Opinion
Sofiat’s murder and our booming human body parts market
With the shock, anger, and general revulsion that followed the gruesome killing of 20-year-old Sofiat Kehinde, allegedly perpetrated by her boyfriend and three of his accomplices in Oke-Aregba, Itoko-Tuntun, Idi-Ape in Abeokuta, Ogun state on January 29, 2022, an end ought to have naturally come to our naivety about the pestilence that ritual killings for money has become among us. Or oughtn’t it?
Only yesterday, in the same Abeokuta, in an area called Leme, 43-year-old Kehinde Oladimeji and his wife, Adejumoke Raji, were arrested by men of the Ogun state police command for being in possession of fresh human breasts, hands, and other parts kept in a bucket. In 1996, Owerri, the capital of Imo state, almost exploded when one Innocent Ekeanyanwu was arrested with the head of a young boy called Ikechukwu Okonkwo. Police investigators later found the buried torso of Ikechukwu in the premises of Otokoto Hotel, which was owned by one Chief Duru. This sparked violence in the city, leading to unprecedented burning of properties of suspected patrons of ritual killings. The leader of the syndicate was later arraigned for murder and in February 2003, sentenced to death by hanging.
The belief in human rituals for money, which modernity has not succeeded in killing, is as old as Africa and is still prevalent today in many parts of the continent. Secret societies and their killings were dominant in pre and post-colonial Africa. In 1945 for example, one Amos Oshinowo Shopitan wrote to a senior British official about his two-year-old son who had been kidnapped and used for the “dreadful practice of stealing human beings for either secret immolation or juju making”. In 1946, a total of 161 persons were recorded by the colonial government as having been killed for rituals in the Ibibio area in the present-day Akwa Ibom state. In 1947, a United States consul reported that he had recorded 88 proven and 96 suspected cases of ritual murders in the same Ibibio area.
In virtually all parts of Africa, albino-hunting is a pastime. This species of nature’s creation with defects in skin pigmentation is a sought-after delicacy for rituals for money. Given so many names which range from Igbo’s onye aghali – one with strange white colour; Yoruba’s eni osa (persons of the gods) and zeru zeru – ghost – in Tanzania, so many myths of supernatural powers are woven round albinos.
Today, irrespective of supersonic advancements in technology and diverse ways of making billions through taking advantage of modernity, there are pandemic beliefs in many parts of Africa, which have grown so luscious, that the body parts of albino bring wealth, power, or sexual victory. For instance, in many parts of Southern Africa, it is believed that a sexual romp with a lady with albinism gives an instant cure for HIV and AIDS. Albino victims have their body parts sold for thousands of dollars to Sangomas or witch doctors. In 2016, the Office of the UN high commissioner for human rights (OHCHR) had announced that albino hunters sold a whole albino corpse for up to $75,000, while their arm or leg fetched as princely a sum as $2,000.
In Malawi, authorities announced that, between January and May 2016, six albinos, who included a 17-year-old Davis Fletcher Machinjiri, killed while he went to watch a soccer match, had been discovered. Amnesty International, quoting the Malawian authorities, gave an account of how Machinjiri was killed thus: “About four men trafficked him to Mozambique and killed him. The men chopped off both his arms and legs and removed his bones. Then they buried the rest of his body in a shallow grave”. It looks as grotesque as the killing of Sofiat.
Tanzania has its own share of this barbarism. About 75 albinos were reported to have been murdered between 2000 and 2016. Ikponwosa Ero, a person with albinism, in an interview, had said that albinos in Africa are endangered species and their situation, “a tragedy”, maintaining that the 7,000 to 10,000 albinos in Malawi and thousands of others in Tanzania, Mozambique, and other countries were “at the risk of extinction if nothing is done.”
One other hot cake for rank-minded human parts ritualism in Africa is hunchbacks. In 2011, one Ifeoma Angela Igwe was reported to have been kidnapped from her house, beheaded at a bush path, and butchered. Her hunch, which is believed to contain some mercuric magical power that curates wealth, was also severed off her back. In another instance, one Adeoye Dowo, a 22-year old, was lured into the bush by his girlfriend in Ago Alaye, a village in Odigbo local government of Ondo state, strangled by three men and his hump decapitated. So also was one Taibatu Oseni, a lady of similar age, murdered by her assailants and her hunch removed.
