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The selection of a Yoruba, the Aro of Mopa, former permanent secretary, conservative politician, and lately, failed chairmanship aspirant of the ruling PDP, Chief Sunday Awoniyi, as the chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) - taking over from the largely inactive Alhaji Muhammadu Dikko Yusuf - is one of the most important news in recent times. The 'investiture' is coming on the eve of the bi-centenary of the Fulani Jihad which started in 1804, sweeping through much of what was to become Northern Nigeria, levelling earlier empires, like the Oyo empire, subjugating the Habe (Hausa) rulers and their people, and capturing under its orbit, the 'pagan' tribes in what is now known as the 'Middle Belt'. Apart from the Kanuri, the Igbo were perhaps the only major 'tribe' spared. They were to be politically subjugated more than any other similarly populous and 'enlightened' group in post-colonial Nigeria, within the second centenary of the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate. The Igbo seemed to have been visited with a harsher penalty in the 20th century for escaping the sweeping swathe of the Caliphate in the 19th century. The Yoruba, led by the Ibadan, stopped the Jihadist incursion and 'drive to the sea' - as Sir Tafawa Balewa was to boast in the 1950s - after the Jihadists had driven the Yoruba central political authority from the old Oyo, which was to the north-west of present day Ilorin. Today, Ilorin, the old conspiratorial military outpost of the Yoruba Empire, whose betrayal leveraged the Alimi forces, remains a sore point to Yoruba hegemonists and 'culturalists' who still fight a seemingly losing battle to retake the town from the Fulani 'colonialists'.

News of Awoniyi's selection reminded me of a lengthy interview with the man almost a decade ago when I was a practising reporter. I had asked a question relating to his politics regarded by many Yoruba as more in consonance with the interests of the Islamic North to which he responded with an aristocratic mien: "No one can be more Yoruba that Awoniyi; no one can be more Christian than Sunday". As I read this report, I was wondering if the tested bureaucrat would love to say now that, "No one can be more Arewa than the chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum" - who happens to be Sunday Awoniyi. Adamu Adamu, a prominent media chief in the North, writing in the Daily Trust recently, was on target in 'contradicting' Awoniyi's self-description, in line with the latter description, when he stated that: "Neither Hausa nor Fulani, yet (Awoniyi) is recognised by all as the embodiment of the complete Hausa-Fulani personality. Here is this strange man who surpasses Fulani in pulaku, who beats the Hausa at a display of kara; and has retained all the virtues of minorityness (sic) in a pluralist geographical entity." It is the kind of paradox that recommends itself in the typical Nigerian fashion.

When Awoniyi made that statement some years ago, he emphasized that 'the North' of the Ahmadu Bello legacy - a product of which he is - was not about the Hausa-Fulani, but an amalgam of several peoples, neither based on religion, nor on ethnicity. Adamu was even more elegant in describing this enterprise, when "stripped to its bones", as, "all about competence, honesty and fair-play." There is no doubt that such a 'North' is more of Awoniyi's (and Adamu's) wish than a reality for many people. At best, that 'North' is a very powerful concept - with powerful political consequences - and a potent smokescreen of arguably Africa's most sophisticated power elite, the Fulani Caliphal formation. At worst, that 'North' is based on Fulani (and to some extent, in combination with the Hausa) suzerainty in the Nigerian state; and the subordination of other ethnicities - if not the deconstruction of them - and religions to the Fulani Islamist identity and agenda. It is part of the hegemonic sophistication and (partly forceful) vision of that power formation that an Awoniyi or any other figure in the soft-underbelly of Caliphal power, say in the Middle Belt, can be made to speak for the 'North'. What more evidence could be presented of the 'de-tribalized' nature of this 'North', of the fact that, contrary to 'Southern propaganda', this 'North' is not a fundamentalist (of the Islamic type) concept and formation, and that even a 'Yoruba' (the 'noise-making, eternally tribalistic' ethnic category) can lead this conservative bastion of assumedly retrogressive elements. Usmanu Dan Fodiyo will celebrate in his grave the continued sophistication of the power bloc that he built around religious revivalism.

