Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

OAA

These are great suggestions for job creation and cohesion.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2020 7:06 AM
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Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won't Break. It'd Evolve. Here's How

 

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Yes we have to emphasise education in 2000 languages of Africa in the long term but due to financial constraints the lingua francas take priority first.

In Nigeria for example a big shame on the past national leaders ( and the incumbent government) for not emphasising that each candidate must have a credit requirement in at least one indigenous lingua franca in addition to English at the School Certificate Ordinary Level.  English has its uses internationally but I do not want to continue to learn of Igbo culture in English.

It will thrill me to no end to find out that half of school leavers in the West can speak fluent native speaker Igbo while the other half can speak flawless Hausa.  All regions can be Hausaphonic ( and not just the North)  Igbophonic and Yorubaphonic.  These would be the building blocks of national cohesion within a generation but our politicians are such lazy thinkers who cannot think outside the ( ethnic) box and too selfish in playing divisive politics.

Stage Two:  From National Cohesion to Integrated National Development.

Many of the jobless graduates can be sent across the nation as linguistic cultural ambassadors rather than roaming the streets as if they were not born with any innate saleable skills beyond their university degree certificates.

From such beginnings cross cultural business developments can evolve: from language schools to business schools and business ventures nation wide.

The idea of the dichotomy of federal establishment versus state establishments will be shattered forever: 

 integrated national publuc/private establishments.  

Along the lines sketched by Lagos State govt of joint business enterprises among SW state enterprises there should sprout parallel ventures say between Imo, Ondo and Osun, FG, Anambra and Ekiti, Kano, Lagos Ogun and Abia, FG, Ondo and Rivers, Oyo, Edo and Niger, Enugu, Kwara and Osun.

.All of these will transform to massive job creation potentials between public and private sector potentials of an integrated Nigerian society in which the idea of blaming FG for not creating jobs for the unemployed will become irrelevant as all able hands will be on deck nationwide on all dorts of enterprises their linguistic skills being the bedrock bond.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Date: 26/09/2020 20:27 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won't Break. It'd Evolve. Here's How

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Ogo Farooq,

Na wetin you find during that 'reccing' (reconnaissance) journey to the East? You find retaliatory killing? For where? Nna, give some credit to your in-laws now. Give Ndi Igbo some credit for never resorting to retaliatory mass killings despite waves of genocidal violence directed against them. They keep going back to where they are killing their people for their business of serving their fellow Africans. Urge the Nigerian government to apologize for the treatment of model citizens like the Igbo and offer them reparative justice. No need for evolution on that one.

If you had stopped at Artisan Market in Enugu to buy a goat during your sabo trip, the young Hausaphone sellers would have bargained with you in perfect Igbo because they were born and raised there where a Fulani man was elected for two terms as the first Mayor back in 1952. It is only when you ask them their names that you will realize that they are Muslims. The Igbo, Hausa, Youruba, Efik, Ijaw, Urobo, Tiv, Nupe, Birom, Edo, Ibibio, Ikwere, are all brothers and sisters as you reminded us in a previous post. 

Oga Falola, no mind those parapo Yoruba people, you done dey chop amala and ewedu soup with Oyibo more than you done chop isi ewu with any Igbo man, except Ohadike or Afigbo maybe, and yet they still dey call you Baba Kiki Iwin, not Omo Okoro. Next time they yab you, remind them that the Ooni himself agrees with Ifa that the father of Obatala was Igbo. We are family and anyone who thinks otherwise should prove the null hypothesis of no relationship between x and y.

We are all African brothers and sisters though tongues differ. There will still be quarrels in every family, but the genocidal Igbophobic violence is a colonial intrusion that our people did not experience before slavery and colonialism, according to Walter Rodney inn HEUA. The Labour Party government of Harold Wilson, USSR, and Shell BP are not African tribes, yet they armed the genocidist troops against innocent Igbo people and called it ethnic conflict.

