A historian must be actual, honest and neutral; free from ardour, unbiased by curiosity, concern, resentment or affection; and devoted to the reality, which is the mom of historical past the preserver of nice actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the previous, the director of the longer term. —Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
Historical past is endangered in Nigeria and people who analysis or train it as their vocation are prone to extinction. Each alternative to have a good time or be taught from historical past or historians in a rustic like this, subsequently, is just not one to be spurned.
When the Usman Dan Fodiyo College (UDUS) in Sokoto, North-west Nigeria, introduced that the most recent instalment of its Inaugural Lectures would interact with the universe of historical past, a coincidence of three components assured them greater than the standard bandwidth reserved for such occasions.
First, this was marketed because the fiftieth Inaugural Lecture in what’s successfully the fiftieth yr of the college. UDUS started life in 1975 as one of many 12 federal universities established by the navy within the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil Battle with a mission to disperse the frontiers of enlightenment throughout the nation. Usman Dan Fodiyo after whom it’s named was the founding father of the Caliphal system and a scholar of some reputation.
Second, the subject material of the Inaugural Lecture had audacity written throughout it. The framing was: “The Igbo Issue within the Historical past of Inter-Group Relations and Commerce in Kano.” It departed from the standard preoccupation with tutorial consolation ranges and promised a peek into delicate recesses of the Nigerian narrative.
Third, this was solely the second Inaugural Lecture from the Historical past Division of UDUS and the lecturer was a person who had spent over 43 years educating and researching Nigerian historical past. He had each proper to be taken significantly. Furthermore, this was the trainer of Mahmood Yakubu, the Chairman of the Impartial Nationwide Electoral Fee (INEC), no much less. Right here was a possibility to search out out whether or not the legend of the INEC chairman as an alchemist of fantasy was a product of nature or nurture.
By the point he stepped as much as the rostrum in Sokoto for his lecture on September 5, 2024, Professor Ahmed Bako was assured an viewers like none that he had encountered in practically 4 and a half a long time as a college trainer. A full auditorium within the college was greater than outstripped by the distant viewers.
The esteemed lecturer started by acknowledging that his material was one steeped in “excessive prejudice and feelings”, notably, “in recent times when a variety of tales are being advised or rumours being peddled on Igbo neighborhood in several elements of the nation.” Removed from constancy to his promise to place issues “in correct views” (sic), the lecturer wasted no time in fulsomely embracing the bias.
Rising up, he confessed, he “heard a variety of horrifying tales about Igbo as depraved individuals who killed Sardauna.” On the proof of his rendition, this tragedy was not the origin of their wickedness; it was proof of it.
In line with Professor Bako, the Igbo in Kano are a “diaspora” which calls into query any claims they might should Nigerian citizenship. The pioneer Igbo cultural organisation in Kano, the Igbo (State) Union, was each clannish and “extraordinarily militant” and the modern pan-Igbo socio-cultural establishment, Ohanaeze Nd’Igbo, is a “separatist” organisation.
He was solely warming up. The Igbo, he theorised, “embarrassed” (sic) training “all with the hope of eventual domination of the nation; not essentially for creating it for the good thing about the nation.” Deploying “ethnic solidarity”, he claimed, the Igbo “regularly marginalised and even displace (sic) massive variety of Hausa merchants.”
Removed from an Inaugural Lecture, this learn very very similar to a twenty first Century Invoice of Attainder. There was hardly a constructive contribution to be gleaned from his research of or occasional interplay withthe Igbo. Even the Igbo Union Faculty constructed completely kind neighborhood sources of the Igbo and launched in 1959 was dismissed as “completely meant for the Igbo, the college had solely 9 non-Igbo college students.”
Within the absence of any organising theoretical or philosophical framework, the lecture learn like a long-suppressed eruption that lastly discovered an event to happen. Its context, sub-text, and texture belied its ostentatious declare early within the textual content that it was “purely historic not political. It’s base (sic) on Archival (sic) and discipline analysis.”
Blinkered by prejudice, Professor Bako couldn’t muster the curiosity to interpret his personal proof. Earlier in his lecture, he acknowledged “the colonial residential segregation coverage that established totally different enclaves for migrants”, which successfully binned the Igbo in Kano into an ethnic ghetto in Sabon Gari.
He couldn’t have been so bereft of creativeness as to be unable to discern it was ethnic discrimination that pressured the neighborhood to construct the Igbo Union Faculty. In striving mother and father who sought to afford training to their youngsters who might in any other case have missed out on it altogether, all he had the capability to see was ethnic malevolence.
Professor Bako trotted out hackneyed tropes with a recklessness that disbursed with proof, authority or comparability. For example, he claimed that “trying to find financial energy and dominance make the Igbo to be determined and aggressive. Desperation is what make (sic) them to not solely be disliked by host communities in a number of of the areas of their dominance in Northern Nigeria however to pushed (sic)some younger Igbo into felony actions.”
In help of this declare, he supplies neither archival materials nor proof from anthropology, criminology or comparative felony justice analysis. It was tough to consider this was an Inaugural Lecture.
In Professor Bako’s improbable world, these Igbo are an ethnic group in perpetual conspiracy. In actuality, he comes throughout as projecting his personal ethnic self-image onto the Igbo, reflecting on the identical time the disaster of a rustic that can’t make up its thoughts about this ethnic group. The basic Nigerian trope concerning the Igbo is of an ethnic nationality virtually congenitally incapable of unity. In Professor Bako’s world, nevertheless, all they do is conspire on the altar of ethnic solidarity and earlier than the god of domination.
Blinded by this, the professor couldn’t think about various explanations outdoors his conspiratorial idea of Igbo domination. The lecture mentions “Igbo” 427 occasions and comprises 16 references to phrases “dominate”, “dominance” or “domination” however finds no quotation, authority or proof to help its connection between Igbo and domination.
The one forex it trades in is homogenisation. Magically, it deploys“ Igbo” as singular, plural, and collective. It’s a sorcerer’s epic. Professor Bako’s historical past of Igbo interplay with Kano coincides somewhat conveniently with the onset colonial urbanisation in Nigeria. The textual content is simply too lazy to even speculate as as to whether or not there was any interplay earlier than this time. If he had allowed himself to assume outdoors the body of homogenised Igbo identification, the professor might have realised that totally different Igbo communities got here to training (and to Kano) at totally different occasions.
The Onitsha on the banks of the Niger, for example, had been comparatively early recipients of Western training. Their neighbours in Obosi got here to it somewhat later and pursued it aggressively to not dominate Nigeria (a notion that was alien to them) however to compete extra equitably with the Onitsha. The concept the Wawa, the Aro, the Ngwa and the Onitsha (all Igbos sub-groups) conspired to move to Kano to pursue domination makes that means solely to somebody who’s willfully illiterate about Igbo inter-group relations.
In 2012, an evidently unwell Emir Ado Bayero traveled to Enugu to attend the funeral of Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, whose management within the Nigerian Civil Battle has Professor Bako throwing hissy suits. In January 1966, Ojukwu was the Brigade Commander in Kano who saved Bayero’s life and precluded Chukwuma Nzeogwu’s subaltern, Captain Ude, from coup operations in Kano.
Ojukwu was himself fluent in Hausa and will certainly even have fathered a toddler in Kano. None of this merited acknowledgement in Professor Bako’s elevated piece of pitiable hatchetry. The scholars who endured him for over 4 a long time deserve our ideas and prayers.
One factor is obvious, nevertheless, after surviving Professor Bako: the provenance of this present INEC Chairman is settled.Odinkalu, a lawyer and trainer, will be reached at [email protected]
