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.

JosANA hits TV bigtime!

JosANA hits TV bigtime!

An account of JosANA’s 2 day Kaduna Cultural Exchange Visit 2008

Yes, it’s true; I am now an international celebrity. {There have been paparazzi on my tail all day!}.

JosANA, Nigeria’s most vibrant intellectual hub was hosted by NTA Kaduna and the Association for Nigerian Authors {ANA}, Kaduna Chapter during her recently concluded two-day Cultural Exchange visit to the Crocodile City. The Cultural Exchange, part of the activities of JosANA, is in line with the Federal Governments’ READ program and involves JosANA holding interstate readings in collaboration with other state chapters of the ANA.

Kaduna, the liberal state, was our first port of call.

The journey for me began at 3 pm when ANA Vice Chairman Matthew Mzega and I drove out from Jos in his grey VW Passat, using the Southern Route. We passed through the towns of Forest, Gidan Waya, Kagoro, Zonkwa, and Kachia before arriving Kada City by 8 pm on Wednesday the 15th. We met the Zonal Director of NTA Kaduna, Mallam Abdulkarim Muhammad Abdullahi, who received us cheerily then instructed the station’s Asst. Director of Programs, Mr. Preye to lead us to our lodgings where Chairman Bose Tsevende and some of our members were already billeted. We lodged at the Catholic Social Centre along Independence Way. We met the chairman together with the BBC African Performance 2007 Playwright Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, the Jos City novelist Alpha Emeka and his sidekick, the poet David Onotu who came down from Katsina.

The next morning, we had an early breakfast and by 8:45 am the trusty Assistant Director of Programs had arrived with a bus to convey the JosANA A’ list to Gamji Park, the venue of the reading where an NTA AM Express camera crew was already waiting. The VeeCee and I tailed the bus. Gamji Park proved to be a terrific setting - what with the ostriches, tortoises and of course the crocodiles {called ‘kada’} that give Kaduna City its name. The park is well maintained by the State Government and a posse of gardeners were seen pushing lawn mowers across the grass. The river Kaduna also formed a spectacular backdrop.

Shooting began with David Onotu reading his poem “Niger Area” and there could have been no better background than Lord Frederick Lugard’s Lokoja Bridge, which had been moved to Gamji Park as a permanent exhibition. The extant bridge, like the nation the British Captain sired in 1914 seemed to indicate the certain Manifest Destiny of Nigeria, in spite of one century of the volatile socio-political combustion.

Other work were read and filmed at a recreational hut facing the unhurriedly flowing river where once in a while a fisherman floating on a calabash could be seen, adding a fascinating rusticity to the view. Richard Ali coordinated presentations across the genres by Bose Tsevende, Matthew Mzega, David Onotu, Alpha Emeka and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim as well as a song {crocodile croakey voices – mine mostly! – were never better heard I assure you!} extolling Nigerian Unity and showing appreciation to NTA Kaduna and ANA Kaduna for graciously hosting us. The song was composed by Matthew Mzega. Then JosANA Chairman, Bose Tsevende, had another interview, this time together with the indomitable Friday John Abba, Chairman of ANA Kaduna who came along with his VeeCee, Steve Adinoyi. Elnathan John, Esq, who has just come out with his first collection of short stories title “Dreams etcetera” was also there and he gave this writer an autographed copy! JosANA fraternized with her sister chapter and books by Jos writers were formally presented to ANA Kaduna and vice versa. It was about 1:30 pm when we left for the official courtesy visit to the NTA Kaduna.

We met in the stations’ Conference Room with the Kaduna station’s top management in attendance. Chairman Tsevende informed the Zonal Director of JosANA’s activities and the reasons for visiting Kaduna on her first ever Cultural Exchange Visit, stressing the shared histories of Kaduna and Jos and the integrative intellectual undercurrents that have helped to shape the identity of both cities. She also spoke on the absence of a reading culture in Nigeria, stating sadly that the little reading that goes on is usually of tepid, intellectually uninspiring literature churned out by book factories abroad. The desire to redress this aridity informed JosANA’s Cultural Exchange activities, said the Chairman.

The Zonal Director highly commended JosANA for its original and innovative approach to the reading culture problem in Nigeria and in a memorable response stressed the necessity for Nigerian unity and the critical role of writers in the reaffirming of that autochthonic unity. He also mentioned the civil strife that has in the last decade torn apart Jos and Kaduna among other Nigerian towns in a cheerless roll call and how important it was for writers as the crème of the intelligentsia to rise above the innately disintegrative postures and machinations of the wrong sort of ‘politician’. He then thanked JosANA for visiting and looked forward to further collaboration with JosANA. Hajia Adamu also informed us that a mini library was being set up in Kaduna and JosANA was only too happy to promise it fair contribution of books to this laudable initiative.

The co – host, Friday John Abba of ANA Kaduna, then thanked the Zonal Director for helping to host the “mountain dwellers” who had come down to their fathers in the savannah to “learn one of two things!” To this wisecrack, Mallam Adbulkarim quipped that perhaps it was the mountain dwellers who had brought the light down to Kaduna with their innovative programs? {He was correct!} Arrangements were made for production collaborations between NTA Kaduna and our brother writers at ANA Kaduna.

It was on this note that we left the “Kada City” with fond memories of the liberality of its intelligentsia and the warmth of its people, from the AM Express crew to the ANA Kaduna Chairman unto the Zonal Director himself.

I arrived Jos together with JosANA VeeCee, Matthew Mzega at about 6:30 pm on Thursday the 16th and the one thing on my mind {apart from how nice it felt to be on TV} was how fortunate I was to be a part for the regeneration of Nigeria currently being spearheaded by JosANA, ANA Kaduna and spirited people like Mallam Abdulkarim Muhammad Abdullahi of NTA Kaduna. I was reassured that Sardauna Bello’s dream of Nigerian unity which I share is still doable because even in these trying times for my country, there are still those who believe in her future and who are willing to stand up and be counted in the cause of its consummation.




Richard Ugbede Ali, poet, is the secretary of JosANA.

The Legacy of Bolewa

Below is the first draft of my first novel. It is a story about identity in Nigeria, two lovers caught beween Christianity and Islam, between the cultural identities of Northern Nigeria and Central Nigeria and also between the contrary political forces {integrative and disintegrative} of their parents. It is a novel about seeking out higher ground in order to resolve contradictions. Do enjoy, comments are welcome!

A week after his fiancée left him, Faruk Ibrahim’s Toyota torqued a steady seventy on the dusty tracks of Nigeria’s northeast highway. It was about five months after General Hassan Abba’s coup d’etat and twenty-two years to the day he first fled the little town of Bolewa where he was born – Bolewa, to which he was now headed. The savannah sun bared its vexation on the white Corolla and not for the first time Faruk wondered why he had not fixed the broken air conditioner, for even with both windows wound down, he sweated like a man afraid. That morning, years ago, Faruk Ibrahim was only vaguely aware that the maelstrom of contrary winds swirled increasingly desperately around him.

In the coming months, it was all to come to a head, unimpeded, like a sudden dust storm billowing from the Sahara.

The toilsome journey wound on and on, passing towns no larger than suburbs of Jos City in the central Nigerian plateau from where he was coming. The car’s sedate speed did not compensate the sweltering air and he thought not for the last time that he should have fixed the car’s broken air conditioning. The roads weren’t always good either and sometimes they ceased altogether, becoming long patches of dry, powdery, russet-brown dust.

On both sides of the road was savannah seeming perennially dry, seeming to defy the sun’s fury by stubbornly refusing not to burst into flame. Yet, in the heat, some nomads were about with herds of white cattle, cattle more plentiful than men in Nigeria’s frontier Northeast State. Each time he passed a herdsman and his charge, Faruk hooted his horn in response to the others ecstatic hallooing and raised his hand through the window in salute to this close relative of the American cowboy. The American west is the Nigerian northeast and he wondered what tales of rugged living each hardy heritor could tell of his life. Unconsciously, he thought how many untold stories there are in Nigeria and how all one needed do was scratch the surface a bit and look inwards.

For company, he and the cattlehands had numberless cattle egrets, bubulus ibis, sentinel of the herdsman and watcher of the doings of men, even of his mother and father and their lives before him. He fought a losing battle with his thoughts, which always returned to Rahila and the city of cool climes he had left behind that morning.

“See, Faruk, ba na son ka kuma. We have to call it off, it cannot work anymore, please,” Rahila Pam had said.

“Ba ki so na? You do not love me, or you are quitting me – which is it, Rahila, which?”

“It doesn’t matter. Let me go!”

“It does matter, and you know it! Both things are not the same.”

Miles Davis 1959 Kind of Blue played from Bose speakers. The finesse of the recording now and again kept his mind off the insufferable heat. Somehow, and Rahila Pam had always wondered how, listening to jazz kept him alert to the road like at no other time. Faruk tapped his thumb on the steering wheel in time to Coltrane’s riffs and felt faintly lightheaded from experiencing the culture of a promising past each time Miles Davis’s trumpet said an undying flourish. Jazz awakened something foundational in him absent all the other times when the burden of living amidst the pell-mell pull of life drowned the music of nature from his ears.

He caught himself looking through the driving mirror in time to remember that on this particular stretch of road he was all alone and had been so for quite a while, an hour now, since he had passed a lorry laden with assorted farm produce and rustic farmers hanging on to the tailboards of the old Bedford, laughing and singing rural songs in their own peace. He had hooted his horn at them and they saluted noisily as he passed them. Minutes later when he stopped to check his tires, they also stopped to ask what was wrong and when they found there was nothing they could do, they commended his knowledge of the Kanuri language to which he said he was Kanuri and was presented a prize of bananas and oranges by Wabekwa, an aged untired man who was their king of farmers. Then Faruk was off again, leaving them far behind.

He caught himself looking at the driving mirror again.

Faruk had a thin face. Clear white eyes, which added calm kindness to a somewhat inscrutable face, offset the dark chocolate of his complexion. He had happy, even lips, and when he whistled his lips were sexy. His hair, like his father’s, was wavy, as had been those of his Kanuri and Fulani forbears. His eyebrows were slender and fine, however, and not the typical hawk’s perch. He wore a thin handlebar moustache and had spent much of his twenty-four years enduring the teasing of friends who swore he could never grow a beard. He was tall and lithe, like a Kenyan runner. The effect of these little details was a wholesome beauty that was concealed and enchanted all the same. When he smiled, which was the easiest thing in the world for him, a positive animation livened his features and he could will anything he desired then.

He wore a red polo shirt over white chinos and black sandals of cured snakeskin. Beside him was an already lukewarm bottle of water and in a cooler behind him were the rest of the dozen pack of bottled water he bought at Jalingo earlier in the journey. Beside the cooler was a battered suitcase of brown leather, a suitcase that had crossed continents and been the habitué of countless car trunks, indeed a suitcase that told much of his life story for he had gotten it for his fifteenth birthday. He whistled along with the modal jazz playing from the speakers of his well used, ever-faithful Toyota and gradually he lost himself again in the confusion of his thoughts.

After the last fight with Rahila a week before, he had decided to take a breather from the North-Central State where they lived. He wished to travel away from the differences and choices that tried relentlessly to determine his life and his joys. But he did not know how or where to go. So he visited Yagana Hussena, his late mother Habiba Ummi al-Qassim’s closest friend until she died when he was fourteen.

Prior to his meeting Rahila Pam, Faruk’s mother’s insanity and death had been a private trauma he had overcome, reconciled to the past. It’s related, I know, Faruk had thought, my mother and Rahila; Rahila’s complex with identity. I have to get away.

Rahila made him think of Ummi al-Qassim and wonder why, questioning in his mind the comfortable veneer of acceptance, seeking reasons. Faruk had become intrigued with finding out why Ummi al-Qassim had lost her mind. Insanity did not begin when a person started howling or losing track of things and time, the memory of faces, just like pain did not start at the moment of a beloved ones death but long before that, lingering on long after the fact.

