By Justin Amase
The renaming of Federal University of Agriculture Makurdi to Joseph Sarwuan Tarka University is a fitting though belated tribute and honour to one of Nigeria’s greatest and most outstanding political engineers and leaders.
Both President Buhari who ensured the realisation of this project and Senator George Akume who firmly supported Rt. Hon. John Dyegh the sponsor of the renaming Bill, have to be commended for helping to partly redeem the huge overdue national debt to the minorities and the people of Benue state.
For long, the Nigerian ethnic minorities have been used and dumped by the majority-dominated Nigerian state apparatus. The minorities have been turned into the nation’s hewers of wood and drawers of water and the veritable flotsam and jetsam of Nigeria’s majority power games. They have been condemned to the providers of essential national resources for the economic survival and sustenance of the nation’s unjust and exploitative and inequitable resource distribution tendencies. Just as they were used as canon fodder for fighting both domestic and foreign wars for which they were always denied their rights to the spoils by those expected to be their brother’s keepers.
The late Chief J. S. Tarka’s political antecedents and astuteness during the most turbulent days of the ’50s and ’60s at a very young age were the stuff of legends. He was not only a great bridge-builder across Nigeria’s festering fault lines at the time, but the undisputed champion and leading light in the agitation for the rights of Nigeria’s ethnic minorities and the common man.
It is indeed a sad commentary on the Nigerian national question that with the passage of time, the rewiring of minority discrimination and marginalisation has not only become entrenched, but worst still it is assuming rather more frightening dimensions. This is evident in the inequitable distribution of federal projects, civil and public service recruitments and appointments by successive majority-led administrations.
In all these, the minorities are either given an insignificant share or completely consigned to crumbs from the masters’ table. And their opportunities are progressively dwindling by the day, especially with the additional deployment of religion as a major leadership recruitment and resource allocation criteria by Nigeria’s emergent leadership elite. This is unlike the days of Sir Ahmadu Bello, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe when deliberate bridges were built and at least token concessions made to accommodate and pour cold water over the burning coals of minority angst and cries.
It beggars belief that all this is happening in spite of the historical lessons of our not-too-distant national crises, and despite the findings and recommendations of the 1958 Willinks Commission of enquiry into minority agitations in Nigeria. Just as this ignores the reality that as a subnational group the minorities constitute a majority of 84.42 million or 42% of Nigeria’s current population of 201.5 million, a clear numerical majority. What then happens to the national fabrics in the event of a popular minority revolt as a collective?
Let our leaders refrain from playing the ostrich on the national foundation of the house of cards they have been erecting over the years and over the sweat and sacrifices of the minorities. They should draw on and learn from the lessons of past, recent and ongoing global sociopolitical ferments and upheavals ignited by sustained national injustices. Ferments that not only upturned supposedly invincible status quos but often led to inexorable balkanisation of old empires and nation states.
Let the prevailing unjust status quo in Nigeria be reengineered to breathe, inhale and exhale the global wind of change in favour of justice and national equity, especially as it pertains to minority rights and accommodation. President Buhari should be encouraged to go beyond tokenism and take the bull by the horns in reconfiguring a paradigm shift towards deliberate accommodation of minority interests.
Prior to and from the First Republic up to the time of his death on 30 March 1980 at the age of 58, JS (as he was fondly called) who was born July 1932, rose from serving as a member of the Federal House of Representatives in 1954 (and 1959) at the age of 22 years, to a shadow Minister of Commerce in the same year, and a member of the Nigerian Independence Constitutional Conference in 1958, as well as a member of the Willinks Commission of 1958 on minority rights.
He also served simultaneously as the leader of the largest minority party at the time, the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC), which later entered into an alliance with Chief Awolowo’s Action Congress (AC) and Alhaji Aminu Kano’s Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), to contest the elections of 1959 and 1963. After independence in 1960, he first served as the Minister of Transport and later Communications between 1966 to 1974.
His uncompromising agitation for minority rights led to his arrest and imprisonment in 1962 on trumped-up charges of treasonable felony, an action which combined with the 1959 and 1963 electoral crises and Middle Belt revolts led by the Tiv Riots (in which he was the arrowhead) between 1960 and 1964, triggered a series of events that snowballed into the first military coup on 15 January 1966, and the eventual termination of Nigeria’s First Republic followed by a civil war thereafter from 1967 to 1970.
With the return to civil rule in the Second Republic in 1979, JS contested as a presidential candidate in the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN), a party in which he was a founding member, and lost narrowly to Alhaji Shehu Shagari due to majority elite conspiracy. He was immediately elected a Senator from Benue State, and served as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance and Appropriation.
Yet, and in spite of the above intimidating political profile, J.S. was not found worthy of any major national honour or garlands for his outstanding role and contributions to nation-building, national stability and the current state of Nigeria’s national unity. This is unlike his United States of America counterpart, the late Martin Luther King Jnr who was honoured via a national holiday in a predominantly white-dominated nation.
Perhaps, J.S. was being punished even in death for his audacity in confronting the dominant Nigerian majority leadership bulls with the naked and bitter red flag of their injustices and inequities towards the minorities. For even in Nigeria’s national capital Abuja, he was only found fit for an obscure street in one of its suburbs to be named after him.
JS Tarka’s struggle was against national inequity, injustice and the domination of one group by another in a plural society, issues that still dog our national existence today. There is no gainsaying reminding ourselves that Nigeria’s patrimony is our common heritage. It belongs to all of us, and all of us therefore have an equal stake in it, whether majority or minority. In the event of any external attack on it by any adventurous aggressor, we will rise up together, join hands and fight against it.
The renaming therefore reechoed the relevance of the issues JS fought and died for in our efforts at nation-building. So let President Buhari roll up his sleeves and begin the journey towards real national integration and reconciliation by focusing on the healing of the wounds of the minority and excluded majority, equitable minority inclusion and true federalism beyond the commendable recognitions of the two Nigerian statesmen, late Chief Moshood Abiola’s and Chief JS Tarka.
Hon. Justin Amase, a former Commissioner for Information and Orientation, Benue State, can be reached on justinamase@yahoo.com
