LAST WEEK, I discussed the Middle Belt, that complex lower half of the North, a three-faced geopolitical Janus with one face inspired by the Islamic North, the other by the Christian South, and the third detached from both, a middle road to the Middle Belt identity, fixated on defining a unique geopolitical ecosystem that is neither North nor South, the type my friend, Comrade Tar Ukor, would call the authentic Middle Belt.
There is no way the scary narratives from such a triple civilisation wouldn’t inflame passions, generating different currents in the Conference of Marxism, a prominent Nigerian leftist group.
For the greater part of its history, the United States has been an interventionist state, advancing its interests and nobody’s else, unless it dovetails into its strategic geopolitical trajectory. From Afghanistan to Iraq, to consider only two countries out of many, where was durable peace produced by the American intervention? With a population no higher than that of the Middle Belt, over 90% of them Muslims, the United States couldn’t flush out the Taliban from Afghanistan. After the loss of a few thousand American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of civilian and Afghan fighters, after almost 20 years, the United States was forced out of the country without achieving most of its intervention objectives.
The 125 member leftist group consists of older and old comrades, who got afflicted with the Marxist bug in the ’70s and ’80s in Nigerian ivory towers, some of them accused by the neoliberal-military complex of teaching what they weren’t paid to teach, and generations of their brought-ups in the academia, law, development practice, etc.
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Since the Nigerian left could hardly forge a consensual front on the mechanics of attaining the grand objective of replacing the capitalist state with a socialist one, underscores the opposed currents as the defining attribute of the Nigerian Left. When Marxists bicker and hardly agree on many issues, the bourgeoisie feel a sense of deja vu.
The Nigerian Left might bicker on the formation of political parties and alliance with the peasantry; collaboration with progressive bourgeois parties and ties with the labour movement; alliance with anti-imperialist blocs; socialism in one country or the permanent revolution, etc, but in war or crisis, the Nigerian Left never shied away from the patriotic defence of the nation’s sovereignty. Its imprint was palpable in the 1962 struggles against the Nigeria-Anglo Defence Pact.
The protracted conflicts in the Middle Belt and the United States intervention to save Nigeria’s Christendom, is subtly polarising the Conference into the pro-intervention group, and those opposed to it: the #onNigeria’ssovereigntywestand group.
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The conflict is only discernible, not yet fully blown due to the refusal of the sovereignty group to outrightly join issues with the intervention group, as both camps are headed by respected senior comrades, the revolutionary and intellectual models of the younger members of the Conference.
For the pro-intervention group, the defence and security of the homeland, supersede regional and national sentiments; socialist posturing and Marxist rhetoric. As the Belters at the barricades confronting the alleged murderous colonisers, the American presence is a manna from Heaven, an end to the decades of the failure of the Nigerian state to fully enforce the social contract between the governed and the state.
An advocate of the United States intervention exasperated by the sovereignty current in the Conference posits that “It seems Marxism in Nigeria has become an ass, a solitary for uncritical and self-serving ego seeking rhetorics”.
Yet, another intervention sympathiser avers “…A leader from Central Nigeria, in one of the countless mass graves, holding the bones of his innocent people appealed for help from the U.S.A. Response came, it may not be under perfect conditions, but it came. No apologies. Shikenan”.
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The sovereignty current faults the Christian extermination narrative, justifying the American presence as hypocritical, since Muslims are as much victims, if not more than the Christians in the North-West and North-East, regarding the intervention as a pretext to cede Nigeria’s sovereignty to the United States, whose intervention trajectory in scores of countries around the globe, failed to achieve the publicised objectives, becoming only smokescreen to satisfy imperial greed.
After apprehending many indigenous Middle Belters killing, maiming and torching houses, and involved in cattle rustling, reinforced with the political refusal to integrate the Nigerian cattle Fulani into the Belt economy as stakeholders, regarding the localised conflicts as part of a wider Nigerian crisis, and the lackadaisical attitude of the Nigerian state to decisively confront it, constrain one to conclude that the foreign intervention agenda dovetails into a hazy trajectory at variance with the aspirations of millions of Middle Belters and the generality of Nigerians, whose faith in the Nigerian Project is unshaken, hoping that the present crises would be overcome.
For the greater part of its history, the United States has been an interventionist state, advancing its interests and nobody’s else, unless it dovetails into its strategic geopolitical trajectory. From Afghanistan to Iraq, to consider only two countries out of many, where was durable peace produced by the American intervention? With a population no higher than that of the Middle Belt, over 90% of them Muslims, the United States couldn’t flush out the Taliban from Afghanistan. After the loss of a few thousand American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of civilian and Afghan fighters, after almost 20 years, the United States was forced out of the country without achieving most of its intervention objectives.
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In the case of Iraq, false reasons were fabricated to facilitate American intervention in 2003, regime change and the assassination of Saddam Hussein, leaving Iraq more unstable after the United States withdrawal from the country in 2011.
Since when has the United States become the altruistic defender of religious, ethnic and cultural minorities? If the American intervention to save Nigeria’s Christendom, will be short and decisive, many would grudgingly reconcile themselves to it, but was there any resource rich country where the Americans forced themselves and left shortly thereafter? After an eight-year disastrous engagement in Vietnam, 20 years in Afghanistan, 8 years in Iraq, only God knows when the altruistic United States would call it quits with oil and rare minerals rich Nigeria.
Younger comrades might pose these: should Marxists in a community threatened by genocide prioritise ideological posturing and sentiments over the defence of the community by an ideological opponent? Isn’t it un-Marxist to trade off national sovereignty with a plundering hegemon, never known to have enforced a lasting peace anywhere it intervened?
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And shouldn’t the failure of the Nigerian state to undertake its most fundamental responsibility of the social contract, be a strategic political gift to the Nigerian left, to reposition itself, and prod its Nigerian Mamdanis into the electoral battle in 2027 to showcase its political and governance trajectory?
And due to the similarity of the East European national question with most African nations as multinational states, addressed at great cost by violent struggles for autonomy, separation or confederation, shouldn’t East European template satisfactorily address Nigeria’s national question without plunging the nation into unnecessary bloodletting?
After apprehending many indigenous Middle Belters killing, maiming and torching houses, and involved in cattle rustling, reinforced with the political refusal to integrate the Nigerian cattle Fulani into the Belt economy as stakeholders, regarding the localised conflicts as part of a wider Nigerian crisis, and the lackadaisical attitude of the Nigerian state to decisively confront it, constrain one to conclude that the foreign intervention agenda dovetails into a hazy trajectory at variance with the aspirations of millions of Middle Belters and the generality of Nigerians, whose faith in the Nigerian Project is unshaken, hoping that the present crises would be overcome.
Jahun writes from Dutse, Jigawa State Capital.
