Matters arising, Resource Control: The Greed Factor

By 

Mohammed Haruna

I see that my piece on "Resource Control: The Greed Factor" on the Comet Opinion pages  two weeks ago has provoked the anger of Mideno Bayagbon who writes for the Vanguard. Writing in the April 18 edition of the paper, Bayagbon who I suspect is from the oil producing Delta region, gave me the verbal lashing of my life. Not since Reuben Abati, The Guardian wordsmith, said I am a rude person and an intellectual of the Jihad for defending Sharia, have I been so tongue-lashed.

"Reading that crafty piece by Alhaji Mohammed Haruna, one of the few Northern elite who has had something like a respectable career to his name", Bayagbon said of my article, "I was greatly saddened that one of those I used to have some measure of respect for in journalism could be so trite, so insincere, so manipulative and so greedy."

My article, he further argued, showed I was merely trying to please some core Northern elite whose stock-in-trade is to loot the treasury, buy flashy cars, build mansions in Abuja, Kaduna, or Kano and export the bulk of their loot abroad. Bayagbon felt so strongly about my article that he captioned his rejoinder, "Mohammed Haruna and greedy Northerners."

In spite of their harshness, however, you get the feel of the depth of Bayagbon’s animosity against the so-called core Northern elite, not in those words but in an earlier paragraph. He says in that paragraph that when Chinua Achebe wrote once-upon-a-time, that the problem with Nigeria was that of its leadership, the famous novelist was merely being nice. Achebe, Bayagbon says, "might well have written that the problem with Nigeria is the problem of the Northern elite: Indolent, greedy and parasitic."

What did I say to provoke such strong diatribe against myself and fellow Northerners? For those who may have missed my piece, all I said was that the primary motivation for both sides to the debate for control over oil is greed rather than the well-being of majority of poor Nigerians. Bayagbon is angry that I should call those demanding for resource control greedy. With people from the oil-rich Delta region suffering from all these years of terrible neglect when they see oil wealth being used to develop Lagos, Abuja and elsewhere, it is understandable that any Delta indigene will be angry at being called greedy for demanding full control of what is underneath his soil.

Such anger, however, is not an excuse for Bayagbon’s emotional outburst.

To return to our angry friend Bayagbon: obviously, he holds a view which is widely shared among Southerners — their elites and commoners alike — that Northerners are simply spongers on the national economy. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this view. One such prominent exception was the late Ken Saro-Wiwa.

In 1990, Ken told the Daily Times in an interview that, as far as he was concerned, the Yoruba, and not the much-maligned Hausa-Fulani, have gained most from Nigeria’s petrodollars. Predictably many Yoruba came down on him like tons of bricks. One respondent called Ken a coward and a disappointment and said he would stop in the Sunday Times. Another, who was rather personal, said Ken was merely compensating for his short stature by developing a huge ego. Another, who was even more personal, reminded Ken that the Ogonis were cannibals, once-upon-a-time! And so on and so forth.

Far from being cowed by these reactions, Ken chose to re-affirm his position in his Sunday Times column on August 12, 1990. Under the title "Yorubaphobia", he insisted that "Yes, indeed, the Yoruba have been the main beneficiaries of the petrodollars of the Niger-Delta and environs. The loss of the Ogoni, Ijaw, Urhobo, Isoko, Ekpeye, Ogba, Ikwerre, Ibioro and Igbo has been the profit of the Yoruba."

In his imitable plain speaking and simple diction, he sought to dismiss all accusations that he was a Yorubaphobe for merely stating that the Yoruba have benefited most from Nigeria’s oil. He said he admired the Yoruba for their contribution to Nigeria just as he was critical of them for their negative qualities.

"The problem ..." he argued, "is not whether pipelines are going from Ogoni to Akure, Ibadan and Lagos. They do. Metaphorically, if not in reality. Nor is it whether the Yoruba have got as much or more than the Hausa-Fulani. It is whether... the Yoruba can take all of us along the path of Nigeria that is fair to all ethnic groups, that Nigeria envisioned by the great African visionary and intellectual, Awolowo. For to who much is given, much is expected".

Ken, as I said, was an exception among Southerners. Most Southern writers tend to agree with Bayagbon that Northerners are mostly, if not solely, to blame for the ills of this country. For example, writing in The Comet of February 1, Sina Odugbemi, one of its foremost columnists, said "Many, if not most of the radical proposals for restructuring the federation are a reaction to domination by the core North. People have been provoked and badly scared".

However, widespread as Bayagbon’s and Odugbemi’s views are in the South, they, as well as Ken, are wrong. Dead wrong. The so-called core North or even the wider North is no more responsible for the ills of this country than any other section or tribe. The problem with the ethnic perspective to the country’s problem is that it distorts, or even ignores, the true class nature of the marginalisation of the vast majority of Nigerians whose lives have never been touched by oil money. In this regards, the most accurate into the issue was by one Sola Oke in reaction to Ken’s "Yorubaphobia". Oke said among other things that "The vast majority of Hausa-Fulani, the Igbo, the Yoruba, the Birom, the Efik, the Urhobo, name it, Sir Kay, are the true majority. It is you and I and the rest of the privileged class that are minority by virtue of cornering the bulk of the national wealth and prospects."

This "pampered" minority, Oke emphasised, existed in all ethnic groups and other Nigerians were virtually their prisoners. It was true, he said, that the Yoruba controlled the higher percentage of the privileged class than the Ogoni and the Ijaw, and presumably the other ethnic group. Even then, he argued, reversing the percentages of the ethnic members of this class is not the solution to Nigeria’s problems.

The real war, writers like Bayagbon and Odugbemi must accept, is, as Oke concluded, not between the Yoruba, and the Hausa-Fulani and the Igbo and the other ethnic minorities, North or South. The real war is between the real majority impoverished Nigerians and "the selfish and insensitive minority" to use Oke’s word. This class paradoxically includes columnists like Bayagbon, Odugbemi and myself. It is the greed of this class that I talked about when I wrote the piece that enraged Bayagbon so much, he apparently believed the best way to respond was to call me and all other Northerners every nasty name he could dredge up from his dictionary.

Mohammed Haruna was a former managing director of the New Nigerian newspaper and Press Secretary to a military dictator.