To
understand why there seems to be a Northern domination of the Nigerian
polity (as against Hausa or Fulani domination which is a myth), one has
to read and understand the principle of unity found in Genesis 11:6
which reads:
“The LORD said, Behold, the people
is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and
now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to
do.”
The above verse of Scripture is the
bedrock of the seeming Northern dominance in Nigeria. You see, even if a
people are more intelligent and educated than their neighbors, they
will nevertheless serve those neighbors if they are not united and the
neighbor is united because unity is greater than both education and
intelligence.
To understand the Northern psyche, try
to join several social media fora. In such fora, you will find that
Southern Nigerians are very indiscipline in the way they use their words
to run down their own leaders and people. Nothing is sacrosanct to
them.
Southerners can and have insulted their
political, traditional and spiritual leaders using some of the foulest
language on earth. I know of young Southern Nigerians who have called
former President Jonathan ‘pig’ and Southern elders who have called his
wife a ‘hippo’ and others who have used the most insulting words on the
President of the Christian Association of Nigeria.
When we behave like this, we show
ourselves as pedestrian to our Northern brothers. We indicate that we
are a people of a lower culture because no matter how educated you are,
if you cannot respect your own fathers (whether they deserve respect or
not) then you are lower than an illiterate who respects his father.
In Exodus 20:12, God commanded us to
honor our father and our mother. He did not say we should honor them
because they are honorable or because they deserve respect. He said we
should honor them because He as God commands it. And he attached a
promise to that command-“Then you will live a long, full life in the
land the LORD your God is giving you.”
Northerners understand this principle.
The principle is that you should honor your own father and mother, not
your neighbor’s father and mother. They are honoring their fathers and
their mothers and that is why God is ensuring that they “will live a
long, full life in the land the LORD your God is giving you.” That is
why they are ruling and leading and deservedly so!
And if you notice, the average
Northerner will join you a Southerner to insult your own leaders and
fathers. If you want to insult ex President Jonathan, they will join
you. If you want to insult Pastor Oritsejafor or his successor, Pastor
Ayokunle, they will join you. If you want to insult the Oba of Benin or
the Ooni of Ife, they will join you. Even if you want to insult Southern
leaders like Chief Olu Falae and Afenifere or Alex Ekwueme and
Ohana’eze Nd’Igbo or even Chief E.K. Clark and the South South People’s
Assembly, they will join you.
However, the minute the matter shifts to
Northern leaders or elders or traditional rulers, the Northerner will
show the stuff he is made out of and will not join you in insulting his
or her elders and institutions. It does not matter if that particular
leader, elder or traditional ruler is more guilty of an offense than his
Southern counterpart. As long as he is Northern, the average
Northerner, commendably, has the discipline to respect his own.
I urge you, if you are a Southerner, to
think back to all those Northerners who joined you to insult and rubbish
then President Goodluck Jonathan. Are they doing the same to President
Buhari? Are they supporting you when you call attention to the
President’s misdeeds?
Where are those Northerners who left the
North to sit down with you in Ojota to dance to Pasuma Wonder as you
demonstrated against Jonathan for removing the subsidy on petroleum
products? Did you hear even a whisper from them when President Buhari
did even what Jonathan did not do and increased fuel without increasing
salary? (Jonathan increased salaries before increasing fuel price).
Or have you noticed that they are making
excuses for the President? Are you seeing that the same persons who
joined you in rubbishing Dr. Jonathan are calling on you to exercise
patience with President Buhari?
What about when the Sultan of Sokoto
defended Fulani herdsmen and asked the media not to criminalize them and
said that criminals who kill people during fights for grazing grounds
are to be differentiated from herdsmen, did your Northern neighbors
pounce on him the way you pounced on Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor when he
called on Christians to defend themselves against the radical Islamic
sect of Boko Haram?
I remember young Southerners who called
Pastor Oritsejafor every evil and foul name in the world when he said
that. They were gleefully joined by their Northern neighbors. But now
that the case has been reversed, have those who joined you to rubbish
pastor Oritsejafor invited you to do same to the Sultan? Of course not!
You see, when you sell your own mother
for a penny, you cannot expect your neighbor to price her for a pound.
And when you neighbor sets the price of his mother at a pound, he will
never sell her to you for a penny.
Those Southerners on Twitter and
Facebook who were championing the downfall of then President Jonathan
are now providing excuses to justify the downfall of our beloved Naira
from ₦225 to a dollar that Jonathan left it to ₦470 to a dollar today.
As vile as you and I down south consider
the late General Sani Abacha to be, he is still beloved up North so
much so that more monuments and facilities are named after him in the
North than are named after any other Northerner with the arguable
exception of the late Murtala Mohammed.
This is a man of whom it has been
established beyond every reasonable doubt that he was a thief and not
just a thief but a blatant one of whom billions and hundreds of millions
of dollars of his loot are still being repatriated today. Yet, when our
corruption hating President Muhammadu Buhari went to pay homage to him
on the tenth anniversary of his death he said and I quote “Abacha never
stole”!
Yet today, the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission, EFCC, will arrest those who served in the previous
administration and without providing any evidence, Southerners will
deride and convict these people simply because an EFCC “source” leaked
to the press that they are guilty!
So, to all those who called Jonathan,
who gave us the third fastest growing economy in the world, a ‘pig’, you
can now see that your neighbors who laughed with you when you did that
know in their heart that you are the real ‘pig’ because they will never
trust a man like you who insults his own mother and father to please his
friend with any type of power.
They may not like me, but I assure you,
if push comes to shove, they will prefer me and others like me because
they know that a man who respects his father and mother is a man who
understands power!
And that my friend is the reason for the
seeming political dominance of Northern Nigeria over Southern Nigeria.
They are united and because of their unity, “nothing will be restrained
from them, which they have imagined to do.”
Reno Omokri is the founder of the
Mind of Christ Christian Center in California, author of Shunpiking: No
Shortcuts to God and Why Jesus Wept and the host of Transformation with
Reno Omokri (Monday at 12am on San Francisco’s KTLN, Channel 25 on
Comcast). He tweets from @RenoOmokri.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author
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