National Conference: LAMIDO'S ABUJA GAFFE

By Ochereome Nnanna

THE Lamido of Adamawa, Dr. Muhammadu Barkindo Mustapha, is turning out to be quite an outstanding delegate to the ongoing National Conference. I can imagine, by now, his colleagues will stop their side-talks, whisperings and murmurings whenever the royal turban is given the microphone to speak.

In the two recorded episodes when he addressed issues arising in the gathering, he has managed to ruffle feathers, raise hackles and stoke ethno-religious temperatures, including hurling an outright direct personal insult at a colleague, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, whom he accused of “ranting”. It beats me that the Chairman of the Conference, Justice Legbo Kutigi, did not caution or ask him to apologise to Adebanjo. I shudder at a situation where the situation were turned the other way round and Adebanjo calls the emir’s obvious incendiary contributions a “rant”. It would probably get Hausa/Fulanis and Yorubas stabbing at each other all over the streets of Northern and Western Nigeria, heavens forbid.
This highly ranked royal father seems fully dressed for battle. That is highly uncharacteristic and unbecoming. Right from our pre-independence conferences, royalty and traditional authorities have always formed part and parcel of delegates to our conferences. They have to be there because they form an important part of our indigenous civic culture.

Traditional and political establishment lords, especially those from the North, have always tended to carry themselves with dignity and nobility in the public, including open, if politically charged forums like the National Conference. In the past, what you saw was a few hotheads taking up the microphone to breathe ethno-religious fire and brimstone, with some of their colleagues pretending to prevail on them to behave themselves.


Meanwhile, it was a well-orchestrated strategy to cow the delegates from other parts. This happened during the Constitutional Conference called by General Sani Abacha in 1994/1995. People like Engineer Buba Galadima exuded smoke and granted explosive media interviews to press home their northern and Abacha agendas against the counter-surge of NADECO’s June 12 agitations. In fact, at a point, when I hinted his colleague, retired Col. Isa Kachako, a delegate from Kano that I was going to seek Galadima’s views on the quarrel between delegates Chief Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu and Prof. Jibril Aminu at a plenary session (which led to the rumour that Ojukwu slapped Aminu), Kachako pleaded with me:
“Please, don’t interview Buba Galadima. He is too mad!”

The Lamido, Barkindo Mustapha, indeed, goofed when he said as follows: ““Mr. Chairman, I have observed that some people have started jumping the gun by commenting on issues like resource control, resource ownership, etc. In this case, let me also jump the gun to say that states which don’t have oil should allow the states which have oil to take a 100 per cent oil revenue and states which don’t have oil should take land resource. That means ownership of land should revert to those states and anybody who wants to use the land or the structures in the land must pay rents to those states or the traditional owners of the land, for example, the FCT.” The most disagreeable part of this statement is the reference to land in the FCT.

Constitutional abomination: In the first place, it is a constitutional abomination for anyone to claim “traditional ownership” of the FCT. The Territory belongs to the Federal Government of Nigeria, which is exercising the sovereignty of the people of Nigeria over the Territory on their behalf, in line with Part 1 Chapter VIII Section 298 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999. It may be in the North Central geopolitical zone, but it is home for all Nigerians equally, and the centre of the nation’s unity. Every Nigerian lays equal claim to the FCT and no Nigerian group can grandstand over the “traditional ownership” of the FCT to the point of regarding it as part of their land resources to “control” and extract rent from other Nigerians.

Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, father of Nigeria’s independence and foremost nationalist, was the first leader to call for the movement of the capital of Nigeria away from congested Lagos to “a virgin land and an area in the centre of Nigeria”. When General Murtala Mohammed, as Head of State, set up the Justice Akinola Aguda Panel to explore the possibility of moving the capital the panel merely followed Zik’s prompting and settled for Suleija (which is now renamed Abuja), which measures approximately 8,000 square kilometres. Even if the conference decides on 100% resource control on natural resources to include oil and land, the FCT will be completely off-limits to any kingdom, state, or region as the case may be for the purpose of rent. Certainly, I do not see how the Lamido’s Yola Emirate will be able to collect rent in Abuja!

Geopolitical reality

All these ethnic and regional jingoists and “gun jumpers” often lose their sense of proportion and geopolitical reality in their delusional rush to make spurious claims on the National Cake. Only the federal government will continue to decide on behalf of all Nigerians how land and other resources of the Territory will be exploited and administered in the interest of all.

When the Lamido made his outburst, he obviously meant to get back at agitators for resource control from the Niger Delta. Even though they often hyperbolically call for 100% resource control of the oil and gas resources both on land and in the nation’s territorial waters, I am quite confident that they will be mollified if the sharing formula in the 1963 constitution is restored. That is equitable, since it was used when the North and West were economic giants through agriculture. But when oil started booming and spewing billions of dollars from the territorial grounds of the former Eastern Region, the defeat of the Igbos in the Biafra-Nigeria war became an opportunity for the rest of Nigeria led by the North to overturn the sharing formula, on the ground that the oil wealth needed to be used for “even development” of Nigeria. Where is the even development?


Never Again: But if Lamido’s angry reaction to this agitation is upheld, the singular group that will be devastated and turned into foreigners in their land will not be the Ijaws of the Niger Delta. It will be the Igbos. The Ijaws are few everywhere, don’t mind their paper 10 million population. They don’t really want to travel beyond Port Harcourt or Warri. Outside these cities and, perhaps Lagos, they prefer to travel abroad. Their presence in Abuja is because Jonathan is sitting in Aso Villa as Nigeria’s president. The Niger Delta people from the South-South will lose virtually nothing if Abuja becomes part of Lamido’s estate for rent collection.
It is the Igbos, who have sunk billions of dollars into housing and estate development in Abuja that will become Lamido’s overnight contrived tenants! They own majority of the landed property in Abuja outside governmental holdings. It will never happen! abandoned property will never happen again in Nigeria!! Igbos will never build again for others to steal. The Port Harcourt episode is the last, and only because of the peculiar circumstances of the civil war.

Those daydreaming that time will come when other enterprising Nigerians will build mansions and commercial estates on prime federal territory and then run away will expire while waiting for their heart’s evil desires to come to pass.

Let the delegates save their energy from such foolish and untenable agitations and focus on the mission for which President Goodluck Jonathan assembled them in Abuja: creating a new Nigeria that will become one of the greatest and most prosperous nations in the second century of our advent as a nation.


If we are only for ourselves what are our lives for? Make a difference; make the world a better place.
Dr Stephen E Ogbonmwan

Vanguard