Opinion
Can we get Buhari to resign? Today!
Now that the wise, prudent, babes and suckling have come to the gruelling realisation that Nigeria is gradually coming to a deadly repose under President Muhammadu Buhari; it is nice seeing everyone in frenzied scampering. Legislators in Abuja, like vipers stirred off their places of comfort, are spitting venom. The political elite, seeing from afar the impending expiry of their inordinate suck of the Nigerian nectar, are confused and disconcerted.
Abuja, their nest of filch, is becoming too hot for comfort. The same Abuja is also fast assuming the violent notoriety of Afghanistan and Tel Aviv. Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists coming in different names and attired in shades of different murderous allies like ISWAP, Boko Haram, Ansaru, bandits and Fulani herdsmen, wave at Aso Rock from the cusp of their guns and grenades. Exactly a week today, they hoisted aloft a whiff of their earlier threat to kidnap President Muhammadu Buhari and the Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, by ambushing the elite Brigade of Guards, the president’s elite security guard.
Apparently a flex of bravado and their can-do bravura, the terrorists had stormed Bwari, the federal capital territory, where they ambushed a detachment of the elite Nigerian troops. At the end of their operations, three officers and five soldiers had been killed. A few days later, a military checkpoint close to Zuma Rock which borders Niger state and the federal capital territory, was reported to have been attacked by people feared to be terrorists. On the economic front, the Nigerian naira scurry inside its hole whenever the dollar and other foreign currencies holler, hoisting its worthlessness for the world to see the emptiness of the minds of Nigerian rulers.
Those who hysterically warned Nigeria of the bottomless pit the country was blindly walking into by voting for Buhari in 2015, as well as those who naively shouted “Sai Baba!” at his approach have now all met at a critical juncture of harrowing regrets. Nigeria is slipping off the handle very fast. In the midst of this grotesque situation, I remember two nuggets which effectively explain the Buhari phenomenon. One is the lyrics of Jamaican reggae musician, Peter Tosh; the other is an ancient yet scary anecdote we were told growing up in the 1970s. The anecdote was a weapon the Yoruba society of the time used to wean children away from greed. It also illustrates the saying that all that glitters isn’t gold. It was the story of a notorious womanizer named Lailo whose pastime was an insatiable collection of Daughters of Discord – apologies to Prof Wole Soyinka.
Represented as a hunter in some versions of the anecdote like the one Ibadan-born Awurebe musician, Dauda Epo Akara, narrated in one of his songs, but in some others simply as an avaricious man for whom précis couldn’t be found in his sexual diary. One market day, Lailo was in the market to hawk his merchandise. His gluttonous eyes then caught this ravishing beauty with the radiance of a zebra. She had no single blemish on her body. Instantly, the lady’s arresting beauty took Lailo’s brain to factory reset mode. He instantly ran a ring around her and baited her as she went through each of the serpentine processes of purchase of wares in the market.
As this beautiful lady made to leave the market, Lailo helped her carry some of the wares and then Lailo followed her. The lady repeatedly warned Lailo to leave her alone and return to his home, to no avail. He assumed that her refusal of his advances was a demonstration of the usual women prudery which actually translated into her desiring him.
As they walked down the forest path, this beautiful lady continued warning Lailo to go back. “If you do not take your leave of me, we will get to a bluish river that challenges the heart of the brave-hearted – t’o ba dehin, o kan odo kan aro” the lady warned. Lailo obstinately continued following her. “If you do not take your leave, we will get to a blood-red river that challenges the heart of the brave-hearted – t’o ba dehin, o kan odo kan odo kan eje,” she warned again. Lailo persisted. And then they got to a point of no return indeed. As they sunk further into the forest, they met guards, to whom the beautiful lady returned all her borrowed appurtenances of beauty, one by one – the beautiful face, the arresting legs of a gazelle, the heap-like backside and the cuppy bosom of a damsel. Lailo persisted. At the last minute when it dawned on him that he had got to a point of no return, Lailo attempted to run back. By then, the beautiful lady had turned into what she really was – a fearful, frightening sphinx, with the incisors of a carnivorous animal. As Lailo attempted to run, the animal tore him into pitiable mincemeat.