Beyond the fact that he was a supreme religious teacher and spiritual leader, Dan Fodiyo was no doubt the most sophisticated political theorist of all times in what was to become the Nigerian formation. He sought to understand the nature of power and knew that it had to be captured, held and tamed by its being imbricated in religious zealotry; because, in truth, the most firmly held forms of power are the kind that are enfolded in religion or quasi-religious concepts. (Witness: The Christian fundamentalists in charge of American power) Ahmadu Bello took it from there and enlarged Dan Fodiyo's domain, bringing to that bloc, a power and leverage over such a vast land that even Dan Fodiyo could not have dreamt of, as Professor Peter Ekeh articulates it. Within a few years of Nigeria's independence, Bello, in his sagacity and manoeuvres had won more 'slaves' for the Caliphate and taken the political Jihad to new heights. In the very soil of the Ogoni, the Itsekiri, the Ijaw and the Urhobo, as it happened, Caliphal power reigned supreme, using oil money to oil its machinery.

No one can deny that that 'North' was created out of a historical epoch; it is not a 'natural' entity. And that historical trajectory is based solidly on the Jihad. The Jihad created the possibilities of the 'Northern Region' on which Lord Lugard - who could pass for a Jihadist himself in his fascination with and utilization of the fallouts of the Jihad - built and which Bello consolidated. It is this 'North' that Muhammed Haruna spoke to recently in his open letter to General Theophilus Danjuma on the Nigerian condition under Obasanjo. But A.B. Ahmed, former editor of New Nigerian, already bade that 'North' a farewell in a two-part essay in the Guardian in the late 1980s ("Farewell to the North 1 & 2"), where he claimed that "once you mention the North, people go hysterical conjuring up images of one minded horde of unthinking people perpetually following a long turbaned emir, with or without reasonable cause". I quote him from memory, so I cannot affirm the exactness of the quote, but the line of argument is patently correct. So, where did that 'North' re-emerge in Muhammed's piece - given that Muhammed is one of the few competent voices of that assumedly dead 'North'? Is that 'North' is alive again in Awoniyi's selection?

The selection is significant. Even though it is not the first time the 'North' would do this, it is precisely this kind of politically sophisticated move that has been recommended to the core progressive leadership in Yoruba land with the issue of the separation of Afenifere-AD. Who did not know that the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) was the political arm of an ethno-religious formation, the Caliphate? After the major error of the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), which was unrepentantly 'Northern' even in name - the only of the three major parties in the First Republic to call itself by a regional name - the 'North' learnt its lesson. The NCNC and AG that were largely Igbo and Yoruba respectively, masked their ethnic trappings in the First Republic. But, by the Second Republic, that very sophisticated power bastion had moved on, not trapped like its competitors. It consolidated on the alliances achieved in the First Republic, realizing that it was actually possible to have a Northern party that was not so called in name, with its vassals scattered all over the country, with strongholds in the South-South particularly - a matter that still beats political analysts given that this region suffers more than any other region from the consequences of the wastages that are called economic and fiscal policies in Nigeria.

To return to the present, many might see Awoniyi as another 'Obasanjo', the archetypal-conservative, anti-Yoruba-mainstream, Fulani-power-reifying Yoruba man. Some might see Awoniyi and Obasanjo as the same - two Yoruba men regarded as good tools by the so-called 'Hausa-Fulani oligarchy'; being both Christians, they would constitute good advertisements for the 'large heart' of the 'North' and its 'melting pot' nature. They could both be seen as some of the best faces of the Caliphate's ability to make diverse, and therefore un-trap-able, its power and influence that looms large on the Nigerian space. Both might consequently be dismissed as "Fulani Yoruba". But that would not be a comprehensive accounting of the public career of both men. First, Obasanjo has since 'weaned' himself of that image of the 'North's' lackey - not for good, though - and the 'North' has appropriately disowned him. Again, both men cannot be similarly classified. For one, Obasanjo never worked with Sir Ahmadu Bello, the late pre-eminent leader of the North. So he could not understand the dynamics of the inner workings of the "Premier's Office" - as the core of the Sarduana bureaucracy was known - and its implications for contemporary politics by the heirs of that order. Awoniyi was in the inner circle - even though not "inner-inner" - of the Caliphal political formation. Also, he is a 'northerner', unlike Obasanjo.

But is it possible that Awoniyi as head the emergent Caliphal socio-political group, ACF, ends up like Obasanjo - a 'Northern' choice that turns out not to be in the best interest of a 'North' that has come to imagine itself to be the representation of the common Nigerian weal? Suppose as head of ACF, Awoniyi ends up also pursuing 'Yoruba' - or what will be described as 'Yoruba' - agenda? This is most unlikely precisely for the reasons above. Unlike Obasanjo, Awoniyi really 'belongs'. Obasanjo was only a 'conscript' - brief conscript - of this power formation, one whose personal limitations and uncommon self-aggrandizement were later to belie the 'conscription' in his second coming. On the contrary, Awoniyi is a capable, humble administrator, without the over-blown personalist agenda that could predispose him to subvert the power formation that produced, nourished and sustains him. Awoniyi's vision of Nigeria may be largely (Ahmadu) Bello-ist, if you will, but it is not a vision that is merely an extension of his ego, as the case with the other man.