Your final paragraph on Somalia raises the curse of the Tower of Babel that Toni Morrison ailuded to in her Nobel Prize lecture, praising diversity as something good - speaking the same tongue leads to trouble because even when someone whistles to say that your mama is so ugly, you go hear am and say that he should take it back or wahala go burst. Germany, Japan, Italy, Rwanda, and Somalia came close to that hysterical imposition of monolingualism but they each paid a huge price of nearly being wiped out of the face of the earth.

What you left out of the equation is the question of class. Irrespective of your language or religion, you go follow them dey chop if you are one of the Aristos oppressing the people. Eskor Toyo taught us that Nigerians make the mistake of thinking that religion or ethnicity is the most important identity but if you no go school and you no get kwudi-ego-owo-okuk-money, you go dey chew nails for any capitalist country.

Farooq, pursue this research but shift it away from ethnic supremacy. Instead ask the Hausa elites and ordinary parents why they are neglecting the education of the Talakawa. It is impossible to imagine that the Igbo would dominate the federal government as much as the Hausa and Fulani have while their young people perform so poorly 

in education. Let us address the question of access for all boys and girls immediately and train them to avoid the distractions of smart phones and naughty movies late at night.

This is a problem that will not wait for gradual evolution across Africa. Education can be revolutionized within a generation so that, irrespective of the numbers of languages you speak, you can read and write t make it more difficult for anyone to mobilize you to go and kill millions of your brothers and sisters just because they speak a different tongue that you probably learned and aced the way they say that Baba Buhari got A in Igbo on his WAEC certificate (perhaps to equip him to spy on the unjustly hated Igbo but also more likely because he may have been adopted by an Igbo teacher when he was orphaned). 

We need to emphasize education in all the 2000 languages in Africa to enable us to tap into the mystery hypothesis which states that no culture has ever industrialized by relying on the languages of colonizers.

This may be relevant to the testing of the hypothesis:

Bright Chimezie - Because of English

Bright Chimezie - Because of English

Biko

On Saturday, 26 September 2020, 11:40:51 GMT-4, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:

Oga,

This last paragraph from the column answers your concern:

"Of course, as the example of Somalia shows, nations don't endure merely because of the similarities and shared memories of the people that constitute it. That was why Steve Goodier once said, 'We don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Only notes that are different can harmonize. The same is true with people.'"

I agree that I need to develop it further. Although linguistic similarities don't erase ethnic differences, I think they make harmonious co-existence easier.

Farooq

 

Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
 

Sent from my phone. Please forgive typos and omissions.

On Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 9:06 AM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Farooq:

 

Great essay, but can you do a follow-up in comparative terms? Link languages to identity (we see the success in Israel, the Afrikaners in South Africa). I have traveled to places to see how this works, including to India. But I have also see failure—the Yoruba speak the same language and its variants but they fight a lot. Don't be surprised, there are Yoruba who say that I am not Yoruba because I eat with Biko!

 

Unless I am misreading you, and doing so to an extreme, a common language does not erase other identity markers, as they are socially constructed. The slaves and their masters spoke the same language, to use an extreme example.

Ahmad Bamba used Wolof to do what you are recommending, ultimately creating a broader identity.

I am not joking—if spreading the use of one language can bring about what you intend, a state that controls the bulk of the budget can achieve this within a few years. If you don't speak Hausa, no pay-check!

 

Let me now get into trouble with you—I once told you Buhari every week is a bad staple; we need to eat other food!

TF

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, September 26, 2020 at 7:45 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won't Break. It'd Evolve. Here's How

 

Saturday, September 26, 2020

Nigeria Won't Break. It'd Evolve. Here's How

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

 

Nigeria will be 60 years old as a formally independent country next Thursday, but the divisibility and tiresomely endless feuding that have emerged as some of its defining features since its forced birth more than a century ago show no sign of abating.

 

The immobilizing factiousness of the past five years have particularly conduced to the growing sentiment that Nigeria won't be around much longer.  Opinion leaders of major ethnic groups are plotting exit strategies from the Nigerian union.