The Nigerian 2015 election that enthroned Buhari as president and the enormous and grotesque carnival of hopelessness that the country is embroiled in today remind me of Tosh’s Nobody feel no way in his Mama Africa album. Its lacerating lyrics sink deep into the subconscious. Tosh had warned that “It’s coming close to payday” as “everyman get paid according to his work this day” and that, “you cannot plant peas and reap rice, cannot plant cocoa and reap yam, cannot plant turnip and reap tomato,” and “cannot plant breadfruit and rea potato”.
In the words of Tosh, it is our payday as a country. In 2015, we planted the seed of a terrorism-loving president and today, we are alarmed that terror has festooned the neck of the country. We sowed as seed the weakest leader in the history of humanity and we expected a valiant, running helter-skelter now that he cannot lift a finger for us. Again, General Buhari was that beautiful sphinx whose bewitching look entrapped Nigeria, the Lailo, in 2015. He looked so enrapturing to behold. His minders said he possessed multiple healing features. Buhari was marketed as a sure recipe for our multifarious national ailments. As a retired general of the Nigerian Army, he was held as the answer to the dreadful, then mutating Boko Haram insurgency calamity that had befallen Nigeria. He was a fitting response to the cluelessness of Goodluck Jonathan. He would incinerate corruption with his fabled pedigree of personal integrity. His vice, whose gift of the garb was in the realm of legendary Mark Anthony’s, would fix the Nigerian economy, so the lame narratives went.
However, one by one, Buhari unravelled unto us like the ravishing beauty of that Lailo sphinx. He peeled those fake ascriptions, one after the other, until he manifested as one bloodsucking affliction. Today, that beautiful woman we saw in the market has swallowed more blood than any other in Nigerian history. Today, the demon of the marketplace has swallowed so many of us in his insatiable bowel.
Unfortunately, we have crossed the Rubicon and it is no time for apportioning blames. The urgent assignment in the hands of Nigerians today is how we can collectively retrieve this great country from the hands of the small-minded sphinx who has taken our country to this precipice.
Last week, a video surfaced on social media which succinctly explains that the Nigerian Lailo is hanging inside the incisors of the sphinx. Never did it occur to me that a social media-circulated video clip could forcefully deny anyone of their peace of mind as that viral clip did. It was a duet featuring a cast of two ladies. The ladies were unknown angels whose assignment on earth was obviously to forcefully burst human beings’ lachrymal glands. They did this effectively. Anyone who watched the clip lost some ounce of tears in the process. The heroine of the one-minute, fifty-four seconds-duration clip was a lady of obvious northern Nigerian descent. Strapping a blue Muslim hijab around her head and neck, medicated glasses sitting uncomfortably on the ridge of her nose, she strapped a car seat belt around her, indicating that the filming of the clip was inside an immobile car. Intermixing Hausa and English to form a perfect blend of sorrowful outbursts, she told the story of the horror that has become Nigeria’s northern Nigeria under President Buhari.
“I saw horror when I was in captivity. I had nightmares when I was in captivity. That (was) why I left Nigeria; that was why I am here. But walahi talahi if you have not been through what we have been through… a lot of us who have been through captivity and been raped multiple times by terrorists, you will not know the pains, you will not know the agony… Nobody believed me; nobody said anything, nobody helped me (cries helplessly). No one! No one! And that is what is happening right now to our children. They are being killed. Nobody is saying anything! … I was raped! I was raped! I was raped by terrorists! I still have marks on my hands”.
And then she burst into a paroxysm of a highly contagious revue of tears. It was so infectious that her colleague cast who had listened to her grisly narrative without a word, except occasional punctuating grunts of Lailahilahala! Lailahilahala, began to sob. The ladies immediately and unwittingly recruited me into this lachrymose assignment of theirs. Like a burst pipe, my tear gland burst too, as I suspected it did with many Nigerians who watched the clip. As the horror narrative gradually reeled to its end, the two ladies then tore into another round of very fitful and almost disconsolate gush of weeping. None of the two ladies could or attempted to console the other. I cried along with them. Even if you were as unfeeling and mirthless as to be capable of eating the ugly, unexciting and meatless head of a tortoise for dinner – as the Yoruba would say – your eyes, at this intersection, must be filled with dripping well of hot tears.
