By Lasisi Olagunju

A minister suffered severe abuse and reprimand from the elites of the North last week because she asked the North to choose mass education first before mass marriage. Sixty-four years after independence, we are still struggling to understand Nigeria’s Muslim North and its ways. A 1950 letter to the editor of Gaskiya, northern Nigeria’s preeminent Hausa newspaper, should tell us something about the mystery of the region.

The letter appeared in the newspaper’s number 391 of 8 March, 1950 on page 2.

It reads:

“To the Editor – I beg to lay this complaint before you, so that you may approach the Sultan in order that I may achieve my desire. I am of slave descent, belonging to one of the families of court slaves. Both my father and mother were slaves of a certain emir. My mother’s name is Munayabo, and my father’s Ci-wake. A well-to-do man has fallen in love with me, and I love him too, but he has got four wives already. For this reason, we find it difficult to make arrangements for living together. I asked a learned mallam, who told me to ask my father’s consent first, according to Islamic law, and also that of the authorities. If they agree to the proposal, I can become his concubine, Islamic law allows it. This is what the mallam told me. Well, Mr. Editor, my father, Islamic law, I myself and the rich man have agreed, only the authorities remain. May they agree to make proper arrangements for me so that I may be allowed into the harem of the man. My father’s and my mother’s names show that I really belong to a family of former slaves.

“I believe there are quite a number of girls such as me in the North. We have found that if girls in our position were allowed by the authorities, as is permitted by the law, to live as concubines in the harems of princes and well-to-do and important officials, the number of prostitutes who walk the streets would be reduced considerably. In this way, it may be possible for some of us to give birth to children who will one day be useful to the country. In this way, I may give birth to a son who may even one day become an emir. This will be better than our walking about in the towns and giving birth to children without proper fathers. Our religion permits it, but it is the authorities that are closing the door against us. I am sure that if the authorities allowed it, certain great houses in the North would accommodate thousands of us.

“Mr. Editor, I have given you a full explanation. We have come to an agreement with the said rich man, and are only waiting for the consent of the authorities on behalf of the Sultan. I wish you would lay my statement, as set out here, before the authorities and not allow room for destructive criticism. I should like the critics to understand that it is not my father who is trying to sell me into slavery. It is at my own free will that I desire to live in a big harem with a man who has already got four wives. I adjure you by Allah, Mr. Editor, to publish this letter so that I may get a reply and permission from the authorities.”

(Signature)”.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Taxing Hunger In Iregba

I got the above letter from Joseph Schacht’s ‘Islam in Northern Nigeria’, published in Studia Islamica, 1957, No. 8. The author said the signatory of the letter was “a well-educated young girl who had passed with distinction through the modern Government College for Girls.” Note that the letter was not written in the 19th century. It was written a few years before independence.

For better or for worse, a lot has shifted since that letter was composed. I do not think girls are still born over there into ‘slavery’ and thus have to beg to be allowed to marry. What I know (and everybody knows) is that the North routinely stages mass weddings for hordes of nameless girls and ladies. Are they children of slaves?

I am a Muslim from southern Nigeria and each time strange things happen in the North in the name of Islam, I exchange glances of surprise with my brothers here. Schacht (1902-1969), the author of ‘Islam in Northern Nigeria’, was a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York. He was the leading western scholar on Islamic law. In that article, he said the Muslims of our North whom he saw in 1957 “form a very isolated community.” He wrote that “most of their isolation is voluntary and intentional” and that “they are generally afraid of being contaminated by modern ideas, and particularly by the non-Islamic South.” I strongly believe they still prefer their isolation from “modern ideas” and from the South. And we are still in the same country. Shouldn’t we just restructure and redefine boundaries and contacts?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Flying Gods, Lying Prophets And Power Bandits

I am being very careful choosing my words as I write this. I have written some paragraphs and cancelled them because I am, like the girls of Niger State, an orphan with no capacity for self-defence. But, it would appear that northern Nigeria’s biggest business today is mass wedding and mass production of children. After child-making, it has religion, very economically lucrative political religion. With this combo, it wrecks itself and stunts the country, and sows contagious poverty across the land. I hope no one is going to contest these.

