PEOPLE AND POLITICS

By MOHAMMED HARUNA

MATTERS MISCELLANEOUS ARISING

kudugana@yahoo.com

(1)  As the Ramada season begins…

The reader should please pardon me if I sound a bit preachy and personal this morning. With the Ramadan fasting period here, the reader, I am sure, will understand, if not pardon, my preachiness today. I will like to start with a little introduction of an organisation based in Kaduna of which I am the chairman. Vision Trust Foundation, VTF, was founded eight years or so ago at the initiative, as far as I can recall, of Alhaji Falalu Bello, Sarkin Bai Zazzau and Alhaji Ahmed Dasuki. Dr. Usman Bugaje, formerly Political Adviser to Vice President Atiku Abubakar, and now a prominent member of the House of Representative as the chairman of its Foreign Affairs Committee, was the first chairman of the organisation. I took over as its chairman when he moved on to advise the Vice-President.

Among the broad objectives of VTF was healing the political and religious rifts in the leadership of the North, which had negatively affected the region’s political pre-eminence. VTF was also concerned about the educational and economic backwardness of the region as well as the relative backwardness of Muslims in all parts of the country.

Our take on all these problems was that they were due more to internal weaknesses of our constituency than to any outside conspiracies, even though such conspiracies may exist. Our strategy, therefore, was and remains, essentially one of introspection and self-help, beginning with Kaduna where most of our founding members reside.

One of the small but practical steps we first took towards achieving our objectives was to start a micro-credit scheme and a motor-cycle ownership scheme for victims of the religious riots of February and May, 2000. Long before then we had agonized about what to do regarding the use of unemployed youth on all sides of our political and religious divides to foment the kind of violence that had changed Kaduna from being arguably the most accommodating city in the country into one hell-hole of religious riots. The February and May 2002 riots merely served to ginger us to move from discourse to action.

Early this year we decided to broaden our approach by training and sponsoring as many youths – both men and women – as we can to become self-employed. To do this we chose twelve trades and skills including computer and secretarial studies, restauranting, welding, plumbing, electrical and electronic repairs and carpentry. In late March we organized a workshop at Arewa House involving a number of youth organisations and potential donors to increase public awareness of the dangers of youth unemployment and raise funds for our youth empowerment scheme. At the end of the workshop, we received about N5,800,000 (Five million, eight hundred thousand Naira only) in cash, cheques and pledges from Kaduna State government, the Vice-President, business groups, the British-American Tobacco Nigeria, Foundation (BATN,F) and individuals including the chairman of the occasion, Alhaji Ismaila Isa Funtua.

We also received offers in kind to train many members of the youth organisations in the selected fields. BATN,F, represented by its General Manager, Mr. Folu Koku, offered to train twelve youths on computer and secretarial studies at a private computer school. It also offered to establish a business center for them at the end of their training which will be handed over to them provided they demonstrated, among other things, the ability to pay back the cost of the facilities in the center.

On that occasion, not only was Kaduna state the biggest donor, the governor, Alhaji Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi, delayed another engagement in Zaria, to personally attend the opening ceremony. The state government has since redeemed its pledge. It has also carried out the instructions of the governor to employ a very gifted invalid youth, Adamu Husseini, in its ministry of works.

As at last month, we had a total of about N3,500,000 in our kitty for the project, with the balance of about N1,300,000 still outstanding as pledges. Out of the N3,500,000, we have spent over N3,450,000 to train 112 youths (including the 12 sponsored by BATN,F) in computer skills in Kaduna Polytechnic and at a private computer school. We have also been training another 46 youths in welding, tailoring, plumbing, restauranting, etc.

What we are doing at VTF is obviously a drop in the ocean of the problems confronting this country, indeed even Kaduna town alone. But a small difference is better than no difference at all. Needless to say, if all of us in positions to do something about society’s problems can commit ourselves to doing so, the difference would be a huge, huge one. Our regular introspections and our little experience at VTF suggests that one of the biggest obstacles to solving our problems of poverty is not any lack of resources – these are aplenty at both public and individual levels. Rather it is the mix-up in our priorities at both levels.

This is why I am writing this morning as we begin the holy season of Ramadan fasting to appeal to Muslims and Christians alike to lend a helping hand to the VTF and to all organisations that strive to help the poor and the underprivileged to become self-dependent.

In writing this piece I will like to refer the reader, especially the Muslim reader, to one of the most profound articles that anyone has written in recent times on how simple it is to solve the problems of our society – if only we sincerely wish to do so.

This is the article written by Adamu Adamu entitled Memo to Umra returnees in the January 17^th edition of Daily Trust and reproduced last week-end in the Weekly Trust by its editor, Garba Deen Muhammad, with a witty but profound small introduction meant to hopefully prick the reader’s conscience.

For the benefit of those who may not have read the article, Adamu did a simple arithmetic which was highly revelatory of how privileged Muslims, as individuals and as political leaders, have got their priorities mixed up by regularly spending both private and public funds on the annual ritual of Hajj and Umra even when such monies could be better spent attending to far more basic needs of their less privileged compatriots. The object of his article, said Adamu, was to “remind non-first-time pilgrims – and by extension all socially conscious Muslims – that while they flew out in droves to perform the umra, a bigger umra at home was left undone”.