So why is Awoniyi's undemocratic selection - as some 'disgruntled' elements in the group have described it - significant? Why is his selection to lead the political Caliphate, whose influence has been seriously eroded in the last two decades, crucial, as the Caliphate celebrates, next year, the anniversary of its bicentenary and faces the challenge of post-Obasanjo Nigeria? This selection is the stuff of what The News of the old would describe as "the North moves"; for indeed it is a major move in a political chess game. A Yoruba man would be leading the 'North' into its tri-centenary and into an immediate battle against another Yoruba man. It is precisely because of moves like this that the core power elite in the North has come to dominate politics in Nigeria. The current "Obasanjo challenge" - to the Nigerian idea - represents a different thing to this 'North'. Since the Igbos were routed in their attempt to stop the power bastion in 1966, and punished continuously since then for this 'up-starting' impudence led by Major Kaduna Nzeogwu, which almost completely wiped out a generation of Northern leaders, Obasanjo is the first Nigerian leader sanctioned by that power elite who seems to have turned totally on them - even though he has really not done much against them, beyond his horrendous personal style. The anointed now annoys. In spite of his incompetence, Obasanjo has, for the Northern hegemonists, demonstrated the 'danger' of allowing a non-Caliphate-respecting 'arne' (pagan) to take over power in Nigeria. And how else to fight him than to select a beloved 'arne' who will symbolically "de-tribalize" the battle partly because he shares Obasanjo's ethnicity, but one who does not share any of the grand sensibilities that authorize the Yoruba identity in contemporary Nigeria. (Which, incidentally, Obasanjo himself neither understands nor shares.)

Those organizing for power in this power formation - which itself is split along the lines of allegiances to Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Ibrahim Babangida - who use the Arewa identity as a resource are simultaneously using Awoniyi's Yoruba identity and his northern identity as tools to re-capture power. After using General Muhammadu Buhari's candidacy to stroke the soft underbelly of the so-called "Obasanjo-anti-North" apparatuses of the present order, Awoniyi would now be leading the final 'counter offensive'. At any rate, the man has enough personal grouse to want to fight the 'monster in the Villa'.

However, if they want to be fair to him, Obasanjo didn't start the decapitation of this power formation, which necessitated this fight. General Ibrahim Babangida, who is now in the ACF - when it is convenient for him to be there - started it. Or, in fact, we could go back to General Buhari. In his 'evangelical mission' with Tunde Idiagbon, Buhari - both of whom Prof. Wole Soyinka described as 'partners in (the) crime' of tyranny and martial 'Fulani hegemony' - started the desperate moves that brought the suzerainty of that power elite so sharply into relief in the 1980s. Under both generals, for the first time in Nigeria's political history, two Fulani irredentists in military uniform were heading Nigeria, even though the Yoruba name of one almost masked his identity. Members of the power formation that produced Buhari-Idiagbon were regarded by most Nigerians as responsible, more than others, for the crisis that led to the collapse of the Second Republic, yet Buhari and Idiagbon harassed and hounded others more than they did the northern elements - or so people believed. (Umaru Dikko is a sore limitation to this argument, but perhaps for other reasons). Buhari and Idiagbon in their infantile but sectional campaigns and ill-advised war on the press and other freedoms, provided grounds for their cheap ouster, in spite of the security state they were trying to create. Then IBB, who simply went after all power bastions in Nigeria, stepped in. IBB went after the Kaduna Mafia and confiscated their 'weal'. Consequently, he forced his friend, Ibrahim Dasuki, on the Caliphate and so demystified the House of Dan Fodiyo. After Dasuki, it was easy to assail the solidity of the Caliphate. Economic crisis, political crisis and social upheaval were to combine to erode this power bastion. General Abacha was the pallbearer. He removed Sultan Dasuki - in a laughable attempt to ensure 'justice' for the 'robbed' Maccido; Abacha and justice, excuse me! - and so permanently 'desecrated' the stool. The new Sultan was no longer heading the 'old' Sultanate, so much so that, as documented in a recent work, he was shut out of a gathering in Abuja under Abacha because he arrived after Maryam Abacha! The successor to the throne of Dan Fodiyo shut out because of a woman. Haram!