I will be shocked if you did not follow last week’s big fight between the Minister of Women Affairs, Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye, and the northern elite led by imams from Niger State. The woman offended the North because she said no to a plan to shell out 100 orphaned girls to some randy men in a mass wedding. And because of that, press conferences and acid rains of sermons poured across the swarthy region on Friday. They said the ‘condescending’ female minister from the South overstepped her bounds. They said it was their religious culture to assist female orphans to solve their problems by marrying them off en masse, so that they can multiply and fill the earth with children. They did not tell us if their culture has plans only for the girls while male orphans are left to roam the street as Almajirai.

The image a mass-wedding evokes in me is that of tethered rams at sallah markets. Or, more appropriately, a mass of what slave merchants called dabukia (female with plump breasts) and farkhah (female with small breasts) in mid-19th century Sokoto, Kano and Katsina slave markets. I have read some defences for the botched mass wedding of Niger State. Some said the girls and their families begged for it and the speaker paid as a man of God. Let us assume the girls truly begged for the weddings, couldn’t their helper just give the ‘help’ without the humiliation of a mass sale?

Yet, it is said that the loud mass weddings we see in the North are followed almost immediately by quiet mass divorces. Yusuf M. Adamu and Rabi Abdulsalam Ibrahim, both of Bayero University, Kano, did a seminal work on what they call “the rashness of divorce in Hausa society.” In their ‘Spheres, Spaces and Divorcees in Zawarawa: A Hausa movie (2018)’, quoting Solivetti (1994:252), they say Hausa Muslim society has “one of the highest rates of divorce and remarriage in the world.” It is also in that piece that I see a raw passage on commodification of marriage in Hausa land. A character in the movie exclaims: “The prices of things in Nigeria are rising, especially crude oil, gold and diamond. The prices are rising. But why has the value of women fallen so low? (Tattalin arziki ya na ta tashi a Nijeriya, musamman ma na man fetur da gwalagwalai da lu’ulu’u. kullum dada hauhawa su ke. Amma farashin mata, ya a ke ya fadi wanwar?).” Read the various defences in support of the controversial mass wedding in Niger State. Do a character assessment of the suitors, especially the two said to have assisted their in-laws to pay ransom but now want “marriage without delay or their money back.” Have the angry Imams and mallams asked what kind of husbands those ones will be?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: FG’s N90 Billion Hajj Politics

Nigeria is a composite of contradictions; what is poison in the south is sweet sauce in the north. The Ovimbundu (Bantu) people of Southern Africa say that the mist of the coast is the rain of the desert. In the place where I come from, mass children is interpreted as mass misery (omo beere, òsì beere). We also warn that marriage is easy to contract, what about soup money? Mass weddings were conducted yesterday, last year and in the last decade in the North. What happened to them? Where are the benefits beyond their adding to the hardship of the destitute? Where I come from, we say a mother does not feel the weight of her baby (omo kìí wúwo l’éhìn ìyá è). But the trunk of the North’s elephant is, by choice, made a burden for it to carry. The North’s way of life hurts where I come from – Western Nigeria. I am not the only one who has this thought. While the southern bird avoids waters that degrade the girl-child, the duck of the North preens and bathes in them. Embarrassing stories such as of this mass wedding stuff are so common with northern political and religious leaders. A hail of threats against counter views comes common too. And when they happen, questions are asked down south about the sense in sharing this Nigerian complex.

‘Season of Migration to the North’, described by a reviewer as a “sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism”, is a 1966 novel by Sudanese novelist, Tayeb Salih. Its setting should have been northern Nigeria. Forced marriage is part of that story. And, in that story, we hear the voice of Hosna bint Mahmoud promising “like the blade of a knife” that “if they force me to marry, I’ll kill him and kill myself.” And, she does just that. Such involuntary, fatal nuptials are routinely tied in our North. They always do it. We will always beg them to stop because their way hurts us.