But as much as I respect the rights of any people to dissociate from a toxic Nigerian union that seems to hold everybody back, I think that news of Nigeria's imminent dismemberment is greatly exaggerated.

What I foresee happening—bits of which are actually already manifest—is that Nigeria would use its current ethnographic resources to evolve into a completely different country. And here's my admittedly imperfect ethnographic forecast of an evolved Nigeria.

 

Let me begin from northern Nigeria, Lugardian northern Nigeria, that is. Home to more than half of Nigeria's over 500 ethnic groups, northern Nigeria is Nigeria's most diverse region. Even the two major ethnic groups from Southern Nigeria are represented in the North.

 

There are Yoruba people who are native to Kwara and Kogi states and there are Igbo people—of the Ezza, Izzi and Effium sub-group, who are also found in Ebonyi State—who are native to at least four of Benue State's 23 local governments. That makes northern Nigeria the microcosm of Nigeria.

 

But I prognosticate that an evolved northern Nigeria would be monolingual with a few holdouts. The Hausa language already predominates in 16 of northern Nigeria's 19 states. Only Benue, Kogi and Kwara states have so far resisted the linguistic hegemony of the Hausa language.

 

Every subsequent generation in the 16 Hausaphone northern Nigerian states internalizes the logic and desirability of Hausa-inflected linguistic uniformity and a corresponding abandonment of the plethora of native languages that dot the region's linguistic map.

 

Even Fulfulde (as the language Fulani people speak is called) is dying in such northeastern states as Adamawa, Taraba, Gombe and Bauchi, and the resistance to Hausa in Kanuri-speaking Borno and Yobe weakens every generation.

 

The relentless march of the Hausa language in Northern Nigeria will ensure that a somewhat unified mega identity, riven only by religion, would emerge, and memories of previous ethnic and linguistic identities would recede or disappear—in the same way that many Hausa-speaking communities in northwest Nigeria have no memory that their distant ancestors were not Hausa-speaking people.

 

So two dominant identities would emerge from northern Nigeria: Hausaphone Muslim northerners and Hausaphone Christian northerners. The Tiv, Idoma, Igede, Igbo, etc. people of Benue State who have historically resisted the Hausa language would share more in common with the emergent ethnic alchemies of southern Nigeria than they would with Hausaphone northern Christians.

 

The Yoruba-speaking people of Kwara and Kogi states would also fit more easily with their kith in the Southwest, with Ilorin Emirate being a holdout even though its sociolinguistic and geographic singularities would not permit its seamless fusion into the Hausaphone northern Muslim identity.

 

The people of what has been called Kwara North—the Baatonu and Boko people of Baruten and Kaiama local governments and the Nupe people of Pategi and Edu local governments— who are culturally more similar to other Muslim northerners than they are to the Yoruba-speaking parts of Kwara State would easily meld well into the Hausaphone Muslim identity. Both the Igala and the Ebira of Kogi have cultural and linguistic kith in southern Nigeria and are easily amenable to Hausaphone Muslim/Christian identities.

 

The former Eastern and Midwestern Nigeria are already witnessing the incipience of an alchemic ethnic fusion of disparate groups enabled largely by the enormous creolization of Nigerian Pidgin English and the Pentecostalization of the Christianity of the regions.

 

By creolization, I mean the transformation of Nigerian Pidgin English from an anarchic, emergency contact language for episodic encounters to a stable, rule-governed, self-sufficient native language that millions of people speak and identify with on an emotional and cultural level such as is the case with the Krio of Sierra Leone.

 

The creolization of Nigerian Pidgin English seems unstoppable and appears primed to play the role Hausa is playing in northern Nigeria as an ethnographic glue to coalesce otherwise historically disparate people. The shared Christian identity of the people of the regions, which is now increasingly Pentecostal Christianity, would accentuate this process.