The hopelessness crafted in that lady’s narrative fills the atmosphere in Nigeria today. Since the Kuje jailbreak of July 2022, a gush of episodic dramas has happened in the country. During that attack on the Kuje Medium Security Prison, the terrorists bombed the prison while freeing 879 inmates, 64 of whom were their comrades in terrorism. Each of these events makes Nigerians realize that they can no longer continue to pretend about their country. As that Ghanaian Akhan poet chanted in ‘My Song Burst,’ one of the poems in A Selection of African Poetry by Kojo Senanu and Theo Vincent, “War has begun, says So-kple-So,” Nigerians realized that the days of pretences have long gone past. On their hands is one of the most irresponsible and ineffective governments in human history. The oats we sowed some seven years and two months ago have germinated into very atrocious and poisonous weeds that exterminate us in droves.
The elites have now seen the danger Buhari portends. They are scampering from pillar to post to salvage their pot of soup. Last Wednesday, some 80 senators, from a total of 105, in concert with majority members of the house of representatives, handed over a six-week ultimatum to Buhari to fix Nigerian security or risk being impeached. The house was also reported to have cancelled its earlier decision to go on recess. A band of grovelling party-men immediately came to Buhari’s rescue. Feebly, they try to exonerate him from the state of hopelessness he has thrown Nigeria. Flakes of that fatal ambush of Brigade of Guards members by terrorists in Bwari reflect the up-scaling of the level of despondency in the polity. In response, the FCT shut down all public schools, while the Nigerian Law School was forced to hurriedly find an alternative venue for its call-to-bar ceremony. Boko Haram, whose pseudo ideology is war on education, won.
It is however certain that push has come to shove. With our hands, we have brought into office a man who is either too naïve, too complicit or too incompetent to lead Nigeria. Despite this incompetence, Nigeria has funnelled stupendously unbelievable national patrimony into this barren exercise of their security. The Buhari government was reported to have spent N4.85 trillion, while withdrawing $2.35bn from the ECA fund, ostensibly to wage war on terrorists who are right now by the tip of its nose. Yet, the Islamist terrorists are energised by the infamous incompetence of the Buhari government. Having succeeded in the spate of attacks it carried out, fears are mounting that public institutions are the suspected next targets of attack by these demons. Those who, over the years, were demonised as enemies of Buhari and those who demonised them are today on the same queue, having come to the reality that Nigeria is haemorrhaging to death fast.
Semantics are being deployed to demarcate where Nigeria stands today. Is it failed, failing or just a fragile state in the hands of Muhammadu Buhari? What we see today that has metastasized into terrorists ambushing the advanced team convoy of the Nigerian president came from Buhari’s dalliance with terrorists, right from the beginning of his regime. The president found excuses for every tissue of terrorism inflicted on this country. Fulani were pastoralists who were forced into Nigeria by the drying up of rivers in the Sahel, he once claimed. As Fulani, terrorists have no boundaries in Africa, a member of his cabinet once told us, in tow. Nigerians blocked grazing routes and the government was bent on re-locating these routes, Buhari himself said, ad nauseam. Captured Boko Haram terrorists are resent into the system under a very suspicious amnesty programme. Today, Buhari’s hands cannot wrap around the sphere of operations of these messengers of death who he has acted as their counsel in years of his being in office. They have wrapped themselves around Nigeria and it will be a miracle if they aren’t planning to penetrate Aso Rock already.
The 10 months that remain for Buhari in Aso Rock will mark a regression that is more fatal to Nigeria than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Today, Nigeria is literally grounded, a state which some optimists called bottomed out. Education is comatose; the economy is gasping for breath and society is in tatters. The glue that wedges us together has melted due, principally, to Buhari’s nepotism and favouritism for his Fulani stock. If you add these to an insecure Nigeria — Armageddon, here we come. As a result of these, whether by impeachment or resignation, Nigeria should get Buhari to leave. Immediately! He has demonstrated rank naivety, aloofness and incapacity to bring anything good the way of this country and enough to be pleaded with to leave the Villa right away. Since he said he was excited at the thought of leaving office in May 2023, can’t he be prevailed upon to leave right now? Immediately?
