JosANA/Richard Ali pictures from ANA Convention 2009 @ Minna, Niger State

The Association of Nigerian Authors held its International Convention last week, from the 29th of October to the 1st of November at Shiroro Hotel, Niger State. The picture above is a view of Central Minna.

Hospitable Nigerlite hostesses, Ruthsie and Gracie.

Richard Ali {the short black fine guy. LOL!} with Awaal Gata, Adbulaziz Fagge and enfant terrible, Gimba Kakanda

JosANA members, Asmau Aliyu and Suleiman Sani

JosANA ex chairman, Allen Abduljabbar Omale, performing on the last night

Richard Ali with the poet Gimba Kakanda

Dr. Victor Dugga, Associate Professor of Drama and JosANA member who won the Drama Prize

Dr. Victor Dugga receiving his prize certificate

Victor Dugga, "baby" Dugga and Richard Ali {Secretary JosANA}

Performance artist, Minat, her daughter, Richard Ali, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, David Onotu and a girl

A young artiste doing the fulani dance!

Cross section of the Hall during the AGM

Cross section of the UK Bello Theatre on Lecture Night. In blue is Dr. Jerry Agada, a day before he became ANA President

Centre is Y. S. Dangana, playright, who contested against Dr. Agada to lead ANA

Richard Ali with young journalist Abdulaziz Ahmed FAgge {Leadership Newspaper}

Odia Ofeimun making a point.

Richard Ali with the Lit. Editor of New Nigerian, Sumaila Umaisha

Chike Ofili, laughing. Asmau and Sani looking on.

Barrister Redzie Jugo, JosANA member, at the Convention

ABU Zaria thespians on stage

A G Dagga Tolar, poet, new Chairman, ANA Lagos

Richard Ali with Ayo the Drummer Boy {ANA Abuja} who came with the ace journalist, Jim Pressman.

JosANA members David Onotu and Suleiman Sani

Gracie

Richard Ali with Dr. Ismael Bala {BUK, Kano}

Panel of Discussants

Alhaji Labo Yari

Medinat, Rahamat, Adbuljabbar and Iman Omale

Dignitaries listening to Governor Muazu Babangida Aliyu

Habeeb Anako, Richard Ali and Ebenpreye {ANA Bayelsa}

Lady Writers

Mimi yar Kebbi with Richard Ali

The Servant Leader, Governor. Babangida ALiyu of Niger State

Barrister. Ahmed Maiwada

Zulu {ANA Enugu} with girlfriend.

My friend, Zulu

JosANA VC, Matthew Mzega

Richard Ali

ANA EXCO 2007/2009

Dr, Dul Johnson, ace producer in black.

Richard Ali, Secretary JosANA, addressing the AGM

Odili Ujubuonu with companion

Alhaji Abubakar Gimba

Sani and Asmau, keeping in touch with the folks back home in Jos

ANA 2007/2009 EXCO after dissolution

Denja Abdullahi, ANA ex General Secretary

Journalists

Thespians on Stage

Dr. Temitope Olaifa

ANA new President, Dr. Jerry Agada

A suya spot in Shiroro, Minna.

JosANA Slam Pictures

Denudation: Remembering Dr. Bala Mohammed {1944-1981}

Denudation: Remembering Dr. Bala Mohammed Bauchi {1944-1981}

So pray for a deluge, that this blighted expanse
Would burst forth into a lusty bloom;
Pray that far from being a wasted effusion
Rapids of tears may turn the turbine of cause.

Pray for A Deluge: David Odinaka Nwamadi



Twenty eight years ago, a government residential building stood blazing in the hot Kano sun. The smoke-filled air was one of three black billows seen from the sky. Within the house, the 35 year old owner lay burning amidst a ton of papers and scant furniture; in another room another man, equally macheted, burned. Who was this first man; and why? His name was Dr. Bala Mohammed Bauchi and he was Political Adviser to Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, the state governor, erstwhile political science don at the Bayero University and before that an ace broadcaster on the Voice of Nigeria. He was also an ideologue of the People’s Redemption Party {PRP} and a socialist. Exhuming the past is a sort of undressing and understanding the why of Dr. Mohammed’s death and the subsequent years is a denudation of the Nigerian story, that we may see it more clearly.