The people I am begging here are the real kabiyesis of the North – the Imams and the mallams. They make the rules and reign as the lords of the north-west, the north-east and parts of the north-central. But, will they listen and stop? They will not. They are what the Yoruba call kò níí gbà, omo elétíkunkun. And we won’t keep quiet.

Nigeria is an unending struggle against conscientious ignorance. The fundamentalism that rules Afghanistan has its professors in northern Nigeria. It is not edifying to faith. Read again the letter I started this article with. Pre-independence northern Nigeria had what was called ‘Fight Against Ignorance Committee’. There is no need to ask what the result of that initiative was. If the committee succeeded, the North would not have the world’s largest number of out-of-school-children; it would not attack a minister for asking it to choose education over marriage; banditry and terrorism and mass poverty would not be the region’s stable staple.

So, when we ask the elite of the North to drop their bad ways, it is not because we hate them and their North. No. It is because we benefit from the Hausa wisdom that emphasises peace over pie: “it is easy enough to find food but hard to get away to a place where you can eat it in peace (Ba samu’n abinchi ke da wuya, wurinda zaka chishi ke da wuya)”. We live in the same house with the North, and while doing so, we strongly believe that we deserve our peace. That was why that woman minister from the south, Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye, tore the North’s mass-wedding scroll and insisted on Nigeria adding real value to the lives of those 100 hapless girls. It is the reason I wrote this.

By Suyi Ayodele

“Could you ‘please, possibly, perhaps’, send me to Kano?” I told my editor last Wednesday.

“You will meet me there” was his response.

I laughed.

A moment later, a friend added his voice: “Why did the Kano government do such a thing under the table? They should have called for an expression of interest.”

We laughed again. I further suggested that the Kano State correspondent “should be penalised for concealing the info!” A friend extended the penalty: “Very well. His Bureau Chief too.”

The Bureau Chief came begging: “Oga mi sir. I am sorry sir. Help me appeal to them sir”

We all laughed.

In my place, they say when a matter goes beyond weeping, one can only laugh. That is exactly what we did that Wednesday morning.

Our laughter was over a news item by the Daily Trust newspaper that morning. The headline reads: “Hisbah allocates 50 mass wedding slots to kano journalists” According to the report, the Commander-General (see rank) of the Kano State Hisbah Board, Sheik Aminu Daurawa, announced that journalists practising in the state had been allotted 50 females out of the number of women that would be given out in mass marriage in the state. Sheik Daurawa, who said that the previous mass marriage during which 1,800 women were married off was a huge success, disclosed that the Hibah Board had decided to expand the scope by including professional bodies as beneficiaries of the mass wedding, and he was generous enough to allocate 50 slots, sorry, 50 women, to journalists in Kano State.

I read the story and I felt that the editor should post me to Kano that moment. Unfortunately, he too had his eyes on the 50 slots! My Editor was not alone, his General Editor too was calling for an “expression of interest” – who no like beta thing?

As I penned this, the possibility of going to Kano was still open as Sheik Daurawa had not disclosed the date for the second mass wedding, which the Islamic scholar said was conceived “to promote moral values in the society and reduce immorality among young men and women.” We shall return to Kano presently.

When it comes to matters of the other room, it does not rain in northern Nigeria, it pours. Something bigger than the Kano mass wedding is about to happen in another state in Northern Nigeria. On May 24, in the Year of the Lord, 2024, dignitaries from all walks of life will be gathering in Mariga Local Government Area of Niger State as the Speaker of the Niger State House of Assembly, Abdulmalik Sarkin-Daji, will be marrying off 100 girls in a mass wedding. Now, wait for it! These 100 girls are not willing spinsters of marriageable ages. No!

They are children who became orphans because bandits struck their villages and killed their parents!

The children became orphans not by their choices but by the failure of the government to protect them and their parents from the killer machines known as bandits. And to ‘ameliorate’ their suffering, the “Rt. Hon. Speaker” Sarkin-Daji decided that the best way to do so is to marry them off.

These wives-to-be are the luckiest of the 170 females under the same circumstance.