Dr. Adedayo , a lawyer and columnist writes from Ibadan, Oyo state
Opinion
NASS Pensioners: How Akpabio, Abbas Should Not Treat The Elderly
On Monday and Tuesday last week, workers and political operatives within the precincts of the new Senate building in the National Assembly complex, Abuja, were treated to a replica of the Theatre of the Absurd. This type of drama originated in Europe and later spread to America in the 1950s. It was influenced by existential philosophy and Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
In that work, Camus captured the fundamental human needs and compared the absurdity of man’s life with the situation a figure of Greek mythology, Sisyphus found himself, where he was condemned to repeat forever the task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, and repeatedly sees the same roll down the hill as he approaches the top.
He, thereafter, juxtaposed life’s absurdities with what he called the “unreasonable silence” of the universe to human needs and concluded that rather than adopt suicide, in frustration, “revolt” was required.
82-year-old Dr. Muhammed Adamu Fika, former Clerk to the National Assembly and former Chairman, of the National Assembly Service Commission (NASC), who calls himself the “smaller Adamu Fika,” must have come across the Camus essay in deciding to lead an emergency meeting of the Council of Retired Clerks and Secretaries of the National Assembly on November 18. The emergency meeting, which was jointly held with members of the Association of Retired Staff of the National Assembly was meant to salvage the pathetic plights of the National Assembly retirees.
Eighty-two-year-old Fika can hardly gather the pace to navigate round the corners of the National Assembly, but he insisted on making the trip to enable him to preside over the meeting as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Council of Retired Clerks and Secretaries. As his retiree colleagues, many of whom are far younger, saw him struggling to walk the required distance from the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Library, originally fixed as venue to the new Senate building, they had to provide some shoulders to lean on. At one stage, an office chair was converted to a wheelchair to ensure the elderly Fika got to certain locations. It was a sad tale, especially if you look at the essence of Fika’s trip to the National Assembly. He was there to preside over a meeting to press home the need for the payment of the entitlements of National Assembly retirees. An alarm had earlier been sounded on the different Whatsapp platforms of the retired workers of the National Assembly to the effect their members were dying in numbers. It was revealed that no fewer than 20 retired workers had died awaiting the payment of their entitlements in the recent past. Another set of retirees numbering 12 were said to have been bedridden in different hospitals across the land. That alarm was more than enough to prompt Fika and his retiree colleagues to an emergency meeting. But the sight of an elderly man, fighting a just cause on an improvised wheelchair was more than absurd.
Payment of the entitlements got stalled after former President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act, 2023, which mandated the National Pensions Commission (PENCOM) to hand over assets of the staff of the National Assembly in its custody after the passage of the National Assembly pension law.
In the beginning, there were no signs that things would go south on the implementation of the Act. Three months after the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act came into effect, PENCOM had written the management to convey its decision to hand off the pension assets of the staff of the National Assembly, while requesting the National Assembly management to provide it with account details to remit the accrued funds. The 10th Senate and the House of Representatives also provided hope for the retirees by providing a take-off grant to the tune of N2.5 billion in the 2024 budget. However, the NASS management could not comply with the request from PENCOM because the Pensions Board had not been inaugurated. Months after months, the retirees waited. Those who were already enjoying their benefits when PENCOM was administering had the payments terminated, while the waiting game ensued.
In trying to fast-track the implementation of the Act, Fika, as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Council of Retired Clerks and Secretaries had forwarded a letter to the President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas, intimating them of the council’s recommendations for positions in the National Assembly Service Pensions Board.
Fika said in the letter, dated February 27, 2024, that “Considering the pathetic health conditions of our retired colleagues, Your Excellency will agree with me that the establishment of the National Assembly Pensions Board is overdue five (5) months after Mr. President’s assent.” He said that his letter was premised on the provisions of Sections 2 and 17(3) of the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act, 2023, which indicate that the presiding officers of the National Assembly shall make the appointments subject to recommendations of the Council of Clerks and Secretaries. But some persons are insinuating that the undue delay might have been instigated by two strange bedfellows-politics and money. Where the two are involved, simply things hardly follow a straight course. However, nothing justifies the nearly 20-month delay in inaugurating the Pensions Board.
At the end of the emergency meeting on Monday, further meetings were said to have been scheduled at the instance of the Senate President, Akpabio, his deputy, Jibril Barau and others but there were no conclusive steps, yet.