The current political apathy and fractionizing tendency of the Nigerian people, so well understood and celebrated misinterpreted by journalists like Karl Maier is a part of an ongoing dynamic; an organic. It is not an unalterable social trait, like the color of eyes or the ridging of fingerprints are physical ones. If apathy is an evil, and if it must be cured then the root strain of it, found in Dr. Mohammed’s assassination need be isolated and cauterized. For every political event is an expression, is significant and like beads can be told.


Dr. Bala Mohammed was an archetype of that sociopolitical genus known in this country as the Radical Leftists; and he was the first of them to be assassinated at the height of Nigeria’s Second republic, on the 10th of July 1981. The man who emerges from the memorial service held a fortnight after his death at the BUK Preliminary Studies School was a Bauchi born scion of the neo-Malikist Uthman dan Fodio jihad which established a caliphate over the northern central Sudan; he was, by birth, conservative. Yet, in the sixteen years before his murder he had established himself first on the radio waves and then in academe as the most lucid of the Nigerian leftist theorists. And, indeed, he died precisely because he was an ideologue of the socialist PRP party. Yet, his murderers sought to justify themselves as acting in honor of Alhaji Ado Bayero, the Emir of Kano, in defense of “traditional institutions”. Against one of its own? Rather ironic.


His intellectual credentials were attested to by his colleague and fellow postgraduate peer at Howard University, Dr. Asikpo Essien Ibok, who said – “I am really sad today to talk about Bala because he is dead. If I speak about Comrade Bala as a political militant, I am speaking about him as a revolutionary intellectual. That is to say Bala was not only a teacher, but a theoretician-cum-practitioner. He postulated many theories and put them to practice. His concern was with theories of liberation. Who did he want to liberate? His people; from ignorance, illiteracy, nepotism, corruption, bad government, everything.“ Dr. Mohammed’s then student, Alhassan na’Ayuba Zakaria said, “Dr. Bala Mohammed is all the teachers you can remember put in one person. He is a Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle, put together. Dr. Bala Mohammed represents in no uncertain terms some of the qualities of Moses of the Israelites, when they were under the tyranny of the Pharaohs; the qualities of Jesus leading the disciples under Jewish persecution and qualities of the Holy Prophet Mohammed, before Islam conquered Mecca in 632 AD.” From the words of his students and contemporaries, Bala Mohammed was one of the last of the true intellectuals; “Bala argues with capitalist social theories to justify socialist theories.” The men who mourned him ranged from Drs. Y.B. Usman and Mahmud Tukur to Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, Adenike Adejobi, Tunde Obadina, Mudi Sipikin to Wole Soyinka who wrote – “The master plan, long decried, long forewarned, is implacably unfolding. We do not know whose turn it will be tomorrow – yours or mine. But we must be prepared. Our deaths must bring no regrets as long as our cause remains to sanctify our brief existence. We will not mourn our brother, Bala Mohammed; let our acts simply perpetuate his memory and honor him for eternity.”


How did such a man find himself macheted in a burning house on July 10th 1981? And how does any country allow such a man, who made the 1978 “Who’s Who in American Universities” list, to be killed during a democratic government? Further, two coup d’état’s succeeded in the 1980’s, the Buhari and Babangida coups; what was the dynamic of these coups? For every political action is a consequence of a peoples underlying, unspoken, zeitgeist. And nations are the expression of accretive human forces, and each cause is defined by the accentuation of interests held in common.


The destruction of the Sokoto Caliphate by the British was followed, for their own interests, by its reformation into a civil service and it, like its counterparts in southern Nigeria performed tax collection services. The Emirs, who never fully controlled their territories anyway, lost even more credibility amongst the socially conscious elements for the people of Northern Nigeria saw them clearly as British agents and obeyed in matters of tax for the reason sole that the British and their courts were feared. The internal decadence of the Fulani feudalists, expressed in their inability to completely suppress the baHaushe elites as well as the expedient abandonment of the canons of the Fodio philosophers, Uthman, Bello and Abdullahi, explains the fin-de-siècle fear they had of Rabeh’s counter-reformist reforms in the Sudan, a fear that of course disappeared with the arrival of the British and the French. The Emirs would rather be British clerks than lose privilege to Rabeh; moral authority over the Hausawa could be sacrificed for the backing of a powerful European patron. The loss of effective power, which danFodio and his direct descendants guaranteed, was redressed by two wars; the Second and Nigeria’s Civil War.


