Why Nigeria’s Northcentral States Can’t be Renamed “Middle Belt”
Farooq A. Kperogi
Saturday, June 13, 2020
Why Nigeria’s Northcentral States Can’t be Renamed “Middle Belt”
A member of the House of Representatives from Benue State by the name of Kpam Sokpo was reported to have sponsored a bill this week titled "Geo-political Zones of the Federation Bill 2020,” which proposes that the North-Central states of Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Plateau, and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, should be renamed the “Middle Belt Zone.”
This isn’t the first time this proposal has been made, but it’s probably the first time it has been formally presented as a bill. As someone who did extensive reporting on the contemporary manifestations and history of the Middle Belt identity in the early 2000s when I was a reporter, I think Sokpo’s bill has no chance of passing. Here’s why.
First, the term “Middle Belt” belongs in the category of what I once called cartographic genteelisms in a June 25, 2017 column titled “Geographic Genteelisms: How We Use Geography to Hide Our Prejudice.” I defined cartographic or geographic genteelisms as euphemistic labels we have invented to cover our prejudices or to help us make willfully opaque references to ethnic, racial, or religious identities.
Middle Belt isn’t a merely geographic concept. It’s actually more religio-cultural than it is geographic. That is why several prominent advocates for the Middle Belt are from states other than what is now known as the North-Central zone. For instance, the late Dr. Bala Takaya, with whom I related robustly in Jos in the early 2000s, was from Adamawa State but was one of the intellectual powerhouses of Middle Belt politics and identity. Dan Suleiman, a onetime chairman of the Middle Belt Forum, is also from Adamawa State.
So, in spite of appearances to the contrary, Middle Belters aren’t merely Nigerians who are caught in the mid-region of the country. Shorn of all pretenses, Middle Belt refers to Northern Nigerian Christians who are not ethnically Hausa. It excludes non-Hausa northern Muslims and Hausa Muslims in Nigeria’s central states.
It also excludes Hausa Christians, although they are more welcome to this identity marker than Hausa Muslims are. That’s why a non-Hausa Christian from southern Borno, or from southern Kebbi, which is as far north as you can get, is considered a “Middle Belter,” but Hausa Muslims like Abdulsalami Abubakar or Ibrahim Babangida from Niger State aren’t.
The Middle Belt, in other words, has historically referred to Christian ethnic minorities in all the six north-central states, the northeastern states of Bauchi, Gombe, Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, and Taraba, and the northwestern states of Kaduna and Kebbi.
Middle Belt intellectuals customarily talk of the “geographical Middle Belt” and the “cultural Middle Belt.” The cultural Middle Belt is indifferent to land borders. As I pointed out in my 2017 article, this is merely a tediously roundabout way to say a Middle Belter is a Christian (or at least a non-Muslim), non-Hausa person whom colonial cartography had labelled a “northerner.”
Andrew Barnes, a professor of history at Arizona State University, made this point eloquently in his 2007 academic article titled “The Middle Belt Movement and the Formation of Christian Consciousness in Colonial Northern Nigeria” published in the Church History journal.
He pointed out that when what is now known as the Middle Belt Movement was formed in 1949, it was initially called the “Non-Muslim League,” which he said was a “reflection of the shared perception on the part of the participants that what they had in common was a desire to be free of the Muslim political control that was to be implemented throughout the northern region as a prelude to decolonization.”
I know it’s easy for northern Muslims in the northcentral states to feel alienated by this history—and for Muslims in the northwest and the northeast to smell an anti-Muslim conspiracy. But that’s both simplistic and insensitive.
Religion is northern Nigeria’s dominant contradiction. Identities are defined by it and excluded on the basis of it. It is inevitable that when people are shut out because of their religious identity, they will unite and organize on the basis of the reason for their exclusion.
I recall a conversation I had with a Fulani Christian from Kano by the name of Bulus Karaye in the early 1990s about the systematic exclusion of northern Christians in politics and quotidian life in even their home states. He told me although I was a non-Hausa person from Kwara State, I stood a better chance to be governor of Kano than he who was native to the state.
He was right. In 1992, a Muslim, culturally Hausa man with an Igbo father and a Hausa mother almost became the governor of Kano State. From 2007 to 2011, Ibrahim Shekarau, who is ethnically Babur from southern Borno, became governor of Kano State. Interestingly, Christians from Southern Borno historically regard themselves as belonging to the “Middle Belt.”
In other words, the assertion of a Middle Belt identity is legitimate and justified because it is a response to the overt exclusion of Christian ethnic minorities in the North because of their religious identity. The late Bala Takaya introduced me to what Middle Belt intellectuals call the concentric circle of power and influence in Northern Nigeria.
There are different variations of the concentric circle, but the one I remember has Hausa and Fulani Muslims at the core of the circle and non-Hausa Christian northerners at the outer edges of the circle. All other northern identity categories fit somewhere in-between.
Like white people who deny the existence of white privilege, many in the far north had dismissed the accuracy of the concentric circle of power and privilege in the region. However, since at least the year 2000, in response to President Obasanjo’s apparent preferential treatment of non-Hausa, non-Muslim Northerners in political appointments between 1999 and 2007, many people in the subregion have now embraced the label “core north.”
Since the existence of a core necessarily implies the existence of a periphery, the implication is that parts of the North that aren’t “core” are peripheral and insignificant, which basically affirms the accuracy of the concentric circle of power and influence that Middle Belt intellectuals had called attention to many years ago but which Hausa Muslims had dismissed as mistaken.
However, the agitation for a Middle Belt geo-political identity is another attempt to create a new “core” (I’ve also heard the expression “core Middle Belt”!) with its own new periphery. In other words, just like “core north” is a geographic genteelism for “Hausa Muslim North,” “Middle Belt” is a geographic genteelism for a Christian ethnic minority region out of what colonial cartographers designated as the “North” since the early 1900s.
