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Kano’s Smoky Future: Let’s Sue The Chinese By Abdullah Musa Without doubt smoke is an irritant. It irritates the eyes, it makes them red. It irritates the lung, it blackens them, blocks air sacs, and according to medical experts, it may lead to either cancer or tuberculosis. I don’t buy any kind of cigarette, but I smoke daily. I am not a passive smoker by associating with smokers, but I smoke because I ride a car, have to stop at road junctions, and in the interval billows from motor cycles find their way into my car; and since I can’t stop breathing, in they go unhindered into my ageing lungs. I am not at liberty to by-pass junctions. Even if such were so, I am often billowed by such emissions where I am forced to drive behind the 30 or more convoy of motor cycles zooming at great speed with their captive passengers. It seems to me the riders are enthralled by the whiteness of the smoke, such that you see them casting a backward glance at the silencer to marvel at the clouds of smoke that to them has no consequence of any kind on the environment and other road users. The road junctions of Kano have changed character. When you approach them, you do not need any road sign to indicate that you are near: the cloud of white smoke enveloping the whole area is the indicator, for within the minutes you have to stay at the road junction, nothing less than forty to fifty moor cycles would be converging there, with their silencers proudly emitting the stock of trade of Benedict the sixteenth: I once saw him on TV going about with white smoke trailing around him; what’s more his selection was announced by the appearance of white smoke. But Kano is thousands of kilometers away from the Papal enclave, and it a Chief Imam that holds sway as spiritual head rather than a Bishop. Yet the billows of white smoke run unabated. We thank God we share with the Honorable Commissioner Ministry of Transport, the honor of having to move around in a car. But in his own case, he rides an official car, sealed and air-conditioned, such that he may be mistaking the white clouds of smoke as either an early arriving harmattan, or the desirable emissions from road side mai kosai(akara) since she also has to earn a living. Nigeria is an entrepreneur’s delight. You can get away with almost anything. If it were done purely with intent on promoting businesses or economic welfare, then one may be sympathetic or even forgiving. But in most cases we are not driven by such altruistic motives. We are driven or rather transfixed by indolence. We have the Standard Organization of Nigeria, whose standards apparently do not include the types of cars or other means of transportation that would ply our roads. When we built our roads did we build into them a form of elasticity that would ensure they expand to accommodate any number of cars, trucks and now motor cycles as the dominant transport vehicle? Today if you are driving car, which you are expected to pay the yearly road usage tax, you come to be so squeezed by the motor cyclists such that you feel you are an intruder on the road. The roads are no longer of two lanes: if they are, then one lane is for motor cyclists and one for the cars; such in most cases you cannot overtake a motor cyclist, but simply and timidly follow him from behind while he bathes you in the choking white smoke. Nasir El Rufai has no vote to lose. Faced with such chaos, he ordered a ban. Here in Kano the law long back took to hiding, for even the implementation of Sarah in relation to free mixing of men and women was derailed by the motorcycle operators. Because the society never had any code of conduct in place, any vagabond can with impunity arrogate to his group the right to behave in any manner that he deems fit. Because the application of law had come over time to wear political color, the machinery of justice may refuse to come to life in favor of the state government. We are that crude, we are that dimwitted! But for how long should we operate this way? For how long would it be feasible for the state to allow people to keep on adding motor cycles in their hundreds daily to our roads? I am not too class conscious: the same may apply to cars, to trucks or even animals. But by our silence we tend to suggest that it is possible. Nobody would be advised to annoy an organized body of men: mafarauta kun sake zaki ya girma!( meaning, the hunters have allowed the lion cub to grow to maturity.) The infant terrible (dan achaba) enjoys the protection of stupendous numbers, and the spoiler attitude of a federal Government that belongs to the dark ages. For if one were not having the mentality suitable for the dark ages, how would one interfere in the administration of justice on those who break the law? Is the law such fluid such that it changes color from one party to another? But it had been in our politicians’ nature to seek to undermine constituted authority in so far as that authority is not responsible to them. It is for this reason that political vanguards that metamorphosed into area boys, yan kalere and the likes are having the field day in their areas of operation. Even internationally, we can see this African stupidity now unfolding in Chad where two former ministers have turned into rebels, seeking to oust Idris Debby in Chad! It is not suggested here that a citizen should come to harm because he chooses to earn a living through a very crude way. Since the genie had come out of the bottle, rural states like Kano cannot afford to attempt to force it back into the bottle. The uphill task is to try to tame it: to give it a human face and mind. I have a grouse against the manufacturers of the motorcycles that ply our roads. Do these types of motor cycles ply their rods with all the billows of smoke? If not, why us? Don’t we deserve cleaner air? Don’t we have right to be healthy? Is it inevitable that such motorcycles must use mix: engine oil mixed with petrol that produces the white emissions? I believe not. I believe it our lack of concern that allows others to treat us with liberty. Unfortunately in Nigeria we are not sophisticated enough for a Federal Government and a State Government of different parties to work for the common good. Otherwise this issue of motor cycles for commercial transport should be exclusively for rural areas. Even at that they should be made cleaner and safer. The Federal Government should also have supported Kano State Government when it wanted to bring decency to women by preventing them from riding at close range with a total stranger. Granted that secularism insists that God’s laws should be broken: but must a woman expose her thighs completely always just because she wants to move from point A to point B? Is this the universal practice? Or are all women such sex objects that they would easily get turned on by every Achaba operator: to whom they expose their thighs, the softness of them; plus a compulsive nudge of their breasts? Kano State Government may not have the constitutional powers to confront China over this sub-standard technology. But with possible cooperation of Federal Government, we can force them to open a retooling plant that would fit these motor cycles with better engines that burn petrol more efficiently. Otherwise the current crop of leaders would have been those whose snuffed out future lives of children just because they refused to rise up to the challenges of their environment. The national assembly should ban further new registration of these killer machines, close down all motor cycle assembly plants till the existing stock are made safer. It may also be Federal Government’s responsibility to give special grants to states in order that they institute a program that would lure operators from this killer trade into: agriculture, factories, carpentry, spare p[arts selling and the like. The environment, the passive smokers and even the achaba operators would be better for it. Whoever would this would have my vote, and where possible, even my time and resources for his campaign. Let’s show the world that we are no longer insane, if we were so in the past.
Abdullah Musa Special Assistant to Kano State Governor On Societal Reorientation (kigongabas@yahoo.com)
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