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Do Buhari, Malami know a man called Tafawa Balewa?|By Festus Adedayo

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Apparently a young officer of the Nigerian Army at the time Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was the Nigerian Prime Minister from 1957-1966, it goes without saying that President Muhammadu Buhari must know of Balewa, even if he didn’t know him. Conversely however, if his official birthday of April 17, 1967 is indeed real, Abubakar Malami probably encountered Balewa as a historical piece. For both however, the life of Balewa and his disposition to Western Nigeria, especially during the crisis that seized the region from 1962 to 1966, should be a reference point if both men do not want the fate that befell Nigeria as a result of Balewa’s self-imposed deafness to the turmoil that began like a minor crisis in the West, to take another shuttle back to Nigeria.

Western Nigeria, aftermath the fiasco of the 1963 national census and the 1964 Federal Elections, was literally a bedlam. The census provoked a narrative of divisionism as results claimed that the whole of Southern Nigeria was less than the North. Commentators were riled by what was perceived as fictitious figures “concocted from harem curtains.”

The allegation was that the North hid behind the purdah system of ba siga, gidan aore ne (no entrance, it’s a house of married women) to stuff figures in the headcount under the conspiratorial goggles of Balewa. In the same vein came allegation that foreigners were being imported into Northern Nigeria. Commentators after commentators pilloried the idea of women in purdah not being physically counted by the census inspectors, relying on verbal figures handed them by family heads. They warned that if a doctored figure was imposed on the people, Nigeria was a few meters from Golgotha. As Buhari does today, 56 years after, Balewa’s silence to this tinder that was primed to burn Nigeria was palpably bothersome.
Balewa advertised this silence when the Federal Elections of 1964 became an orgy of killings in the Western Region. Acrimonious and vengeful campaigns, preparatory to the elections, especially in the West, became the order of the day. Deputy Premier, Victor Babaremilekun Adetokunboh Fani-Kayode, Richard Akinjide and Bayo Olowofoyeku formed the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), comprising Akintola’s United Peoples Party (UPP), the rump of fragmented National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) leaders and the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), to form the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA). The rump of the Action Group (AG) that was left also went into an alliance with the NCNC, Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC), to form an alliance it called the United Progressive Ground Alliance (UPGA). At the end of the day, the election was so farcical that it brimmed with violence. UPGA then announced a boycott. In the 1965 regional election, there was It was a repeat of this gangsterism with both Akintola’s NNA and UPGA’s Dauda Soroye Adegbenro laying claim to having won the election. Sworn in for another term, the Akintola government met serious resistance by the populace, including decisions of the people not to pay tax, which forced government to review cocoa price from £110 per ton to £60. This eventually led to the Weti e upheaval.

While on a tour of Benin in June, 1964, still feigning ignorance of the crisis, Balewa was quoted to have said that he could not judge the intensity of lawlessness in the West on account of newspaper report of the brigandage. Balewa, who projected the image of an “unworried” and “unconcerned” Prime Minister with his “ominous silence,” was pummeled by the Western Region media. He still advertised a façade of insulation from the worsening fate of the West and someone who didn’t read newspapers. Worse still, as Balewa departed Nigeria for Accra to attend an OAU meeting in October, 1965, he was quoted to have alleged that the violence in the region was contrived. While at the Ikeja Airport, he was asked by journalists what he was going to do about the fire raging in Western Nigeria. Successfully tucking his bother inside his flowing babanriga, Tafawa Balewa reportedly looked round and cynically declared; “Ikeja is part of the West and I cannot see any fire burning.” That same fire consumed him on January 15, 1966. It was a case of a disease that would kill one which is always pampered and treated with kid gloves. The pillory of Balewa that resulted from this peremptory treatment of the western crisis was accentuated by his perceived shield of his party man and “fast drowning political friend” – a la the Nigerian press – Premier S. L. Akintola and Balewa’s refusal to invoke the Emergency powers as he did in 1962. This led to an editorial comment by the Nigerian Tribune saying that: “Whether Abubakar (Balewa) intervenes or not, (we are) convinced that this is a war the people are bound to win.” This was the situation on the morning of January 15, 1966 when the fire that Balewa ignored successfully gave birth to the first military coup in Nigeria which effectively ended the lives of Balewa, Akintola and others.

This writer went into this long-winding retelling of a long Nigerian history so as to situate Buhari’s Balewa-like ominous personal silence on the fire burning from the flanks of the Western part of Nigeria which is manifesting as a slide in its security affairs. Call it tribal arrogance or needless over-hype, history tells us that the Western Region is always where the Nigerian crisis snowballs from. Apart from the consequential crash of Nigerian first democratic practice of the First Republic, the seed of which was sown in the West, military rule also crumbled in Nigeria on account of the West’s united civil resistance against autocracy, with the martyrdom of its son, MKO Abiola, in 1998. With these, a charge of unnecessary revisionism cannot be sustained against my claim that there is another ominous fire that is burning in the country from the Western flank, as well as my projection that any Nigerian leader with a heady or natural laid-back disposition that manifests as resistance to peace in the West can be said to be peering at the grave of Balewa.