A communique released after the meeting indicated that the retirees observed that the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act, 2023 went through full legislative process in the 9th National Assembly and was assented to by President Muhammad Buhari. It further noted that the delay in implementing the Act has caused undue and untold hardship to the retirees who are unable to access their retirement benefits, adding that while a number of the retired Staff have died, many others are bedridden due to sufferings occasioned by the non-payment of their entitlements.
According to the communique, the meeting decried the pains the retired staff have been subjected to and recalled that appropriate recommendations as per the composition of the Pensions Board have been made to the Presiding Officers of the National Assembly, in line with the enabling Act.
Opinion
The Fuji Music House Of Commotion
Like every lover of Yoruba traditional music, language and culture, I have of recent been inundated with requests to lend a voice to the newest raging fire in the Fuji music genre. Since the passage of Alhaji Sikiru Ayinde Balogun, popularly known as Ayinde Barrister or Agbajelola Barusati, there have been longstanding tiffs on whom of the trio of Ayinde Omogbolahan Anifowose, KWAM 1; self-named King Saheed Osupa (K.S.O.) and Wasiu Alabi Pasuma, was the “King.”
These musicians’ recent quest for supremacy is not new. From time immemorial, supremacy battles have been part and parcel of Yoruba music. Apparently now tempered by modernity, in the olden days, the battles were fought with traditional spells, incantations and talisman aimed at deconstructing and liquidating their rivals. Mostly fought on genre basis, I submit that pre and post-independence entertainment scene would have been livelier, far more robust than it was but for the acrimonious liquidating fights of those eras.
In the Sakara music, Abibu Oluwa, a revered early precursor of this Yoruba musical genre, who reigned in the late 1920s and 1930s, had Salami Alabi Balogun, popularly known as Lefty Salami, Baba Mukaila and Yusuff Olatunji as members of his band. Oluwa praise-sang many Lagos elites of his time, especially Herbert Macaulay to whom he sang his praise in the famous track named “Macaulay Macaulay.” In it, he sang the foremost Nigerian nationalist’s alias of Ejonigboro – Snake on the Street and prayed that he would not come to shame.
Sakara also produced the likes of S. Aka Baba Wahidi, Kelani Yesufu (alias Kelly). It was sung with traditional Yoruba instruments like the solemn-sounding goje violin whose history is traced to the north, and the roundish Sakara drum, beaten with stick and whose appearance is like that of a tambourine. Sakara music is often called the Yoruba variant of western blues music because of its brooding rhythm though laced with a high dosage of philosophy.
When Oluwa died in 1964, he literally handed over to Lefty who, born on October 1913, died December 29, 1981. Lefty, a talking drummer under Oluwa, churned out over 35 records before his demise, one of which was a tribute to Lagos monarch, Oba Adele (Adele l’awa nfe – Oba Adele is the king we want) and another to the Elegushi family. I dwelt considerably on Sakara because it is believed to have had considerable influence on other genres of traditional African Yoruba music, especially Apala and Fuji, with the former sometimes indistinguishable from Sakara.
Apala music, whose exponent is said to be Haruna Ishola, originated in the late 1930s Nigeria. Delivered with musical instruments like a rattle (Sekere) thumb piano, (agidigbo) drums called Iya Ilu and Omele, a bell (agogo) and two or three talking drums, Apala and Sakara are the most complex of these genres of traditional Yoruba music, due to their infusion of philosophy, incantations and dense Yoruba language into their mix. Distinct, older and more difficult in mastery than Fuji music which is considered to be comparatively easy to sing, Ayinla Omowura, Ligali Mukaiba, Kasumu Adio, and many others were Apala leading lights of the time. The three genres have very dense Islamic background.
The latest entrant of all the three genres is Fuji. Pioneered by Ayinde Barrister no doubt, for an Apala musician biographer like me, I am confused that Omowura, as far back as early 1970s, asked listeners in need of good Fuji music to come learn from him – “Fuji t’o dara, e wa ko l’owo egbe wa…” Sorry, I digressed.
