Nigeria’s mythical cabals and phantom mafias
By Salisu Na’inna Dambatta
Malam Garba Shehu’s press release on June 14, 2022, denying that a cabal is making decisions in the Buhari presidency regarding many issues in the country triggered and rekindled the appropriateness of recalling how as a reporter I went in search of cabals and mafias and their methods. It was a futile exercise.
First some definitions: Collins online dictionary says, “cabal” is used in critisizing a group of politicians or other people who meet and decide things secretly. Another definition says cabal implies “a small group of secret plotters, as against a government or person in authority.” None of these definitions suggests anything sinister. Interest groups can design their legitimate activities in secret and openly persue such interests.
What of mafia? Aside from its definition as a group of organised criminals, there is a definition relevant for this item. It runs thus, “any small powerful or influencial group in an organisation or field.” This suggests that each organisation can have an influencial group which promotes its legitimate interests. “Caucus” is used widely. And it is interchangable with the healthier definition of mafia.
While working as the “Zone A” Chief Correspondent of the Daily Times of Nigeria in Kaduna, there were stories in Nigerian newspapers and magazines about a Kaduna Mafia that was said to have been the power remotely controlling and manipulating every federal government, and by extension, Nigeria. This is fantastically unbelievable.
As a reporter of the largest newspaper in the country with a zonal headquarters in Kaduna at the time, I tried to find out the truth about the existence, roles and how that mafia in Kaduna influences the government and its supposed methods in manipulating the country as it wished.
My tedious and unsucessful search for members of the Kaduna mafia and its ways was ongoing when that endeavour was complicated by a media frenzy about Ikenne Mafia. This mafia was said to have its base in Ikenne. Myth had it that it revolves around the all-time Yoruba leader, Chief Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo. One of its purposes was to challenge and terminate the influence and powers weaved and attributed to the highly elusive, supposedly all-pervasive and probably invincible, Kaduna mafia. In addition to that objective, the Ikenna mafia was assumed to have been keenly focused on the destruction of the strong unity of the defunct Northern Region, which was politically intact despite breaking up the North into several states.
As it was in the case of my fruitless search for the big and powerful elements behind the Kaduna Mafia, it was not possible for me to pin down a particular person who claimed membership to the Ikene mafia in the defunct South Western region.
As if the country does not have enough myths on the existence of powerful mafias, another mafia was created and played up by the powerful media in the country: the Lantang Mafia. Many assumed, in fact some people actually believed that, a group of military officers of northern origin from Plateau state, belong to a mafia which influenced many activities in the various military-led governments that ruled the country. The assumption and attempt to give such officers a mafia colouration that was obviously fallacious, could have been borne out of envy and malice. It is a mafia that had neither a register for members nor an office where it met.
In my view, cabals and mafias in the context of Nigeria, were created to have fall guys to blame for failure to achieve certain goals by different factions of the Nigerian elite, an alibi or excuse for failure.
Beside their shadowy mafias, which were assumed to have their hands in all economic, political and other beneficial activities dominated by the elite, another one was conceived and developed in the imagination of those who always seek to read ulterior motives in every decision by any government they do not control.
They use the word “cabal” to describe such imaginary exceptionally influential power brokers who are said to be more powerful than the President of the country. This is an unlikely scenario.
After all the endless claims of the existence of mafias and cabals over the years, the failure to name members of such groups and locate their addresses by those who say they exist, indicates that they only exist in the realm of unfounded speculations. In the case of the Buhari presidency, the claim of a cabal driving its direction and policies, is not only false, but mischievous and unfair.
Salisu Na’inna wrote from Dambatta, Kano State.