And if you think that Mr. Niger State Speaker is alone in this shenanigan, you are damned wrong! The governor of the state, Mohammed Umar Bago, and the Emir of Kontagora, Alhaji Mohammed Barau, are to serve as guardians to the female orphans during the mass marriage ceremony! Neither the governor nor the Emir has denied this.

What about the ages of the 100-would-be wives? While the ‘father’ of the mass brides, Sarkin-Daji, did not disclose their ages, a source, who should know, volunteered that the oldest among the ‘intending brides’ should be around 16 years! “This is just the conservative age. I know that a girl of 13 to 14 years in that locality is already a multiple mother”, my source volunteered! The speaker, who had already listed the proposed mass wedding of the orphans as part of his “constituency empowerment project aimed at alleviating the suffering of the impoverished”, waxed more ‘generous’ by saying that he would be paying the dowries for the bridegrooms, in addition to procuring “all necessary materials for the mass marriage ceremony.” And of course, his soulmate in the generous act, Sheik Aminu Daurawa of the Kano State Hisbah Board would be on ground to witness the ‘grand’ ceremony.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Bobrisky And Our Other S/He Offsprings

The mass weddings in Niger and Kano States would be conducted without any recourse to the psychological make-ups of the would-be-brides. I don’t also know if the would-be-husbands would also be allowed to ‘inspect’, feel and touch the girls, the way a buyer feels goats on their tethers before buying them. Don’t worry; we have sunk deeper than this as a nation! Phew!

On this page last week, we discussed the issue of the age of admission to Nigerian universities by the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman, who proposed 18 years. His argument was that any child who goes to the university before the age of 18 is “too young.” The professor of Law further argued that those “too young” undergraduates “are not mature enough” to cope with the rigours of life in the tertiary institutions, and attributed most of the problems in our higher institutions to the ‘immature’ undergraduates. This is the irony of Nigeria. Professor Mamman is from the north. This is how a friend, Rev (Dr) Bola Adeyemi, responded to the referenced column last week: “In his part of the country, girls of 13 years of age ‘are mature’ for marriage; boys of under 18 years are mature enough for ‘almajarism’ and terrorism, but not for education.” I could not fault the Reverend gentleman. How on earth do we explain our situation to the sane nations of this world without sounding not all there? How do we justify the proposed mass wedding in Niger State without looking like people from the Stone Age to listeners from other countries?

Chapter Two of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria (As Amended), deals with the “Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy.” Section 14 (2) (b) of the same chapter states specifically thus: “the security and welfare of the people SHALL be the PRIMARY PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT (emphasis mine)” This is exactly the responsibility the government has failed to discharge in Niger State, and in most states of the north, and the entire country in general. On a daily basis, we read, hear or witness, the killings of Nigerians in their homes, on their farms, on the highways and schools’ dormitories, by felons the state was expected to checkmate. About two days ago, bandits stormed a university in Kogi State and whisked away about 15 students.

Everywhere you turn in Nigeria, it is like the song of the iconoclast, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, “sorrow, tears and blood”. Yet we have various levels of government. We have people we voted to power to do the job for us. We have the National Security Adviser (NSA), whose only interest is to collect cybersecurity tax while bandits kill at the rate of 10 for two Kobo! We have Generals in all our Armed Forces; we have an Inspector General of Police and other top hierarchies who superintend the rank and file. Bandits struck in Niger State, as in other places. Parents were killed. Children were orphaned as a result of such crass irresponsibility on the part of the government. The only response we got is a proposed mass wedding for 100 orphans, whose parents were victims of a remiss government, to only God-knows-who suitors! Who are we as a people? What are the core values of our being as a nation?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Odi, Zaki Biam And Okuama: Beyond Sentiments

The education of the girl-child has been a troublesome issue in Nigeria. A February 26, 2024, article on the issue, titled: “Gender desks on frontline of girls’ education in Nigeria”, and sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO’s International Institute for Education Planning, states: “In Nigeria, where 50% of girls are not attending school at the basic education level, major planning efforts are underway to promote gender equality in and through education.” The paper posits that between 2024 and 2027, the roadmap for the Education Sector “aims to bring 15 million out-of-school children back to school in the next four years.” Again, in an earlier piece by Ada Dike of Daily Times newspaper, published on October 15, 2023, on the topic; “Problems facing girl-child education in Nigeria”, the author said: “poverty, peer pressure, early marriage, unwanted pregnancy, being their family’s burden bearers and lack of parental care are parts of the challenges hindering girl child education in Nigeria”. All these identified factors are more prevalent in the north. The most vicious of them all is the issue of “early marriage”, the type Speaker Sarkin-Daji of Niger State and Sheik Daurawa of Kano Hisbah Board, are promoting with crass impunity.