Today, the Sultan is no longer "His Eminence", as caliphal agents conspired to describe his throne - as superior to that of others in Nigeria, who are just 'Highnesses", forcing the likes of the reigning Ooni of Ife to take on the title of Olu-Aye (owner of the world), a pagan arrogance which the man has since dropped, ostensibly at the feet of Christ. The eminence is now a matter of history. The most improbable indication of the rupture in the very recesses of the Fodiyo coppice in Sokoto is not just that an ex-sultan (Dasuki) lives - the British did it first in early 20th century - but that the ex- "Commander of the Faithful" was in fact heading for the Oputa panel, a temporal authority, to seek 'redress' for human rights violation (his removal and exile), until perhaps he was persuaded against the 'sacrilegious' implications of that move.

This is the legacy that Sunday Awoniyi has been summoned to surmount. On the surface, Awoniyi is being made to lead the challenge against a fellow Yoruba. But the interesting thing is that in spite of Awoniyi avowal of his Yorubaness, neither he nor Obasanjo is considered a 'real' Yoruba among the rump of the dominant power elite in Yoruba land. No matter though, as we are set to witness an epic battle between Sunday Awoniyi and Matthew Obasanjo, the one on behalf of a largely Islamic power bloc and the other ostensibly on behalf of no discernible power bloc, other than himself. Interesting enough, it is also a battle for the soul of the 'North' among key northern power-hustlers - Atiku, Buhari and Babangida - which the Buhari forces have temporarily won, in a triumph over the Atiku forces who ensured the earlier headship of the body by a constant Aso Rock Villa-guest, M.D. Yusufu.

This project of the reinvigoration of the Arewa primacy in the Nigerian Union parades some characters who ought to be in jail for their participation either in the alleged recent looting of public treasury or human rights abuses under IBB and Abacha. How do you call a project one of re-invigoration of any sort when you put some of these characters in it? The ACF, you could say, is a collection of the discredited, the disaffected, the publicly condemned and a few genuinely concerned and credible voices in the North. Awoniyi, one would think, is ill-suited, given his own enlightened vision, his track record, his uncommon integrity and honesty, his thoroughness, to lead such a group. But, these are precisely the qualities that the Arewa community desperately needs now, as it advances towards the next 100 years of its history as arguably Africa's most powerful (ethnic) formation. The Arewa could not have found a better candidate for this stage of the battle, the immediacy of which compels the surmounting of the 'Obasanjo (read, Yoruba) menace' and recapturing of power from the fissiparous elements contesting for it. Which, when you stretch it, would specifically forbid the granting of power to the Igbo, for instance. Sokoto State Governor Bafarawa was succinct in a TELL interview: "We want our power back".

Awoniyi is also the best to stop one form of that threat to 'Northern' power represented by the attempt to re-fashion the Nigerian State along the lines proposed by the SNC advocates. Some of the most important duties of Awoniyi would be to kill for all times this move, or if not, subvert its more progressive and 'anti-North' agenda if the conference ever holds - such as the way Abacha subverted the constitutional confab - return power to its Nigerian 'habitat', the North, consolidate and ensure the continued territorial integrity of Nigeria as an 'offshoot' of 'Northern' integrity.

This 'new' move by the ACF, we must admit, is a decent and defensible response to the equally limited, ethnically fixated responses in other parts of Nigeria. It is a response to the frustrations of the Yoruba who think that Obasanjo has not silenced that 'North' forever by castrating it; of the Igbo East which seems unclear about where to locate its interests in the present formation, but wishes for a 'Biafran' republic of a type that would ostensibly save it from the reduction in her status and wastage of the talent of millions of its constituents occasioned by her 'contamination' by the Nigerian idea; and the minorities whose agitation for validation and resource control, if ever triumphant, will more or less exterminate this power bastion. But, at the same time, it should be significant that the Arewa group is repositioning at a time when even the last 'refuge' of Obasanjo, the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE), which used to give him unqualified support, has now come to accept that the president is a cultural embarrassment to even Yoruba supremacists, and a threat to the egalitarian, libertarian visions of Nigerians in all corners of the country.

