Category: Wednesday

Do not follow a person you see running away
– African proverb

After weeks of attempts to ignore each other, they finally began to come to terms with the objective similarity of their conditions and circumstances. They were going nowhere. Not even a few feet away from each other. They could finally speak with each other, a significant progress from the silent struggle for space, fresh air, fights that no one separated, alliances that collapsed every few hours and the imperatives of sharing very little. The normal protocols in detention will be the existence of a leader supported by enforcers and a hierarchy designed by length of stay, muscle and the necessities of maintaining order. Not here. This is not the normal cell. Every inmate here represents the others’ source and target of hostility. The cell was the world that had locked them up, its occupants constant reminders that they all had long chains that are not severed by walls or circumstances.

The ground rules had been set. They shared a righteous indignation and a sense of profound injustice. Their innocence was beyond question, a mark of honour worn with pride and fortitude. Martyrs all, they had agreed no cause is nobler than the other. They are champions of causes that clashed and struggled for validation and triumph in the world outside. Here, they will share their versions of the injustice of the Nigerian state, the inspiration behind their struggles and the cause of their current circumstances. No interruptions, no arguments, no challenges.

Inmate One goes first. He is a fighter for the cause of Biafra, a nation his people were destined to have and build into a model African nation. He had inherited this cause from generations who had lived lives, fought and died on the margins of Nigeria, a nation which milked his people’s innate genius and enterprise. The simple demand to leave a nation that is inherently incapable of doing justice to his people, a  demand recognised by a world which acknowledges rights to self determination for certain cultural groups has been resisted by the rest of Nigeria and many Igbo who prefer servitude to others than joining the struggle for their own nation. His struggle will not end until the Nigerian state yields. By any means necessary.

Inmate Two states his case. He is a fighter for a nation where his Islamic faith will not be answerable to other faiths or political systems that negate, abridge or pollute it. The Nigerian state as it exists represents an intolerable assault that cannot be ignored or tolerated by all good Muslims. His fight is a divine call to resist the imposition of systems that compromise the essence of being a Muslim. Victory is assured by Allah, whose demand to fight to free Muslims from non -Islamic influences and compromises is being ignored by many Muslims, and entirely by other Nigerian non-Muslims. These are enemies who should be fought without distinction. His war will be over when the Nigerian state becomes a model Muslim state, or yields grounds to carve out an Islamic State from it. By any means necessary.

Inmate Three speaks. He is a freedom fighter for a people whose God-given wealth is being stolen by other Nigerians. His people are rewarded with a pittance, poverty and destruction of all other assets on land and in water. The world colludes with the Nigerian state to pump out his peoples’ wealth to areas where life is made comfortable. Most Nigerians have fed fat from his people’s wealth under dubious arrangements that allow strangers and foreigners unhindered access to incredible wealth that could give every youth and adult from his communities all the benefits of modern development. This is a fight for the life and soul of his people, a fight abandoned by many from the community and resisted by a Nigerian state which could collapse without his peoples’ stolen assets. It is a war that can and must be won. It will not stop until the Nigerian state is made to accept that his peoples’ wealth is not available for plunder by foreigners and other Nigerians. By any means necessary.

Inmate Four states his case. He is a fighter in defence of his community which is being destroyed by people from other communities. His people have been farmers, simple folk living in peace with everyone who was willing to respect lands, boundaries, traditions and rights bequeathed by ancestors. Until recently, quarrels and conflicts with neighbours and strangers have been resolved through ancient mechanisms and processes, as well as the facilitation of organs of the Nigerian state. These are no longer effective, and his community has had to protect itself from assaults, attacks and imminent extinction with the same methods being employed by its enemies. It is no longer safe to wait until after you are attacked. Taking the fight to the enemy is the only effective means of keeping the community safe, or as safe as it can be in a situation where it has to raise its own security and buy weapons at great cost. His war will not end until women and children can sleep in their villages, and men can go out to farms and markets without being attacked. By any means necessary, his community will protect itself.

Inmate Five says he is not a freedom fighter. He has no noble cause to champion. He fights to survive in a nation that has not prepared him for anything other than a life of crime. The violent crime for which he is being accused should be visited on the Nigerian state, a nation built precariously on two pillars of pervasive violence and subversion of all laws of the land. He is one of millions in that bulge around a nation that is actually its uneducated, unskilled demographic nightmare. Violent crime is only one variant among crimes in a nation of virtual criminals, the worst crime being caught. There are millions like him out there, grabbing and shooting their ways a day a time. One day he will be finally victimised by the state’s bullet or a lynch mob.

