BY COL. ALBEHU DAUDA GORA (RTD)
For all I know and care, crises only may end up benefiting only those who engineer them which is why the governor of Kaduna State Malam Nasiru El Rufai, is again the cynosure of this post in the light of his penchant for creating and or engineering crises in his style of leadership in the State, while the subject matter is the obnoxious Kaduna State Government Gazette No 21 dated 16 August 1998 called Kaduna State Legal Notice Number 1 KADUNA STATE LOCAL GOVERNMENT ( ADMINISTRATION) LAW 2018. DISTRICTS AND VILLAGES RESTRUCTURING (AMENDMENT) ORDER 2O18. Much as one tries, there is no way but to see El Rufai as a 21 Century Islamist Jihadist desperately trying to achieve by other means what Usman Danfodio failed to achieve through warfare and Malam Nasiru El Rufai knows this to be true.
The point of departure in the Gazette No 21 of August 16 2016 is the suggestions that “the will of the people” informed It which is completely untrue. It is so tragic that-El Rufai has decided along with members of a dubious committee of individuals careful picked by him for the purpose of working to achieve an already predetermined outcome with regards to the restructuring which perhaps a few people may have advocated for. We did not vote for El-Rufai to turn Kaduna State on its head, rather, we voted him on the strength of the campaign promise of ‘Making Kaduna Great Again’. The Gazette specifically states thus “Due to popular request for change of nomenclature of some Chiefdoms and Districts, and also for the reorganization of same, the State Executive Council at its sitting held on Monday 29, April 2018 approved the said request directed that the Principal Order should be amended accordingly”.
This is the clearest indication yet that El-Rufai, much like a kangaroo, had a specific agenda in a pouch he carries under his belly the task of implementing this dubious agenda, while as governor of Kaduna State. For a fact, he had already decided the outcome of the Committee even before it started sitting. I am compelled to interrogate why the governor in the face of more serious problems confronting our State decided to prioritize this subject matter. Ridiculously and shamelessly too, his restructuring affected mainly Chiefdoms in Southern Kaduna. This dubious and uncalled for exercise was meant to balkanize the Chiefdoms in Southern Kaduna, while planting the seeds of friction and discontent in the enclaves called Emirates he is intent on creating or has by the Gazette created. By this action, the governor only succeeded in confirming what his critics have all along been pointing to about him being a Religious Bigot.
The implications of this action, as far as Southern Kaduna is concerned, is that the governor is bent on not only engineering yet another crises, but simply to re-colonize them. El-Rufai may not have read History, many of us did and still do. There is the phenomenon that late Fela Kuti sang about which he called, “Colo Mentality “. In that epic song, Fela stated very clearly that we have been freed from colonialism, but that some are still in bondage because they have refused to be freed. El-Rufai may not have known or on purpose refused to know that most ethnic communities in Northern Nigeria after the foreign colonizers left the shores of this country were effectively handed over to a more brutish form of internal colonizers under the Emirate system. Some level of freedom for the ethnic nationalities in Nigeria started with the creation of States. Specifically in Kaduna state, the military administration of Ja’afaru Isa created some chiefdoms out of the Zazzau Emirate and there was a further creation during the Ahmed Makarfi administration. As a people, we still owe a lot of gratuity to both Ja’afaru Isa and Ahmed Makarfi. That El Rufai is deliberately focused on eroding this freedom our people have enjoyed and returning us to the chains of domination from which we have already been freed simply will not and cannot work. Specifically, the Atyap people haven gotten the Atyap Chiefdom with their Monarch as the Agwatyap which they for a very long time craved for, shading their precious blood, loosing precious lives and suffering imprisonment at different times in the endeavour. The Atyap nation did not and will not request for a change in the status quo, therefore any chance made by either the government of Kaduna or the Committee set up by El-Rufai to have recommended the supposed change of the Chiefdom from Atyap Chiefdom to anything else and the designation of our monarch as the Agwatyap to any other tittle is a complete assault on the Atyap nation and stands unrecognized. . El-Rufai is simply trying to be a knight in shining armour to impress only God Almighty knows who, but it will not work because the Atyap people did not ask for it. It should be on record about El-Rufai that what the electorate who put him in power are asking of him, he is not providing, while giving what in the wildest of imagination has never been asked for. It is consensus of the Atyap people to retain the extant nomenclature of both the Chiefdom as “Atyap Chiefdom ” as well as that of our monarch as ” Agwatyap “.Nothing and for emphasis no extraneous arrangement supersedes what the Atyap People have agreed on.
It must be noted that the ethnic nationalities occupying the geographical space called Southern Kaduna are very unique by way of our cultures, values and traditions. It is not on record that our people have gone out of their way to contest other people’s land. We are a peace-loving and hardworking people content with that geographical space God Almighty gave our forebears and which they have bequeath to us. Any piece of history arguing to the contrary was deliberately concocted, contrived to achieve a purpose other than the truth. In the light of the above therefore, El-Rufai’s Gazette No 21 of 16 August 2018 is only worthy for the dustbin. It is the very height of absurdity for any 21 Century dictator, even if such goes by the name of Malam Nasiru El-Rufai, to attempt to trample on our basic freedoms during a democratic dispensation. The menu of hate and marginalization the El-Rufai dictatorship has inflicted on the Southern Kaduna people is immeasurable. The desire to create Emirates anywhere outside those areas already recognized as such is to the best of my knowledge is an anachronism. To the Southern Kaduna people, take heed of the basic lesson of life which late Chief MKO Abiola left behind for us which posits that, “unless you offer your head, nobody can give you a haircut”. Whilst El-Rufai and his ilk are busy trying out how to cause yet another crisis in Kaduna State, our people should remain calm and law-abiding, but they must also be ready to defend our land, culture and values.
To God Be The Glory.
Col Gora is a concerned citizen and writes from Kaduna