On entering the shaded porch of Yagana’s house, which was filled with potted plants giving off an ozonic trace of well-being, she said -

"My God, what troubles you? Your face is as long as a Kaaba door!"

She was standing at the far side of the porch mulching compost with gloved hands unto the roots of a promising rose bush. She led him to sit on the cloth sofa and shouted for the maid to not let her son starve or thirst in her house. She was an old woman, about sixty, and her gray hair peeked out in neat cornrows from under her Dubaijin headscarf. Her skin was pale, as had been his mother’s; she had the kindest face he had ever seen.

Hussena, his yaya, always adopted the undying spirit of a young girl with him and now she smiled at him with the coquette of a lover. She called him Habib, her love. She called him that perhaps because it was also his mother’s name - Habiba. Habiba Ummi al-Qassim had been Yagana Hussena’s dearest friend, a sister of the blood.

Faruk took his seat beside her and told her of Rahila. She kept nodding, did not interrupt him save to bid him eat some of the food and drink that had been silently placed on a stool beside him. While she listened, Faruk noticed it seemed as if a film had appeared over her eyes, as if his words reminded her of something else.

The old woman’s complete silence was not so much because she was listening to him as because his words unearthed memories long entombed by the silt of many years. He looked up ever so often and only the alert questioning glint in her eyes made him continue his narrative. Of all cosmic jokes God played on the denizens of His world, deja vu was the most unnerving, the most improbable. It was exactly deja vu that coursed through Yagana Hussena’s mind as Faruk sat there on her porch, telling her the problems of his love and how dim the prospects of his joy without his love were.

Decades before, Hussena had listened to his mothers words - words striking in their similarity to Faruk’s and those words, these words, had so clearly been a cause of much suffering. It was impossible for her to draw a conclusion other than that another tragedy was in the offing.

She knew skill and tact would be needed to ward it off, as one might gently nudge a meteor off the path of the earth and catastrophe, and that the task had fallen to her. So be it! Colonel Dibarama, Faruk’s father, could not save the boy from the enigma of identity that even then reached out to grab Faruk and carry him unknowing to the depths of hell, a hell that had consumed his mother already. No, Hussena thought, I did not do enough forty years ago, Allah forbid that I do not exhaust myself this time around, what is life if one holds back from living because of life? So be it!

She wondered about General Hassan Abba and where he figured in this new complexity. Hassan was definitely aware, he was always aware. Her own Hassan who had tried to make the most of it, her soldier-boy who had punched up a ray of light at a time when twin dusks of the Arab and Usman Waziri stifled her dawn like an unrepudiable promise. And even though Hassan’s actions then had not been able to ward off the fatal confrontation - for how can one ward off a woe that one does not know - it had provided a leeway through which Habiba had escaped with this boy and lived for a decade, encumbered but alive and hopeful in time.

Now Hassan Abba was Head of State.

In the end, everything just begins.

But Yagana Hussena realized, even though it was imperative that he knew, telling Faruk what had happened in Bolewa when she was still a girl would do him no good. It was only in personal rediscovery that he would find the strength he needed to make the right decision, strength absent decades earlier and for which Hussena had never fully forgiven herself.

Just then, her pet macaw, Haruna, started chirruping "strength strength, haw-haw, strength!" and Faruk saw her smile one of her fine smiles and she looked up at him just as he finished speaking.

"Haruna has a habit of reading my mind. Did you hear him? He just said 'strength', just what you need."

"How do you mean, Yaya?"

"I mean that you should not fight on a field not of your own choosing. In knowing the field, lies strength”, she said.

"You mean a strategy?"

"Yes, in a way. Strategy is knowledge, foreknowledge precisely. Come, I have some of your mother’s things, I think its time you had them" she said, standing and grasping his arm lightly, leading him into the familiar house past the living room to her own quarters, which were neat as ever, where she bade him sit on her brown ottoman.

The room had large windows and its walls of fresh lemonade green, with the white carpeting and the gold green Oriental rug, suffused airiness much in the same way the potted plants gave rarity to the porch. He fiddled around with a paperweight, uncertain why she wished to give him his mother’s diaries just after he had told her about his own troubles with Rahila Pam. What had that to do with foreknowledge? The elderly woman straightened up and placed herself beside him on the ottoman, putting a large brown envelope in his hands. She stroked his face and told him what he had to do.