If you collate the anger of the people of Western Nigeria today against the Buhari government’s attempt to stop the  Western  Nigeria Security  Network (WNSN)  called  Operation  Amotekun  and their pleasantly strange unity of purpose on Amotekun, you would arrive at a juncture that makes the current situation a throwback to Nigeria’s Western region’s palpable animosity and brimming angst against the government of Balewa. These are the offshoot of a press release issued by the office of Abubakar Malami, Attorney General and Minister of Justice, offering legalistic arguments against the security outfit. In the release, Malami also made a Balewa-like statement, to wit that Southwest could not inform him of Amotekun from the pages of newspapers. Such arrogance!

If Buhari’s DSS would give him truthful report of current situation in the west today, he would find out that, for the first time in a very long while, Southwest Nigeria is throwing away her constant variables of politics and religion to damn the Federal Government on its apparently self-centered stand on Amotekun. It is worsened by Buhari’s baffling taciturnity to the crisis.

While Balewa at least showed his patent disregard for the escalating violence, Buhari’s embarrassing absence of a personal opinion on the matter, leading to the projection of his government’s voice by surrogates like Malami make the belief that Nigerians are being ruled by unelected triumvirates to gain notoriety.
Malami’s press release has been subjected to a forensic post-mortem by very knowledgeable Nigerians which makes a repeat of the damning verdict on him irrelevant here. The greatest way to put a lie to Malami’s legalistic argument is to scan it for abidance by the principle of natural justice. This resultant query will emanate from the scan: Is man made for law or laws are made for man?

When South-westerners were being killed, kidnapped and ransomed like pawned necklace by rampaging Fulani herdsmen from the North or wherever, with a Federal Government that was either too inept to counter them or too complicit in the plot to lift a finger, should the letter of the law or its spirit rescue the people from the bind that the Malamis conscripted them?

The frenetic pace with which Northern Nigeria demanded the surrender of Southwest’s desire to secure herself, against the backdrop of the Federal Government’s inability or incapability to ensure peace in Nigeria as a whole, is not only suspicious but smacks of an ulterior motive. Only a few days ago, Miyetti Allah, the umbrella body of a group said to be one of the most deadly terrorist groups in the world and whose reckless public utterances are festering by the day, audaciously asked Southwest to drop the idea of Amotekun if it wants the presidency in 2023. It was also reported to have asked that governors behind Amotekun should be arrested. What arrant nonsense and magisterial belief in entitlement to power!

All these seem to confirm earlier tissues of rumour that the banditry of the Fulani felons, the attempt by the Buhari government to get settlements for them in all parts of Nigeria, the defence of herdsmen’s bloodletting by no less a person than Buhari himself with all manner of ill-logics at his disposal, as well as by top officers of his government, the RUGA plot and other shenanigans by government that were largely targeted at getting the people’s tormentors-in-chief soft landing in all the nooks and crannies of Nigeria, are all parts of a larger plot to Fulanize the rest of Nigeria. If you lay the premises like this: Fulnai herdsmen are tormenting Southwest Nigeria; Buhari and his government are defending Fulani herdsmen; Southwest Nigeria plans security outfit to combat Fulani herdsmen and other criminals; Buhari government wants to stop Southwest Nigeria, that conclusion will naturally flow from the premises. Amotekun and the resistance of its coming to life are a palpable indication that the satanic plot to inflict Fulani herdsmen on Southern Nigeria was real after all.

The coincidence of the 40th anniversary of the end of the Nigerian Civil War with this current governmental bigotry must have made the world realize that the about one million Nigerians killed in the war may have been martyred needlessly. This is because the Nigerian Hausa-Fulani leaders have not purged themselves of the rank, narrow-minded and selfish leadership that rankled Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and which was the major impetus for the civil war. Yakubu Gowon was recently quoted to have said that he didn’t regret his actions in the war, which included the killings of multiple of thousands Igbo and thousands of soldiers on both sides. Except he is fascinated with untruth, Gowon should know that it is very glaring from the experiences of other ethnic groups in Nigeria under this government that going through the 30-month war only to have a Nigerian leadership consumed by this government’s kind of thinking makes the death of our heroes past a vainglorious exercise. It is obvious that resistance to Amotekun is fired by a narrow-minded protection of the President’s ethnicity while other ethnicities are left naked and at the mercy of violent murderers.

Just like Balewa, Buhari has turned a deaf ear to solicitations not to set Nigeria alight by this ominous silence on Amotekun. He is egged on to a destructive stiff-neckedness by his ostensible obsession with the defence of his Fulani kin. I cite a prophetic Nigerian Tribune editorial of November 18, 1965 where the newspaper had written, inter alia: “Whether Abubakar (Balewa) intervenes or not, (we are) convinced that this is a war the people are bound to win…with all (his) cunning of a fox and all the trickery of a monkey…”

Buhari should learn from Balewa’s fall and not take the silly silence of self-styled Yoruba leaders who Yakubu Danjuma called Fifth columnists, as approximating a bendable will of the Southwest people. Southwest Nigeria has always been the graveyards of the Balewas and their recalcitrant offspring in federal office.

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NASS Pensioners: How Akpabio, Abbas Should Not Treat The Elderly

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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.

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The Fuji Music House Of Commotion

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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.

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Almajiri: Why Northern Leaders Must Look Themselves in the Mirror

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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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