 

As anyone who pays attention to Edo State would testify, the new identity formation among southern Nigerian minorities is already killing Islam in Edo North where it has existed for decades. There is a mass Christianization of Muslims in northern Edo, and this would only intensify in the coming generations.

 

As I've shown previously, Islam is a strong building block for identity formation in Northern Nigeria, so that "Hausa" and "Muslim" have become misleadingly synonymous in the Nigerian popular imagination. That is why people of northern Edo used to be erroneously called "Bendel Hausa" even though they speak an Edoid language that is almost mutually intelligible with the Bini language.

The association of Islam with Hausa—or, to use the trendiest hyphenated identity formation, Hausa-Fulani—is leading to its repudiation in even historically Muslim polities in southern Nigeria such as Yorubaland. 

 

Stories of Yoruba Imams who aren't allowed to lead prayers in the North and of the distrust of the authenticity of the Islam of Yoruba people by Hausa Muslims help to solidify resistance to Islam. Today, overtly Muslim Yoruba people are seen as by non-Muslim Yoruba as perfidious toadies of the Muslim North.

If this attitude persists—and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't—it means southern Nigeria would become wholly Christian a few generations from now.

 

It is not clear to me now if Pidgin English in the former Western Nigeria would be creolized like it is becoming among southern minorities because of the social prestige of the Yoruba language and the numerical power of its native speaker base, but there are already signs that this is happening among the Igbo people.

 

The Igbo language is the only Nigerian language with millions of native speakers which is nonetheless classified as an "endangered language" because of the tendency toward what Professor Chukuwma Azuonye has called "the fetishization of English" among the Igbo, including code-mixing and  code switching, assimilation of Pidgin English into the Igbo language, among other factors he identified in his article titled "Igbo as an Endangered Language."

 

I have a personal encounter with this. In 2000 when news filtered through that there were retaliatory mass slaughters of northerners in the southeast, the editor-in-chief of Weekly Trust where I worked requested that I travel there to cover it.

 

He said I could easily pass for an Igbo man and that my linguistic handicap in the Igbo language wouldn't be an issue since Igbo people actually revere their kith who are monolingual in English. What he said turned out to be accurate. Throughout the five days I traveled all over the region, not once was I suspected to be anything but an Igbo.

 

I got along with a mixture of Pidgin English, Standard English, and a strategic sprinkling of "nna" and other popular Igbo intensifiers in my speech. In fact, when I was returning to Kaduna, someone in Onitsha actually asked why I was going to "where they are killing our people." "Nna, na my business," I said.

 

In other words, generations from now, the fissiparity that drives Nigeria's current ethnic tensions will dissipate and the fresh contradictions of an evolved Nigeria would frustrate its dismemberment.

 

For instance, Hausaphone northern Christians, who are a huge chunk, would be invested in a united Nigeria for their self-survival. Although they would share linguistic affinities with the Hausaphone Muslim North, their apprehensions about religious domination would connect them to a creolized Christian South.

More than that, though, Nigeria has generated an enormous repertoire of collective national identity symbols that the upcoming generations, who won't be moored to the same identities as us, would find hard to throw away.

 

Of course, as the example of Somalia shows, nations don't endure merely because of the similarities and shared memories of the people that constitute it. That was why Steve Goodier once said, "We don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Only notes that are different can harmonize. The same is true with people." 

 

Oshiomhole and His Lizard and Lion Hyperbole

I watched a video clip of Oshiomhole's interview with ChannnelsTV a day before the Edo governorship election where he characterized Obaseki's promise to extirpate his "godfatherly" tentacles in Edo as the threats of a "lizard" to a "lion." (Obaseki is the "lizard" and he is the "lion.")

 

That's an unusually over-dramatic hyperbole, which aggrandizes the enormity of Oshiomhole's defeat--and the deep psychic rupture he must be nursing now. 

 

The defeat of a lion by a lizard is the stuff of legends. The Bible's "David and Goliath" story pales miserably in comparison!

Related Article:

Obaseki's Win, Tinubu, and the Power of American Threats

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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