The forces that killed Bala Mohammed knew themselves to be despised by the talakawa and indeed the non-Fulani elements that were already regrouping at the start of World War II in various northern towns; the fear of the feudalists was the same one feared from Rabeh earlier, that of an anti-caliphate uprising that would obliterate their privilege. After the war, the Jamiyar Mutanen Arewa {which became the Northern People’s Congress} was formed by returnee soldiers and the few educated northerners. With the ascension of the blue-blooded Ahmadu Bello, the caliphate elements saw that they could continue their parasitism in the coming democracy and they lost no time in doing this upon his assumption of the Premiership. By systematic infiltration of public office. Sardauna Bello was a skilled administrator and an altruistic dictator who unstintingly held the progress and unity of the piebald Northern Region dear; but he could not, nor had he any desire to, police the fellow scions of unearned patronage who were formed by the same system as he. Yet, his power was political and democratic and he showed this severally, most notably in the public humiliation, deposition and banishment of the corrupt Emir Sanusi of Kano to Azare in Bauchi. He kept the north together the same way the Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa kept the country together, as anyone who must run a multiethnic state does, by political compromise and appeasement. But then came the second war.


The impact of the Civil war and the trauma that followed it, with Bala Mohammed’s death, are instructive if the current stupidity equation of Nigeria is to be understood. Here we have popularly elected politicians assassinated for reasons no more cogent than tribal dominist ones; dominist, clear from the barbaric manner of the killing of the Bauchi born Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa; tribal, clear from the selective pattern of the killings. In one swoop, the mechanism of balance, Ahmadu Bello , was removed, leaving the opposed forces of both patronage and progress in Northern Nigeria in disarray. And the Army, not political organizations like Jamiyar Mutanen Arewa, became the arena for a struggle of interests. Had Jack Gowon not showed up on January 14th 1966, it might have been a different story; in those crucial days and months later, he was to assume the role of Ahmadu Bello, a human mechanism of balance. Had Ironsi done what he should, the trauma that followed would have been less, even unnecessary. Our writers, from Okri to Okpewho to Soyinka have expressed the trauma so well that there is no need to rehash the pervasive despair of the ‘70’s here. In the aftermath of that war the forces that killed Bala Mohammed realized they could guarantee continued patronage by dominating the Army on the one hand and undermining the talakawa on the other by keeping them out of schools. They had achieved the dubiously sophisticated genius of ruining the educational infrastructure of their class enemies. Yet, at this time, other men like Bala Mohammed, Y.B. Usman and Mahmud Tukur felt that a common oppression was the lot of many Nigerians and this same oppression could unite them all; that thus, socialism, would be a news basis to realize all other aborted pan-Nigerianisms. Bala, who was a lucid thinker gifted at simplifying the most complex relationships so the petty trader could grasp it, decided on a post-graduate study in Political Science at Howard University so he could attack oppression by education, this time in Academe, as he had earlier as a broadcaster on Voice of Nigeria, Lagos.


The trouble with parasitism is that it cannot, by definition, be creative. And though the parasites of patronage across Nigeria especially the traditional consevatia found a successful platform for the1979 general elections in the National Party of Nigeria {NPN}, they could not create a Sardauna Bello or Tafawa Balewa or Saadu Zungur, the first two who animated the NPC and who, with the third, animated the Jamiyar Mutanen Arewa before it. So the country again became starkly polarized between the representatives of patronage {NPN}, and the representatives of progress {opposition parties} in which Bala Mohammed found himself on being appointed political adviser to the Kano State PRP governor, Abubakar Rimi in November 1980. And nine months was enough engagement to get him killed. Apart from the corruption flowing from a lack of ideals and hence fiscal restraint, Dr. Bala Mohammed communicated clearly to the common people in simple language what he saw; that the NPN and its puppeteers had no ideas and thus no policies except a vague, pitiable and eventually dangerous nostalgia for a dead Sardauna’s days. And so he had to die.


