Opinion
Time to kill NBC
The hypothesis that words, either written or spoken, are the worst enemy of despots and totalitarian regimes has been tested over time. Words are lethal, superior to mortars and armaments of war and penetrate deeper than bullets. Words are equally known to eventually precipitate the collapse of despotic regimes. It then stands to reason that dictators must wage war on words.
Merve Buyuksarac found out the above when it was almost too late. Crowned Miss Turkey in 2006, Merve’s brush with the imperial power of Recep Tayyip Erdogan began like a joke. On her Instagram page, assuming that poetic license shawled her from the biting proboscis of imperial power, she poured scum at what she referred to as high-level corruption and sleaze in Turkey. Couching this in very inviting poetic lines, Merve located Erdogan as the kingpin and epicentre of the rot. Pronto, as the Americans say, she was arrested and on May 31, given a suspended prison sentence of 14 months. Turkey frowns at such impudence of insulting the imperial office of the president. Such affront could net its violator up to four years imprisonment. More than 1,800 people have run afoul of this law.
Like Erdogan, Tunisian president from 1987 to 2011, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, widely known as Ben Ali, was ruthless and diffident about the possibilities of free speech. He was dictatorial and repressive and his 23-year rule of Tunisia was signposted by manacles and barbs. Amnesty International, Freedom House and other international human rights groups voted Ali’s regime as terror personified and his regime authoritarian because he muzzled free speech. Under his watch, Tunisia became a police state and ranked 144th out of 173 countries in the world in repression of free speech.
Ben Ali abridged fundamental freedoms in a bid to sustain his authority. He did this by limiting the spread of information and suppressing citizens who wanted to speak out against his government’s multiplicity of violations of human rights. If you dared oppose Ali in the media, you were due for harsh consequences, the least being imprisonment. Apart from arbitrary jailing, he also generously deployed arbitrary disappearance of activists and journalists who had the temerity to speak against his demonic rule. The way he censured and censored free speech was through the control of information that could be channelled past the Tunisian borders. Smuggling books into Tunisia was the only way out for anyone who craved information. But you had to pay the very corrupt Tunisian police a heavy bribe. If for any reason, the police failed to play ball and you were caught, the smuggler was liable to a long jail sentence.
When foreign censure was becoming boring and jangling to him, Ben Ali decided that privatization of the Tunisian media would do the magic for his censorship of free speech. This was unbeknown to the rest of the world. The world then gave him unmerited applauses. The claps had not abated by the time he bared his fangs. He ensured that his daughter, Cyrine Ben-Ali, secured ownership of the only internet provider available in Tunisia. Of course, a welter of critical journalism outfits sprung up to take their destinies into their hands. One of such was Kalima. Kalima was a media group that published an online magazine and also had a radio outfit. In 2009, Ali shut Kalima down for being too critical of his government and family. In Tunisia, not only did journalists face heavy censure, but Emperor Ali also foisted a regime of heavy police harassment on news disseminators. The ones unlucky to get arrested by his goons were often mercilessly tortured.
On January 14, 2011, however, Ben Ali’s cup ran over. Like the proverbial offspring of a cobra that ensures its death, the Arab Spring revolution suddenly erupted, with Tunisia as its test case. On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, the later-to-be-famous street vendor, suddenly set himself on fire and his self-immolation became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution, christened Arab Spring, ultimately setting alight the whole of the Arab enclave. It became a vote of no confidence on autocratic leaders. Bouazizi’s wares had been confiscated, as well as being humiliated and harassed by a Tunisian municipal official and her aides. In the midst of this month-long protest, sensing that his time was up, Ali and his wife, Leila and their three children, fled to Saudi Arabia. He subsequently died on September 19, 2019, in exile.
Despots and totalitarian governments all over the world, including those who shawl themselves with veneers of democracy, cannot stand free speech. Their modern-day variant dictators are smart enough to know that a war on freedom of speech is a war against their existential survival.
