With the inauguration of Bola Tinubu as Nigeria’s president in May, a quirky, yet emblematic fact slid silently by many observers and prognosticators of Nigeria’s politics. For the first time since the return to civilian democratic rule in 1999, a Fulani is not among the country’s top two decision-makers.
Neither the president nor his vice is from the Fulani ethno-political stock. Tinubu is Yoruba from the South-West region of Nigeria, while his vice, Kashim Shettima is Kanuri, from Nigeria’s Chadic North-East.
When Tinubu picked Shettima as his running mate, he was then a sitting Muslim senator and former governor of Borno State, the heartland of an Islamist insurgency that has killed and displaced thousands of people.
The move by Tinubu, who is also Muslim, broke with the past practice where presidential candidates from major political parties have chosen running mates from a different religion in a bid to foster unity in the country.
The Fulanis, like Nigeria’s Christians, would have to be content this time with being onlookers from the outside, staring yearningly into the heart of ultimate decision-making in the country.
“Decisive political power has left the Fulani for the first time since 1999,” a senior member of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, noted.
It wasn’t always so. With the ascendancy of Olusegun Obasanjo as president in 1999, he chose Atiku Abubakar as his deputy. Atiku, a Fulani from Adamawa State triumphed over the late Abubakar Rimi, a former governor of Kano State who self-identified as Fulani and who was the choice of the then ruling establishment.
Eight years later, after a cool internecine political war at the seat of power between Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar, Umaru Musa Yar’adua, the scion of a feudal Fulani family in Katsina State assumed power as president. Yar’adua’s deputy, Goodluck Jonathan eventually chose a former governor of Kaduna State, Namadi Sambo, another self-identifying Fulani as his vice when he assumed power as president after Yar’adua’s death in May 2010.
Jonathan was replaced by Muhammadu Buhari five years later.
Buhari, like Namadi Sambo and Yar’adua, identifies as Fulani, although some assert that Buhari’s father was of Buzu (Tuareg) origin from Agadez in the Niger Republic, while his mother was Kanuri from Kukawa in Borno State.
‘Hausa-Fulani’ is a socio-political construct designed by Nigerians from the south and most widely used in the region. It is an ethnic designation that includes the Hausa and the Fulani. In the context of Nigeria, the groups are frequently combined as a reflection of their intertwined histories beginning in the 19th century, when the Fulani Muslim scholar Usman Dan Fodio launched a jihad that assumed control over Hausa city-states and established the Sokoto Caliphate.
“The cultural and ethnic melding of Northern Nigeria’s Hausa and the Fulani people,” Farooq Kperogi, columnist and professor of Journalism at Kennesaw State University in the U.S posits, “is so deep, so labyrinthine, so time-honoured, and so unexampled that a fictitious ethnic category called the “Hausa-Fulani” was invented by Nigeria’s southern press to describe the emergent ethnic alchemy it has produced”.
He added that “Northern intellectuals resented the label at first. For example, the late Dr. Yusuf Bala Usman, the famously iconoclastic professor of history at the Ahmadu Bello University who was ethnically Fulani and who was the scion of the Katsina and Kano royal families, condemned the hyphenation of Hausa and Fulani as both ill-willed and ignorant”.
Historian, Ibrahim Ado Karata noted of ‘Hausa-Fulani’ political hegemony in northern Nigeria, in a December 2017 interview, “Let us look at history for us to know how things happened. It was not just because you are Fulani that you automatically became head of state or president. Being scholars of Islam, they had great opportunity, and the only opportunity for one to have social mobility is to have knowledge. So, most of those who happened to be in leadership positions were educated people. What happened during the jihad, which was a movement of intellectual scholars, was that Dan Fodio had several students from Hausa land.