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), as of October 23, 2023, gave the figure of out-of-school-girls in Nigeria to be 7.6 million, with the caveat: “mostly from the northern region.” Of the 20.2 million figures of out-of-school children in the country, the international body said that over 60 percent of the total is from the North. The figure, as given by Christian Munduate, UNICEF Nigeria Country Representative, in Kano, during the International Day of the Girl Child 2023, which had the theme: “Our Time is Now – Our Rights, Our Future”, said: “Nigeria, alarmingly, accounts for 15% of out-of-school children worldwide. Yet, only a mere 9% of the poorest girls have the chance to attend secondary school. This is not just a statistic, it’s a wake-up call…” She added that Kano State ranked second in the number of out-of-school girls in Nigeria, with Kebbi State leading with 67.7 percent.

The elite of the north, nay all Nigerians, should be deeply worried that the data on literacy level published, recently, by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), showed that of the 10 uneducated states in Nigeria – Kebbi, Yobe, Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, and Niger States, all make the list! Little wonder then the states in the north have a large number of girls to be married off at mass wedding ceremonies. That is our collective shame as a nation. This is why Nigeria keeps crawling, and drooling, 64 years after independence. No matter the pace the other regions of the country intend to take, our stunted brothers up north would keep slowing us down!

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Can I Tell Our First Lady That Graduates Drive Cabs Here, Too?

The girl-child is an endangered specie in the north. We all witnessed how a former two-term governor and senator of Zamfara State, Ahmad Sani Yerima, was changing neonates as wives the way a nursing mother changes diapers. We only watched and we did nothing! The man sat in the hallowed chamber of our highest law-making body to join in making laws “for the good governance of the country” while he wantonly destroyed our future with his incurable paedophilic propensity. The best we did was to hide under the blackmail of culture and religion. We never interrogated the mentality of a man above 60 years pulling his trousers at the sight of a 13-year-old girl! And we have millions of Yerimas all over the country, prowling and devouring our young girls. Nobody says a younger girl should not marry her grandfather if that is where she finds ‘love’. Our argument here is that it is morally wrong, mentally inconceivable and legally inappropriate for any man, no matter his age, status and political exposure, to snatch an underage girl in the name of marriage. Nigeria practises universal adult suffrage. That gives one the feeling that the age of consent cannot be lower than the voting age of 18 years.

Even, on a moral scale, picking an 18-year-old for marriage while her mates are still in school is eternally despicable. But our leaders do it with impunity! The deposed Emir of kano State and former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (SLS), secretly wedded Sa’adatu Barkindo Mustapha, the daughter of Lamido Adamawa, in 2016, at the age of 18, before making the affair public in 2020, when Sa’adatu turned 22. The former Emir of Kano was 55 years old then! But that was not all with the deposed traditional ruler. In the same 2016, SLS was fingered in the abduction of Ese Oruru, a 14-year-old girl from her Yenagoa, Bayelsa State home, by one Yinusa, aka Yellow. The girl was taken to the Emir of Kano’s palace, where she was forced to ‘marry’ Yinusa. Attempts to retrieve the little Oruru from SLS’s palace were met with stiff resistance until Nigerians rose in an outcry. One of those who fought for Oruru’s release, Fineman Peters, said then: “This case defies sanity… This is the most blatant state-sponsored case of paedophile (sic) that I have ever seen…”

The barbaric case of paedophilia which Google defines as “sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object. Specifically: a psychiatric disorder in which an adult has sexual fantasies about or engages in sexual acts with a prepubescent child”, is not a native of the north. It has mild and largely negligible expressions in virtually all states of the Federation. The difference between the north and other parts of the country is in its prevalence up north and the tendency to wear cultural and religious cloaks on such an act of depravity. From Delta to Edo, Osun to Ekiti; Akwa Ibom to Rivers and Abia to Enugu States, cases of cradle snatchers abound. We have senators whose pastime is seeking young girls to devour.