The milieu of Dr. Bala Mohammed’s death was one intrinsically related to Cold War politics and being a socialist from post colonial Africa who studied Political Science in the United State’s gave him a unique awareness of economic oppression and its dynamics. The national space of his politics was that of a rising fascism; bereft of ideas, the NPN could only but maintain by force its intellectual vacuity, a stick and stick approach to those already beaten. Evidence of this fascism were; the deportation of Shugaba Darman, a Nigerian citizen; massacre of peasants at Bakolori, Sokoto; harassment of PRP supporters at Ningi, Bauchi; the killings of citizens in Keghara Dere, Rivers; the impeachment of Governor Balarabe Musa of Kaduna. Wole Soyinka, expressing popular progressive views wrote an open letter “You Are Not The State” to the Police IG Sunday Adewusi in which he declaimed a “a virulent outbreak of the rash called folie de grandeur. . . .familiar historic delusions”; Professor Soyinka decried attempts to turn Nigeria into a police state, of a sort quite different from Spain and Italy, one where police bullets sometimes “fly off” in the direction of civilians! And so, Bala Mohammed, who could explain the why of all this simply and lucidly, died.


Fatedly, for there are no mistakes in any nations political expression, two stern faced Majors-General showed up in answer to the prayers of Wole Soyinka, Y.B. Usman, Umar Santuraki, Tunde Obadina, Darman, Rimi and other Radical Leftist. The Buhari regime was a progressive one; it paid its respects to Bala Mohammed’s death by avoiding the political mistake of misjudging the desperation of threatened privilege. They did this by imposing their wills on and locking up the venal politicians and their feudalist supporters, including this writer’s uncle; thus seeking to cauterize them. This imposed sanity, unlike Rawlings in Ghana, was eclipsed in 1985 by the finest agents the killers of Dr. Bala Mohammed had; General Ibrahim Babangida and Dr. Jibril Aminu. The intellectual spirit looming behind that regime was Dr. Jibril Aminu and he it was who ensured eight years of venality; eight years that bequeathed Sani Abacha, then Obasanjo and Yar’Adua – all agents of patronage with the exception of Abacha who was a misunderstood dictator quite in a class of his own. If there is a God, he was not listening to the cries of the oppressed, nor to Dr. Asikpo Essien Ibok who prayed Bala Mohammed’s soul not rest in peace; to the first we see a logic defying resilience, to the second the reality of amnesia.


But I remember Dr. Bala Mohammed Bauchi, now. I remember him in this denudation, I who am aware of the subsequent careers of Rimi and the other Radical Leftists turned tepid, turned collaborators in a double murder. And why do I remember him? Because I mourn the dying of the Nigerian quality now in catalepsies, since a needless Civil war, a commonality that has received no expression since the morning of July 10th 1981. I remember because though sophistry of thought pervades all strata of the country, though arrogance mark the leadership and dissembling keeps my countrymen’s thrall – there was the self sacrificial choice of one man, Bala Mohammed Bauchi, and a “once upon a time”. In that last, “once upon a time”, lies hope that the three decade dormant expression of my country will stir again and raise another, less forcedly tragic, Bala Mohammed; and hope that the steel and concrete sealed despair of my nations trauma will burst into a life-flower of patriotism and progress.


And since I am denuding time and remembering the past, I shall recall lastly a couplet from a poem the Hausa poet and PRP activist Mudi Sipikin read at the memorial service of my mentor Dr. Bala Mohammed, who was killed for a noble cause, the ideal of a just, democratic Nigeria he cherished – for Dr. Bala Mohammed was a patriot;

“Patriotism is a badge of honor/
Derived from solid truth without any falsehood.”




Ali is Secretary, ANA Plateau State chapter and former Editor, Sardauna Magazine. richardalijos@yahoo.com

Looking Out the Window

LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW

Far away from Kaduna, the smell of roasting cashews, surfing the morning air, assails the clean-shaven boy featherly. Framed by the barred windows, he looks beyond the walls of the house, far above the trees, and though his eyes at their farthest never leave the pleasant green spread of palm trees and cashew trees, he feels an uneasy wave in his stomach. With his palms to the wall holding up the curtain he wonders about Falmata and familiar places, about the reasons that have led him here.

“Shall I get you some water to bath?”From his thoughts, he turns only lightly to smile kindly at the gap toothed Igbo boy. “Yes, Nnamdi. Thank you.” He is unaware of the accent in his speech which Nnamdi muses about, as he makes his way down the stairs, fascinatedly. Back in the room, looking out the window, our boy is in another space, in another time. He has effeminately arched brows, thin lips, his complexion is a dark chocolate brown – he would be beautiful were he not thinking. But the concentration of his thoughts takes the expressive from his eyes; his face becomes curiously plain, like a sheet of paper when a pen is hanging over it.