“But we also have to understand that Dan Fodio’s lieutenants did something very important that today we are seeing as something that brought unity to the people of northern Nigeria. They promoted Hausa as lingua franca. Most of their books were written in Hausa. Today, many Fulanis in the city don’t even, or can’t speak Fulfulde language. I’m sure the Sultan of Sokoto and Emir of Kano don’t speak Fulfulde. But they are all Fulani by ethnicity. Even Sardauna was speaking Hausa and English.
“One important thing you also have to look at is that Hausa has dominated everybody – the Hausa language, mode of dressing, food, even the system of traditional institutions in all the states in northern Nigeria, is in Hausa”.
Read also: Tinubu promises to replace subsidy with social amenities in Democracy Day broadcast
Since then, the term, ‘Hausa-Fulani’ has gained currency among the northern Muslim elite as a political mobilisation and identifying tool rather than an ethno-cultural authenticity.
The reality is that when the term is deployed for political enlistment, it tends to defer to the exigency of Fulani domination rather than to the Hausa side of it.
Thus, the absence of a Fulani among the nation’s top two leaders is a paradigm shift and the failure of a calculated gamble by the Fulani political elite.
Atiku Abubakar, Nigeria’s former vice-president and the candidate of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) was the choice of leading Fulani political elite, and all indications pointed to them working for his victory.
In January, Sa’idu Maikano, the national president, Fulani Jonde Jam Youth Association, a gathering of Fulani youths and herders across Nigeria, said they had endorsed the presidential candidate of the PDP, Atiku Abubakar, ahead of the 2023 general election.
“We sat and looked at the forthcoming general election, and we think about what will help our people because in the previous elections, we only go with a single party but now we will only endorse a candidate based on a recommendation from our people in their various states.
“But I am calling on our people to vote for a specific candidate as president, we will not talk about any governorship candidate, because they are job seekers.
“Today we have endorsed Atiku Abubakar, all Fulanis in Nigeria will give him our votes. We do not want to say 100 percent, but we will give him at least 97 percent of our votes,” he said.
Since 1999, Fulanis have become habituated to seeing one of their own residing in Aso Rock, Nigeria’s seat of government, with other deliberate appointments and positions allocated to them.
Being the predominant ethno-political bloc in the north, their hold on power and the instrumentations therein had been tight and had extended for a long time.
The Fulani enigma was for a long time the bespoke influence in governing the country. This made it possible for the ethno-political union to continue to be in the mix of every political consideration at all strata of the nation’s political affairs.
Just like the popular belief that only a religiously syncretic candidacy can ascend to power in Nigeria, the debuting of the Tinubu presidency went against popular sentiments that only with a Fulani candidate or running mate could a presidential contender access power in the country.
Unlike understandable public sentiments against a same-faith ticket, the absence of an ethno-political group in the highest corridors of power does not evoke the same kind of strong feelings.
In July 2022, governors of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), from the North-West and other leaders from the zone called on the ruling party to choose its vice-presidential candidate for the 2023 election from the region.
The term North-West in Nigerian politics is a subtle euphemism for the term ‘Hausa-Fulani’ who tend to dominate the region’s population
“The North-West,” said North-East stakeholders in a rebuttal, “had been within the corridor of power in the last seven years of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, and for such demand to be made indeed speak volume of gross insensitivity”.
“There is no traditional way of selection of a running mate. It is my prerogative. There is so much thinking that goes into it,” Tinubu said of his choice of Shettima as running mate. “Can you work with this individual? I see the capacity, I see the temperament. I see the vision for the mission at hand and I find him very suitable for that. So, I picked him, his name has been submitted.”
The agreement, Tinubu said, “is that North-East should be produced. So, I recommended and picked Kashim Shettima that is known to be very qualified, has a temperament and commitment, loyal to the party. Patriotism dictates that and he is very patriotic. Kashim Shettima has been nominated, his name is with INEC”.
Fulani socio-political leaders might be subtly smarting from the bloc’s absence from Aso Villa, but they also know that eight years of an ineffectual and wasteful Buhari government has left most Nigerians suspicious of a Fulani candidate.
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