Inmate Six was next. He too is a fighter in his people’s cause to resist the destruction of their livelihood and lifestyle. For centuries, they have lived a life on constant move, dictated by the needs of livestock and the imperatives of preserving a culture under constant threat from a rapidly-changing world. Conflicts and frictions with settled and farming communities have been a constant part of life, but these have been mitigated in the past by effective dispute resolution systems and governments that designed methods of reducing conflicts. In the last few years, however, shrinking secure grazing land, expanding urban settlements and indifferent or even hostile governments have combined to threaten the lives and assets of his people. Land is now the only asset recognised by governments with little sympathy for his people. His own asset is a nuisance and a threat, and the land he needs to sustain it and expand is being taken away. He is hemmed in by insensitivity and hostility. He cannot move forward without being an aggressor. He cannot stay because he owns no place to stay. He fights for space, a job he is ill-prepared for in a nation in search of demons. He makes new enemies by the day, losing many members of the community to crimes and lifestyles with less stress. What is left of his lifestyle and asset will be preserved. At all cost necessary.

Inmate Seven sighed. He was not prepared to speak, but he had to honour a commitment. I am the Nigerian state, he says, including its justice system which you all accuse. I am in this cell with you because I am also accused of failing Nigerians. I am supposed to be your protection and guarantor of you rights. I am to mediate between your rights and those of other Nigerians. I have lost the legitimate monopoly to use violence as a means of enforcing law and order to crime and every grievance. I am accused of failing to stop widespread corruption which impoverishes citizens and pushes them into desperation. I am like a large prison, a much bigger version of this cell, in which every inmate is my victim. I cannot provide judicial or guarantee social justice. I am accused of victimising everyone. Yet only I can address injustice.

Wise men speak because they have something to say. Fools because they have to say something –Plato

In the last few weeks, voices raised over the administration’s management of the economy have become louder and more distinct. Those that sounded like political grudges around the management of the party or the President’s apparent decision to ignore calls for substantial overhaul of his key advisers and appointed public officials were no less shrill, but they have been largely treated as traditional irritants by the people whose jobs it is to slap back on behalf of the President. Many of the politically-aggrieved have chosen the path of designing a future without damaging exposure, but have left enough room for notice and speculation, which is vital to political health. Spokespersons have been busy countering most of the pointed criticisms, but the way things look, they will now be a lot busier, or become more discerning in choosing how, when, where and what to respond to. The presidency is at that stage when every criticism hurts, and those who say they are giving you advice as friends are instinctively doubted. When the only real friend is one who suffers your limitations in silence, your circle of friends shrink by the day as more and more walk away and tell the world that the nation has a problem in you. There were a few friends of President Muhammadu Buhari who agonised over his wife’s publicly-expressed opinion over his choice of company. A few weeks ago, they would have been in the ranks of those who worried how much of that much-publicised outing and the responses were products of insufficient attention to opinions of the most intimate and closest circles around the President. A few have  now taken up more or less the same method of publicly calling attention to serious limitations in the presidency’s capacities to respond to popular perceptions regarding its hold over the nation’s affairs. You could be tempted to remove Buba Galadima from this intimate circle now, given the fading quality of his grievances, but the robust riposte by the President’s men suggested that even the comments of a man they say was discarded for deep moral limitations and who today may not win an election with his family as voters had hurt the President by hinting at a character flaw in the inability to sustain and reward loyalty, and for his doomsday scenario that everyone will abandon the President by 2019.

Then former President Obasanjo rumbled in with gloved hands to remind President  Buhari  that he was running low on fuel. For a man known for his poison pen and irredeemable quality of staying right in the face of all power, a few friends of the President will be happy Obasanjo is not writing a letter. He had delivered a lecture at which he upbraided policies around the management of the economy, questioned the wisdom of borrowing $30b, and  protested being lumped in President Buhari’s refrain that the last 16 years of the nation’s experience under the PDP have been an unmitigated disaster, which his administration is having to reverse. Obasanjo’s warning that the march was slow and confused because the President leading it insists on looking back while attempting to move forward was a way of hinting that he can remove gloves. Perhaps to soften blows, Obasanjo threw in a few commendations in the direction of President Buhari, and then his trademark lampooning of the federal legislature as evidence of our penchant for tolerating organised plunder of the commonwealth. Perhaps the rambling, no-holds-barred response of the legislators had encouraged the President’s men to hold fire and restrain instincts to hit back. It may not be entirely out of place as well to assume that higher wisdom had cautioned against hinting at a serious falling-out between Buhari and a man who had started with warm embrace and finished in serious scuffles with all other presidents since 1979.