Indeed Awoniyi would need all the assistance he can get from his Arewa constituents. He becomes the head of the Arewa community at a very critical juncture in Nigeria's history. In spite of his public image in the political South, Awoniyi is not your usual Caliphal 'man-Friday'. He is not anyone's quisling or hireling. He genuinely believes in a great Nigerian nation, even if that is informed by his conservative notion of such greatness. Although the complete story is yet to be out, because research is yet uncompleted on it, Awoniyi, with other key elements in Yoruba land, was instrumental to an attempt to ensure a cross-regional dialogue (between the North and the West) in the post-June 12 era, so as to ensure an understanding between Nigeria's two most powerful and visible power elite, the Northern Conservatives of Sardauna hue and the Yoruba progressives of the Awolowo camp. What became of that initiative remains to be documented. So, you cannot say Awoniyi has not tried his best to engineer a kind of 'national conference', even though you could call it "Class National Conference," rather than sovereign national conference. He was obviously genuinely engaged with finding a permanent solution to the protracted leadership crisis in Nigeria.

Those who then accuse Awoniyi of not being Yoruba would do well to remember that it was his Yorubaness that he used in this instance as a resource to broker 'peace' and dialogue. What you could accuse him of is a reductionist idea of how to solve the Nigerian problem, by convening a cult of aristocrats with conservative and progressive credentials behind closed doors in Lagos and later in Kaduna (the latter meeting failed to hold) to solve the Nigerian crisis. But the truth is that much of the crises of nation-states are solved when the power elites resolve to follow a particular path. No doubt that people's power displayed on the streets has engineered the bigger changes that reconditioned man's existence as a political animal - witness: the French Revolution, which is the touchstone of much of what has come to be known as 'democracy' in the real sense of mass politics. But this never vitiates the argument for elite accommodation.

So, how is Awoniyi as Arewa leader to push the frontiers of what he began in the mid-1990s? And how can that initiative be expanded to include other sections of the country? The challenge for him would be how he can link the Arewa (internal) dialogue with a national dialogue and not restart another elaborate and laborious project of seeking undue advantage in a country that moves towards a cosmopolitan conversation on Nigeria's future. He can help in making all realise that the kind of incompetence that we have in the Villa today is less a reflection of ethnicity than of the constitutive incapacity in an individual - as we ought to have realised all these years. With a Yoruba man at the apex of the Northern laager, perhaps the Yoruba can now hear the northern viewpoint better, or at least listen better than they ever did.

Part of Awoniyi's challenges then would also be how to respond to and perhaps rein-in the army of the lightly-employed political jobbers in the North represented by the likes of Wada Nas, Abacha's erstwhile "Special (Conspiracy) Duties" minister, who, in a most shameless manner moved from being the spokesperson of a murderous regime to a 'social critic' - who even reminded the Commonwealth heads of the suspension of Nigeria under Abacha and recommended same treatment for Obasanjo. Such reversible elements as this - in conjunction with their southern equivalents - whose only conception of public good is what they imagine to be in the interest of the 'North', no matter the immorality and evil implicated in it, would foul up the attempt at national dialogue. At the same time, such people also need to be factored in, so that their foul and trivial responses to serious matters, while it is part of 'democratic' free expression, are not allowed to be the loudest voices in a sober, honest and serious discourse of national redemption.

Awoniyi must attend to the open and hidden reasons why the conspiratorial combine selected him to lead the group. But he would also acquit himself well if he realises that first, he is a human being before he is an Arewa leader. And justice, as the Nobel laureate is given to stating, is the first condition of that humanity. The policies of Obasanjo regime (yes, a regime it is) are causing havoc all over the country. By Obasanjo's actions and inactions, several hundreds of our people are dying daily, many more go to bed hungry, many are jobless and miserable, many are sick and uncared for, many more are fleeing from the unreported hellish conditions of daily living while the president hosts the world. The social grievances underlying the smouldering discontent in the country, even though inaudible to President Obasanjo, are heard in every corner of the country - which is what the Trust captured in its controversial editorial, through the evocative words of J.F. Kennedy, about those who make peaceful change impossible making violent change inevitable. These social grievances hardly have ethnic or religious colourations; they are therefore angers and frustrations shareable across ethnic and religious divides. They are basically questions of food, water, housing, wages and civilised life. Let the 'new' ACF also remember these people as it makes its move to re-seize power. Awoniyi can lead the ACF to recognise and honour, and yet, proceed beyond, the intersection of "tribe and tongue" which has been used to hold Nigeria down at crossroads.

It was the Sokoto Caliphate that was set up with the triumph of the Jihad 200 years ago; as we mark the bicentenary, the goal of the present 'Jihad' should be a just, equitable, and egalitarian Federal Republic. The African-American writer, James Baldwin, writing on the centenary of the emancipation of the Blacks in the United States hollered, "the fire next time!" For us, at the bicentenary of the Jihad, it should be, "the Federation next time"!

Dr. Adebanwi, who teaches political science at the University of Ibadan, is currently a Bill Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, UK.