Down a parched road lies the tomb of northern Nigeria’s most celebrated leader. Legend holds that when the structure collapsed a few years ago the exposed body of Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and standard bearer of the northern elite , had been miraculously preserved as it was on the day he was shot in January 1966.
Today, that same elite, once regarded as the nation’s arbiter of power, stands divided and the region is in turmoil. President Umaru Yar’Adua, the latest northern-born leader, lies apparently incapacitated in his third month in a Saudi Arabian hospital.
A young northerner, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, allegedly tried to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day in the name of al-Qaeda. The region is reeling from the latest ethnic and religious violence that saw hundreds killed in and around the city of Jos last month. With a succession struggle looming, the name of the Sardauna, a traditional military title, is invoked as a symbol of lost unity. The political tussle between the north’s old establishment and a new breed of younger leaders could be decisive in charting the course of Africa’s most populous nation.
“The big problem today is that the north is not the north we used to know,” says a former presidential adviser. “In the old days, five or six of them would choose the candidate [for president]. Now it is fractured. The northern leadership is too old. The young Turks are no longer willing to listen to them.”
With its predominantly Muslim population bound together by a common language, Hausa, the north is home to more of Nigeria’s 150m people than the largely Christian south. The nation’s wealth in the form of prodigious oil reserves lies under southern soils, but the north has traditionally held the political power, producing a string of military and civilian rulers.
Yet when the generals handed power to civilians in 1999, northern elders backed Olusegun Obasanjo, a southerner long regarded as an ally, for president. Their shock when he purged northern officers and nurtured a new generation of northern politicians still reverberates.
As the power of an old guard who cut their teeth in the decades after independence from Britain in 1960 declines, a new batch of leaders has emerged. To their critics, many of these young Turks are products of a political system that diverts revenues from Africa’s biggest energy sector into a vast patronage network.
The old guard’s detractors counter that it was under them that institutions were corrupted. Far from being a golden age, their era was fraught with coups, civil war and the beginning of the economy’s long decline.
The north’s once-thriving industries have collapsed under the weight of smuggling, corruption and a failing electricity grid. Only lizards occupy boarded-up textile factories; a buoyant agricultural sector is a fading memory. Young beggars gather among traffic.
Official data show that in three northern states, more than half of all children under five are underweight, far more than in the south.
The leadership crisis has laid bare the elders’ waning authority. Some northern statesmen have upbraided the cabinet for failing to insist that Mr Yar’Adua hand over interim powers to his vice-president, Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner who has been forging alliances in the north. But the ruling People’s Democratic party – not the north’s ageing intellectuals and religious leaders – now calls the shots.
Half a dozen state governors and ministers from the new breed are possible contenders for the presidency in elections scheduled for next year, vying with former intelligence chiefs and retired officers favoured by the old guard.
“[The old guard] do not have the power to stop the young Turks from mounting into power,” says Shehu Sani, a democracy activist in Kaduna, the Sardauna’s resting place. “But they have a capacity to make things uncomfortable for them.”
That many in the north appear to have turned their backs on Mr Yar’Adua betrays the internal divisions. The president hails from Katsina, in the far north, and is resented by many who feel he has failed to share the benefits of office and revive the region’s economy.
For Yusuf Maitama Sule, an elder statesman from the ancient northern city of Kano who served under the Sardauna, the fusion of political and commercial power lies at the root not only of the north’s disintegration but also Nigeria’s ills.
“Sardauna used to tell us … ‘you can’t be running and scratching your buttocks at the same time’. You can’t be in government and do business at the same time,” he says.
Now 80 and blind, he adds: “Today … the politician, he’s not thinking of the national interests but his own personal interest, making money. That is why there is chaos.”
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Tom Burgis
West Africa correspondent
Financial Times