The statement released following the Ondo governorship elections which saw the President and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu lining up behind different aspirants and the triumph of the President’s man appeared designed to limit serious depletion in the ranks of the President’s friendly circle. It was emphatic on non-existence of any rancour between the two strategic allies, as well as the tremendous esteem with which Buhari holds Asiwaju. This attempt at damage control is yet to show dividends, but it does suggest that the President is sensitive to  the dangers of having too many ex-friends and allies. It may have been, at least in part, an effort to  stem the rumoured plans of many pillars of the structure put together to capture power two years ago, to move away and reconstruct political platforms in new territories with different blocks. There will also be some hope that those vigorously working at replacing the inner circle of influence and confidence will take the statement seriously and back away some steps, at least for now. The next few months will be interesting because they will have to reveal how the battles for 2019 will be fought, with and against whom.

The President will have to hope that those who manage his image and strategy are on the same page with whatever his plans are for managing the political contexts of his economic policies and his political plans in the longer term. Right now, there appears to be a fixation with knee jerk reactions to criticisms and comments that suggest that the post-Ondo elections statement was a glitch. By any standards, the recent critique of the administration’s fiscal and monetary policies by the former Governor of the Central Bank and now Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, is significant in a number of areas. First, it is informed and frank, in the tradition of a man who had dared more hostile adversaries and has the scars to show for it. Second, it says a lot about relations between the Emir and the President, two people who have more than a shared history of being on the receiving end of power and of the struggles to end the Jonathan administration, that such comprehensive indictment of some practices and policies of an administration managing an economy in deep recession has to be made in public. The Emir is not an ordinary citizen with knowledge, experience and courage who has no access to power. He occupies a very sensitive position with a tradition of being seen, not heard. He obviously feels it is more important to say what is wrong publicly than tolerate it behind a turban, a tradition he breached under Jonathan, and now does under Buhari. Three, Emir Sanusi would expect that he will be taken up by the President’s men, and this is likely to caution that what he said about the economy and its management would have benefitted from his ability and willingness to defend them. A long and bruising engagement with the Emir will do a lot of damage to an administration already neck-deep in criticisms over its performance, even if many are undeserved.

Initial responses to the Emir’s critique suggest that it will be treated in the same manner other criticisms are: with a tweet or a paragraph or two more suited to the social media, condemning them as uninformed and mischievous. This will be deeply damaging and counter-productive. A studied response by those with the capacities to understand the critique and the disposition to address, not the Emir, but the nation over them is what is needed at this stage. The same approach should be adopted in responding to the multiple sources of complaints and alarm being raised over the scale and projections of malnutrition and starvation among displaced populations in the Northeast. The global community and local groups have rendered invaluable humanitarian service to all victims of the Boko Haram insurgency, working with all Nigerian governments and sometimes going where these do not go. There will certainly be a few among the more than 50 organisations in the Northeast who are in it for their pockets, but the vast majority of them represent genuine and valuable sources of relief and assistance to a desperate population. They see and speak in private about incompetence and corruption in a region facing one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world today. They plan to stay, but they also need to be taken more seriously when they raise issues because major stresses between them and Nigerian authorities will seriously hamper more spending that will be contingent on greater levels of efficiency and transparency.

The only cure for grief is action–G.H. Lewis

By the time you are reading this, the story behind the video showing the lynching and burning of a seven-year old Nigerian child for stealing garri would have assumed many versions, including some which will maintain that it was all a work of fiction. Whatever you believe, it is difficult to ignore the fact that adults filmed and posted a murder. There was no evidence of anyone among onlookers attempting to intervene. No police. No Samaritans. Just a child helplessly begging for mercy and our shrinking soul. These types of videos and pictures rob us of more of the very thin layer of our sensitivity to violence, blood, guts and designed evil. They remind us of how low we have sunk as a people. Neither our faith nor our laws keep us restrained. We kill and maim and melt into a society that just moves on. I published  the material below in November, 2013 (admittedly in some anger) when I thought the legion of the unloved, unprotected and desperate younger northern generation we are all responsible for will eventually be the undoing of us all. I reproduce it today to appeal to President Muhammadu Buhari: please, sir, find the people who murdered that child and bring them to justice

He is somewhere near 16, but no one is sure. Actually no one has bothered to register his actual date of birth. Police have different ages for him taken from his many detentions. He has a home and a family, but no one will go out looking for him if he is not seen for days, or forever. He is tough and scary, but he is also very scared. He fears the beatings and torture from police, but he fears the violence of members of his gang and rival gangs more. He lives everyday as if it could be his last, because it actually could. He has no faith in anything or anyone. He trusts no one, and no one trusts him. He has bruises going back to when he was about 13 years old. He has beaten people to death, or near death, and he expects that his end may be violent.

