but wrongly believed that the series of killings executed by Fulani herdsmen were parts of efforts to Islamise Nigeria despite overwhelming evidence on the ground that proves otherwise. The Fulani herdsmen killings is more an economic crisis that centres on struggling to use resources, than it is religious. How and what relationship does it have with Islam or Christianity? Prejudice.

Osinbajo said that, within last week or so, he woke up around 6:00am in the morning and saw a text message on his phone sent by a renowned Christian leader who said to him that one day he will account for allowing Muslims to dominate and take over the government of Nigeria. He said, he wondered what informed that sort of message while statistics show that there are two more Christians than Muslims in Buhari’s cabinet. He cited an example of a time when a Northern Senator visited President Buhari in his presence and complained bitterly on marginalization of his people. He however left with the embarrassing information that North West, his zone were leading in the number of heads of government parastatals with 47, followed by South West, South South, South East, North East and then North Central. Why didn’t this senator do his homework before complaining? Misinformation.

Some Igbo leaders had in the recent past complained to Osinbajo how there is no single person of their kinsmen among the service chiefs. He systematically told reminded them that there was a time not long ago, when Nigeria had two Igbo men among the service chiefs, with other zones not having any. Did they bother to ask why were they favoured at the expense of others or do you want justice only for yourself? Politics.

Osinbajo blamed the killing of some Biafran protesters on the dilapidated law and order structure of the Nigerian State which had degraded over time. For instance, from the killing of Chief Bola Ige in 2001, Harry Marshal in 2003 and so many high profile murders, how many culprits were brought to justice? Will those killers ever be uncovered? Extra-judicial killings by Nigerian security men and law enforcement agencies have never been bias, everyone, not only Igbos has been victims at different times and unless the system is adequately fixed, the problem is bound to continue. Do Nigerian security men kill base on tribe or do they just do that to the ordinary masses extra-judicially? Carelessness.

At the end, what the Acting President demanded from the media were simple; stop giving publicity to divisive people who are ignorant or are just mischievous. Secondly, the media must appear more informed than the ordinary citizens and must as a result help in tackling the misinformation about how things happen and why. He advised that, despite the universal convention of right to self-determination, but Nigeria is better off as one country. If Nigeria disintegrates into smaller countries that can be run over at will by powerful ones, he said, every region will be disadvantaged in different proportions. He therefore said our strengths lies in our diversities, number and size. He gave the example of Lagos State’s economy being six times bigger than that of Rwanda despite all the so-called giant strides recorded by Paul Kagame over the years. He emphasized that the country needs not disintegrate into smaller parts for people to have the opportunity of holding public office and if it is his face or that of President Buhari you dislike that you want secession, then know that, their days in office are numbered but Nigeria can live forever.

Now, tell me you are not impressed by Osinbajo’s words even though I only reproduced a brief summary? However, the question is, to what extent will the Acting President’s intellectual appeal solve the problem at hand? We understand that he had expressed his resolve in previous meetings to use the full force of the law if needs be. But I think what he should be thinking is what is the genesis of this problem despite been historical, escalating only when they came to office?

One of the major reasons I am writing this article is not only to share with fellow Nigerians what transpired in that meeting, but also to send back a message to the presidency which time and other obvious factors didn’t permit me to do so at the meeting. The message is that, no matter how it may try to absolve itself from blame, the Buhari-Osinbajo presidency must partly accept responsibility for the divisive situation we find ourselves today. The presidency was quite aware from the 2015 elections, of how divided Nigerians were socially, religiously, politically and regionally. What they should’ve done, was to make intensive and extensive deliberate and conspicuous moves in the first few days of their presidency to mend fences and unite the nation before governing it. Alas, they didn’t do that, at least not in an effective way, and by the time they wanted to govern, the Niger Delta Avengers had already plunged the nation into an avoidable recession.

It is commendable that the presidency later made efforts especially in the South-South and South-East to bring everyone to the table, but the truth is, they need to do better. It takes more than one or two meetings to achieve consensus and unity; these kinds of meetings must be continuous and must be extended to include people that are crucial to unity even if they are perceived to be enemies of government. There was a reason why Late ‘Yar’adua allowed militants into the Villa and treated them like Kings. Jonathan may have used money and patronage to buy peace, but APC must take lasting measures to solve these problems. They must also stop turning what looks like a blind eye to calls for restructuring the country.

At the end of the meeting, the Acting President took it upon himself to meet everyone on his seat, shook his hands and have a word or two with him. Such was his humility, simplicity and brand of politics. He is an intellectual leader per excellence. I strongly wanted Tinubu to become Vice President, but now I am satisfied of Osinbajo’s technical and political capabilities. If there was anything positive that religious sentiments like the Muslim-Muslim ticket brouhaha had produced, it is Osinbajo.

Usually, people in authority will give you their hands to shake, but Osinbajo is the type that will actually shake your hands. Osinbajo shook my hands firmly and when it occurred to him that I appeared star-struck, he while asking some questions, brought himself much closer to me to hear me better, make me feel comfortable or both; perhaps he had noticed I told myself, that I was obviously and by far, the youngest person in the meeting who might have undeservedly and accidentally became a participant.

Twitter: @AmirAbdulazeez