It is why despots’ first priority in government is to impose restrictions on freedom of speech. This was what the Russian Bolsheviks did in 1917. The very day after the coup d’etat that ushered the regime into power, its first assignment was limiting freedom of speech by proclaiming the “Decree on the Press,” through which newspapers considered to be “sowing discord by libellous distortion of facts” were shut down. It was the same way that, a few months after its entry into power in 1933, the German national socialist government began attacks on books and the acquisition of knowledge. It burnt books in their millions, followed by an introduction of knee-jerk censorship by its ministry of propaganda. If you check the ratings of press freedom by international organizations such as Freedom House, communist states like Vietnam, Cuba, China, and North Korea and harsh despotic governments like those of Syria, Iran, Belarus, Sudan and Turkmenistan lead from the rear. To ensure their survival, totalitarian states pad themselves up with very strong propaganda machines with which they shore up an obvious dearth of free speech and credible information, all geared towards the manipulation of the people’s minds.
Asked what his disposition would be to free speech when he forcefully took over power from Shehu Shagari in the twilight of 1983, a dour General Muhammadu Buhari unapologetically proclaimed, like a tiger about to tear the flesh off an animal’s bones, that he would, with his bloodthirsty military decree incisors, peel off the flesh of free speech. He said this in an interview with the trio of Dele Giwa, Yakubu Mohammed and Ray Ekpu on February 6, 1984. For Nigerians to now expect a man who had such untainted disdain for free speech in 1984 to have purged himself of his self-constitutive baying for the blood of press freedom would be expecting a tiger to morph out of its bone-crushing tigritude.
Military despots like General Buhari knew that the Nigerian press has a very rich history, indeed, the Nigerian press is older than and predates the Nigerian state. With the installation of the first printing press in 1846 by the Presbyterian Church in Calabar and the founding, eight years after, precisely in 1854, of the Iwe Irohin by the Reverend Henry Townsend of the Church Missionary Society (CSM), the Nigeria which came out of the 1914 amalgamation was younger in historical antecedents than what is today the Nigerian press.
Since 1846, the press has been a formidable influence in the growth of Nigeria. Nnamdi Azikiwe, one of the patrons of the Nigerian press, who published the ubiquitous West African Pilot newspaper, while eulogizing the history of pioneers of Nigerian press, said their activities were “identical with the intellectual and material developments of Nigeria”, while also submitting that Nigeria produced a “galaxy of immortal journalists!” who played a unique part “in this corner of the earth in the great crusade for human freedom”.
Thereafter, for 35 years, the Nigerian press moved with Nigeria in its travails under the emergent military rule. Since 1999 when full-blown democracy returned to Nigeria, the press has had a wider horizon. There are more modern equipment and even a multiplicity of platforms for mass communication. The radio is no longer strictly controlled by the federal government as Radio Nigeria, a federally owned organization, nor is television strictly owned by the government. Social media has widened the space and made information dissemination available on the web of the wide world. The radio has today grown to become a very powerful octopus of the Nigerian media, with the multiplicity of radio ownership.
As said earlier, to run a regime which unpretentiously simulates the totalitarian government in China or Turkmenistan, in a 21st-century world that has a total aversion for despots, Buhari needed a character like Lai Mohammed. Adolf Hitler also needed Lai’s professional ancestor, German Nazi politician and Gauleiter of Berlin, Paul Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had turned the spleen of the world in his official assignment as chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, as well as Reich minister of propaganda from 1933 to 1934. To be able to clone Goebbels effectively, Lai must have mopped up all essays on this unexampled propaganda warlord. Buhari must have been fascinated by Lai’s very mercurial showing as ACN and APC propaganda terror machine. Today, Lai has had an exemplary mastery of the game of divisiveness, crass governmental lies and artful manipulations.
The first thing Lai did upon being announced minister of information was to do a generational circum-guessing of what Goebbels would do if he were to be nominated by an Adolf in a 21st century Nigeria. Unlike Europe or Germany in the 1930s, the print media has lost its savour massively. The hugely pillaged Nigerian economy and the unfavourable global economic climate have largely affected the purchasing power of readers. Newsprint has risen to somewhere close to the stratosphere where only a few hands could reach. While the Nigerian print press recorded over a century of pervasive influence, respect and contributions to communication, there is no doubting the fact that its influence is waning. Some extremist views even submit that the newspaper press is nearing its extinction.