While KWAM 1 emerged with his Talazo music from the ashes of his being a music instrument arranger for Barrister’s musical organization in the early 1980s, the feud in the house after Barrister’s death erupted when narratives allegedly oozed unto the musical scene that KWAM 1 referred to himself as the creator of Fuji music. He however promptly denied the claim. For decades, Osupa and Pasuma were locked in horns over supremacy of the Fuji music genre. In August 2023, the two however seemed to have decided to thaw their feud as they shared stage with Wasiu Ayinde, at Ahmad Alawiye Folawiyo, an Islamic singer’s 50th birthday celebration in Lagos. KWAM 1 glibly acted as their senior colleague at the event.
As an indication that they are no bastards of the teething and recurrent supremacy battles that emblemize traditional Yoruba music, the three Fuji music icons seem to have gone into the trenches again. It first started with Taiye Currency, an Ibadan-based alter-ego of Pasuma picking a fight with the musician who self-styled himself Son of Anobi Muhammed’s Wife. In a viral video, Currency had disclaimed reference to Pasuma as his “father” in the music industry. In another video not long after, KWAM 1, like some kind of father figure, was shown asking Currency to apologize to Pasuma.
A few days ago, a video of Osupa went viral. Therein, he was chastising a particular hypocrite he called “Onirikimo” and “alabosi”, who is “stingy and is ready to shamelessly collect money from those under him.” Osupa also claimed that this “shameless elder” had strung a ring of corn round his waist and should be ready to be made fun of by hens. Watchers of the endless tiffs among these Fuji icons swear that KWAM 1 was the unnamed Fuji musician Osupa was casting aspersion on.
The trio of Sakara, Apala and Fuji music also witnessed such petty squabbles. While many claim that the fights were promotional gambits aimed at having their fans salivate for their hate-laced musical attacks against one another, some others claim that the rivalries were genuine. In the Apala music scene, Haruna Ishola and Kasumu Adio fought each other to the nadir, with Adio, who sang almost in the same voice and cadence as Ishola, suddenly vamoosing from the musical scene. Rumours and speculations had it then that a mysterious goat bit Adio and rendered him useless. While Ayinla Omowura also fought Fatai Olowonyo, Fatai Ayilara, among others in the Apala genre, the duo of Yusuff Olatunji and S. Aka also feuded till their last days. This is not to mention the interminable fight between Kollington Ayinla and Barrister.
If the tiff between the trio of KWAM 1, Osupa and Pasuma is about age and Yoruba traditional respect for elders, KWAM 1 would easily go away with the trophy of the best of the three. However, if philosophical depth, musical elan, research of lyrics and deployment of Yoruba language are at issue, none of the other two musicians can unbuckle Osupa’s sandals. Osupa began his musical career in 1983 as a teenager and has gone through the mills, his late father being a musician, too and Awurebe music lord, Dauda Epo Akara’s musical contemporary.
Unlike their predecessors, the three Fuji musicians are literate and should thus address their musical issues in more mature manner. Osupa even recently bagged a degree from the department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. One thing they should know is that, whether one is supreme to the other or not, their fans will readily queue behind the brand that delights them.
Opinion
Almajiri: Why Northern Leaders Must Look Themselves in the Mirror
Two incidents happened during the 1994/95 NYSC service year, which I was part of in Birnin-Kebbi, Kebbi State, and they gave me profound culture shocks that I still remember till today. I would equally say that those incidents probably justified the Federal Government’s decision to float the scheme.
We were told that part of the reasons General Yakubu Gowon floated the NYSC was to ensure national integration, cohesion and exposure of young Nigerians to cultures of other parts of the country other than where they were born.
First was the shock of seeing a director that I was attached to in the then Government House, who had just taken a new wife, and sat among drivers, gate men and other junior staff to dine. I saw them seated round a huge iron pot of Koko, a local delicacy, exchanging one big spoon made of calabash, as each took turns to use the spoon to eat the delicacy. It was as if I was witnessing a scene where children of a big family were struggling to catch a portion of food or where people were eating Saara, as they say it in Yorubaland.
As I walked past the noisy crowd, I was transfixed seeing the newly-wedded director among the lot. He saw me standing still, as I couldn’t comprehend what he was doing there, and he got the message. ‘Taiyo, (as he used to call me) you won’t understand,’ he said as he waved to me to keep going. When we later saw, he explained that what he just did was a way of assuring the commoners that ‘we are all one,’ as they felicitated him on the new bride. But I could not fathom how the occupant of a ‘huge office’ as that of a director in a Government House , would sit among “commoners” on a tattered mat to share a single spoon and eat in public.
