“If sharia cannot bring affinity between the Yoruba and the fulani tribes, even after gifting the Yoruba with undeserving power by the fulani, then no other geographical entity will attempt an alliance with the fulani even in the nearest future” – Engr. Odo Ijere
As Mallam El Rufai and his fulani intelligentsia begin to mull the idea of dusting their old alliance play book with the Southsouth region of the country, we might remind him how the same alliance led to the untimely death of the renowned poet, Ken Saro Wiwa and the subsequent emasculation of the Niger Delta with the attendant expropriation of its oil and gas resources.
New alliances will not save the Arewa North but a critical self evaluation of it’s anti development paradigms and reevaluation of new policies in corporate identity and corporate unity with the rest of Nigeria.
The arewa North is fastly losing its self worth and esteem because of its refusal to modernize its backward society and denounce neo conservative and primitive culture that keep them more isolated from a Nigeria that is bound to evolve.
They are today confronted with the reality of a Nigeria that more or less does not need them as an integral geographical component by reason of its malevolent imposition of primitive Sharia, feudalism, a tendency to denounce education values, a proliferation of illiterate and itinerant almajiri policies, a denunciation of the girl child education, a body politic that promotes mass poverty and so on and so forth.
The Arewa North today is not needed by any of the dominant tribes for any purpose; hausa, igbo, Yoruba, Tiv, idoma, efik, ijaw, etcetera. So with whom will they form the alliance? Therefore, El Rufai’s dream alliance is already dead on arrival or he has to look towards Niger Republic.
If not the military decreed alliance due to the exigency of the civil war against the Igbo tribe, the Ijaw, itsekiri, ikwerre, ibibio, efik tribes will never have anything to do with them because of cultural and religious disaffinity.
El Rufai should understand that the Arewa North will never be able to recover from the demarketing of their region by the born to rule attitude of Dan Fodiyo children and their quest to deep the Koran in the Atlantic Sea.
In the face of exigent realities confronting them today, they must first deal with the emerging problems of hausa separatism and sectarianism which if not resolved has the potential to obliterate all their historical legacies in the lugardian contraption.
When El Rufai and his fellow hegemonists will have time to recount their mistakes, they should remember to tell themselves the home truth that they took their luck of religious bigotry too far by believing they could recolonize the lugardian business empire without a fight.
They should remember to tell themselves the home truth that Nigeria is a hegemony of multi ethnic tribes and so only an egalitarian society can be made possible and not in the less, a primitive Sharia practice that values poltics more than religious practice.
If sharia cannot bring affinity between the Yoruba and the fulani tribes, even after gifting the Yoruba with undeserving power by the fulani, then no other geographical entity will attempt an alliance with the fulani even in the nearest future until they deal with their religious bigotry.