The night of drinking and talk, that last time. He had arrived early, as Falmata expected him, to see to the final arrangements. Within the hour, by 7:30 p.m., their friends started arriving the Hanwa GRA apartment which for the last time would host Falmata’s salon. The music played, Afrobeat and neo-soul; Fela Kuti and his son, Badu and Whitney from the 90’s, Alicia Keys. Fifteen guests – the usual habitués being Ahmed, Emman, Elnath, Tirnom, Hauwa Dogo, Ibrahim Tagwai, then there was the priest called Beckett and Waziri, the sufi mystic. Ahmed and Emman, with big boned Tirnom, were at a corner tending the raised spits on which a fifth share of a ram he had marinaded in spice since the day before lay roasting – a fragrant offering to what, he couldn’t say. Maybe to youth. Some of the others were drinking; Guinness or orange juice according to their morals, Hauwa Dogo and Ibrahim were dancing, surrounded by Elnath with two of the girls,cheering. He looked at them all; there had been stars in his eyes.

“It’s going well, isn’t it?”
“Yes, my love, it is.”
“For the last time.”
“Beauty does not fade,” he’d said, “ . . .yes, for the last time.”
Maybe she said “Yes.” Falmata had moved away to a table where the Jesuit and the Sufi were and he’d heard laughter, hers, sweetly, as she dragged them both to dance. The priest obliged her. It was Fela Kuti; Sorrow, Tears and Blood. His Falmata, dancing with stars in the sky above her. Falmata, who had studied English Literature, Fulani, dark as he was, dancing; she, the second half of his soul poem. A month before today.

The boy looking out the window sighs, unaware that for a while a little girl had been watching him, had watched him three long minutes because she wanted to say good morning to the new teacher - and she had turned away sadly. His thoughts had returned nearer where he was, to the market he had been at the day before – the Udenu market where he had gone to buy coffee. He remembered the many thin, emaciated faces beckoning him to be cheated and the smell of rot – unable to say if the rot was not a living human one. Dirty market, fat women and children with sunken eyes. Then the boy with the wheelbarrow brushing past him but not fast enough for him not to see the butchered remains – the head and tail of a horse. He had almost collapsed, throwing up and gripping at a wall for support, immediately withdrawing his hand at the thought that horses were killed within those walls. And eaten. “I am all right,” he said, but not one of the spectrae hadnoticed him. His thoughts had been of his pony, Wutsia, stabled at Jos – in this land, amongst these people, Wutsia would be butchered and eaten. The nauseaus boy, Almasi George, had run away out of the market then.

Emman and Ahmed had done the steaks marvelously; all had been eating and drinking and talking a long while already. It was about 10 p.m. Mostly, they had talked. They had talked as they always had over the years, about dreams and their introspections because that was the forte of those still young, for whom beauty was a token granted. He talked. Falmata, who did not drink, sat by him in the makeshift bar – an open Guinness before him and their friends clustered all around in a rough semi circle. He read one of his poems. Dispersion stood just out the gates of her house waiting to bear each of them away. They talked, soon, about their country, the integrative forces and of Civil Wars in the 60’s and of militants in the southern delta.

“If they send me to the south, I will abscond. I will not serve,” Musa had blurted out. He wore a rust colored tee-shirt and neutral colored trousers, his glasses hooding just under his clear eyes. He was speaking of the Volunteer Teachers Corps to which every male university graduate who refused military service was called up for a year.Almasi had smiled,
“You can’t do that, Musa.”
“It’s true, I will abscond. Why should I do anything for the country? What has the country done for me?”
But Falmata had stated then in her breezy way, “But you, Musa, are a noted misanthrope. Nobody has ever done anything for you!” and this was met by laughter. Even Musa smiled, removing his glasses. He had studied Political Economy and hoped to lecture.
“Your only option is to go for military service.”
“And be killed in the Niger Delta? Allah ya kiyaye!”
“No one will have you anyway, you’re too skinny.”
“Haha!”
“Bloody country. Why can’t they leave me alone?”
“I agree with Elnath. To be left alone, here with you people. I would rather be here.”
“But we cannot be young forever,” the priest, Beckett, said, and his words shrouded the night with silence; they sat drinking their despairs, they, the best and the brightest in the heart of a Nigerian dystopia. Yet, every one of them loved the idea that was Nigeria – only they did not wish to see the underside of that ideal, the patches sewn there; they were afraid what the cardinals south and west and east would show them. For it would be a violation – same as losing one’s virginity, the ideal shattering in the face of the real or the forced face of old maids, an ideal held unto in spite of the real – both ways were rapes, and there wasn’t a third way. But the elegant boy with his arm around his girlfriend was not afraid.
“I will go wherever I am sent. I think I must know the complexity of the country and not take it for granted. If I am sent, to the East or West, even to the Delta, I will go. They are, after all, Nigeria.”
A month before.