One of them from one of the Niger Delta States, an unrepentant paramour, who would not go for outright under-age girls, stocks his harem with girls that could easily pass for his granddaughters! We all condoned him and rewarded him with an election to a higher legislative chamber. The shame of it is on all of us! Now, the chicken is coming home to roost. On Sunday, May 12, 2024, we all read the account of the 28-year-old father of little Faith, a five-year-old girl, who posted on his Instagram page, the naked photos of the toddler. Faith’s father, who had since been arrested in his Auchi base, by the men of the Edo State Police Command, was said to have taken the poor little girl to a hotel, took off her clothes and took her naked photos which he uploaded on his Instagram handle! Thank God for the immediate response of the police on this matter.

When one begins to read cases like these, especially from our brothers up north, one cannot but feel sad. Ironically, the region we all pity is like the proverbial troubled soul on whose behalf we all fast and pray, but who keeps on having three full meals everyday (eni aa tori e gbawe to nje osan). How do we address this issue? That informed the banters at the beginning of this piece. The elders of my place say: oro to ba koja ekun, erin laa fi rin – when a matter goes beyond weeping, one can only laugh). And like we say in the Niger Delta region: make persin laugh before persin kpai! Let me ask my editor again: Any chance of going to Kano?

By Lasisi Olagunju

I do not believe that the president of any country will deliberately wreck everything. Their problem may be arrogance or ignorance – or arrogance in ignorance. Or, they may be worshipping wrong gods or feeding their gods with what they must not eat.

You remember Sir Shina Peters’ song for M.K.O. Abiola on the billionaire’s implacable friends who refused to eat his food?

“You gave smooth pounded yam to your friend,

Your friend refused to eat.

You made soft, mushy amala for your friend,

Your friend refused to eat.

You called your friend,

Your friend refused to answer you.

You do not know what they say you did wrong.”

There are at least two sides to a story such as this. Why would I give my friends food and they refuse to eat? Why would I shout their names and they ignore me? Am I calling the right names? If my offerings are right, shouldn’t I then check if they are really my friends?

The ace musician sang that song years before June 12 happened to Abiola. The musician may not know, but that chant is straight from the lore studio of the priests of life.

The foundation story of the song I tell here:

One ancient Yoruba king called Oniregba Osodi, at the beginning of his reign, asked his priests if his era would be peaceful and prosperous. The king was told to take care of all birds in his kingdom because they were hungry and angry and would hurt his happiness.

“What should I do and where are the birds?” the king should ask that question but he did not ask. He was the smartest and the wisest human being around, so he thought.

Instead of asking for directions, the king announced that he knew the road and blurted out orders. He commanded every man and woman in his kingdom to bring out all their grains and feed their ducks and fowls. The people brought out their corn and guinea corn and fed their ducks and pigeons, chicks and chickens.

The king was happy and satisfied.

But, the real hungry, angry birds were looking and watching.

“This oba is king also in idiocy,” they concluded and resolved to teach the powerful how to be wise.

Then, they struck. Nothing Oniregba did amounted to anything. He moved from market to farm, all was in vain. His efforts were like Abiku’s bangles in Soyinka’s lines. He sent his servants on an errand, they did as Alaafin Aole’s spell ordered them: The messengers did not come back. They even did worse. They created their own message, like Afonja did, and delivered the same to an audience different from their lord’s. Wracked by hunger and want, shouts of “ebi npa wá” rent the town while disease and death and general pestilence reigned.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Petrol Pains, Wilderness Wanderings

In the midst of the commotion, the sad king, in tears, challenged his priests on the failure of their prescription. “False prophets,” he called them.

They replied the king that he did not feed the birds as they counseled him to.

He said he did. They told him he didn’t.

