An open letter to Northern leaders (2)

Aliyu Musa

Sardauna, as we all recall, did not anoint successors for himself and his generation from his family and friends. He chose you because he trusted you to not betray his dream, our dream. He did not amass wealth, enough to last several generations, for himself and his family because he knew the vanity in that and, above all, he did not want to create a class of a few superrich in the midst of an overwhelmingly poverty-stricken majority.

He did not use religion as a tool of convenience nor did he use poverty as a weapon to enable him dominate and trample on the people he called his; none of his contemporaries, a few of whom may still be vaguely around, did any of those. He did not divide the ranks of his followers on the basis of tribe to allow him rule for as long as he wished. He was a just leader, a father to all whose aspiration was a united north devoid of the sort of poverty that breeds the kind of terror miserably tearing us to pieces today.

Terror in the form of the Matatsine cult, Boko Haram, Ombatse and many others feasts on the cannon fodder your act of betrayal offers. Unlike Sardauna you amass wealth forgetting that poverty, as scandalously rampant as it is in your immediate environment, exists. You are so cloaked in your comfort that you care too little whether those left in your care survive or sink. All that matters is you and yours – your very close ones – and your wealth.

As pivotal as education is to human development in this age (and always) it does not matter whether those masses of people around you acquire any of it or not. For there is always a use for the ignorant, like employing them during elections as thugs to intimidate opposition, harass the electorate and manipulate outcomes. And the fruits are what we reap today. No one begrudges us, though.

Public schools, as far as it concerns our clime, are artifacts of bygone days. So, you build gigantic structures which you furnish with state-of-the-art learning kits, import expatriates to teach and charge extortionate fees, which you know full well only the few in your class can afford. For the rest of the population underneath mango trees or what remains of those structures you once benefitted from serve as their schools. And you sleep soundly each night.

Sirs, I know I have been very uncouth but I still beg your indulgence. Let us be sincere for once and do a soul search. First, how did we end up with people like Muhammadu Marwa Maitatsine, Musa Bakaniki, Muhammad Yusuf, Abubakar Shekau and many dubious characters as our champions? You probably can’t remember. But I have an idea. You abdicated your responsibility and rogues stepped in.

Once upon a time, at the uttermost of your nonchalance, many of us gave up on hope and took to hooliganism because it was a safety valve for our frustrations. And because it favoured you, you encouraged this derail. So cults under such nomenclatures as ‘yan daba, ‘yan gunda, ‘yan kalare’ ‘yan sara suka, ‘yan dawa, ‘ecomog’ etc. sprouted suddenly. For you it seemed a win-win situation as you used the army of thugs they supplied to fight your political battles and conveniently kept the downtrodden as minimum a threat to your dream hegemony as possible.

But you did not realize it would all boomerang some day as it obviously appears now. So, the same thugs you used began hunting you because they know all the ‘behind-the-scenes’ on-goings and, even though not everyone has contributed to ‘their making’, they vent their anger on all, bringing those scenarios Thomas Hobbes once captured in his Leviathan concept nearer home than one would ever have imagined.

More baffling, though, we all still stand akimbo seeing how fast the flood is drenching all and sundry. But the wait might be over too soon to our ill-wishers’ delight and it shall all be history.

Acting now might save the ship from a stoppable wreck although it is fast headed toward the hills.

(To be concluded)