2015: Benue State, flagship of political tension

LATEST UPDATE: 2015: Benue State, flagship of political tension

BY ABAH MATTHEW ABAH-ENYI

Nigeria certainly has a date with history in 2015. As a matter of fact, everybody is holding his or her breath. Country home of town dwellers are getting renovated in more comprehensive ways than they ever got since they were built. North, South, Central, East and West, the feel­ing of an emerging danger on the politi­cal horizon has become the beginning of wisdom. As with most typical Nigerian problems, everyone is involved in do­ing something about himself or herself, while nobody feels responsible for doing something about how to avoid it, because no individual feels he or she brought the problem into being. Relocating to one’s country home with family and loved ones is the only visible preparation the 2015 Nigerian election foreboding has unleashed across the nation.

Benue state, the “Food Basket of the Na­tion”; the state of the “two wise tribes”, apol­ogies to veteran journalist, George Ohemu; the state whose citizens toil so much, but har­vest so little, according to facts on the ground, is the Nigerian miniature where the mounting political tension engendered by the impend­ing 2015 elections has found dangerous nur­turing. The state whose sons and daughters, elder-statesmen in Nigeria, have picked up the gauntlets on their country’s behalf when it mattered most, is in the eyes of a gathering storm.

In contradiction of the widely maintained mindset that Nigerian public affairs analysts are best at criticizing as against proffering so­lutions to prevailing national problems, this piece sets out to put the hammer on the head of the nail set squarely on the problem of po­litical injustices that prevail across the nation and the time-bomb it represents.

Late president Musa Yar’adua may have remained unsung on the pages of Nigeria’s present day public records, but not for long. He is bound for reverence in Nigeria’s his­tory books when it gets written, for his dem­onstrated belief in justice as a condition for peace. He earned it through the teeth-gritting implementation of the Niger-Delta Amnesty. The international community, and to a greater extent, the Nigerian political class should in­vest on the late Nigerian head of state the stat­ute of a role model. As history has a way of imposing itself on the people that fail to write it properly or learn from it, the late president’s day of recognition, nationally and internation­ally is just a few historical “days” away.

The absence of justice and fairness any­where near the pages of the Nigerian politi­cal lexicon is the reason why nearly everyone believes the 2015 election year in the coun­try almost tantamount to doomsday. A nation may be blessed with the best manned police force, or army, or even an electoral body, but if its laws and statutes are bereft of justice and fairness, it sits on the tinderbox of injustice-induced doomsday. This is why each time Ni­geria’s political deception merchants flash the card of National Conferencing, the citizens grit their teeth even as they node their heads in consent, hoping that political justice and fairness can emerge from there. That hope has remained a mirage.

So everyone believes the other party, the other neighbor, the other geopolitical zone, or the other religious group will set the nation on fire because of the injustices that are bound to prevail during and after the elections in 2015. There are just too many versions of the injus­tices that prevailed in the Niger-Delta region before late president Yar’adua era in many parts of Nigeria that need correction, urgent correction.

The Benue state example will suffice. Since the creation of the state thirty eight years ago, when the state’s three senatorial zones were carved out by the Babangida administration in such a way that two of the three, all peo­pled by the Tiv-speaking people of the state can elect the governor for the state without recourse to the zone peopled by the Idomas, a slave-master political relationship has pre­vailed between the two otherwise brotherly people. Every election year, the Idoma po­litical class would vow to make their Tiv brothers see reasons with them on the issue of rotating key political offices. But because the nation’s electoral laws are mercilessly tilted against such wishful thinking; and the kind of negotiations that should make the Tivs “risk” the option have not been engaged in, the situation has remained cloudy and risky to political peace in the state. No Idoma man or woman has ever been elected or appointed Governor, Speaker of the state House of As­sembly or Chief Judge of the state since its creation. The National Conference which was to address the fears of many segments of the Nigerian society on election-related injus­tices has not turned out to be anything much different from its precedents. The conference recommended the correction of political in­justices at the local government, regional and national levels through the instrumentality of an electoral law which will make political parties rotate all political offices around the component parts of the geopolitical entity.

The conference’s recommendations can only be implemented through any one of three op­tions: the National Assembly Constitutional Amendment option, the Referendum option and the Presidential Pronouncement option under which the president can make political decisions on issues that the Conference had made recommendations. This means that the monopoly of governance which has afforded geopolitical zones with superior population advantages to continue to expropriate state powers to the exclusion of their neighbors at the federal, state and local government levels will continue into the immediate future in Ni­geria. If Nigeria must have peace in any of its forms, be it political, religious, ethnic or regional, the nation’s leadership must find the political will to right the wrongs that are wait­ing to be unleashed on the minorities by the majorities and supported by the laws of the land.

Here lies the political cauldron that fumes in Benue state and across many other states in Nigeria. It also forms one of the causative rea­sons of Nigeria’s present estrangement from peaceful National life.

At the last count, the array of governorship aspirants who had picked the ruling party’s forms for the race to Government House Makurdi clearly indicated that the Idoma people’s cries for a chance to rule the state for the first time in its 38 years of existence had yet to make any impact on their Tiv neigh­bors. There are no indications that the kind of democratic negotiations that can lead to a peaceful agreement on the issue is on the table amongst the political leadership in the state. While the Idomas, with their one sena­torial zone seem to believe that God will, this time around, work His usual wonders on the minds of their Tiv neighbor’s political leader­ship to offer them the governorship seat on a platter of Gold, the Tivs are on record to have insisted that the Idoma people’s political di­lemma in Benue state is a beautiful version of cruel justice. They courageously look who ever cares to listen in the eyes and argue that the Idomas, either by Devine intervention or superior brainwork, have always cornered al­most all federal positions zoned to the state into their bottomless pockets, and that they have had to look helpless before their people on such issues as federal government employ­ment opportunities and federally allocated development projects. Consequently, they in­sist, what they lose to Abuja power-play, they must recover in Makurdi.

Perhaps other forms of the hands of God exist across Nigeria, not just in the form of aspirants but in many other forms of risk-control, unity enhancing opportunities too invisible for the ordinary eye. To all who love Nigeria in the shape she is, everything boils down to the political will-power to put laws and statutes that will ensure justice for all in place across Nigeria. Sounds so simple yet proved to be so impossible.

• Abah-Enyi is Editor-in-Chief of Wind- Sound Africa, windsoundafrica@gmail. com. Tel +2348039656096.

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