The other incident was quite pathetic. My friend, Tunde Omobuwa, was posted to a school in Yauri, in the southern part of the state, for his primary assignment. But he found the place boring on weekends. So, he arranged to always be with me on weekends.
One such weekend, we decided to take a stroll round the streets near the Government House. We took off from the place of my primary assignment, the Federal Information Centre; bought corn beside the office, and started ‘blowing’ the ‘mouth organ’ as we strolled. We were too engrossed in our gist and the sweetness of the corn to note that some young boys were trailing us, praying that some leftovers of the corn would drop for them to scavenge. Somehow, the two of us dropped the corn cob almost simultaneously. We were more than taken aback by a commotion that erupted at our back. Four eight or nine year-olds had descended on the supposed leftovers and broken the corn cobs into pieces. I was again transfixed as if one was hit by an electric shock. Remember that feeling when you play with electric fish?
I was moved to tears as I had never ever seen a group of children scavenging on nothing as it were. I beckoned to the kids and offered them N20, which was the highest denomination at the time, and with some smattering Hausa words told them to go buy their own corn from the same place we got ours. As they left, heading to the corn seller, I couldn’t erase that ugly sight from my mind. Was it really possible that some people scavenge on nothing this way? I was later to see incidents of children swarming around restaurants and pouncing on near empty plates.
These incidents told me clearly that the North was a different place and that the life of the boy child is not only risky and endangered but sold to stagnation and deprivation, unless you are one of the lucky few.
Having benefited from the free education policy of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) between 1979 and 1983, when the Second Republic was terminated, I knew that there is a lot the government can do in educating the children. In my secondary school days, I was the Library Prefect at one point, and so I saw an excess of books supplied by the government to our school. So, I was an example of the feasibility of free education. It was the same way the Action Group government had handled education in the years preceding Nigeria’s independence and the First Republic.
So why can’t the state governments in the North declare free and compulsory education for the young ones out there? Why should children be made to scavenge on empty corn cobs just to see if they can find pieces of seeds left over?
And why was my director giving drivers and gate men in the Government House false hope that they were all the same, instead of him to challenge them to seek to lift themselves up the social ladder?
I think there was no excuse for the North not to have adopted a free education policy, just as Chief Obafemi Awolowo did in the South-West. And if we say the North needs to look itself in the mirror, you again remember the efforts by President Goodluck Jonathan to educate the multitude of Northern children through the Almajiri Schools. That government built more than 400 of such schools, which were abandoned because it could upset the oligarchy. The oligarchs forgot the truism that the children of the poor they refuse to train today won’t let their children sleep peacefully.
But the governor of Borno State, Prof Babagana Zulum, appears to have got the message. Last week, I was thrilled to see him organise a summit to reform the Almajiri system.
The Almajiri education system is a traditional Islamic method of learning widely obtained across states in northern Nigeria. Through that system, which is tied to Islamic teaching, youths, especially boys are kept out of the formal western education system. I don’t know why the teachings by Islamic scholars cannot go alongside that of Western education as it obtains in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and other Islamic countries that are doing well economically and in the world of science, technology.
While addressing the summit, Zulum had mentioned the need to address the root causes of insecurity through the provision of education for citizens of Borno, adding that improper teaching of Islamic studies has contributed to the emergence of Boko Haram insurgents in the state.
According to him, to curtail whatever is the adverse effect of Almajiri education; the Borno State Government has established the Arabic and Sangaya Education Board to introduce a unified curriculum for Sangaya and Islamic schools. He said that the reform would include establishing Higher Islamic Colleges to cater for Almajiri children and blending the religious teachings with the secular curricula as well as skills.
He said: “The Sangaya Reform is a great development. It will give Almajiri a better chance in life, particularly the introduction of integrating western education, vocational, numeracy, and literacy skills into the centres, which are also described as Almajiri and Islamic schools.
“Distinguished guests and esteemed educationists, government’s intention was to streamline the informal and formal education systems to quality integrated Sangaya School for admission into colleges and universities.”
One would have thought that governors with radical postures like Nasir el-Rufai and others before him would have proposed this type of reform, but it is better late than never. Zulum should be supported to get something out of this.
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