The king gave a detailed account of his specific orders and how they were carried out.

The priests exchanged looks and laughed. They told the king: “Kabiyesi, you offered the wrong sacrifice to the wrong birds in the wrong place.”

The wise ones moved near the king and, in plain language told him who was hungry and angry and needed to be fed. He wondered why the priests did not tell him this the other time; the priests reminded him of his haste, his arrogance, ignorance and lack of decorum. “You didn’t wait and didn’t ask,” they told him. The king’s royal head wisened. He was sober. Now, he did what the priests told him to do. He didn’t have to wait long before his salvation came. His reign was long in peace, happiness and prosperity.

And, so, in Iregba till tomorrow is the song:

We made smooth and soft pounded yam,

We gave the birds of Iregba,

The birds said no, they won’t eat.

We rolled out pots of succulent amala for the birds of Iregba,

The birds said it was not their food,

They refused to eat…

When we gave the right meals to the big birds,

They ate and chirped with joy…

I did not make this story up. If you are a Yoruba and you are like me with a knowledgeable ancestor, consult him. Even if the forebears are like mine, long dead, their undying spirit should whisper to you the truth in the tale. But if you have no father and no mother, and you have no idea where their bones rest, put a call through to Professor Wande Abimbola. He has the knowledge. Or you can go to Chief Yemi Elebuibon in Osogbo. The tale is his to retell. He has a fuller version recorded in one of his books.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: For Yoruba Muslims And Pentecostals

Except he retraces his steps and changes the deity he serves, by the time Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu ends his tenure, he will be remembered for creating greater misery and more poor people than have ever lived in Nigeria. I don’t think that will be an enviable legacy. But he chose it. Every king writes the history of his era.

When a government neglects the road, opts for the bush and pumps efforts into wrong ideas, what it does is the same as starving the birds of life. Its efforts will, till eternity, roll up and down the hill like the boulder of condemned Sisyphus, the devious tyrant of Ephyra who violated “the sacred hospitality tradition” by killing visitors “to show off his power.”

Let us look at it. You moved the price of petrol from less than N200 to almost N1000 and upended every plan in every home. You pushed the naira tumbling down Mount Everest and clapped for yourself as a man of courage. Your Sango’s stone celts struck the market and shocked food prices beyond the reach of the hungry. People who need food, you continue to feed them hope in poisoned cans of tax, more tax and more levies.

Until now, I never knew that the introduction of taxes and levies could be celebrated as achievements by a government. Our government has that epaulette proudly emblazoned on its right and left shoulders. And we are so pinned down in helplessness.

The history of tax is one of intrigue. In ancient times, it was levy to fight wars. In medieval times, it was what Terence Dwyer (2014) calls “a fee derived entirely from surpluses” – the same thing Adam Smith prescribed as the “ability to pay”. In modern times, tax has become “a burden on production.” Why should people pay tax to an absent government? Tax theorists say tax is payment for government services. In ‘The Birth and Death of Taxes’ (1977) economic historians, Edward Ames and Richard Rapp, trace the history of tax as a feature of government’s economic life. They tell us that there is “a public good called protection, the suppliers of which are called governments.” They say a government “has a monopoly over the supply of protection to its subjects and taxes are the price paid to the monopolist.” They take it further, identifying two kinds of protection: one is defence, the other justice. They say when a threat is from foreigners, there is a demand for defence. When the threat is internal, one group of the same population unleashing threats against another, the good on demand is justice. Both goods should normally be exclusively government products. But, you and I know this may not always be so. A government that provides neither defence nor justice but still demands and collects tax is simply extortionate. In that case, what should the subjects do?

A newspaper on Sunday said the president had halted the proposed collection of cyber security levies from the poor and the rich. If it is true, I salute and thank the president. But, should that demand ever have been contemplated at all? What law backed the collection order in the first place? Who should collect and manage taxes under a just, normal law, the Federal Inland Revenue Service or an office created strictly to advise on security?