The murder of Sofiat was particularly grotesque. It must have alerted both government and the governed that our society had gone past the stages of pretenses and innocence. Her abductors, four teenage suspects of between 18 and 20 years, had allegedly killed her, severed off her head, and burnt it almost into ashes in a mud pot, with her remains already packaged in a sack to be disposed of by the time they were arrested.
For us as a people, I intend to argue in this piece, we are just crying over spilled milk, and like a knock-kneed, we have refused to look at the foundation of our current problem of ritual killings. Our case is analogous to that of the proverbial bush rat which was complicit in its own calamity. While assailants were digging his hole, the bush rat refused to raise alarm and when he was arrested, roasted in the hot furnace, he raises his hands up above the head to raise alarm, which Yoruba express as, “Okete gbagbe ibosi, o de’gba alate, o ka’wo le’ri“. There is no denying the fact that we are a people who believe in achieving material successes through harnessing mystical powers. What those four teenage boys who killed Sofiat did was go on a long shuttle into their African roots to borrow a leaf from our barbaric past.
From creation, in the search for explanations to the physical and earthly things whose order and happenings are beyond their comprehension, Africans created a counterpoise for physical objects in the spiritual. To them, nothing happens in the physical without a corresponding occurrence in the spiritual. In this anthropomorphic belief, gods are behind the order of the universe and look over the affairs of men. That was why gods like Obatala,
Sango, Ogun, Amadioha, and the Arochukwu deities were created in Africans’ own image, unseen but with believed awesome powers that superintend over the affairs of man. The deities were worshipped with various objects. Stephen Ellis, British historian, Africanist, human rights activist, and author of the famous book, ‘This Present Crime: A History of Nigeria’s Organized Crime’, said: “Nigerians, then and now, maintain a dialogue with the invisible realm, in effect trying to shape their own well-being through a process of negotiation with the spirit world”.
One of such gods in West Africa is the Olokun. Olokun is an androgynous god or orisha, which means that it could be a man or a woman, depending on the people who worship it. The belief of Olokun worshippers is that it is the parent of Aje, the orisha that is in charge of great wealth and whose residence is at the bottom of the ocean. Olokun’s reputation as the ruler of bodies of water is legendary. It is also revered as the sole god with authority over water deities. It is said to possess the ability to give man great wealth, health, and prosperity. To maintain communication with the Olokun, a regime of murders by ordeal or ordeal by innocence was perpetrated. Human sacrifices to the gods were required and, added to the slavery experience – where man sold his fellow man for mirrors and liquor – the heart of the African became as hard and scarred as the tortoise’s carapace.
In 1912, the British governor-general, Lord Lugard, in a letter to his wife, Flora Shaw, said he had just dealt with a file that contained 744 murders by ordeal. Ordeal by innocence is a very severe or trying experience that was prevalent in pre-colonial Africa. It was a method of trial where the guilt or innocence of an accused person got determined by first subjecting them to a tedious physical danger. One of the methods used in ordeal by innocence was to singe the victim’s flesh with fire or throw them inside hot water and whatever fate the victim suffers then becomes an indication of divine judgment on them.
As far back as the early 20th century, Nigerians’ renown for seeking material successes through mystical powers had gained the attention of British colonial power. J. K. Macgregor, headmaster of the famous Calabar-based missionary school, Hope Waddell Institute, which Nnamdi Azikiwe attended, had detected over a hundred mails from abroad in the hands of his pupils. Writers of the letters promised the pupils, in the words of Ellis, “quack medicines and quack methods of treating diseases… magical works and letters from various societies that professed to give esoteric teachings that were sure to bring successes and happiness”. Those letters came from America, England, and India. Macgregor was so bothered that in 1935, he wrote the governor-general about it.
Africans, Nigerians saw the intervention of colonial Britain in their social and political affairs, especially its frown at barbaric killings and turning of the human body into commodity or money, as meddlesome interloping. British colonial government, which saw itself on evangelism to civilize Africa, frowned at such barbaric acts of human sacrifice for money. To it, such practices were repugnant to natural justice. This however did not deter the practice. Only God knows the number of young boys and girls whose blood were spilled from pre and immediate post-colonial Africa, on the altar of claims of wealth-seeking, health-seeking, and purification of lands with human blood. Sweets, chewing gums, nuts, Akara balls, and other fascinating things were used to truncate the destinies of hundreds of children, ostensibly with the aim of increasing the wealth and well-being of their patrons.