The advent of social media and internet usage has relegated hardcopy news to a secondary role, prompting navigation of the print press online and de-emphasis of printing. The internet then became a breeding ground for billions of citizens of the world and a borderless ground of opportunity to share opinions freely without let. It also became a floor for the exchange of personal and group communication. Like the biblical account of the devil that is roaring, seeking who to devour, despots also moved with citizens to the internet. It became a hunting ground for tyrants whose disdain for freedom of expression is as rotund as a bed bug that has amply sucked its victim’s blood.
All dictators needed to do was to transit from their old tactics of silencing dissidents and journalists into a new tactic of muzzling authors of tweets and posts that affront their quest to continue to lustre in their imperial fiefdom. The road to repression by totalitarians today is paved with bile and hatred for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram aficionados. However, the pestilence of dwindling believability of news received from the internet, through the orgy of fake news, has cast a huge pall on cyber information. For totalitarians and despots, the only alternative left is for them to activate their terror on the broadcast media of radio and television.
Broadcasting is unique and is growing in leaps and bounds as means of mass communication. While its effect is instantaneous and possesses tremendous power to penetrate a multiplicity of locales in a matter of minutes, this power is rivalled only by social media as means of communication. The power of the broadcast media is also in that, voices, videos and pictures can be transmitted to a large number of listeners and viewers who reside thousands of kilometres distance.
Broadcast media’s pervasive influence is a threat to despots and budding Haitian Papa and Baby Doc regimes like Buhari’s. So when towards the twilight of last week through its puppet, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), the Buhari government revoked the licenses of 52 broadcast media houses, it merely thought out of its despotic box. It was the same thing Tunisian Ben Ali did by appointing his daughter as sole licensee of internet broadcast.
Like all modern-day despots who fashion novel methods of abridging free speech, Buhari chose an innocuous, economic weapon to deal with press freedom and free speech. This tactic falls in line with what the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar did to poet Maung Saungkha in Burma. Writing on his Facebook post that he had a tattoo of Myint Swe, acting president of Myanmar, on his penis, Saungkha was arrested, tried and found guilty of defamation. He was then sentenced to a six-month jail term. It later turned out that the poet lied – he actually possessed no such tattoo! To the Swe puppet and the puppeteers, however, the mere fact that Saungkha made reference to such a “heinous” issue in an off-colour poem courted the imperial wrath of the state.
NBC’s ostensible grouse with the broadcast outfits was that “they failed to renew their licenses as required by law”, Saddled with the role of regulating the broadcast industry, NBC has acted more as a cudgel in the hands of Buhari’s Goebbels in its arbitrary imposition of fines on TV and radio stations over programmes that questioned the legitimacy of the Buhari government. After paying a huge sum for a licence, NBC again arbitrarily demands a 2.5% charge to be paid by these broadcast houses for every year of their operation. This is in an era where electricity supply is near zero and where diesel is sold for about N850 a litre. Nigerians have also queried the quixotic addition of the line, “in view of this development, the continued operation of the debtor stations is illegal and constitutes a threat to national security,” to reasons why NBC had to revoke the licences of the outfits.
Unknown to it, by shrinking the space against credible sources of information as represented by the 52 broadcast outfits which operated under the radar of the NBC, the Buhari government gave vent to a goblin it had repelled from mutating in the Nigerian space – the multiplicity of fake news. As opposed to its manual of operation as a broadcast regulator in its advisory capacity to the federal government, NBC has become the Rottweiler of the Buhari government. It is neither autonomous, independent nor does it shun interference. The over-politicization of the commission and how the so-called regulator has morphed into Lai Mohammed’s attack dog is a miserable mutation. By hacking those 52 broadcast media with its sledgehammer, Buhari has rendered many Nigerians jobless.
When you look at the Nigerian governmental firmament to find out where the repressive weapon of the Buhari government against free speech is hung, look no further: It is in NBC! The government does not want to hound individuals into prison as it did with Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, via draconian Decree 4 of 1983 in its first coming. This has the tendency of attracting unnecessary attention and international odium. Its target now is institutional repression. That is why Nigerians must not take this arbitrary despotism cloaked in the shawl of economic generation for the federal government lying low. Our ultimate must be to see the end of NBC.
Dr. Adedayo, a Journalist, Columnist and Lawyer 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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News5 days ago
Bank Robberies Now History in Lagos Since 2014 – IGP
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Crime & Court5 days ago
Human Rights Lawyer, Dele Farotimi, Granted ₦30m Bail
