Western

Education and Politics

Comparing the Northern and Southern Nigerian Opposition Partnership


in the 2015 Elections

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

The Nigerian Federal Government has built universities in all regions.

The almajiri situation is particularly challenging for the North, in particular,
and Nigeria, in general.
Educational Empowerment and Social Unrest in Northern Nigeria
Boko Haram Islamic terrorism has grown out of the Northern Nigerian Muslim
population, a reigniting of Islamic extremism earlier manifested in Maitasine.
The fed govt has gone ahead to fight Boko Haram as well as build schools to
educate Northern Muslim youth who could be susceptible to terrorist
recruiting and incitement to violence, the first such initiative in Nigerian
history.

The almajiri schools represent the first initiative in Nigerian history to properly
educate the dispossessed Northern Muslim youth.
The almajiris have not suffered severe social and economic disadvantages
bcs they have not been trained in the skills necessary to work in a modern
economy.
Even papers hostile to the govt such as Leadership, have carried out an
extensive survey on the almjiri schools, covering Minna, Kebbi, Kaduna, Jos,
Jalingo, Damaturu, Makurdi, Gusau, Yola, Lafia, Kano, Lokoja, Dutse, Ilorin,
Sokoto and Katsina, as demonstrated in the Leadership article "Is the FG's
Almajiri System of Education Working?
Elevation of the North to reach the same level of social development as the
South requires drastic educational and other interventions in social
engineering.
Islamic Civilisation and the Challenge of Modernisation
Such engineering is particularly critical in the light of the severe challenge
being faced by Islamic civilisation in the world today, as demonstrated in the
recurrence of mob massacres and Islamic terrorism in the North and Islamic
terrorism as the greatest security threat in the world today.

Islamic civilisation is struggling with the imperative of modernising, which

today, is largely driven by Western civilisation.
Modernising implies reform, reform implies engagement with human and
rationalistic, rather than faith centred approaches to reality, implying
challenges to established religious authority.
Such challenges imply a threat to ancient social anchors and centres of
power.
No society can maximise its creative capacity if it is dominated by an
ideology based on faith, not reason.
Faith based societies encourage slavery of the many by the minority, slavery
of different kinds, two versions being Saudi Arabia and China, though I
understand China less.
The Implications of Disparate Levels of Social Awareness in Northern
and Southern Nigeria in Relation to the 2015 Elections

The quota system was established in Nigerian education to make up for the
North's comparative backwardness in education.
That backwardness remains till today.
Why have the Northern elite not adopted the Awolowo driven SW and the SE
approaches that jump started the education of their people and the initiatives
that enabled the economic resurrection of Ndigbo in the South-East after the
Nigerian Civil War?
I suspect they are not interested bcs that would weaken their power.
The Imbalance in the North/South Composition of the Opposition to
President Goodluck Jonathan

That power is represented in the block Northern Muslim votes that are the main
value of the opposition Presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari in the APC
coalition.
The reverse side of that is Buhari's ability to penetrate the South to a degree,
with the help of the APC marketing that works on the psyche of Southerners
whose social horizons are less shaped by religious/ethnic orientations.

Father Mbaka's action in the SE in endorsing Buhari and castigating

Jonathan and doing so at a packed deeply symbolic church service would be
unthinkable and even near suicidal for an Islamic cleric in the North
supporting GEJ and castigating Buhari.
Instead we have Sheikh Gumi who challenged both Buhari and GEJ
describing his family and himself as being threatened and Zakzaky, if I
remember correctly, describing GEJ's govt as behind Boko Haram.
Outside the PDP hierarchy, I am yet to read of any positive comment on GEJ
from the Northern elite or any critique of Buhari coming from any of them.
Yet Southern elite in various areas of social life are lining up to challenge or
condemn Jonathan.
On account of this imbalance of critical response, I am convinced the NorthSouth partnership represented by opposition to the govt of Goodluck
Jonathan is an unequal partnership and fundamentally hypocritical on the
part of the Northern partners.
I am not convinced a truly mutually beneficial, democratic arrangement can
be built on such an unjust and hollow foundation.
The change this partnership represents is simply an effort to actualise the cry
of 'power must return to the North' that has been sounded since PDP
refused to field a Northerner in 2011, with the Yoruba political hierarchy
riding on that sentiment to get a piece of the action.