Leaders in Nigeria: shape up or ship out.
My writing teacher at the university taught my class to "keep it simple." By that Olatunji Dare meant that our expressions and our constructions must be such that ordinary people on the street must be able to understand us without going back and forth to the dictionary. I have a profound, almost worshipful respect for Dr. Olatunji Dare, now a professor emeritus. He was a master of the profession, a very good craftsman, with a great facility for words and a master satirist. But Olatunji Dare got caught one day in his writing when he asked dons to "shape up or ship out." It was a satire which his colleagues at the academia misunderstood and over which they cried foul and took him to the cleaners. They felt he was taking sides with the government of the day and asking them to either bend to it or resign en mass. But Olatunji Dare was saying the opposite. Some of his students took him up on the satire. Why did he write what even his colleagues at the Ivory Tower would not understand? Was that not a breach of his golden rule over which many of us his students earned the death penalty many times? Dare is good but his language could be caustic when he is angry, especially over journalistic infractions. He told a classmate then that he was not fit for a university journalism class and he advised him to go and sell cement. It was a time termed "cement armada" when the government of Yakubu Gowon did nothing but import cement and got the whole port in Lagos messed up. Those days were the beginning of the economic quagmire that Nigeria is experiencing now, the days we had money but Gowon said we didn't know how to spend it even when our electricity infrastructure was begging for investment.
Professor Dare didn't reply to his colleagues but told his students that he was not writing for people of the streets but for college-educated people and that the writing was an opportunity to "catapult him from obscurity to celebrity." Today, Olatunji Dare is a writing celebrity, I may be wrong but I don't think he has anyone better than him in this nation where pain and misery are the lot of the majority, at least for now. Now, I'm not about Olatunji Dare but about the Vice President, Kashim Shettima who is not a writer like Dare but a very good master of the English language and a straight shooter like Olatunji Dare. I thought about the current predicament since Nigeria had the unfortunate luck of being ruled by an inactive personality called Muhammadu Buhari and being succeeded by a megalomaniac, Ahmed Bola Tinubu who made the economy messier with his IMF-instructed free-floating economic policies. Even Sanni Abacha as wicked as he was refused to buy the IMF pill but Tinubu turned his back totally on Nigerians when he chose to listen to the IMF.
Tinubu's number two went somewhere recently and said something that should warn Nigerians of an impending danger. A video trending on social media shows the Vice President telling an audience which was not captured in the footage, but which must be some of the political leadership gathering in Nigeria about what may be the lot of Nigeria and Nigerians if there is no immediate change of attitude. Mr Kashim Shettima said his unnamed friend was driving to Kano in the north of Nigeria when he and his family encountered a group of street urchins who came and with some objects broke the windshield of the car and spoke to the occupants in the Hausa language which the Vice President translated to English: "You bastards, we are suffering and you are enjoying." What amazed this friend of the Vice President was that these street urchins did not run away, it was rather the friend of the Vice President and his family that scampered away, to employ the exact words of Kashim Shetima. The street urchins didn't run away because they had been long in preparation for these days, they had been pushed to the wall and like a goat who when pushed to the wall is ready to fight his oppressor.
Vice President Kashim Shettima was blunt in condemning what he called primitive accumulation among Nigeria's leadership. He told them there was no difference in the lifestyle of the man with 20 million naira and the man with 200 million naira. He warned that if this primitive accumulation among Nigerian leadership is not halted, these deprived Nigerians will soon rise to wipe out this current crop of leaders. Since the Church and the Mosque lost their voices in speaking truth to the Nigerian power, to halt an impending social disaster, the Vice President waded in. Kashim Shettima is the voice for now to his colleagues in power and it was good that they heed him to prevent a social holocaust in this country. The Vice President is from the north, the part of the country that harbours some of the greatest human misery yet has leaders who always want political power. Elsewhere, Professor Babagana Zulum, governor of Borno where Shettima had also been governor told a meeting convened to celebrate the northern political icon of all times, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the first and only premier of Northern Nigeria and effective power holder in Nigeria. Zulum no doubt was addressing a northern audience that the money spent to organize that conference and celebration would sponsor 1000 students through school and that money was being wasted by the political leaders in the region on a venture that is not profitable.
For the standard of the conservative and religious north, Zulum's admonition was revolutionary. But it represented the growing disgruntlement in the north which the leadership has chosen to ignore and will continue to ignore to its disaster. Anything that disparages Ahmadu Bello is held as blasphemy held in equal proportion to blasphemy to the prophet of Islam (PBOH). But certainly, Zulum was not out to disparage the esteemed politician but to pass an urgent warning to the northern political leadership. He and Kashim Shettima warned of a political Armageddon that is about to blow up on Nigeria and Nigerians except there is a change of attitude among the political leadership.
The citizens of the Northern region used to be the most submissive part of the country. Islam taught them to be submissive to leaders but this submission has been abused and the people are prepared to revolt. When we began to read of an upsurge in banditry and kidnapping again in parts of the country especially more in the north, I worried about who may be behind it but when we started to see the photographs of the young boys who were arrested and what they said to journalists, I concluded that Nigeria is in big trouble. These young street urchins said they were the boys who sold water and picked scraps in the neighbourhood of people they later kidnapped. They had studied their victims and they knew very well their Achilles heel and came when they were least aware. They collected ransom in hundreds of millions. These boys have envied their victims for a long time, they have felt deprived. They are the products of over-procreation that no government in the nation have been bold enough to control. It is better to keep this poor population ignorant so they won't compete with the children of the emirs, the children of the civil servants who had access to the nation’s till and so were able to send their wards to universities abroad. They used archaic religious provisions which have been long abandoned in places where Islam originated to keep these people perpetually poor. When they are thus poor, they can be mobilized to kill people with education who are shouting against that oppression and calling for equal opportunities in Nigeria. It has taken a long while but these street urchins who have been trained in the art of murder have finally arrived on the scene and have decided that the leaders who have thus kept them pauperized must be punished: "You bastards, we are suffering and you are enjoying." Their aggression is shown in their faces; since they were very young they have been thrown into the almajiri system by their parents simply because of poverty and for this reason, they are shipped to a mallam who instructs them in Islamic religion. But the pain for these children who attend the almajiri school where their parents pay no fee and are not responsible for their feeding and clothing is that the mallam equally throws them on the streets to beg for money and eat from dustbins, thus hardening them. Now they are ready and want to unleash vengeance.
With time they will unleash violence and no military in Nigeria or anywhere else will be able to tame them. They are in the majority and they don't fear death because they have nothing to lose and therefore nothing to fear. They are tinder for the fire of God's anger to fall on irresponsible leadership. They are the members of the invisible constitutional conference who will restructure Nigeria by force and get regions to be created and police to be decentralized. They will reorganize and reconceptualize our religions. You say they are not educated but they have been trained in the bush and on the streets, they know more than you and I think. The only option to avoid them is to shape up or ship out.
Tunde Akande is both a journalist and a pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos