Iliyasu Gadu
Ilgad2009@gmail.com
08035355706 (Texts only)
If the late Premier of Northern Nigeria Sardauna of Sokoto Sir Ahmadu Bello, late Prime Minister of Nigeria Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, late Mallam Aminu Kano the leader of the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and late Joseph Sarwuan Tarka founder and leader of the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC) all venerable political leaders of northern Nigeria in the days of yore were to wake up from their graves today and behold the state of northern Nigeria, I daresay they will be utterly disappointed.
As Premier of northern Nigeria in the first republic the Sardauna will take one look at the killing field that the north has become from one end to the other, the various infrastructure he built and the socio-economic human capital development programmes he initiated across several areas which have either now been abandoned, or willfully destroyed and in a gesture that speaks volumes about what he’s seen, ask of the present crop of northern elders and elites with sardonic irony in his well-modulated spoken English; ‘’I see that you have done quite well with the legacies we left behind for you. I suppose you chaps are proud of yourselves now?’’
Tafawa Balewa ever the taciturn, avuncular personality that he is, will take one look at the North as it is today, shake his head and with a straight, expressionless face, elect to say nothing, indicating by that gesture that silence speaks more in such circumstances than talking.
Mallam Aminu Kano, the voluble champion of Talakawa politics in northern Nigeria well-known in his lifetime for his acerbic wit will distance himself by several country miles against the entire political crowd in Kano, Jigawa, Katsina and Kaduna states, his core political turf during his days. Aminu Kano will readily not hesitate to verbally roast the political elite in those states for their grand posturing on issues pertaining to the welfare of the poor masses, while they live a life of stupendous ostentation.
Tarka, popularly called ‘’JS’’ from his initials and who was highly revered in the middle belt areas of Nigeria will critically question the way his idea and struggle for a sense of belonging for the non Hausa and Fulani ethnic groups in the northern political scheme of things. He will marvel at how people who once opposed him vehemently and declared they had nothing to do with his movement when he first mooted it, are now opportunistically latching on to it to pursue their agenda. He will be amazed that the all- inclusive idea he envisioned of bringing the peoples of these areas regardless of differences in faith and ethnicity, has now been turned into a platform for exclusion and division among the people. He would observe that the same people mouthing about injustice have proven to be worse than the system they used to criticize now that they have been given a bite of the cherry.
Collectively these four iconic bygone northern leaders would look at the abysmal statistics of the present state of things in north where the region is cited as the poverty capital of the world and one of the most dangerous areas to live in the world. The would also consider that all over the north without exception, the steps they had taken to upgrade education and initiate industrial development, agriculture and infrastructural projects like the Baro inland port and a host of similar other ones have atrophied. They will find it difficult to wrap their heads around why the north known as the model of peaceful co-existence in Nigeria and indeed the world has now become a seething cauldron of discontent, disillusionment and disappointment where life and livelihood has been reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature. They will marvel at the stupendous revenues that have accrued into the north over the decades yet the area has been hurtling inexorably into unstoppable retrogression without any concrete concerted efforts to stem the tide by its crop of leaders.
On top of all these lamentation, these late leaders will lament that over the decades not only have the succeeding leaders in the north done very little to stem the tide in retrogression of the legacies they left behind, they will look ruefully with utter contempt the efforts being made by the current crop of northern leaders to use their names opportunistically in furthering their personal agendas.
Let us face it squarely, northern leaders do not have the inclination to resolve the issues plaguing the region. If they did, they will not tolerate for instance the almajiri system in the north. They will show greater resolve in a concerted way to ban it and its various manifestation all over the north. The practice does not jell with Islamic injunctions and in our modern world. It is most wicked and anti- human to subject millions of promising boys to a practice that dehumanizes them and deprives them of the sort of future that most northern leaders and elites prefer and arrange for their wards and children. The almajiri system practiced in the north is not practiced anywhere in the Islamic world and a close look at it reveals a fundamental deviation from the Islamic provisions that guides it.
The same grandstanding, opportunism and lack of political will to stop the almajiri system is also applied on the issue of banditry, kidnapping and insurgency that has reduced to its knees. When northern leaders routinely gather at forums to purport to tackle these issues what you see at such meetings are vainglorious exhibitions of ostentation, hubris and hollow opulence and power by those who have neither the ken nor commitment to face up to the issue. In individual states were the issues are ravaging there is an abiding suspicion that the authorities at various levels have actually turned the issue into a lucrative war economy and bazaar on the lives of poor rural folks.
If the leaders of northern Nigeria have a plan or blue-print to solve the issues of poverty, criminality, educational backwardness, social mobility and empowerment we are yet to see it for all the countless meetings, symposia and studies we have had on the retrogression of the region. In actual fact, northern political leaders can rightly be accused of being sadistic at seeing their own people suffer from the effects of the deliberate and willful acts that produce the retrogression the north suffers from.
The North can only pull itself from this miasma if shows a concrete willingness to shake off some of the outworn cultural practices that incubate, encourage and glorify retrogression in the name of upholding religious tradition and a dubious sense of superiority.
For now, with all the numerous life threating challenges eating it, the north remains steeped in glorification of a past that has little or no relevance to the reality of contemporary Nigeria. In this regard the north presents a pathetic picture of a once great region now reduced by its failure to garner the necessary political will to plan for the future when it had the wherewithal to do so, looking for straws to clutch on to in a fast-changing Nigeria it used to hold sway in the scheme of things.
