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The North’s Wretched Of The Earth By Babayola M. Toungo
Whenever you think northern Nigeria has reached its nadir in the area of insecurity, we touch a new low. With the killing of Major General Mamman Shuwa, war time General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the first Division, the situation was pushed a notch lower. The late Shuwa was the most invisible among his peers throughout his retirement years and many people believed he died a long time ago. His low profile life after retirement belies his larger than life stature of the folklores surrounding him while we were growing up. Shuwa was an enigma to many people but that was the way he chose to live his life. May his soul rest in peace.
The north has been under siege, so to say, since the middle of 2010. The first salvo was fired in the Eagle Square during the Independence Day celebration of that year and since then the region has not known peace. Almost every part of the region has experienced one crisis or the other; lives have been needlessly wasted and economies, both public and private, destroyed. The level of infrastructural damage in a region with already atrophied infrastructure is mind-boggling. This is happening to a region noted for its high level of poverty and illiteracy, high poverty level, low economic and commercial activities and dangerous rise in immorality and indolence. The area is therefore home to the largest concentration of beggars found anywhere in the world. These factors and bad governance by a leadership that is increasingly isolating itself from the people may largely be responsible for the insecurity situation.
Much as one may try to make excuses for our leadership (particularly the northern governors and other political leaders of the region) one is forced to admit leadership failure at all the strata of governance in the north. The northern region has never had it so rough and I dare say no region has ever had it this tough without any fear of contradiction. Gone were the days when parents were either forced or enticed to send their wards to school; gone also were the days when there was competition among parents as to who has the highest number of wards in the school, or the number of university graduates per household; gone also were the days when service to the community and nation supersedes personal aggrandisement. Today the competition may be on who has the least number of students in school or which mallam has the largest body of almajirai. Our streets are littered with street urchins, some barely out of their diapers – non-among them has a chance in hell of seeing the four walls of classroom.
My generation and the generation before enjoyed the best governments have to offer is now denying these poor souls the chance to even hope for a decent life. We, the inheritors, are guilty of the perilous state of our communities. We foolishly think being well off personally is tantamount to living in peace and to hell with the other guy. Living behind high fences topped by electric or razor fence gives us a false sense of security. We forget that those boys – those that we turned into hewers and drawers of water – venture into our houses, some to our innermost sanctums, to spy on us and see first hand how our over-pampered, children live while they scavenge our thrash cans for remnants of junk foods bought for our kids to or from school. We invite them into our lives to come and wash for kids, sweep our houses and remove the garbage from our houses. They see us living a life that they can only envy; yet we wonder how they become beasts without compassion. We turned them in these beasts, wittingly or unwittingly.
We steal the money meant to educate them and send our kids abroad only for them to come back (or brought back) as graduates of drug addiction. We pilfer the monies meant for the purchase of drugs and equipment for public hospitals to afford us the opportunity of travelling abroad for the merest ailment only for us to be brought back in caskets or strange ailments that our doctors lack the expertise or equipment to take care of. We siphon the monies meant for the provision of potable drinking water to build boreholes in our houses. We pinch monies for the provision of electricity and buy generators so our kids won’t miss Scooby Doo, The Simpsons, Ben10 and such other cartoons that only encourage immorality. We are comfortable stealing funds meant to construct roads for the use of the poor and buy planes to pollute the atmosphere and air they breathe. How did we come to this heartless century? We that are noted for compassion are today guilty of lack of empathy.
We were given free education by our past leaders and now that we have taken up the leadership mantle have failed our younger ones and generations yet unborn. We pretend not to know the causes of the mayhem unleashed on us by those whom we neglected and treat like dirt. The hopelessness, their poverty and the way we throw our ill-gotten wealth at their faces are some of the things that make them behave irrationally. We have taken away their future and that of their children, yet we think they are unreasonable. Have we ever paused to think our roles in the creation of the monster that is now threatening to consume us? Have we been fair to those who made it possible for us to be the successes that we belief we are today? How did we come to this sorry pass?
We have created a nation where injustice appears to have taken permanent residence. Different folks are treated differently and this therefore, engender lost of faith in the country. While pickpockets and small-time criminals are punished, armed robbers are rewarded with the country’s highest honours, appointments and contracts. I can easily empathise with a boy who grew up on the streets, through no fault of his, when he becomes a killer for hire. I am not justifying such behaviour but where you have a country that doesn’t care about your well-being and a president who “doesn’t give a damn” about you and your feelings, what do you expect to get? The streets are harsh and unforgiving.
The spate of killings and property destruction sweeping across the north is a serious indictment on the leadership of the region. They appear to be going round in circles with no clear vision as to how to bring an end to this madness. Unfortunately they are part of the problem. The poverty level of the region can be directly attributable to their selfish style of leadership. For their visionless leadership style, today the economy of the north is prostate, the result is what see – unemployment spawning poverty, which breeds discontent that translate into anarchy. While our cities and villages are burning, we pretend to find solutions in posh hotels, drinking coffee and exchanging banters while reading our mails on our Ipads, Iphones, BlackBerry and Samsung Smartphones. Each of these gadgets is enough to send a kid to school.
The north is fast turning into a concentration of illiterates; drug addicts, morons and this invariably make people angry and suicidal. Suicidal because they don’t have anything in life and nothing to protect. Their lives become hopeless so therefore not worth living. If such be their lot, why do you think they should spare you. Shuwa is gone through the bullets fired by either an amateur or a trained killer. His visibility, service to his community and the fact he lived all his live in the midst of the down trodden, couldn’t save him from them at the end. Are we living the life Shuwa led? Are we truly one with the people just like the late General? Have we really tried to interrogate ourselves on why the region, known for its peaceful coexistence has suddenly turned to violence, where human life isn’t valued more than a dog’s?
The genesis of the violence surrounding us can be located in our governments abandoning education, making it unaffordable to the poor. This led to the burgeoning in the number of street kids – their training ground being the streets and their teachers the criminals roaming the streets looking for gullible, innocent youths. Thus we unwittingly created an army of killers, rapists and sundry criminals. We created mindless, hopeless youth that will look you in the eye and shoot you dead without blinking their eyes. We assumed in our usual fashion that we could use them as cannon fodders and scallywags during elections and discard at the end of their assignments. To have total control over them, we introduce to hallucinogenic drugs but forgot to learn how to wean them from it. They now take all manner of assignments to enable them satiate their thirst for the drugs.
These then are those that could kill without any emotion. These are our legacy to the north that our parents inherited from the likes of Sardauna, Tafawa Balewa and Mahmud Ribadu. While our first generation leaders bred first class scholars, civil servants and military officers, we have proudly procreated the demons that are consuming us. To insult them the more, we conceived the Almajiri schools, more to give out contracts to the ‘boys’ than to cater for their education. Why don’t we use the money so voted for these segregated schools to incorporate them into those schools where the kids of our domestic helps go to – the public schools.
We either rethink our ungodly, thieving ways or be prepared to be consumed by the hatred we are brewing in the bellies of these poor souls. |