It will appear that having been smoked out by the EFCC and with a greater general awareness of their nefarious activities, which has made their preys be on the alert, the market of scam that the Yahoo Yahoo boys engage in has been grossly affected. Thus, the human ritual market seems the next sought-after.
Unless we want to deceive ourselves, those four headhunter boys who murdered Sofiat in Abeokuta, the hunchback hunters, the albino scavengers of Tanzania mirror who we are as Africans. Centuries of preaching on the sacredness of the human body and the visible monumental strides of technology have not succeeded in impeaching our ancient beliefs in spiritualism and metaphysics and their manifestations in ancient primitivism and barbarism. We attribute great mystical powers to money, right from the beginning when cowries and iron bars became the means of exchange. Money today is more valuable in our estimation than human life and we go to every length to have it. For us in Africa, money is not Mammon; it is life.
Immortal Bob Marley counseled – many more will have to suffer – as we enter the election season preparatory to the 2023 elections, many will be used for sacrifices to get to offices by politicians. It is in sync with us. In the first republic, the three regional political parties were built around secret societies. Ogboni society, which wielded enormous powers before the colonial incursion, was consequential in political decisions. J. Y Peel, in his ‘Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba’ (2000) had noted that Yoruba use human beings, especially strangers, as sacrifices, at funerals for important people. Mortuary killings have been very prevalent since ancient days. In 1847, when Basorun Oluyole of Ibadan died, 70 people were killed to act as his consorts in the hereafter.
Today, there is a rat race to embrace Olokun, the sea goddess of money. It is worsened by the fact that governments have abdicated their social responsibilities and everybody is running a race for self-sustenance and personal survival over the harsh and inclement social weather. In homes, parents and their children build grooves where money is sacralized daily. Our social situation is aggravated by the fact that law and order have taken a sabbatical from governance in Nigeria.
Those days, if you didn’t have money but had character, you were given pride of place in society. Today, character without money is dead. The get-rich race has become pandemic. Politicians, governments, and Nigerian leaders, in general, are patrons of this social order. It began first with the godification of money and then, a huge war waged on the merit system. Uneducated and unskilled hooligans are suddenly made rich by the system, simply because they are anvils in the hands of politicians. Flaunting of ill-gotten wealth plays a major role in polluting the subconscious of the youth.
There is this reasoning which has infected the thought process of society that education is drab and unrewarding, thus pushing children from the path of their future redemption. The church has also helped fester this mindset with the pride of place it gives to money and wealth. General overseers live in magnificent, superfluous, and stupendous wealth gotten from subverting the minds of congregants through religious scams. They openly and unabashedly call for billion naira donations to church and bother less to crosscheck sources of wealthy donors. This cancer has eaten so deep that today, parents help their children to pad up scamming ventures. They take them for spiritual fortification in shrines of pastors, diviners, and marabouts.
It will be naïve, unrealistic, and wrong to say that rituals of human body parts for money are ineffective. Or that the metaphysics of human sacrifice does not have an effective science to it. As Africans, we cannot deny metaphysics like Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who called it nonsensical. A dark practice like this which has endured for centuries cannot be waved aside that peremptorily. Or else we are saying that our forefathers, reputed with those inventions that still subsist till today, were ignoramuses. They were not. Human rituals are a fact of existence with their own grotesque science known only to the practitioners.
However, a time has come for Africa to join the rest of the world to do away with the crudity, barbarity, and primitivity of human rituals. Governments should first make life livable for their people so that human beings can return to their love for themselves and put money in its secondary place in the scheme of things. Today, the extreme poverty afflicting the populace has turned them into beasts who pawn themselves for cash. It is why human rituals for money have quadrupled what they were pre and in the immediate post-colony. Second, the government must consciously de-radicalize money and its effects, and flaunting of wealth should attract sanctions.
Social studies lessons of pre and post-independence must be exhumed. They were learned by rote and taught to pupils from creche, an example being the Yoruba J. F. Odunjo’s Alawiye series, which taught the values of work, condemned get-rich-quick syndrome, and pronounced damnation for indolence. Money must and can never be the only source of happiness and respect in any sane society. We must push it down from its unearned and undeserved first position in our affairs and push up values that sustain a people. These precepts must be read, memorized, and recited like verses of our Bible and Quran. Only then can we stop the pernicious harvest of our children in their prime, in the hands of flesh-hunters for money.
Dr. Festus Adedayo, a journalist, lawyer and columnist writes from Ibadan, Oyo state.
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.
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.
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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