Professor Peter Ekeh, historical insights and Political development in Nigeria (2)

A major grouse of Uthman Dan Fodio and the Fulani leaders of the Jihad was that the Hausa Kings were weak sovereigns who did not effectively and firmly enforce the hegemony of Islamic governance on their domains. Unlike the more liberal standards and practices of the Hausa Kings who subordinated the ruler to the state, the Islamic structures of governance as exemplified by the Sokoto Caliphate perceived the state and government as private property of the rulers. A significant point that Ekeh makes is that there were striking similarities between governance traditions in the pre-Jihad Hausa states and those in existence in indigenous states and empires in Yoruba land, Benin, Oyo and other areas of present-day Middle and Southern Nigeria.

Ekeh distills three principles of governance that separated pre-jihadist Hausa states and the indigenous states and empires of the West African region on the one hand and the post revolutionary Islamic caliphate. The first was the question of the ownership of the state. In his words, “The premier indigenous principle of government that was challenged by the Fulani Revolution was about the ownership of the state. Who owns the state? According to the theory in use in pre-Revolution Hausa land and indigenous Nigerian states, the state predates royalty and other forms of rulers. The state therefore belongs to the political community. In pre-Revolution Hausa land as it was in Oyo, Benin, Nupe and scores of other indigenous political systems, the King was a custodian of the state. It was this principle of government that Uthman Dan Fodio directly challenged. In his own words, again, “the government of a people is the government of its king without question”.

Other principles of governance which distinguished the pre-Islamic revolution in Hausa states as well as other territories in Middle and Southern empires and states of Nigeria were those of the question of the accountability of the state to the people and the status of the individual in the polity. In the indigenous political communities unaffected by the Islamic jihad, the ruler was ultimately accountable to the people and this was exemplified by the tradition in some of these ancient states that the king commit suicide if he lost the confidence and trust of his people. “By contrast, the ruler in Fodio’s theory of government was accountable to God through the intervention and interpretation of some theologians, Sheiks who are learned in God’s ways. Since these theocratic interventions would ultimately lead to Arab authorities, accountability in Fodio’s scheme would invoke an allegiance to foreign powers. This was a principle that Songhai disputed with Morocco”.

On the nature of the relationship of the individual to the state, in the indigenous governance systems, the individual was significantly relatively autonomous of the state. Thus, kith and kin groups existed as intervening factors between the state and the individual. The individual could own land while women’s conduct could not be dictated by the state. In fact, women constituted powerful interest groups that could threaten the position of the rulers. In primordial Hausa land, for instance, the famous Queen Amina ascended to power at the apex of the Zazzau Kingdom and gained her place as a significant figure in Hausa history. Indeed, the Islamic Jihad was partly motivated by the perception of excessive liberalism of the Hausa states in the permissive roles played by women in those societies, a tendency alien to the Islamic tradition which was more restrictive of the participation of women in public life.

Consequently, as a result of the jihad of 1804, there emerged a bifurcation in the governance traditions and practices between the pre-jihad Hausa states as well as the latter Sokoto caliphate and the indigenous governance practices of the other states and empires comprising the rest of Nigeria. The Fulani Revolution led to the dominance in the Hausa states of a form of Islam which allowed “little room for the separation of society from the authority of the state or the separation of state and mosque. A primary tenet of Fodio’s confession of Islam was its construction of total state and society as two entities that cannot and ought not be separated, or differentiated, each from the other, in any shape or form”.

With the arrival of the British in the course of the 19th century, the imperialists ruled various parts of its conquered territories as separate administrative entities despite the amalgamation of 1914. Essentially, the Southern and Northern parts of Nigeria were governed separately in virtually watertight compartments with negative implications for the future evolution of federalism in post-colonial Nigeria.

As Ekeh put it, “The consequence was that Nigerians’ political attitudes were frozen and hidden from the knowledge of their fellow Nigerians for more than half a century. Southerners knew very little of the political situation of the Emirate North; nor did the Fulani and other leaders in Emirate Northern Nigeria know much about the Southern neighbors”.

He continues, “As Kirk Green (1968) has well intimated, the first meeting at the Ibadan conference of 1950 between Southern and Northern leaders was painful because of their ignorance of the political ways of the other regions. But the 1950 Ibadan conference was the first thaw in the frozen politics of colonial Nigeria. As it turned out, the entire decade of the 1950s was devoted to decolonization in which Nigerian leaders for the first time framed the national question and attempted to provide a solution to its mandate”.

The political and cultural differences between the North and the South; a situation complicated by tensions between ethnic majority and minority groups in each region, led the founding fathers in 1954 to opt for federalism as a way to enable the various regions of the country to rule themselves with reasonable degrees of autonomy.

Following the military intervention of 1966, however, the military virtually extinguished Nigerian federalism and replaced it with a heavily centralized structure in consonance with its own unitary organizational configuration. Ekeh notes that “A main price which military rulers paid for waging and winning Nigeria’s civil war against secessionist Biafra was the promise that they would uphold and expand Nigerian federalism. While the war lasted, and in the five years following it, federalism flourished in certain administrative matters, as military chieftains exercised considerable powers in their regions. But there was heavy resentment within the military against the permissiveness that this form of administrative federalism entailed. In 1975, Nigeria’s wartime military ruler, Yakubu Gowon, who tolerated these diversities, was overthrown by a military team led by Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo”.

The post-Gowon military pursued thoroughly anti-federalist policies including the imposition of a uniform local government system, centralized control of land, take over of state universities by the federal government, imposition of a uniform, centralized policing system and the proliferation of mostly unviable states. Furthermore, the Murtala/Obasanjo regime bequeathed to the country the excessively unitary 1979 constitution, which is scarcely different from the extant 1999 Constitution.

While it is well nigh impossible to revert to the regional constitution of the first republic, Professor Ekeh does not see an alternative to the thoroughgoing re-federalization of the current constitution to restore a reasonable degree of institutional autonomy and financial viability to the component parts of the federation. How to walk the tightrope in balancing contending centripetal and centrifugal forces and rejuvenating federal practice in Nigeria informed by the country’s historical heritage but not jeopardizing national cohesion will be a critical challenge of the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration.