Unconcerned Buhari picking his teeth By Ikechukwu Amaechi ON May 29, that is tomorrow, President Muhammadu Buhari will mark hi...
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| Unconcerned Buhari picking his teeth |
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
ON May 29, that is tomorrow, President Muhammadu Buhari will mark his fifth
anniversary in office. Questions will concentrate the minds of many. What does
the North want out of Nigeria? Is there an exclusive Northern agenda? If there
is, to what extent does that agenda promote national unity?
These questions could be stretched further. Does President
Buhari subscribe to the idea of a Nigeria that works for all? Is he an
inherently good but misunderstood man? Does he mean well for Nigeria and
Nigerians? Has he done well for the country?
These posers have become more germane in the face of ongoing
smuggling, enmasse, of able-bodied young men from the North to the South in the
midst of a nationwide restriction on interstate travels. The mode of
transportation amplifies the desperation. The complicity of security operatives
who have the presidential mandate to enforce the lockdown orders betrays the
motive. The deafening silence of the Presidency, despite public outcry, makes
the matter more ominous.
This week, Imo State recorded 20 new COVID-19 cases, all of
them Northerners who were intercepted as they were being smuggled into the state.
Because they were not quarantined after their samples were taken, nobody knows
where they are right now. So, Imo is in crisis. There are new 20 confirmed
cases of coronavirus in the state, yet no one has an idea where the people, who
are neither indigenes nor residents, are. These émigrés are taking advantage of
the coronavirus-induced restrictions for their furtive voyage aided by Nigerian
security outfits dominated by Northerners. And these are not economic migrants.
Let me digress with an anecdote. Nigerians can never forget
Mrs. Patience Jonathan, the irrepressible former First Lady, in a hurry. She
breathed life into the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, asphyxiating political
campaigns after the 2015 presidential election was postponed from February 14
to March 28 by dramatically taking over the floundering re-election campaigns
of her husband, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, through a parallel campaign organisation
– Women for Change and Development Initiative.
In her outings leading the PDP women presidential rally, she
paid no heed to political correctness. She was raw and wild and effective.
During a rally in Calabar, Cross River State in early March 2015, she unsettled
many, when, speaking in Pidgin English, she touched on what had become the
shame of the North.
“Our people no dey
born children wey dem no dey fit count. Our men no dey born children throway
for street. We no dey like the people for that side.” Only a Patience
Jonathan could muster the political will to say that. It was tantamount to
committing political hara-kiri and she was never forgiven by those who saw in
her comments an attack on their “way of life”.
Mrs. Jonathan was talking about the almajiri phenomenon: A
system of Islamic education practiced in Northern Nigeria which encourages
parents to leave parental responsibilities to an attached Islamic school. Sent
away to distant places by their parents in the name of religion, all alone with
no guardians, some at the tender age of four, the almajirai are handed plastic
plates for begging to fend for themselves. That is archetypal child abuse,
which promotes youth poverty and delinquency and destitution. Besides, most are
radicalised in the process and become ready recruits for criminal gangs and
terrorist groups.
A 2014 UNICEF estimates had a figure of 9.5 million
almajirai in the North, quite a sizeable number more than the population of
some countries. That is a very lethal army of children without compunction.
Something is definitely wrong with a system that encourages “mass production” of
children with no parental responsibility. The Northern elite who claim it is
their way of life know that, which explains why it is meant only for the hoi
polloi.
Now, back to Buhari. Many Nigerians wonder what legacies he
will be leaving behind after his tour of duty as president. With three years
still remaining of his second term, many strongly aver that he has been very
unfair to the country that has given him so much. Insecurity is at its worst,
level of mistrust unprecedented. Our national fault lines have never been more
magnified. Most Nigerians outside the Hausa-Fulani ethnic nationalities believe
the worst of their president, who has done practically nothing in the last five
years to promote national unity.
Can a president plot evil against his own people? While
Buhari’s apologists say it is absurd to contemplate such, history is replete
with precedents. But whether he is guilty as charged or innocent, if I were
him, I will be worried. It should bother him that half of the country view him
with so much suspicion. They don’t trust him and think the worst of his
government.
The feeling is pervasive. And this time, it is not only the
Igbo, already labelled naysayers, that are mourning. The Yoruba are shouting.
The Ijaw are screaming and the Middle Belters are crying blue murder. So, there
must be something fundamentally wrong with the way Buhari carries on that
engenders strong suspicion and resentment.
The last five years for most Nigerians have been years of
strife, tension, blood, sorrow and tears. It is time President Buhari had a
rethink, changed strategy. Today, most Nigerians from the South are more afraid
of the spectacle of human cargoes stowed away in every movable object from the
North to the South at a time when interstate movement is prohibited by both
state and federal governments than they are of coronavirus.
Bizarre occurrences
Recently, the Niger Delta Forum, a pressure group, demanded
through its national chairman, Air Commodore Idongesit Nkanga (retd.), an
explanation from the president. The Forum is flabbergasted that the almajirai,
with all the subsisting lockdown rules, are “still transiting across the
country in long vehicles, without being detected and stopped by security
agents.”
Similarly, on May 19, the Association of Southeast Town
Unions, ASETU, weighed into the befuddling phenomenon. “We have the strange
arrival of able bodied young men in such a coordinated fashion. These bizarre
occurrences can only make sense if there is an equally bizarre plan afoot,”
ASETU lamented in a petition addressed to the UN alleging ethnic cleansing.
Another group, Igbo Board of Deputies, made similar
allegation in an open letter to the international community where they alleged
impending genocide in Nigeria. “Under the cover of the COVID-19 lockdown,
thousands of armed men between the ages of 18 and 35 years were being
systematically transported across the length of Nigeria, over 1,000 kilometers
from Northern Nigeria to occupy Southeast, including other Southern parts of
Nigeria,” they alleged.
It may well be that these groups are crying wolf where there
is none, but these movements are real. On April 21, the Northern Governors
Forum resolved never to “allow the (almajiri) system persist any longer because
of the social challenges associated with it, including the perpetuation of
poverty, illiteracy, insecurity and social disorder.” The 19 governors also
agreed to totally ban the system in the North because of the “risk that
almajiri children are exposed to because of the coronavirus disease” and unanimously
resolved to “evacuate the children to their parents or states of origin”.
But why bring them to the South, which is neither their
states of origin nor abodes of their parents? It is typical for government to
play deaf and dumb at a time like this. But a president with eyes on the
verdict of history and a government conscious of constitutional obligations to
the citizenry should be worried. At a time like this, silence is not golden. If
government is not behind these dangerous movements overtly or covertly, then an
investigation is in order.
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