By Chris Gyang
It is morally reprehensible and the highest form of injustice to betray someone who has labored hard, always bending over backwards, to please you. But in the game of politics, sometimes morality is kicked to the background and the cut-throat dictum – “the end justifies the means” – is put forward as the overriding principle.
Perhaps no politician in Nigeria today feels the sting of this sort dictum like Governor Simon Bako Lalong of Plateau State. For the records, he also occupies the ‘exalted’ position of the Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum.
Here is one governor who has spent a good part of his tenure doing tortuous, unbelievable contortions to prove to these same people in Jos North who eventually did him in politically that he was one of them. But in the affairs of men, impulses are not written on faces.
When Mr. Lalong finally exits Government House on May 29, 2023, he will be a very sad, despondent man. This native, prodigal, son who abandoned his own people will be heading back into the harsh, real world full of regrets for so callously misplacing his trust. And the cost? A dented political career and, most importantly, a reputation that may not be easily regained or repaired.
He will carry the scars for a long time to come. This cut may yet be the deepest.
Fired by an inordinate zeal to swell his personal ambitions, Governor Lalong almost always sat on the fence whenever it mattered most. As long as he was given an ephemeral sense of political significance and belonging by the forces in Jos North and the core north, he cared less about the welfare of the majority of his citizens.
At best, he resorted to the misleading narrative churned out by the Buhari administration that it was “bandits, unknown gunmen, miscreants and criminals that are killing Plateau people” even when it was clear that it was Fulani terrorists that were on the rampage, without let or hindrance from the powers that be.
They propped him up with false adulation, which swelled his ego. He sometimes assumed the part of a petty despot at the top of the political food chain and wreaked unbelievable havoc on our polity, economy, proud history and psyche. Indeed, he was a hero of the core north. But now he is in a deadly free fall. They have let go of him, discarded him.
You can only imagine his imminent crash.
Governor Lalong would have loved to continue hibernating in the self-delusion that he was the darling of the core north and their siblings settled in Jos North. But his public denunciation by Sheikh Sani Yahaya Jingre, a key political player who commands a lot of respect among Muslims in Jos North, rudely burst the governor’s make-believe bubble.
After the Juma’at prayer on the eve of the February 26 by-election, the cleric ordered Hausa and Fulani Muslims in Jos North to vote for the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) instead of the governor’s APC. This must have rudely brought Mr. Lalong back to earth.
This also set the stage for the disastrous outing of the governor’s candidate in that by-election, coming third behind the PDP and PRP – a relatively unknown Party in the state.
This singular act once again underlined the religious and ethnic character of the politics played by Sheikh Jingre and his people in Jos North. Sadly, the governor had been an active supporter and beneficiary of this exclusionist practice since 2015.
Critics wonder why he could not leverage on his much vaunted influence and clout as the Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum to rally his fellow governors in the region to beat these recalcitrant Party members into line. After all, the sheikh and his followers have their ancestral roots in these other northern states.
But even if that was impossible, why didn’t Governor Lalong exploit his reputed closeness to President Buhari, who has a cult following among the sheikh and his ilk, to appeal to them to support the governor who has consistently been a most loyal ally?
Whether he tried these or not, there is a growing consensus among citizens here that even if he did, the truth is that he would have hit a brick wall because both President Buhari and the Hausa and Fulani settlers of Jos North have always perceived Mr. Lalong as a pawn mainly to be used in achieving their political and religious agenda.
He must be conveniently discarded whenever he is no more relevant or begins to show signs of constituting a stumbling block to their set goals – such as refusing to hand them the APC ticket for the by-election.
Today, Governor Lalong has become a political liability to the APC in the state as it is reeling from desperate internal dissensions and mass defections to the opposition PDP. His relevance has waned considerably.
Above all, he has lost the respect of the Christian majority in the state because they see him as having served as a willing accomplice of the core north and their Jos North kith and kin.
He is now a lonely and forlorn political figure, caught between a rock (the Jos North Hausa and Fulani settler community) and a hard place (the state’s Christian majority). Political commentators say that, given this parlous state of affairs, Governor Lalong’s chances of delivering the state to the APC in 2023 are almost zero.
They strongly believe that the February 26, by- election was a litmus test for what will come in the 2023 general elections in the state. This is due to the fact that Jos North/Bassa Federal House of Representatives Constituency is composed of one of the most vibrant, diverse and cosmopolitan political demographics in the country.
Plateau State, an entity whose proud and independent indigenous people have historically been fiercely opposed to the domination of the core north, has never supported the APC, widely seen as a northern political party.
But Governor Lalong amply succeeded in exacerbating this hostility towards the APC by succumbing to the whims and caprices of the Buhari administration – especially pertaining the burning issue of Fulani terrorism which has had a heavy toll on the human and material resources of some of the state’s indigenous populations.
The Hausa have a chilling, brutal proverb: no matter the level of familiarity between a man and chicken, it can never stop him from slaughtering the chicken. Macabre as it may appear, the symbolism embedded here captures the very essence of the relationship that has existed between Governor Lalong and the Jos North Hausa and Fulani settlers since 2015.
He is now a lost, wandering, prodigal/native son who has been humiliated, shunned by those forces whose identity he struggled so strenuously to adopt.
It could still be said that to bite the dust the way he has done may not be the end of life.
But, like his counterpart in The Good Book, is he willing to find his way back home?
▪︎ Gyang is the Chairman of Journalists Coalition for Citizens’ Rights Initiative – JCCRI