Where Are Our Consciences?

By

Babayola M. Toungo

babayolatoungo@yahoo.co.uk

 

The issue of almajirai and almajirci has occupied many discourses both privately and in public for over a decade now with nobody willing to do anything about the scourge, particularly those that may be directly responsible for its burgeoning profile in the recent past.  Today, in most of our major cities, particularly in the north, these hapless fellow human beings are a permanent eyesore dotting all major street intersections, shopping malls, fuel stations and such other places where people spend money.  A recent report by one of the organs of the United Nations put the number of these “wretched of the earth” to be about 10.6million.  The report scared me.  But looking around, I realised nobody is willing to do anything about these unfortunatesouls.  An otherwise noble tradition of scholarship, the almajirci has now taken a negative toga due to the neglect of those involved in it by a society becoming more and more selfish.

 

Growing up in the early seventies in Yola, the almajirai we know were the itinerant students of Islamic studies going from house to house in the neighbourhood begging for food during mealtimes.  Immediately after having their fill, they would go back to their schools located in the compounds of their mallams.  Those days, the almajirai learnt the Quran, jurisprudence, fiqh, hadith and other branches of Islamic knowledge sitting in a circle around either the teacher or one of the senior students who must have graduated from the basic classes.  Before graduation, most, if not all, learnt one trade or the other apart from the Islamic knowledge to help sustain them in life.  Some would go deeper in their search for knowledge and eventually become mallams with their own students.  In those days almajirci was really what it meant – scholarship – no more, no less.  You could not meet them on the streets, fuel stations, shopping malls with their ubiquitous begging bowls making nuisance of themselves by harassing motorists and shoppers.  Their begging was confined to their neighbourhood and only for what to eat.

 

Today the average northern youth, particularly in Hausa land, starts taking care of his needs at the age of five.  This is the age at which these luckless kids are sent out to the streets to satisfy their culinary needs by whatever means.  They grow up in the streets from such a tender age to the age of maturity with neither scholarship nor trade learnt since they spend all their waking moments on the streets.  They are thus exposed to the vagaries of the streets and of the criminal elements constantly prowling looking for innocent young recruits for their burgeoning criminal enterprises in a country where crime pays big time.  At a time when their peers are in school, they are denied the opportunity by an uncaring society made up mostly by those who enjoyed free education in their time.  We see them struggling for vantage positions at fuel stations and shopping malls where we go to spend money on things we do not necessarily want or need, with our kids ensconced in the comforts of our cars with windows wound up, cool air conditioner blowing their ever glowing skins and music blaring from hidden loudspeakers, conveniently blocking their wails for assistance of “a taimaka mana da na abinci”.

 

Our consciences have been numbed by a choice of movies from a variety of sources watched on 42” Plasma/ LCD television screens while reclining on chairs made from the finest materials.  Our worldview is therefore shaped by Supersport, Movie Magic and other entertaining foreign channels while theirs are shaped by the deprivations they go through and the “big men” who drive past them in glorified ambulances.  We don’t feel moved whenever we past these hapless kids, moving between vehicles with their torn pants, licking fingers made dirty from the remnants of a Mr. Biggs takeaway thrown from the window of a moving car driven by one of us.  We do not feel any pang of guilt in buying motorcycles for the children of the poor during campaigns and unleashing them on a society lacking any form of public transportation, to operate as commercial motorcyclists while our kids, their age mates, are in schools in Ghana, Togo, United Kingdom and the United States.  We do not experience any feeling of discomfort when we park by the roadside to buy telephone recharge cards from their calloused hands while our kids, again their age mates, are sitting behind big desks as executives in the major companies and government agencies.  What sort of animals have we become?  We do not feel any remorse turning these kids into political thugs, street vendors, porters, shoeshiners, itinerant manicurists while our kids are trained from birth to be their patrons.

 

Even if for our selfish reasons, have we thought what future holds in store for us and those kids who in the next five to ten years will become grown men with needs like ours – craving to own whatever we own – the women, the cars, the travelling to far off places like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Dubai and the USA, places they only hear while eavesdropping on the conversations of “big men”, the shopping, the clubbing, etc.  Have we ever thought that when the deprivations continue while as they attain the age of maturity with nothing to their names, and therefore nothing to protect, they may turn against us to wreck what we have amassed over the years through crookery, theft, corruption and denial of their fundamental rights to be well educated and provide jobs?  When their collective anger boils over, are we certain it would not turn into a volcano that will rain its ashes on all of us?  Can we be positive that we have not started seeing this in the violence rocking the country from Lagos to Maiduguri, Port Harcourt to Sokoto?

 

We should look around our GRAs and other highbrow areas and see God’s work on our own kids.  Most junkies and drug addicts are found in our closets.  This is God’s on way of telling us we are on the wrong path, yet we don’t see the irony.  Let’s please search our rusted consciences and see if it is possible for us to retrace our steps from this route to perdition that we have taken.  Let’s rejig our educational and employment system to incorporate those unfortunates.  Remember, most of us were no better than them but we were given the opportunity to go to school and be gainfully employed thereafter not because of who we were, but because of what we were.

 

Either we quickly defuse this ticking time bomb, or it will blow up in our faces.  The choice is ours.