Confusing the public spirit: A critique of "The Nigerian Condition" by Dr. Mahmud Tukur

By

Femi Awoniyi

Speyer, Germany

The temptation to ignore the recent provocative opinions of some prominent Fulani intellectuals is great, but it would be dangerous to give in to it. It is important that we do not concede to them the power to condition the public spirit at will.

Dr Mahmud Tukur's article "The Nigerian Condition" makes interesting reading, if one overlooks, of course, its anti-Yoruba diatribes, sermons on Utopian leadership and the boring rehash of platitudinal prescriptions to the Nigerian ailment.

He admits that things are bad in Nigeria and that this situation did not begin with Olusegun Obasanjo's coming into power. It has become fashionable amongst northern politicians and intellectuals to lay the blame for all the country's ills on the president and to date their history to his assumption of office in 1998.

Dr Tukur, a former university teacher and one-time federal minister, concedes that leadership has been bad "particularly over the last 15 years or so" and he shares the popular sentiment (at least in the South), that the problem with the country is a fundamental one.

The Fulani intellectual agrees that the Nigerian state or what is left of it "has ground to a halt due to over-centralisation of authority and power" and that "The institutions of the polity ............ are subjected to a greater degree to the immobilism and suffocation of over centralisation (sic)".

Yet throughout the 9,319-word article he did not once make a reference to the clamour, in southern Nigeria, for a constitutional conference for the purpose of decentralising the Nigerian state. One would have reasonably expected this burning issue to at least have been mentioned.

Because the Nigerian newspaper market is dominated by southern publishers, Mahmud Tukur advocates an "audio" solution to the problem of media marginalisation of the North, as if radio has not always been the chief mode of mass communication in the region for more than 50 years. He deliberately fails to acknowledge that press usage in Nigeria is lopsided because of regional differences in literacy rates. And one is tempted to ask him: How much social progress can you achieve in a society where mass media is mainly "audio"?

And when Dr Tukur condemns the southern press for being "sectional", he conveniently forgets that these newspapers are simply private enterprises, established by individuals not to advance a specific viewpoint but to do business, and that its contents are determined by the 'anonymous mechanisms' of the media - the public mood, technology, competitive pressure, economic factors etc. The impression created by Northern intellectuals and politicians, that the content and messages of the "Lagos press" are collectively programmed, is unfounded, and a form of moral blackmail.

One is led to conclude that the northern power establishment fears its strangle-hold on popular opinion in the North is being eroded by southern newspapers hence, its vociferous campaign to discredit the whole press as "ethnic, parochial, myopic, largely uneducated, ignorant of the country, biased,....."etc.

Mahmud Tukur mourns the demise of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) because of its "free accessible basic health services which provide common drugs" at the grassroots' level, among others. It would be interesting to know why the intellectual mourns an institution like the PTF, an ad-hoc body which is not part of the public administration system in the country? What magic did the organisation perform that state governments, state health ministries, state health management boards, local health authorities etc. cannot combine to emulate?

On education in the North, Dr Tukur writes: "Why should a child in Kano, Sokoto or Yobe deny his humanity and his whole cultural background if he is to get 'modern scientific education'". Some paragraphs later he continues "There is no attempt to teach youngsters about wind direction, temperature patterns, types of rainfall, the equinox, the contents of a bracket, how to prove theorems and how to factorize. Parsing, indirect speech, split infinitive, onomatopoeia, simile, alliteration have never been heard of."

Since Dr Tukur started his schooling in Nigeria, it would be interesting to know if he had been asked to "deny his humanity". In what way are people 'denying their humanity' to get education in Nigeria? Instead of supporting the call for an "education emergency" in the North, knowing full well that the current regional lopsided literacy rates in the country are a source of weakness of the polity, he tries to create doubts about education, derisively labelling it 'modern scientific education' and shortly afterwards criticises the education system for not imparting scientific knowledge. One contradiction after another!

There is no fundamental conflict between providing education and training to young people and Islam. Recently, Saudi Arabia awarded contracts for the construction and administration of 3,000 new schools to a consortium of American companies (see The Economist, June 9th - 15th 2001, page 76).

Muslim engineers and technicians in Malaysia and Indonesia build computers for export to the West. Under Dr Mohammed Mahathir, Malaysia has become a show case of a modern land that is actively participating in the international economy but which has not jettisoned its Muslim character. Women who serve at McDonald's or assemble computer motherboards in factories proudly do so in their traditional Muslim garb.

The recent fashionable anti-'western' rhetoric of northern intellectuals would convey the impression that western influence is sweeping our cultural space and that you need a new ideology to safeguard the indigenous identity. They also argue as if Arab influences were not foreign.

As for an exemplary model for our development, Mahmud Tukur advocates Pakistan. Yes, PAKISTAN! But drugs, lawlessness (there are parts of the country where the influence of the state is totally absent and 'tribesmen' even administer criminal justice, including punishment by death), economic stagnation (all key economic indicators, including Foreign Direct Investment have been deteriorating for the past three years), corruption (as of writing this article on 12 June a delegation of the Asian Development Bank was visiting Islamabad to probe a large-scale theft of foreign loan in the country's central bank) and the repression of popular agitation for the restoration of democracy are the Pakistani reality of today. A chaotic reality.

That is the Pakistan we should emulate, says Dr Tukur.

And he writes about the middle class as if it were the outcome of the gathering of like minds and not that of a process of the social economy.

From the foregoing, it is clear that Mahmud Tukur and his fellow Fulani intellectuals and politicians are not ready to participate in any honest debate to find a solution to the country's woes, but are out to make dialogue impossible.

When we mention Europe, we are railed against for exhibiting a 'slave mentality'. But Ali Mazrui is allowed to use the examples of Canada and the history of alcohol legislation in the United States to buttress his support for the Sharia in Nigeria. And Maitama Bello can cite the example of American states who have the death penalty and those who don't to justify Islamic legal code in Nigeria. But they deny others the right to use the fact of 'state troopers' and 'city police' in the same country to support their call for state police in Nigeria.

It is said that the media serves to reveal the rival intrigues of the contending powers of a polity so that the public at large may examine them. The 'informal compulsion' of the better argument is expected to win the heart of the public and condition its spirit in the end.

The Gobbelian strategy of Mahmud Tukur, Bala Usman and others, of willfully manipulating uncontroversial and undisputed facts of history, and of employing inequitable logic of discourse are meant to scare away alternative views from the public space. A tactic to create an atmosphere of violent moral confusion, a possible precursor, if care is not taken, to physical violence in Nigeria. 

It is hard to disagree with Vanguard's Mideno Mayagbon that the major problem of northern Nigeria and Nigeria is the northern elite. It is a class whose power seems to be built on keeping their people in the dark and hindering our collective social progress.