He is available to politicians and religious enforcers, when he stays off drugs long enough to be told what to do. He floats in and out of gangs. The local police and local vigilance groups know him, and he knows them. Children fear him, adults shun and curse him, and peers keep him on a tight leash. He is the face of half of northerners under 18. The other half know of him. They did not go to school with him, but he was always there when they went and came back. They grew up in the same neighbourhood, but their worlds grew further apart as they got older. They learnt lessons in schools, he learnt his in streets. He is half almajiri, half illiterate, available for anything that will give him a meal and some excitement. They could graduate and go further than secondary schools, or they could fail to get any further, and live on similar circumstances as him. They have hopes for a future with education and jobs and families. He lives for the next meal and the next fix.

He is in all the towns and cities of the North, an alarming reminder of our decaying social and economic assets. Politicians who used him during election campaigns now zoom past him in big sport utility vehicles (SUVs) with tinted glasses. They do not know him. They should not. He was brought to them, drugged and willing, to be mobilised to break heads and chase away crowds. They bought him a knife and lots of drugs, and sent him forth to steal political mandates.

A few of his mates have found accommodation in corridors of power as quasi-vigilante and political enforcers. They appeal to him to wait for the next elections. The next elections are too far to wait for on an empty stomach without a fix. So a gang which fights other gangs and the community provides an alternative source of engagement. It promises some form of identity, protection, excitement, people to rob, women to rape and endless sources of drugs. Police and vigilance groups show no mercy, many times killing his mates. His gang also shows no mercy, protecting its turf with knives, cutlasses and blood. Community leaders shut their doors when gangs fight. Police do not come until it is all over, and casualties are registered. Kids admire or fear them. Some request to join.

When northerners contemplate their future, they should start from their substantial army of alienated and angry youths. That category with no education, no skills, no future and no faith in anyone or anything. They should ask searching questions over what happens to the tens of millions of school-age children who do not go to school. They should ask what happens to 10 million almajiri when they become adults and have to find space in a nation which has zero tolerance for anyone without education or skills. They should ask how the millions of young married girls manage families without physical and emotional maturity, education or resources. They should ask what type of wives and mothers they make; what type of children they bring up; and what the community loses by not allowing them to go to school, even if married.

The juvenile, drugged and armed young gang member that terrorises urban communities is a blight on the North’s landscape. He feeds the marauding criminals who live in forests and attack villages at will. He was a member of the lowest ranks of, and would have been shot dead hundreds of times or is incarcerated in detention facilities all over the nation. He joins fights between rural communities, for little more than the desire to shed blood for a pittance and small scores. He lurks around streets, robs and maims and rapes because he can. He is untouchable, a link in a long chain of untouchables who remind the powerful and the wealthy that they have failed. He is the reason why politicians speed past the public at frightening speed; why the rich build high walls around their residences and why our towns and cities are dotted with military and police checkpoints.

The angry and hopeless youth are now being joined by those in the universities who see a diminishing prospect for the good life. Hundreds of thousands of young undergraduates now sit idly in seething anger, feeling abandoned by the government, the community and their teachers represented by ASUU. They now have a grievance almost the size of their neighbour who never went to school. The system has failed them. They will now graduate at a much later date than planned. The months of strike are not likely to revolutionise the quality of the instructions they receive, their learning environment or their welfare. Even when they graduate, the prospects of getting jobs are becoming dimmer by the day. They will join millions of other young people who will be bitter that a nation which should do much better by them has failed them woefully.

The nation is breeding entire generations which are fed on heavy doses of frustrations, bitterness and hopelessness. They grow up with no sense of obligation to a nation which has done nothing for them. Those who have received little or very poor education learn to resent the rich, the powerful and the well-connected peers who will rush past them into expensive education and guaranteed employment. They are taught to blame others, and hate other ethnic groups because they are responsible for their conditions. They hate politicians who milk their future dry; they resent the hypocrisy of religious leaders who preach honesty, sacrifice and humility, but live opulent lives. They resent every form of authority because it has been corrupted, and because it reminds them of the conspiracy of the powerful and the wealthy to keep them out of the good life.

The expanding numbers of unemployed, unskilled, bitter and desperate youths in much of the North will provide the tinder for explosion when political competition and disputes go searching for foot soldiers. For a brief moment, the millions of alienated and bitter youths with no future will find relevance as heads are broken, houses razed and whole communities destroyed. Leaders who failed to give them hope and a future may perish at their hands, or they may build higher fences, while those who have no future scramble for their pittance.

If you are not worried about 2019, begin to worry now.