The author shows how Muslims spend an average of over 20 billion Naira annually on umra when Muslims are “behind in all indices of development”, and when it is said that giving succour to the poor and needy or bringing happiness to the afflicted is better than a hundred Hajj after the obligatory one. Here it is instructive to note that all the three leading lights of Shehu Usmanu bin Fodio’s jihad – Shehu Usmanu himself, Shehu Abdullahi, his brother ,and Sultan Muhammadu Bello, Shehu Usmanu’s son – never went on Hajj, not because they did not have the means, but simply because they regarded the job at hand of reforming Muslim practice and spreading Islam was more rewarding both here and in the here-after.

To drive home his point about umra and going to Hajj more than once not being a priority for a Muslim, Adamu drew attention to a governor who used public funds to sponsor 100 pilgrims to Mecca while the salaries of workers remained unpaid. The author also drew attention to the folly of a local government chairman spending N5,000,000 on Ramadan and Sallah gifts while the buildings of the primary school next to the local government headquarters remained without roofs after the last hurricane blew them off.

As we enter the Ramadan season, we should use it to re-examine our priorities and commit ourselves to doing first things first, as individuals and as groups and as leaders at our various levels in society. If we do so we will surely narrow, if not eliminate, the gap between the poor and the rich, a gap which invariably turns us into each other’s enemy rather than each other’s friendly neighbour.

(2)   The latest media’s Muslim Campaign

Early this week, the BBC and VOA, among other global media, gave prominence to the story of the governments of Zamfara, Kano and Kaduna states suspending their participation in the current Unicef campaign on child immunization against polio. The anti-Muslim slant of their stories was quite obvious from their emphasis on the fact that these are all predominantly Muslim states. The slant is also obvious from their thinly disguised attempt to ridicule the reservations expressed by those states about the safety of the vaccines. As far as the editors at these global media are concerned, if Unicef says the vaccine is safe – which a Unicef spokesman says it is – there is no earthly reason why anyone else should have any doubt.

Yet anyone even superficially familiar with the mysterious ways of multi-nationals, including pharmaceutical conglomerates like Pfizer and Monsanto, knows that in their pursuit of profit, it is not beyond them to suborn governments and even international organisations like the United Nations and its organs, including Unicef.

The doubting Thomas is invited to read The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast, an American investigative journalist who divides his time working in New York and London. In this 2002 book, Palast reveals how Monsato, one of the world’s biggest chemical companies, was able not only to easily place or make friends in governments all over the globe, he also reveals how Monsanto was able to compromise the World Health Organisation’s Joint Experts Committee on Food Additives, into giving one of its controversial products, a bovine growth hormone called BST, a clean bill of health, inspite of the fact that the hormone was known to promote infection in cow udders and to increase the risk of breast and prostate cancer in humans who drink BST-laced milk.

In our BBC story about the polio campaign a spokesman of Unicef admitted that tests on the vaccine may SEEM to indicate the contaminations feared by those who have expressed reservations about its safety. Yet instead of addressing those fears, even if they are more apparent than real, the BBC et al tried to pooh-pooh them as the superstitious rantings of mischievous, if not malicious, Muslim clerics.

No one doubts the need to vaccinate children against infections but knowing how multi-nationals put profit above safety, especially when it is the safety of the poor that is at stake, no sensible persons would dismiss suspicions about the genuineness of the new global campaign against polio as the rantings of conspiracy cranks or paranoid anti-globalisers.

(3) Corrigenda

Since the publication of my article on the problems of the Bank of the North, BON, on September 24, my attention has been drawn to a factual error on the retreat organized by the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, to stem the BON’s slide into bankruptcy. In my article, I said the retreat was held in 2001 at the onset of the bank’s problems. I have since learnt that it was held in January this year as a desperate measure to halt the bank’s decline that had started two years before.

The error is regretted.

I wish to also correct the very profound error I made in my article of September 10, on the death of the Etsu Nupe, Alhaji Umaru Sanda Ndayako. In my article, I said the family of Umaru Majigi to which the late Etsu belonged, did not descend from Dendo, the founder of the Fulani dynasty of the Nupe Kingdom. Mohammed Ndayako of Dendo Chambers,in Minna,Niger State, wrote back on September 18, to correct my assertion.

“Mohammed Haruna, a Nupe, who can rightly be described as a member of the Umaru Majigi clan because of his personal relationships with them” Ndayako said, “should have checked the historical records of his origin very well before putting the said wrong historical account in his popular Wednesday column.”

I have since then gone back to cross-check the oral account of the Dendo-era Nupe history I had believed was correct and I must admit I am in error regarding what I said of the Umaru Majigi ruling house. Post-graduate works on Nupe history by Idris Shaba Jimada and Manko Yilata Abdul and the book, The Emirates of Northern Nigeria; A Preliminary Survey of their Historical Traditions by S.J. Hogben and A.H.M. Kirk – Green, among other books on Nupe history, show that Umaru Majigi was the son of Mamuda Majigi who in turn was said to be the eldest son of Dendo. Mamuda was said to have shown no interest in being Etsu till his death.

As Mohammed Ndayako says, I really had no excuse for my error. First, Senator Dangana Ndayako, a younger brother of Alhaji Umaru Sanda, is my childhood friend. Second, the father of the late Etsu Nupe, Alhaji Muhammad Ndayako himself the 9^th Etsu, and my grandfather, Alhaji Abdullahi Ndajika, the Etsu of the Nupes in Ibadan, were very close friends, so much so that when the young Umaru Sanda went to study at the then  University College,Ibadan, his father entrusted him to the care of my grandfather. Finally, the late Etsu Nupe and my late uncle and step-father, Alhaji Garba Nmanda, were also close friends.