The next day Faruk went to the National Directorate of Employment and almost like something planned, he was informed that there was a placement for a social studies teacher in the Northeast, if he was interested. It was a six-month spot while the substantive teacher was on sabbatical.

Fine. Where?

Federal Government College, Bolewa.

Laughter bubbled up within him for at that moment he remembered what Yaya Hussena had always said, that something coming was on its way all ways. So, she had been right after all. Of course, he would go to Bolewa.

And here he was on the dry dusty roads of the Northeast.

His father had been surprised at Faruk’s decision especially on hearing the teaching appointment was in Bolewa. The Colonel believed he had instilled enough strength in his son for the younger man to make his decisions.

But Bolewa? Things must be getting dangerous here for the young man, but, again, Bolewa?

Who knows, the Colonel thought, it might all work out for good. The machinery of his brains began to assimilate the angles beneath the board. Everything was a chess game for Ibrahim Dibarama,

The music stopped but Faruk did not play it again or place another disc in the tray.

He drove on, his thoughts still far away in Jos.

“It cannot work, Faruk. It’s all broken down. I cannot marry you, I am sorry.”

Rahila, with her head bowed in tears, had tried to remove the ring, Faruk was angry and he held her hand.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

But she did not answer.

“Here’s your ring.”

Rahila had turned away from him and looked out through the window. He then grasped her by the forearm and turned her slowly so she could face him. He wanted to play a game they used to play but his voice had grown husky.

“What are you?” he cried.

She had looked up at him then.

“I am the mountains; you are?”

“The breeze,” he interjected.

“We cannot be.”

“I am the sun,” he tried again.

“But you are not.”

“You are rain.”

“I am not. Not anymore.”

That was the moment the waters broke between them. His heart raged because he was afraid.

She tried again, “Faruk, I am sorry, I hate to be, but I am, now. You are from the North; I am from Central Nigeria, we are separated by a whole complication of history and conditioning. I thought it was possible, but I cannot, we cannot, be indifferent to our distinct identities. I am my mother’s child; you are your father’s son. We neither of us can undo that.”

Faruk had looked at her again, her bowed head. He was silent awhile, standing inches from her. Then he bent forward a bit and pressed his lips on her cheek feeling her shudder, he closed his eyes. Rahila’s eyes were closed also. Both were in pain.

“You are breaking my heart,” he said.

Then he turned way, leaving her amid the contradictory swirl of her emotions and the memory of her dying joy.

A week before.

Thirty minutes later on the Northeast Highway, Faruk Ibrahim came to a junction. Straight ahead was Maiduguri, 200 km away. He took the road that led to Nguirama and then on to Maidunama and Bolewa.

He still had 300 kilometers before he could present himself to the native land from which he had been for so long sequestered, to say to the oracle of his mother, I am your son, tell me of our history.

Re: North's vicious circle of Poverty

Re: North's vicious circle of Poverty

By

Ibrahim A. Waziri

In the 26/07/08 edition of Weekly Trust Newspaper is the cover story with the above title, which discussed the poverty phenomenon in Northern Nigeria in the light of the much attention the issue has garnered in recent times, especially when the Central Bank of Nigeria’s governor, Professor Charles Soludo drew attention to it - though reiterating what he once said a year past - at a lecture organised by the Northern Development Initiative in Kaduna, some weeks ago, asking the federal government to declare the situation in the North, a national crisis.