While we sheepishly surrender and pour libation to Abuja’s god of extortion, we are being offered as cheap ingredients for money ritual. CBN’s demand for cybersecurity tax from everyone, including sellers of pepper and locust beans, was said to be rooted in the Cybersecurity Act 2015 and its 2024 amendment. But that is not correct. The law mentions neither you nor me, nor the sweaty yam seller next street.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Murder And Vengeance In Okuama

Let us check what the law contains. Section 44 (1) of the Cybersecurity Act 2015 says: “There is established a Fund, which shall be known as the National Cyber Security Fund (in this Act referred to as “The Fund”).” Subsection (2) adds that “There shall be paid and credited into the Fund established under subsection (1) of this section and domiciled in the Central Bank of Nigeria: (a) A levy of 0.005 of all electronic transactions by the businesses specified in the Second Schedule to this Act.” And what is in that Second Schedule? The Second Schedule is plain; it habours neither the jìbìtì nor the rìkísí which we read in the CBN circular. The Schedule says: “Businesses which section 44 (2)(a) refers to are: (a) GSM Service providers and all telecommunication companies; (b) Internet Service Providers; (c) Banks and other Financial Institutions; (d) Insurance Companies; (e) Nigerian Stock Exchange.” The 2024 Act amended the 2015 Act without touching the Second Schedule. Indeed, the Amendment Act reinforces that schedule by prescribing punishments for non-payment of the levy by the businesses so listed (see Subsection 8 of the Amendment Act). So, where did Tinubu’s Central Bank of Nigeria get its long turenchi demanding that you and I start paying cyber security levies to an office that already has its share of the budget?

Apparently some people needed more money for the next night party, they did the maths and felt what the listed companies would pay them wouldn’t be enough for their frolics. They then converted all of us to ‘businesses’ without bothering to tinker with the law as they did in February. They simply asked the CBN to help them rewrite the law with a wordy circular. They did so knowing that we are a conquered people who won’t bother to check what the law truly says.

Even the businesses listed in that cyber security law will argue that they are being unfairly taxed. You would know and agree with them if you apply the theory of tax as payment for public goods. What does the government sell to them that warrant incessant taxation? How many of those businesses get ‘defence’ or ‘justice’ from the government as we know it?

“Nigerians pay one of the highest implicit tax rates in the world — way higher than developed countries,” African Development Bank’s president, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, cried out in January 2021 at a Federal Inland Revenue Service Tax Dialogue. “Think of it”, he said “they provide electricity for themselves via generators; they repair roads to their neighborhoods, if they can afford to; there are no social security systems; they provide security for their own safety; and they provide boreholes for drinking water with their own monies.” Yet, more taxes and levies are rolled out daily against us like Israeli armoured tanks in Gaza.

We should be afraid. There was a time in France when the people were compelled to purchase salt by the government which also forced them to pay extortionate tax on it. Kings and principalities historically taxed the most important ‘goods’ of life. Salt has always been that important – even the word ‘salary’ is related to salt; you may check the history of its Latin root ‘salarium’. And, so it was heavily taxed. The French called the salt tax la gabelle. Historians Theodore Sands and Chester Higby in 1949 published an article on ‘France and the Salt Tax’. In it, they recall that the history of the gabelle under the Ancien Regime is “largely a story of increasing taxation and flourishing abuses.” They say there was even a king of France who monopolized the sale of salt and made the people pay salt tax without selling salt to them. They add that it was a period when the government was “satisfied to receive the money supplied by the system and forgot the people who paid it.” The repercussion was an insurrection that pillaged the rich and, later, ignited the French Revolution.

Today’s Nigerians are like the birds of ancient Iregba. They are hungry and angry. In his ‘Salt, Politics and the French Revolution’, Toby Jaffe warns that “everyday commodities, including food, have the power to uproot, shatter and recreate societies…The revolutionary events around the salt tax of 18th-century France teach us that something as deceptively simple as salt can be a spark plug for civil unrest and revolution.” Now that Nigeria taxes everything including hunger, may God give us the fortitude to bear what may be coming.

The author, Dr. Lasisi Olagunju is the Saturday Editor of Nigerian Tribune, and a columnist in the same newspaper. This article was first published by the paper (Nigerian Tribune). It is published here with his permission.