By Ochereome Nnanna
ONE day in 1988, the Production Supervisor of our newspaper, Weekly Newsline, sauntered majestically into the newsroom. Let me keep his name out of this for obvious reasons. This elderly man made a loud announcement while production activities were in full spate.

“We don show them!”

He proudly recounted how his townsmen and women deserted their village, Alawa in Niger State, and moved over to Alawa in Kaduna State to escape a new edict enacted by the new Military Governor, Lt Col Lawan Gwadabe, making it compulsory for all parents to send their children to school or risk being arrested and prosecuted.

Parents were fond of sending their girl children to hawk and later marry as from 12 years old and their boys to go to the farm or stay with Malams as al majiris who took to begging during the day.

When the villagers heard that agents of the state government were coming to inspect compliance they decided to bolt rather than comply. And a “normal” human being thought it was a feat to be celebrated! Meanwhile, his own educated daughter who was already married and seeking admission to Ahmadu Bello University, ABU, was a staff of our company! Can you see the hypocrisy, which is unthinkable in any other part of the country?

On Sunday, February 15, 2009, The Guardian’s reporter, Musa Njadvara, filed a report of a strange act of magnanimity by Yobe State Governor, Alhaji Ibrahim Geidam, who was a guest at a wedding in Damaturu Central Mosque. He offered to pay the bride price for any bachelor who fixed his wedding at the Mosque. I quote the story: “This initiative, according to Geidam, is to discourage Yobe men from immoral acts and related social vices fuelled by their state of singleness”. Hope he also gave them money to sustain their new families!

In nearby Bauchi State, Governor Isa Yuguda appointed over one thousand aides, and later lamented that they shielded him from realities on the ground. Adamawa Governor, retired Admiral Murtala Nyako, reportedly appointed even more aides than Yuguda, and rotated the First Ladyship among his four wives, an event that made national news when they engaged in power struggles. With the mindset of people like these, how can extreme poverty not thrive?

Poor leadership has for long produced a sludge of mass illiteracy and poverty that should have warned of the Boko Haram doom to come. Soludo’s alarm that “poverty is a phenomenon of the North” was recently supported by an article written by Babatunde Ahonsi on the back page of THISDAY on June 8, 2011, entitled: “The Geography of Illiteracy”. Ahonsi analysed the 2010 Nigerian Educational Data Statistics, NEDS, in which a survey of Nigerian children aged between 5 – 16 years was undertaken.

The three zones of the North, especially North West and North East, brought the far distant rear in terms of school enrolment, basic literacy and numeracy. Also, another survey by the National Poverty Eradication Programme, NAPEP, put Anambra and Bayelsa as first and second respectively on the affluence chart, while states in the North, especially, North East, again brought the rear.

All these surveys and facts point to the reality that lack of education not only breeds poverty and destitution but also ensures generational transfer of poverty. The founding fathers of modern Northern Nigeria successfully fought the menace in the 1950s.

The group that succeeded it in the 1970s felt the way to further the fight was to evolve national programmes that would hold the rest of the country down for the North to “catch up”. The figures displayed above and elsewhere clearly indicate the failure of that diabolical strategy.

I had expected people like Kawu, who had the privilege of going to school, to campaign for free education for Northern youth at all levels as Sule Lamido’s Jigawa is now doing, if indeed they love the North and Islam. Instead, they jumped in support of a terrorist group that says it does not want Western education for Muslim Northerners.

They call those who want this menace to be annihilated “enemies of the North and Islam”. So President Shagari was an enemy of the North and Islam for defeating Maitatsine?

The laughable thing about these self-appointed Boko Haram media advocates is that they labour so hard and in vain to interpret out of context the clear messages of the terrorist group. How can: “We don’t want Western education”, mean the same thing as fighting because they did not get it? It is part of the warped Al Qaeda agenda which, even the Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence, Sa’ad Abubakar III, one of the biggest Muslim leaders in the world, has spoken against. Groups that seek to worsen the educational disadvantage of the North are enemies of the people wearing a religious masquerade.

The “dialogue” being advocated by Kawu and his cohorts is a mere attempt to copycat the Niger Delta post-amnesty programme, whereby the noisy propagandists of militants in the media have now become lucratively engaged as contractors and middlemen in the post-amnesty.

Some people want the same for themselves if they succeed in blackmailing Nigeria to dialogue with Boko Haram. Maybe it is a sour-graping blind support for those sponsored to make Nigeria ungovernable because some people were soundly defeated in the recent elections. They should stop playing the “Kawu-ard”. No more pussy-footing.

But I am sure the gambit will not pay off. NIGERIA WILL NOT DIALOGUE WITH BOKO HARAM OR ANY OTHER TERRORIST GROUP. HO-HA! The Chief of Army Staff, General Azubike Ihejirika, has promised the Army will stamp out this terrorist pest troubling our North Eastern frontier. Nigerians are fully behind them in their quest to make internal containment of terrorism and violent crimes a priority over international peacekeeping ops.

But this time when we have exterminated the Boko Haram pest, we must address the causative factors. We must encourage Northern leaders to emulate the rest of the country and extend education to the common people, not just their family members. We must make the fight against illiteracy, poverty and destitution a national agenda.
That, to me, is the real “stick and carrot” approach.

CONCLUDED. FOR NOW.