Kwara, Niger, and most of Kogi states don’t fit this identity. Kwara, for instance, is predominantly Muslim. What is more, central and southern Kwara are linguistically Yoruba, which gives them more cultural affinity with the Southwest than with the North or the “Middle Belt.” Kwara North is peopled by Baatonu, Nupe, and Bokobaru people who share more cultural and religious affinities with people from, say, Sokoto than they do with people from Plateau. They would be lost in a Middle Belt zone.
Everyone knows most of Niger State used to be part of the Sokoto Province. It is culturally indistinguishable from states in the far north. Kogi is a confluence of so many cultural, ethnic, and religious influences and doesn’t fit quite easily in a Middle Belt Zone.
The Ebira in the state are predominantly Muslim. The Okun people are linguistically and culturally closer to Ekiti State than they are to any state in the North or the “Middle Belt,” although the late Bello Ijumu from there was prominent in the Middle Belt movement. The Igala are so spread out that they can be found even in the Southeast and in Edo and Delta States. And so on.
Most importantly, though, Muslims in Kwara, Niger, Kogi, and even Nassarawa states are unlikely to accept being part of a region whose name owes etymological debts to a 1940s movement called the Non-Muslim League.
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Cornelius Hamelberg
The idea is unity in diversity. A good idea.
Perhaps an outlandish view, but, really, what’s all the fuss about? I have patiently read through and fail to see what all the fuss is about, apart from the scribe of the piece’s certified predilection for splitting hairs as in the traditional how many angels are dancing on the point of a pin?
Would there be any special disadvantages or negatives attached to that certain section of Nigeria being an administrative unit labelled “The Middle Belt”? At the end of the longwinded (as usual) diatribe/ apology/ verbose explication we are left bereft of an alternative nomenclature that should be mutually pleasing to the various people and parts of that belt of/in Nigeria being lumped together under that one banner or umbrella under the Nigerian sky and known as “the Middle Belt”
Once upon a time, there was a whole country that one man, Lord Lugard, carved out in Africa and it’s still in one piece and still known as Nigeria.
The other part Cameroon, still remains.
Once upon a time too, we had the” Mid-West” which sort of disappeared, sometime after the Biafra war of secession.
Today we know that “Abuja is the capital city of Nigeria, in the middle of the country.” ( OK, if you want to be the crank that you are and quite fanatical about it, Abuja is probably not in the absolute “middle” of the country, give or take a few inches, kilometres, or if you’re British, miles – and when a Swede says mile (mil) in the Swedish language, he/she is talking about what six British miles – so even “mile “ can be deceptive – goodness knows the kinds of areas of disagreement when it comes to measuring distances in the various mother tongues and in Arabic, “before the White Man came”
Today, the question is by which criteria does one Besserwisser Kperogi want to delegitimise the conveniently political, geographic, geo-political, multicultural, multi-religious as always, pluralistic and demographic categories that Nigerian lawmakers want to pass into law?
We have North America, Central America, South America, no problem.
We have what in popular usage is till conveniently referred to as “the Middle East” and, “the Far East”, no problem
In the mighty United States itself, we have what’s known as the “South” and “the Deep South”, delineations made intelligible and credible by geography, climate, and history, lastly, maybe permanently, the sharp divide and division made by the civil war. At this stage of US history, I’m thinking of his lastly read Burr and O how Gore Vidal is being dearly missed - Jimi Hendrix too
“I’m going way down South
Way down to Mexico way - alright
I’m going way down South
Way down where I can be free
Where no one’s going to find me
Ain’t no hangman going to
Put a rope around me “ ( Jimi Hendrix: Hey Joe
He would have been saying a thing or two about the current situation , just as one would normally expect someone like Kperogi another Nigerian African Negro currently holed up in Georgia to be saying a thing or two about other topical matters about fellow humans, brothers like himself are having their asses lacerated and lives terminated by the US law enforcement police.
Challenge me about this conundrum in Ebonics or in Her Majesty the Queen’s English and ( my grandfather was an architect, not an Imam and my someone else sang in the Westminster choir ) partly why I’ll be so funny you would have to leave Atlanta by reverse middle passage.
But thank GOD, the latest news is that A letter signed by all 54 African nations has requested the UN Human Rights Council to urgently debate racism and police violence – we’re going to iron this out without disputing how North of South or East from West Egypt is from Nigeria or if North Africa is part of Africa or of the Saudi Arabia peninsular
The Middle Belt – as a concept or political concoction has occupied some space in this forum and in the runup to the Nigerian presidential elections Professor Moses Ochonu’s deliberations on this matter in this forum – and out of this forum struck a chord. He himself Idoma and from Benue which is at the epi-centre of what is referred to, without equivocation as “ the Middle Belt “ – the only outstanding question still being how much more of the areas immediately North and South of the “Middle Belt” will be absorbed by / incorporated into the so-called Middle Belt – and of course the perennial question of the Muslim-Christian matrix, the Middle Belt symbiosis, the Muslim- Christian interface in the Middle Belt living as one people (Nigerians) in peace and harmony - Islam making incursions into the Christian folds through peaceful dawah and vice versa Christian missionary zeal wanting to convert pious Muslims into the holy bread and imbibing the holy wine, both religions having their exclusive claims about their paths to salvation, perhaps it should be better that Boko Haram united the country under one flag and appointed Kperogi as their minister of the Interior, so that he and only he will sort out what the various regions under the unified Islamic administration should be called? That should be the beginning of ruling by decree and dispensing with amiable, amicable discussion, disagreement, debate, agreement, a majority vote, maybe even a consensus in the senate for the good of the land – after all, Shakespeare did ask, “What’s in a name?”
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