And that had led him here, to this window through which the smell of cashews could be perceived each morning, where the inhabitants ate horses and rend the air at night with gunshots celebrating another poisoning, where a slashed at sun tipped into a murky sea. All around him, ideas swirled, for when we stand beside windows things go into us and things go out of us; it is, all ways, a journeying away and to. He thought of the girl who waited for him in Jos, and of his beloved pony and the diaspora into which his cusp had been swept – he wondered if he could make it back from knowing the dynamic of existence and meaning in his country and his heart despaired. For the underside of Falmata’s salon was those faces he had seen at the market, and those faces were vicious.

But the little girl had returned more determined this time.“Good morning sir!” she said, in her little girl voice, from right behind him. Almasi turned on her and smiled.
“Good morning, little one, how are you?”
“Fine,” she replied, clutching her purple and green Barney toothbrush.
“So what’s your name?”
“Kambili. I am six years old!” she added proudly.
“That’s wonderful,” he said, unsure now how to proceed, “my name is Almasi George.”
“Is it true that you will be staying to teach us at the school?” she asked.
But he glanced through the glass again before answering, catching the point where green met blue, but this time he did not sigh. He looked back calmly at the clear, earnest, future eyes peering up at him.“Yes,” he said.He put Kambili’s palm in his and together they walked away from the glass, unaware now that he had let go of the curtain which fell gracefully, covering the window behind him and with it a viewful of many things.

Against The Evil State: My Response to Rabo Abdulkarim

Richard Ali {c}

AGAINST THE EVIL STATE: MY RESPONSE TO RABO

Last week, during the ANA National Convention held at Gusau, Zamfara State, I had the opportunity of interacting with the Kano State Censorship Board’s DG, Alhaji Rabo Abdulkarim. We met at a forum within the convention where he set out to justify his widely publicised agenda to censor all authors in Kano. Five persons spoke before I did, including the poet-intellectual Odia Ofeimun and the academic, al-Bishak from the Nassarawa State University. I believe that forum has given me the necessary knowledge, hence the conviction, to publicly stand by my views expressed then and now in this article.

The entire thrust of Rabo’s justification of censorship in Kano is religious precedent – that somehow, in the works of Kano writers, immorality has been promoted and that this is contrary to Islam which is the dominant religion in the State, hence the need for his censorship. The actual, surely negligible, percentage of such anti-moral, religion-insensitive work does not interest me. The issue is that Rabo and the Kano State Government evidently see themselves in the office of the ulama, priests and imams to whom are entrusted the preservation of religious precept and its moral component. Among other things, Director General Rabo Abdulkarim sought to point out that “even in religion”, censorship existed with aspects of religious text being suppressed on the instructions of God Himself. So he, Rabo, was merely the latest in a long line of “censors” who trace their lineage to God Himself! THIS IS VERY VERY DANGEROUS - the sociologic mindset underlying it is the same kernel that sprouts the Evil State. The second half of the 19^th Century saw such a kernel, that errant strain of social philosophy called Fascism, and its kinfolk; Socialism and Communism. The tragic of the 20^th Century, including two world wars, is its rightful bloom. Now, in 21^st Century Nigeria, such a sinister preamble faces us.

When the State arrogates to itself the moral suasion of Religion, seeking to enforce this arrogation by instruments of legal suasion such as the Kano State Censorship Law, the State has simply affirmed Mussolini’s text - “the keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.” This would no doubt be well and good if such a State were foundationally a fascist State. The Kano State government and its minions, however, were all elected under the 1999 Nigerian Constitution which declares that the country can only be governed “democratically”, meaning by the Rule of Law in government/power relations and respecting Fundamental Human Rights in practice. The State’s arrogation of Religion is clearly the first step in the creation of the Evil State in which “individual and groups” will be relative – contrary to rudimentary democracy. In a democracy, thus in Nigeria, “individuals and groups” must be FREE – freedom of thought, action, even the freedom to life contra-defines Fascism, they are the gene characteristic of Democracy.

