The state of the talakawa. That is the story we hardly tell in the whole theatre of banditry. Yet we know that it is the poor in the north who do everything. They are poor so the elite can preen. They wash their clothes, clean their cars, secure their homes, flatter their vanity in songs and dances, cook for them, fight for them. When it is over, they die for them. They are the lambs on the slab.
For those who know them, they are called the almajiris. They are innocent on the streets, pan in hand with beggary looks. When I was a youth Corps member in Wudil in Kano State, I had one as friend. He ran errands for me. Mosquitoes upended my joy and he was by me day and night like a son as I tried to shake off the pangs and shivers of malaria. I don’t remember his name now. But I know he needed some mentor or official policy to redeem him from the life of a happy mendicant.
I remember boys like him today, and I wonder what and who he is today. Is he in the throes of banditry? Oliver Twist or a redemptive tale like Pip in A Great expectation? Is he still in the precinct trying to live out his days under the mercies of a kitchen, or a dinner leftover, or working like another friend I had in Kano city known as Sunusi, who was a security person but who could read every word of the newspaper?
That was what we should contemplate as we await details of the sweet morsels of 16 tomahawks that rattled southern Sokoto. Some are trying to spin it in different ways. To some, it is America invading northern Nigeria. Some said it is the government of Tinubu, who allowed an imperialist to undercut our sovereign pride. Gumi, the irritant foul mouth, would rather have Turkey do it.
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What is left out is the little boy and little girl, their fathers and mothers in the underbelly of the north. The man who had been paying fines or taxes just to retrieve masara or shinkafa from his farm. The mother who cannot travel without fear to her daughter’s wedding or son in the hospital. The fellow who has lost all hope because the bandits have destroyed all lifelines and he has caved in to their logic of brigandage. He now survives supplying them food and medicine. Of the mother who now carts her daughters to their beastly arms as aquiline comforts.
They are the ones who live in the underbelly of Sokoto and Kebbi and Zamfara. They are the little fellows whose children lay in bunks and are ferried away by the goons of plunder. They are the ones who get slaughtered on the highways, on the farms, on the way to mosques. They are the defenceless citizens who seek mercy but get death.
They have no one to cry to and nowhere to scream, except to their boy wonders of Ak47 and in their lairs in the forest glades of hate. They are the folks we must think about this season. We must not look at the bullets that torch the goons, because they have no mercy in the fibres of their beings. We must not look at it with the eyes of partisan fights because the first people we must fight for are those who have no Ak47 or armoured cars or who do not have bank accounts in Abuja.
Hence, it was a pity when a section of the northern elite has kept quiet and tried to weaponize the misery of the folks for partisan benefits. But it is this section of the northern elite who have shown no pity for the commonfolk. They are not only politicians but a few clerics and even intellectuals and media. They think the fight to stop the hoodlums is about fighting against a region. We have heard about the tormented soul of Gumi and his cohorts and a few politicians including men like Nasir el Rufai and Prof Usman Yusuf, although the small fellow had said nothing at the time of writing. He had tried to turn ploughshares into swords, seeing a north and south duel when it should all be about lifting the real small fellows in the north. His successor is showing him how to do it.
Thank God not all of the northern big men think like Gumi and some top media fellows who see fire when there is light. The fellows who do live in the secluded luxury of feudal rampart. They are not affected by all the hoopla of bandit carnivores. Their children are not in those schools. none of the reports has indicated that even the Kebbi incident involved a big man’s daughter. No. Their children are either in a top school in an impenetrable enclosure in Abuja or in the London at Eaton, or in Switzerland or in Canada or in Dubai or the United States.
They do not need the hospitals. They go for checkups in the U.K. or Germany, when they are not splashing huge sums in choice clinics in Abuja or Lagos. They do not have to go to a bank in town. They have dollars at the ready, and they will spend at will. They have their homes in secure precincts, and their security guards are armed to the teeth. If you get past the security, the homes are fortes.
They do not need to go to the markets where bandits storm and loot and kill. Their kitchens sizzle with aromas inside a fortress of their homes, and all the choice dinners and lunches and breakfasts are chummy between their tongues and lips.
The poor pray in public mosques. The rich talk to God from beneath their roofs. They pray in peace, except when they fortify their ride to and from the place of worship.
They are immune from all the news of the slaughters and tears in the villages and towns in the north. Hence some, like Bashir Dalhatu, who was an Abacha crony and now the leader of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), can compare them to the Niger Delta militants. And they are saying we should coddle the goons.
It is sentiment like this that gave birth to Aminu Kano with his Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and later the People’s Redemption Party (PRP) and he held sway in Kano and Kaduna, and some of the northern progressives today still see him as their ancestor. Alhaji Kano still personifies the tendency of talakawa empathy today as we can see in Kano and Kaduna where strong strands of people empathy still assert themselves.
It is a time like this that we know who is on the people’s side and those who are in the cocky circle, looking down on the majority with disdain and make merchandise of the talakawa and politics of their aches and pains. This is not the time to turn the people against their helpers as Shakespeare narrated in his play Coriolanus.
