HE probably doesn’t realise this yet but if reactions to his comments on the relocation of some units of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, and the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, back to Lagos are anything to go by, Ali Ndume, the Senator from Borno South, is already living in the past. Senator Ndume, as was widely reported all through last week in both the print and electronic media, spoke of some unspecified consequences that awaited President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for the proposed relocation. The senator was so carried away by his angry outburst that he allowed himself to be blinded and overwhelmed by passion. This came on the heels of similar objections raised by the Arewa Consultative Forum’s Bashir Dalhatu.
The CBN under the management of the current Governor, Yemi Cardoso, had announced its intention to relocate some units of its operations back to Lagos. This was through an internal memo which got leaked by those who didn’t like the decision and couldn’t wait for an official release of the memo. They leaked it to force those proposing it into a quick retreat. But rather than the CBN leadership beating a retreat, it is Senator Ndume and his ACF cohorts that now have their backs against the wall. They are being told by everyone who mattered and ought to know something about the issues in question, that they got their thinking all muddled up.
The planned relocation was informed by a plethora of reasons which included congestion at the headquarters of the CBN in Abuja. This was apparently an important even if it was not the main consideration. The idea was a long time plan that did not begin with the Tinubu administration. It had been in the pipeline for about a decade. While there are underutilised facilities in Lagos, the Abuja office is overpopulated, straining available facilities while posing danger to their users. What’s more: most of the clients and businesses that the units to be relocated to Lagos cater to are in fact located in Lagos. Which means that for purely operational reasons of efficiency the decision to relocate was the appropriate one.
No Nigerian needs to be told that Lagos is the commercial/financial capital of Nigeria. It is home to most of our banks and leading ports. But, for the likes of Senator Ndume and the pampered oligarchs who purvey their self- and group interest in the name of a so-called North, Tinubu had to be held accountable for a decision of the CBN and FAAN leaderships. The leadership of these organisations could only have been executing his putative agenda to relocate the administrative capital of Nigeria back to Lagos from Abuja. Abuja and her residents may be under the siege of bandits while Gwoza and Chibok, among other towns in the Borno South constituency of Ndume may have been overrun by Boko Haram and declared no-go areas, nothing of that means anything to these latter-day champions of a nebulous Northern interest. All that matters is how to join the gravy train that Abuja has become for political journey men like Ali Ndume.
It’s baffling the logic that Senator Ndume deployed to reach his conclusion about the import of the CBN and FAAN’s decision. He speaks of some Lagos boys in the corridors of power as if the exercise of power and the authority that goes with it belongs only to people from his part of the country. There is a sense in which some bigoted ‘’Northerners’’ who never saw any thing wrong with the invidious and clearly divisive manner Muhammadu Buhari governed Nigeria with his undisguised preference for a section of the country- there’s a sense in which some of these people believe they can browbeat other Nigerians by raising the red herring of a sidelined North just a few months after power moved to a Nigerian of a different ethnic stock. Which is not the same thing as saying this is payback time for any section of the country. Rather, it is to let those crying wolf realise that nobody is frightened by their noises. By nobody I mean Nigerians of diverse ethnic background, from the North to the South, the West to the East, that are clear-eyed enough to see through the smokescreen of ethnic bigotry that Ndume has lent his face and name.
This is not the first time Senator Ndume would be engaged in this type of outburst that is founded on empty air. it seems the Senator is more interested in being heard than making sense. He wants always to be seen as something of a gadfly, a maverick spokesperson of the North who goes all out to champion the cause of his self-named North that caters only to the needs of the elite. Not minding his relatively long experience in the legislature, Ndume, a former Majority Leader and current Chief Whip of the Senate, continues to throw tantrums like a neophyte politician just learning the rudiments of law making, not to mention statecraft.
He lost his position as Majority Leader as fallout from his reckless insistence that unproven allegations that Bukola Saraki imported a vehicle with forged documents and Dino Melaye lied about his educational qualifications. His insistence that these allegations be probed partly did him in 2017. He was suspended for a whole year, later reduced to six months. it was this same Senator Ndume, much like a school head master, who late last year threatened Senator Godswill Akpabio, current Senate President, with some unnamed consequences for his utterances as President of the Senate, only to turn around later to put a spin on the matter when it looked like he would be sanctioned. Which is to say that Ndume is not new to running his mouth and carelessly rushing in where angels fear to tread.
The impression he conveys is that Abuja, contrary to the intention of its founders, belongs only to Nigerians north of the Niger. The present location of Abuja is the actual ‘’no man’s land’’, if there is any such place. It is a gestalt, deliberately conceived, of at least three states. And Nigeria has moved beyond the point where anyone could stand and speak as if other parts of the country don’t matter electorally. Ndume spoke like someone without historical knowledge when he threatened Tinubu.
Buhari never became president until wise counsel prevailed and he reached out beyond his ethnic region. The moral of this is that no part of the country owns the ace permanently with regards to electoral success. Nigerians have moved beyond Ali Ndume and his kind of politics and he will sooner than later come to this realisation when the North in whose name he pretends to speak is the first to disown him.
