The majority-tribe privilege in Nigeria

 Majority-tribe privilege is the advantage the Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba enjoy as members of the three big ethnic groups in the country. The mighty advantage of belonging to one of the Big Three, the Wa-Zo-Bia groups, is both unconscious and conscious. For those who enjoy being part of the big tribes, the advantage is unseen to (majority of) them, but it is highly visible to the rest of us that belong to the minority tribes. When national public officials and the media list ethnicities in Nigeria and routinely name Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba, without bothering to mention even one minority tribe, you are reminded that Nigeria is wazobia and the country does not regard your existence. Minority-tribe persons grate under their skin when they hear Wazobia, a portfolio word that reminds them of their exclusion, marginalisation, and irrelevance in the general description of what Nigerian citizenship means. With the way the 2023 elections have become a three-tribe affair, you would be forgiven for thinking they are the only ones in the country.

While every tribe likes to believe they are the prime victim of the dysfunctionality of the Nigerian system, they are hardly ever conscious of the oppressions of being part of a country where the name of your tribe never comes up when describing the components of Nigeria. Wazobia domination and majority-tribe privilege influence national and corporate decisions, and the perception of many minority tribes about their collective worth within the Nigerian construct. Members of the Big-Three might interpret majority-tribe privilege as an inevitable consequence of the legacy of how this country was put together by imperial Britain, but they willfully created the lopsidedness in their competition for political power and the capture of the Nigerian state as a means of production. This is not to argue that they did it out of sheer malevolence, but the truth is that the Big-Three create and maintain the dominance of their members in most public spaces through their actions. I am also not saying that Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa always equally enjoy this privilege in all public spaces. I am only naming a privilege we have so far not defined explicitly.

Majority-tribe privilege refers to a built-in-advantage that individual members of Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani, and Igbo ethnicities enjoy in this country, and which is separate from their level of income, effort, perseverance, intellect, and skills. Majority-tribe privilege should not be construed to mean that an individual Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba does not struggle to attain anything in the country—goodies and prestigious positions are not just handed over to them. Also, many individual Igbo, Hausa-Fulani, and Yoruba do not enjoy the privilege or have access to political power and wealth that are identified with their ethnic groups. Members of these majority tribes work as hard as anyone in the world and their accomplishments are well-earned. But that does not remove the fact that they enjoy majority-tribe privilege, because the members of the majority-tribes have greater access to the goodies, opportunities, power, and resources of this country than members of the minority-tribes. To repeat, majority-tribe privilege refers to the built-in advantage that comes to someone irrespective of one’s degree of struggle or ‘hustle.’ In fact, it makes struggle easier for them than any other Nigerian.

Now, many members of the Big-Three would say that they are never aware of such a privilege accruing to them. They are right, because an integral part of this privilege is the lack of awareness of their size advantage, or that they hold more power than the minorities. They are the groups with dominant power in the Nigerian politico-economic space and they can take their Nigerianness for granted, unlike the minorities. This is no small power as we live in a country where politics, policing, parastatals, and the apparatuses of the national security system are easily reducible to favouring one’s group. Minority-tribe citizens cannot afford to forget these brutal facts of the Nigerian national space as they are reminded daily of their tribal identities and the comparative shortcomings of their groups in competitive and highly tribalised national spaces.

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  Members of the majority-tribes are often unaware that they move through professional, political, corporate, and even religious worlds with relative ease—another ease that members of the minority-tribes cannot take for granted or ignore. This ease of movement or navigating public spaces is due to parapo, and the concomitant attitudes of exclusion, entrenched corruption, patronage, and the prebendalism it facilitates. If you are a member of a majority-tribe, the chances of parapo working for you are much higher than minority-tribe members. Parapo persists in our public spaces because it benefits certain people who enjoy and consciously perpetuate them. For instance, parapoism influences the citing of national projects that subsequently give huge advantages to the majority-tribes in their own domains.

Majority-tribe privilege is to be able to walk into a random federal office and see people of your tribe widely represented, hear your language being spoken, or your language being treated as the lingua franca for serious transactions. It is also about walking through the streets of Lagos, Abuja, or Port Harcourt, for instance, and being spared from frequently being addressed in languages you do not understand. Often Nigerians of the Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo extractions assume that anyone they meet on the street in large Nigerian cities understands or speaks their languages.

Majority-tribe privilege is the avoidance of the humiliation of your identity constantly being erased or violently distorted. Often when members of one of the Big-Three meet a minority from one of the regions of the other two, they quickly chalk them down as a member of two tribes other than theirs. Often, every minority in the North is a Hausa/Fulani. Anyone from the former Eastern region is Igbo, and anyone from the former Western Nigeria is a Yoruba.

Majority-tribe privilege is neither tribalism nor absolute advantage. Tribalism, as it is used in Nigeria, means bias, conscious and unconscious prejudice against groups or individuals based on their tribal identity. Tribalism may be geared toward the reproduction of tribal inequality by groups that have power. Of course, majority-tribe privilege can be ultimately weaponized or instrumentalized as tribalism, but it is mostly a comparative advantage. Comparative advantage means the majority-tribes can produce benefits for themselves or extract resources from the centre at a lower relative opportunity cost more efficiently than minority groups, and therefore garner greater ‘profit margins.’ Nigerians, who are Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa-Fulani, are unwilling to recognise that they enjoy this comparative advantage in the national transactional spaces. By the sheer size of their population, ubiquitous presence, political power, intellectual achievements, and capital accumulation, they enjoy certain privileges over other Nigerians who are from minority tribes.

The majority-tribe privilege might not equate with ‘White Privilege’ over Blacks in the United States, or male privilege over females all over the world; nonetheless, it is a privilege. An individual Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa-Fulani person might say they have not benefitted from any privilege, but it does not mean their group does not enjoy certain benefits that minority groups can only dream about or occasionally taste as a forbidden fruit.

            My effort in this essay to name an ethical problem in Nigeria as a majority-tribe privilege is not to give a license to minority tribes to claim the divine status of victimhood or to portray themselves as saints. Often, minority groups at the national level are majority groups at state levels, and they inflict on others the pains they endure at the national level. There are no pure saints or sinners in this matter. Thus, we should try to seek solutions to privileges and prejudices that hamper the social flourishing, equality, and justice for all Nigerians.

Wariboko is Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics, Boston University, USA