Maitama Sule calls for a revolution? By Gbogun Gboroon

Alhaji Maitama Sule is easily one of the biggest minds, and one of the biggest hearts, in our country. I became considerably close to him in the 1970s when I was a member of the National Antiquities Commission and he was chairman of it. Because I saw in him such loftiness of humanity, such talent, such broad-mindedness, and such untainted love for people, I often wondered why the northern political elite never put him forth as candidate for the position of topmost ruler of our country.  And when the northern-based NPN nominated another man as its presidential candidate in 1979, I could not resist asking openly, “Why not Maitama Sule?”

Last week, Alhaji Maitama Sule’s mighty voice issued a call for a revolution in our country a revolution without any violence or bloodshed, a revolution that Nigerians courageously rise up and carry out, a revolution that will completely change the way our lives are being managed in this country, a revolution that will profoundly change the structure and manner of our governance, a revolution that will wipe out the constraints that, since independence, have been treacherously imposed upon enterprise and productivity in our country, etc.

My assessment is that Alhaji Maitama Sule has validated all those Nigerians who have been demanding in-depth change in this country. He has handed serious encouragement to them. And, at this time when our country is heading manifestly into deeper and deeper poverty and deprivation, when, indeed, our country seems to be heading for its death and to conflict and ruin, we Nigerians must not only thank God for Maitama Sule’s call for a revolution, we must, in our various ways, rise up and respond.

Nigeria cannot simply cannot continue the way it is now going. Nearly six decades of crookedness and impunity have brought Nigeria to the verge of ruin. Our former president, Goodluck Jonathan, used to say that he was not the cause or beginning of Nigeria’s complicated problems, and he was right. His failure was in his inability or unwillingness to invest his presidency in real change. Our present president too is neither the cause or beginning of our problems. But he is already failing too because he allows various unworthy factors to inhibit him from pursuing real change.

As we see him now, he seems to operate in the belief that his most important charge is to maintain, and provide for the sustenance of, his Fulani nation’s position of dominance in Nigeria. He ought to be viewing the massive loss of revenue from oil as a God-given opportunity to revive the fundamental strengths of our country’s economy. He ought to be striking boldly for the revival of those productive features that made our economy buoyant and our people reasonably comfortable before independence our farmers’ impressive outputs in groundnuts, cocoa, palm produce, gum-Arabic, cotton, etc. To achieve this, he ought to strike boldly for a restructuring of our federation, for the redistribution of power and resource development as between the federal and the state-local governments, and for massive encouragement and assistance to the state-local governments to revive the myriads of local support systems and traditions that used to empower our export-crop farmers. He ought to champion the decentralization of power generation, in order to make electricity available more widely and more surely in our country, and thus enhance entrepreneurial venturing and success. Rather than do any of these and other things that can boost enterprise in our country, he prefers to hold on to everything as federal ruler, so that, as far as we can see, his Fulani people may not lose power.

For instance, some days ago, there was a report to the effect that the federal government was going to boost Nigeria’s cocoa production to about five million tons per annum. Federal government to boost cocoa production? How? Can it be that the persons responsible for these policies believe that Nigerians are ignorant of the fact that the expertise and traditions by which the producer farmers of cocoa (and groundnuts, cotton, palm produce, etc) were once encouraged belong to our state and local governments? Let them not be deceived. We remember that it was when the federal government, in its zeal to control everything, scrapped our regional produce marketing boards and took over control that our farmers almost totally gave up producing these crops. Do these barons in power in the federal government now believe that, yet again, we can be deceived that it is the federal government that will revive the production of these crops?

Even worse, our president seems to believe that a massive build-up of federally-controlled military and security forces is the way to hold Nigeria together in the hands of his Hausa-Fulani nation. And he has put his kinsmen in charge of most critically important offices in the military and security forces. As I have said many times in this column, he has junked the political party that recommended him to us Nigerians for election, and has built up an administration almost totally manned by his kinsmen whom “he knows”.  And, by doing these things he is expanding and enhancing fear among the other peoples of Nigeria and, God forbid, he may be paving the way for some big trouble in this country.

That is why we must not lose the opportunity to respond to the message of a very credible Nigerian elder statesman like Maitama Sule. Obasanjo and Jonathan are southerners. They are both products of peoples who lead Nigeria in the quest for sane decentralization of power and resource development in this country. But when they rose to the presidency, they both preferred to keep federal power intact, or even to build more on it. Buhari comes from a nation that is passionately, unrepentantly, determined to keep everything in the hands of the federal government, and then to control it perpetually themselves. Yes, what our country needs most now is diversification in resource development; but why should we hope that Buhari will ever do it? The obvious answer is to do what Alhaji Maitama Sule has called upon us all to do.

As Alhaji Maitama Sule said, the word revolution is scary. It tends to conjure up images of masses of angry people pulling things down, causing mayhem and even causing injuries and death. But Alhaji Maitama Sule says that the revolution he envisages does not have to have any of these evils. He urges us Nigerians to stop being afraid to take the life of our country into our hands, and to step out with courage to bring new direction into the life and management of our country. I am sure that almost all elder citizens like me agree fully with him, because we would like to see this country return to the country which we knew when we were younger, the country that was brimming with enthusiasm and hope.  All of us Nigerians of all ages can do what Alhaji Maitama Sule has urged – courageously, resolutely, peacefully, successfully – and hand a much better country to our descendants.