The rage of recriminations of ethno-religious bashing that has razed southern Kaduna in recent times has beclouded many from one of the seminal speeches of late.
Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima looked at the North in the eye, and he did not spare the truth. More evoking than anything is his ability to deliver the speech without any craving of limelight or the profligacy of political capital.
As the chairman of the Northern Governors Forum, he stands as a principal voice of the northern elite, and what we expect any personage in that high estate is to present of speech of self-congratulating grandeur, however false. In other cases, it takes a tone coy self-disregard, criticising itself to excuse itself and to blame the other guy.
But as Governor Shettima gave his speech, you had the impression that other regional leaders would do well to learn from its unvarnished self-scrutiny. One of his illuminations came from reference to the words of the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Muhammadu Sanusi.
Hear him: “He was quoted as saying he was tired of philanthropists regularly expressing readiness to build mosques whereas the majority of girls were growing and married out without education. The result of course being high rise of maternal mortality in northern Nigeria. This bold thinking captures how we have misunderstood our beliefs. The Emir said he has enough mosques but has few educated women. This is true of most states in the North. We have many mosques and many churches with unfortunately, hungry and uneducated worshippers. We have worshippers who don’t have basic knowledge of the religion they practice, yet we keep building worship centres as against educating the worshippers…”
He was not addressing some quiescent students at a back-desert school or some academic lords bored into theory. He was speaking to the world beside emirs and his fellow governors. He was speaking not truth to power. It was power speaking truth to itself. It was an example of power in an extravagant moment of humility.
He also gave one important piece of narrative, hardly highlighted or known by the media. Lamenting the corrosion of poverty, he unveiled an anecdote about spying and dying. Hear him again: “However, at the level of followers and other actors, poverty has made significant influence. For instance, in June 2013, we recorded a good number of extremely poor persons, who were recruited for as little as N5, 000 to either spy on soldiers and report their vulnerability to insurgents, attack and set ablaze by late night, or in some cases, poor old women were paid similar amounts by insurgents to either keep arms in their huts or smuggle arms from one point to another. One case I particularly remember is one Musa Grema, a 13-year-old boy who revealed that he accepted N5, 000 to set three of our primary schools ablaze and also spy on soldiers because his parents relied on him for their feeding.”
I have pondered the story of that little boy since that speech. He was a child of war, but he merely thought he was doing good by his family. What does a little boy of 13 know about the fatal extremes of faith, about the bloodshed that eviscerates other families? He wanted his mother fed, and could not bear to see them hunger and die. Yet, to achieve that, others have to die. A father or mother with a 13-year-old like him will die because he snitched. Or another 13-year-old will go because he wanted his mother not to go.
He is the story of Boko Haram, the story of a failed North, of bad governance that has endured generations while what the elite has focused on was hegemony. What sense does that make when the boy on the street and the girl hawking one piece of Kolanut cannot spell their names?
Novelist Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, a tale of a boy with poor background and teased dangerously into crime and gang. The novel forced the Prime Minister to ask Dickens if such a person lived in England. Oliver twist was a product of capitalist cruelty, but Grema is feudal, deeply rooted though in capitalist corruption.
Shettima hit the bulls’ eye of education. It is the answer to a North that failed to look itself with self-love that is not self-doting. He noted that the backwardness of the North is a failure of effort and not of opportunity. But poverty, he noted, was the result of this, and the North had to tackle poverty. He said if the “North doesn’t kill poverty, poverty will kill the North. Allah Ya Kiyaye!”
As the helmsman of northern governors, I like to think that others are beginning to think like him, and he also talked about appreciation of multiculturalism and difference, which he characterised as a “major challenge and indeed a litmus test of leadership, good governance and progress not just in northern Nigeria but in the entire globe.”
The question of how to address the issue of herdsmen and the clash between them and the other citizens in southern Kaduna naturally flows. Where people are well-educated, and not fixated on religious fidelity, they are able to cast away bloodshed and hate.
The supporters of Donald J. Trump are not necessarily uneducated, but they take advantage of the majority who have read little and therefore cannot know much. Musa Grema who spied to let his family live may think differently if he goes to school and grows into a 50-year-old. He may know they have taken advantage of him.
But it was a society that gave birth to Musa that had to do what he did. It shows, as they now say of America, that elections have consequences. Many military leaders and democratically-elected governors presided over a North that played ostrich abroad but scavengers at home, exploiting the little one. Ali Modu Sherriff, who was Borno governor and Shettima’s predecessor, once boasted that his fellow citizens could not read what the media reported about his bad governance.
It is that sort of scenario that Shettima lamented. Whether Southwest, Southsouth or Southeast, the lessons are not learned enough. If poverty has generated so much bad blood in the North, the currents in other regions are worsening as kidnapping, robberies and impunity are ominous indicators.
There are many Musa Gremas down South. They are ticking bombs, of bombs as boys. It is no longer time for vigilance because we can hear them tick. It’s time to take action.