Many people differ on the different causes and solutions to the problem as it affects the region and the country in general. While some of us are quick to identify with positions as that of Mallam Salihu Lukman, a development Economist interviewed in the same edition of the paper, which squarely blamed it on the leadership of Northern Nigeria, that cannot, among other things, fully account for the 17 Trillion Naira it collected from the federal coffers between 1999 to 2007, in the light of efforts at poverty alleviation. Others, as our brothers across the Niger, will rather blame the religion and culture of Northerners as the main culprit, with the justification that the Northern leaders are not any worse than the Southern leaders and yet the Southerners are better up, so the explanation must be in the values, religion and culture of Northerners, or at a stretched imagination, laziness – as seen in certain statement issued by Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and reported by The Punch of31/07/08.This perception is further strengthened by the content an interview conducted by the Weekly’s reporter, Ja’afar Ja’afar and published in the same edition, under a title that says it all, ‘I was given N50, 000 capital, but I married with it’, and described Mallam Garba, the interviewed, as “a real-life stereotype of a Hausa man.”, who cares not about, “what to eat or what to wear” and is “very indifferent, unambitious and a man with a simplistic outlook to life.”

This piece intends to scrutinise the two positions advanced, in the hope of providing insight into the nature of the processes that led the North to this sorry state economically.

Here it is important to understand the fact that there is a wide gap of difference between, culture, religion, values on one side, and in this context, from world view, which typifies the behaviour of an average Northerner like Mallam Garba. The truth of the matter is religion or culture has little to do with human taste, instinct and desire to survive on a certain standard. It only governs choices on how to achieve a standard. This is why we see a lot of Northerners who are not like Mallam Garba in style, despite them sharing same religion, culture and values with him.

A close examination will reveal that the mechanism of progress that made the Hausa the most vibrant and enterprising nation in the whole of West Africa, at a time of the past, is still here. It is also not laziness as, today; nobody comes from any region to farm for them the food they survive on daily. It is like those seeking for an answer to why the Northern Nigeria is in its state now despite the fact of its elite holding power in the composition of the present Nigerian nation-state for over 40 years, should try some reading in classical power and relational politics and its implication on groups’ socio-economic development. In this, one will see that the North is where it is today only in respect to the popular saying that one cannot eat their cake and still have it as it is with all other natural phenomena.

The seemingly correct explanation is the Northern elite, who are responsible for expanding the paradigm and worldview of average Northernerssituating them at par with their counter parts across the world, got power, in the composition of Nigerian nation, in the late 1950s and in order to keep to it they chose the option of eliminating the middle class among them, because the likely thing to happen is the middle class, if allowed, might grow in economy, influence and strength enough to wrench power from the upper class. This is what happened when Gowon in the early 70s and Shagari in the late 70s, allowed their own to grow strong in the military. They just did away with them in 1975 and 1984 respectively and clung to power making sure they did not make the same mistake their predecessors made. They continued the practice of axing their own economically, intellectually and otherwise.

On the other side, the other regions, with especial example of Awo of the South West, were not faced with anything of political control of Nigeria and as such they continued to strengthen their middle class as the upper class realized the need to empower their own as a comprehensive defence against the onslaught of Northern upper class elite. The middle class served as an armoury to the upper class. They continued the battle for them until the early nineties when IBB annulled the popular June 12 election.

Then came the climaxes, the June 12 was ethnicised and regionalised,the South West had a good number of media outfits and middle class individuals with the right education and economic resources to sustain the fight while in the North of early nineties, very few among the middle class could do well in countering the others in the intellectual fight at the level of resources. At the end of the day, after the demise of Abacha, the Northern elite were confronted with no option than to dash power to the South West in 1999. They have won the fight.

When Obasanjo realized his bearing and started targeting these Northern elites it still remained that they had none to defend them save the few middle class created during Abacha regime under the Buhari PTF. Many young Northerners then have merited contracts and madea couple of millions. They were the ones who established focused media houses, maintained Newspaper columns, and started getting back at Obasanjo and his policies.

And of course, the era of Obasanjo was the era of South West participating in national politics. Even though they already have a vibrant middle class, and sound economic structure that benefited from the regime's economic considerations at the centre, it is evident that they also suffered from what the North earlier on suffered from as their elite started a war of control of the region's social and cultural resources. This war recorded many casualties as even people like Bola Ige had to take exit, brutally killed. Also the control politics did not allow their governors to work in unison with progress of the region. In fact they were rated among the worst in performance.

