If you can read this, you’re in deep trouble - 2

Governor Ganduje in the weekend I travelled to Kano, made a statement to the effect that 3 million Almajirai boys roamed around Kano. He said they were mostly from Niger, Northern Cameroon and Chad. This raises a critical question about the porousness of borders up north. That porousness is historic and cultural and at the bottom of many of Nigeria’s problems. We need to redefine the map of Nigeria. Niger and Chad cannot be passing their Almajirai children to us and selling us refined petrol, while we send our commodities to them almost for free. Perhaps we should recognize those regions officially as part of Nigeria so that we can plan properly. What are those countries doing on this Almajirai problem? If Paul Biya knows that poor children of indoctrinated people in the upper part of his country will simply move into Nigeria, why will he not gloat about how hopeless our country is? Why will he not be deporting our people for flimsy excuses? Have we ever heard of a tripartite meeting on this problem that has now been defined as an international issue? Or should we wait again for the white man to come and organize us as we’ve always done?

Emir Sanusi has also bellyached over this matter, and drawn the flak of many who are simply showing human nature. It seems like people don’t just want to be criticized, even over obvious matters. They say things like ‘tell us in secret’, ‘respect yourself ’, ‘it is conservatism’ and so on. I believe that many of our truths have been told in many secret places with absolutely no effect.

This is where I have problems with my friends who emphasise data. We say we are 180million in Nigeria but that does not consider those who stroll in and remain in Nigeria by their thousands on a daily basis. We hear they are good recruits during elections - as mercenary voters and thugs. Even some of our leaders are said to be indigenes and citizens of these foreign countries. Who does that? Not even the USA will allow a full Canadian to contest elections on its soil except they obtain a US passport. But here everything, including our democracy, is a sham.

Goodluck Jonathan as president built some schools which were expected to fuse the English and Arabic education. None of them are being used today. I heard an argument from one of the state governors that they were abandoned because they were called ‘Almajirai schools’; that none of the graduates of the schools will want to be reminded of having attended an Almajirai school. Why not change the names then? Again, they have become monuments and testimonies to our biggest single disease without which all our so-called policies will come to naught; WASTE. We never plan for anything properly before building them, and we feel no compunction, no pangs or remorse, in building the most expensive things, walking away, and seeing the results of our mindlessness on a daily basis while we are busy stealing a new set of resources.

But no one should think this is a northern Nigerian issue alone. The poverty figures the Emir reeled out are certainly questionable. I’ve seen southerners jump on those figures and gloat about how the south is ahead. I doubt if this is true. The problem of the north is not poverty; it is probably tradition or cultural. In spite of the famous ‘poverty’ that Sarkin Kano speaks about, the north, with the kind of agricultural enterprise shown in the miles and miles of dry season farming I saw in Kano, feeds the south! Lagos had to cooperate with Kebbi to grow Rice. The south claims to have intelligent intellectuals, but those people have done little to reposition their regions. The maize specie I saw at the gates of Kano City are enhanced, and the only time I ever saw anything like that was on a train ride from London to Manchester City. How come we cannot have allyear-round farming in the south of Nigeria too? How come none of our southern governors are using our vast stretches of land for large scale agriculture, even for tree crops? How come the vast farmlands of Ondo and Ekiti are now used to plant Indian hemp? Whereas Kano’s problem is that the Almajirai boys by their millions, don’t want to get involved in the productive process and would rather wake up and loaf around thereby becoming unskilled adults and potential criminals in a world where sophisticated skills are even more essential, in the south, we have millions of boys too, many of them with degrees, walking around in despondency because society has chewed them and spat them out. The south of Nigeria has its own problems with drug addiction, criminality, unemployment and directionlessness among the youth. This is not the time for triumphalism, but for selfintrospection.

They say the height of responsibility is self-criticism. I believe that is what people like Sarkin Kano and Prof. Muhammad Pate have shown. The north in my view cannot be the poorest place in Nigeria. And I have also met Easterners who believe the East is the poorest and complain about their people not investing at ‘home’, despite the Bureau for Statistics confirming that the South East of Nigeria is the richest zone per capita. I personally and humbly think the South West is the poorest. The East is massively into commerce. I admire greatly the fierce independence of Eastern Nigerians and their traditional business mentorship programs. I acknowledge that the need for people to prove themselves in those parts comes with downsides. But almost anything one needs to buy today apart from maybe food, one buys from a South East Nigerian; car spare parts, building materials, household materials, the works. Most if not all of our cities are heavily dependent on these businessmen. Many an emergency situations are saved by their business acumen. They don’t know holidays. They are disciplined and consistent in business.

My sojourn in Kano revealed that in addition to the current control of the levers of government and the inextricability of administrative power from northern Nigerians, agricultural capability is a clear advantage. I believe, just like Emir Sanusi, that my people from the South West are the poorest. We can hardly feed ourselves and we are not strong in commerce. Most of the South West is populated by mud houses falling where they stand because we run away from each other since our cultural beliefs promote mutual suspicion (check our film industry and their emphasis on witchcraft etc). And so we hardly mentor each other. Our money goes to Europe and America, not percolate through our communities. Our educational advantage has turned out to be an illusion. South East Nigeria is now way above everyone in that regards. So with no food, no education, and a growing drug problem among our youth, I believe Emir Sanusi got it wrong; South West is the poorest. Now, I have set myself up to be attacked by the extremist and ‘conservative’ elements among my kinsmen (just like the Emir), who will say ‘how dare you wash our dirty linen in public’. But if that is the price to pay for getting our people to look inwards and face the monsters that they would rather whitewash, then so be it.

Remember, if you can read this, you’re already in big trouble. Your English education is probably peripheral; we haven’t used it to solve any of our problems in a sustainable manner. Now is the time to start.