- By Francis Damina
In southern Kaduna, it is no longer news that the name El Rufai alone emits anger, fear and disaffection to the people. It reminds the average Southern Kaduna man of a man who, based on existing narratives, naturally hates him because of his religion. The name also tells him of a man who, beyond all reasonable doubt, is behind the killings of more than a thousand of his kinsmen- women, children, the aged, physically challenged, etc.
There are equally bandied apocryphal tales in the social media, market places, salons, and even worship centres, about how the man plans to replace the God of southern Kaduna with that of the Arabs. The army of unemployed youth are often told he is the reason why they are idle. The farmers, why they have no fertilizer, and the market women, why there is no money in circulation. Parents can’t pay their wards’ school fees because of him. The tales of his hatred on anything Southern Kaduna is told as if, were God a listening Father, He would have since sentenced him to death. In the circumstance, our problems would have been brought to a terminal point.
These tales have become a dogma that failure to believe or subscribe to, could result to one being declared an anathema by the priests who preach them.
Could this be what my friend Adibe Jideofor refers to as ‘groupthink’ which Professor Irving Janis in 1972 explained as “the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive ingroup that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action”? “In groupthink”, says Adibe, “loyalty to the group requires individuals to avoid raising controversial or nonconforming issues and ideas or even alternative solutions.” All that is required is for one to place his inquisitive faculty of reasoning on suspension only to join the bandwagon in singing songs of parochial nationalism.
My take is that, we must go beyond the existing narratives and then begin to ask ourselves the most critical questions. We must ask where we are coming from and the role each captain played to bring us to this destination. Beyond conventional wisdom and the blame game, I have always been thinking of how the Southern Kaduna elite destroyed Southern Kaduna themselves. Do you remember that in the days of military politics, for instance, when our sons had the opportunity of lobbying for a state, they looked the other way? And that golden opportunity for self-emancipation passed us with a pat on our backs.
Does it make sense that our sons fought to keep Nigeria one and yet, with all the fine officers and men we have to our credit, we now have become vulnerable and defenceless? And we had expected them not to come home to kill, but as veterans of war, they could offer some professionally useful advice on how to end the killings. While some of them have their names in the inventory of billionaires, we are yet to feel their impact in the development of our communities unlike their colleagues in other climes who invested in providing social services and in empowering their own kinsmen. Our own elite prefer to surrender their billions to EFCC than invest to empower us. Little wonder, we have no single specialist hospital, nor any private degree awarding institution apart from the one built by Bishop Joseph Bagobiri.
Read Also: El Rufai, Ganduje, Olympus has indeed fallen! (1)
Or, is it our political class that has continued to short-change us? Their allegiance is first to the gods in Zaria. Otherwise mention a single Southern Kaduna politician whose sponsor or godfather is not from the other divide. With all the kills they made especially in the days of the PDP when they manned so many enviable positions in the governance of our fatherland; a time the immunity to mismanage public resources was conferred on public officers. What did they bring home? Who did they empower? Local champions who make us run short of palm wine each time they are home for the weekend. During the time of our late leader, Sir Patrick Yakowa, the contracts in Southern Kaduna were given to them which they short changed to amass wealth for themselves. This accounts for why the former Governor Yero refused to review the contracts, and we thought he did not continue with Yakowa’s projects in Southern Kaduna. To tell you how much they care for us, when Bishop Joseph Bagobiri of Kafanchan Catholic Diocese, along with other clerics of Southern Kaduna origin, in the run- up to the last gubernatorial elections in the state, asked Southern Kaduna to agree on a consensus candidate, they were the first to fire the salvo by asking him to mind his business as a pastor and stop meddling into partisan politics. At the end, their votes went not to the consensus candidate, but to where there was an immediate transient reward. And our collective future was again mortgaged.
Reacting to it in frustration and in great angst, the fiery Bishop, on behalf of his colleagues said: “We want to state categorically that for agreeing on a consensus candidate, we owe them no apology now and in the future “ And that: “Drawing inspiration from the sacred Scripture, we have always taught that the work of feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, sheltering the homeless, is better realized through responsible use of politics. We will therefore not fold our arms to watch a handful of pretenders rather than contenders in politics mortgage our future.” Yes, the clerics called them pretenders who are out to mortgage our future. Yes, pretenders!
Today, the same cream of politicians who have become internally displaced, are coming home with convoluted narratives ranging from religion, ethnicity, and geography, to make the point that we are where we are today because of one man in Kaduna. At best, these reasons can merely be refugee camps for the internally displaced in their moment of legitimacy crisis. Were there appointments and contracts, we would never see them.
I feel that unless God intervenes, we would continue to suffer largely because, what we see today is only a symptom of years and years of conspiracy premised on religion and feudalism with our own elite as accessories. Bishop Kukah who understands the situation well sees it as the end of a phase in history. Little wonder, knowing that the future of Southern Kaduna rests with the youth and beyond the blame game, he, at Yakowa’s funeral, admonished: “I urge the youth to rise up, fear is dead and it will never rise again. Before Yakowa, you were afraid, you were poor, and felt defeated. Now the world is yours to conquer. Rise up, get ready to light your candles because we have seen the light of a star in Kaduna. Go forward and meet up with other young men and women like yourselves. Free yourselves from religious prisons, dream big and beautiful dreams. A wonderful, peaceful, just and non-discriminatory society lies ahead of you”.
But these fine words will never yield fruits in our lives unless we free ourselves of the false narratives brought to us by our selfish fathers; which they have already packaged as their legitimacy coin to buy our votes in future elections. We must move from wailing to thinking out of the box otherwise our rainbow collection of human resources will only make us an endowed giant but deep down a clueless dwarf.
•Damina, a student of Religion and Society, can be reached via: francisdamina@gmail.com