In our long, trying history, the Nigerian artist and writer, from Uthman dan Fodio right down to Ken Saro-Wiwa have embodied that irreducible freedom, paying the price, social regeneration or death, over the centuries – this is the TRUTH. In attacking the writers of Kano and Nigeria, the State, in Kano through its minions and in Abuja through its acquiescence have launched an attack AGAINST FREEDOM – that also, is TRUTH.

Now that we know definitively the State’s underlying agenda, how have we as artists and writers responded; - to the threat that the same Democracy we and ours have spent blood to enthrone is now being imperilled; that the representative institutions which we have created to protect our freedom are morphing now into appurtenances of the Evil State? How have we responded?

Before I go on, I would like to say in any society, the quantum of stupidity is often the kinetic force that determines the dice face of its people’s destiny.

The Nigerian intelligentsia, when they have not been smirking partisans of the fictitious and alternately chauvinist “North-South” divide have responded to this attack in the manner the northern academic, al-Bishak, did at Gusau. After a circuitous proem, he finally decided to say that if there is a “law” setting up the Kano State Censors Board, Rabo would “never stop” what he is doing. What he said really was that, in the extant case, Rabo should continue threatening freedom while writers should continue complaining of it. What he said involves the admittance of Rabo and the Evil State into the social equation of Nigeria and I assure you there is nothing “intellectual” about a “head-in-the-sand intellect”, the prefix outrages its twin! Al-Bishak’s comments are merely those typifying the response of a considerable percentage of our thinkers and writers here in the North, and it is not any more his fault for exemplifying that mindset than it is mine for attacking it.

What I say is – bar the gates and secure the fastness, do not let Grendel in! Do not, my dear writers and Intellectuals, pretend you do not know what Rabo is about; do not pretend not to know that in this incursion at Kano, the very future of Nigeria, our Nigeria, is at stake. Do not pretend that Rabo can possibly be allowed to “do what he is doing” when what he is doing is scorching the fields where our grains grow, burning the granaries! Do not pretend you do not know that an illegal law MUST not be obeyed, must be fought in the courts and if the courts become corrupt, they still MUST not be obeyed. Do not pretend to not know this and much more!

But, if you choose to so pretend, take off the garb of Intellectual, don that of Quisling and in doing so lose all my respect and friendship - even if that means I stand alone amidst my true few friends.

That is that about the Evil State and my response to Rabo Abdulkarim and his bent masters, the Kano State Government and the Nigerian State. I have also spoken to the Intellectuals who helm Nigerian literature. I wish now to speak to my true friends, the writers of Kano and Nigeria; to the future of Nigeria I say, listen to me please.

The mistake we make too often is to circumscribe ourselves to the walls of the Nigerian middleclass to which by birth or education most of us belong, forgetting we have a duty to through our work interact with Society as a whole. This must stop. We must begin to see ourselves as a part of an organic whole. If the State has turned evil and if the Intelligentsia have turned quislings, we must return to our selves, to the People to whom we belong. If we have remained away from them, we must now rediscover our bonds with them because attacking our freedom and dominating us is just the first step towards the complete subjugation of the People. In attacking our freedom to write, they undermine our right to our thoughts. And when these are successfully stymied, from then onwards, the Evil State will at birth give each child a life’s parcel of ignorance.

Now, especially as we are under attack, we must break down these exclusive glass walls and fraternise our ideas with the lower-classes, lifting them up to where we are, thus increasing our number and guaranteeing that the They who wish to automate the Evil State will know in advance that we are superior in number and resolve. We must shatter the walls and start speaking to the talakawa of Northern Nigeria in their own language. It is for our own good and in our best interest that we realise this, for when Ignorance becomes public policy, we, stamped into the lower-classes, will become nameless faces in a neo-commune. And it will be much harder for us who have gained so much. That is all I have to say to you.

I will end this article by imploring that we must stand against this Evil State in the making and not seek to compromise with it as the our leaders seem self destructively bent on doing, pretending to forget that one negotiates only with equal. And to my courageous comrades in Kano who will go by the names, “Abdul”, “Sa’adatu”, “Yusuf”, “Ibrahim” and “Talatu”, I say – WE WILL WRITE, WE WILL KEEP WRITING AND WE WILL TRIUMHP!

Ali, former Editor, Sardauna Magazine, poet, holds an LL.B {Civil Law} from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.