On his part, Obasanjo had to seek for his loyalist outside his own region because trusting and elevating his regional men in the centre may lead to excessive ambition which in turn may result in a palace coup akin to what happened to his predecessors like Gowon and Shagari and their people whom they trusted with the leadership of the military.

This is about the story of Northerners in Nigeria and what came up in their economic development. It is also the reason why there was no time when Northerners talked much about their economy more than the time of Obasanjo’s leadership.Being it they left the leadership position of the country and the upper class were being attacked by Obasanjo mercilessly. Of course, it was also then that the leadershipin the North achieved most, more than the many years it clung to power at the centre.

This is why some of us think the North can have meaningful economic development only if power is made to stay away from its elite for several years while others think, Northerners may have learnt their lessons and will now work assiduously to develop the region.

The whole of this truth is particularly important to stress here given the pronouncements of the governor of Niger State, Alhaji Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu, who tried to attribute the present economic predicament of the North, as widely reported by Newspapers around the country, to an obscure international conspiracy.

If indeed there was a conspiracy it was a Northern Political Class Conspiracy which lost itself in the game of control politics over time.

As it is now the solution to the problem is not one of a short term as the generation of youths without the relevant skills necessary for survival in formal economy now as the ones to be produced in the recent future are very much in the league of the 86% - quoted percentage of the poor - among us. So an affirmative action, with the intent of taking care of our distant future, which appeals to laws and legislations, is the only options. The solution, though good, is not totally in the much taunted, revitalisation of the Agricultural Sector in the North, for Anambra State that is among the highest in the country’s economic index is not an agricultural haven or oil reservoir. After all the Agricultural Sector, if revitalised, may end up serving the economic need of others if there is no enough skilled manpower with right national and international market strategies among the Northerners. Here it is particularly important for the government to invest hugely in human capital development as Northerners need to have more of a world class exposure in various disciplines both academic and entrepreneurial, necesary for survival in the capitalist world.

We certainly, also, cannot continue in the pretentions of creating welfare states. No how can a government continue to afford a free education for all as the Bauchi State House of Assembly is recently heard to be saying it would put Qur’anic Schools and its Almajirai in the state’s budget. This is not practicable as even the formal Western Type of schools that are government owned are not maintained adequately. In fact the example of Kano State which tried to do that as reported in the same edition of Weekly Trust is not encouraging.

So instead of us to continue sailing the dream boat, legislations must be made and enforced that will compel parents to bear more the responsibilities of the children they produce – since religiously it is their duty - as they sometimes recklessly and indiscriminately marry without regard to religious injunctions in keeping and maintaining a family. Thus they send the children out to others cities, hawking and scavenging as Almajirai, in the Qur’anic Schools they could always find in their own villages. It is these Almajirai , growing in the streets with a very bad taste of what life is, with wrong upbringing, wrong heroes, wrong worldview and wrong skills of survival in the 21st century world, that form the bulk of the poor people in Northern Nigeria.

Also such legislations must lead to the creation of agencies, as in other Muslim African countries, like Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, which will be saddled with the responsibilities of accessing the economic and mental worth of anybody who intends to marry or add another wife as many among us are tilted toward abusing the privilege associated with polygamy by placing satisfaction that comes from their being with many wives above their responsibilities of seeing to the maintenance of the family. They plan to produce as many children as they can without planning to give them the best as the religion requires of them.As such we end up with many children that cannot be catered for adequately by their parents, growing in the streets with a terrible taste of what life is, with no abilities to think and save themselves or even those around them in the context of the challenges daily living presents.

It is my humble opinion that family is the barometer of all communities, and keeping political correctness aside,we will need to understand governance as meaning making attempts to make subjects of a defined community disciplined and responsible in all of their dealings and this starts with the channels and processes of procreation in the community. Failure to address issues at this level signals the triumph of anarchy as it is seen in the threat we are facing from the monsters of poverty in Northern Nigeria due to,largely, among other things, our neglect of legal provisions in the formation of family units in both religion and our secular living.

Ibrahim A. Waziri is a Web Application Software Developer at Iya Abubakar Computer Center, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He can be reached at, iawaziri@yahoo.com, 234- 080- 35167963