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OPINION: Protesters Of The North [Monday Lines]

Published

10 months ago

August 5, 2024

By Lasisi Olagunju

They did what locusts do to farms. They spared almost nothing. They ate road slabs, pilfered roofs and stole ceilings. They attacked and looted at least one mosque – and at least one church. They hammered concrete slabs and squeezed out of them iron rods for sale. Well-paved roads suffered their anger because the beauty of the asphalt offended them. In a library, they stole dustbins and spared books. Trash is valuable, book is worthless. They attacked public and private buildings; they looted doors, wrenched windows off their hinges and stole installed tiles. They are the perfect proof of what the unbuilt child will ultimately do to well-built structures.

The sickest, scariest part of the world is our North. In his inaugural address on January 20, 1961, American president, John F. Kennedy, issued a warning which talks directly to today’s Nigeria, particularly the North. He said: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich”. The out-of-school children in our North are in multiples of millions; they are the death of Nigeria and its elite. Their hunger unleashed a maelstrom of destruction on every part of that region last week, forcing the various states there to declare 24-hour curfews. The round-the-clock curfews remained active at the weekend but the rampaging genies stayed stubbornly out of the bottle. Some of the protesters were said to be with Russian flags on Saturday in Kano. What do they really want?

“The children that came out did not even demand anything other than to break offices and attack police,” Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State told Arise News on Thursday night. I don’t think that truth is the truth. In Daura, they did zanga zanga and massed at General Muhammadu Buhari’s house. They went with a message. In Sokoto, they carried leaves, put their anger on the boil and massed at the palace of Sultan Sa’ad Abubakar. They went there with a message that threatens democracy.

Russia ‘rules’ in Niger Republic and media reports said some protesters in Kano were seen waving Russian flags. What is incongruous in that? Were we not told repeatedly that there is no recognized boundary between Niger Republic and Nigeria’s border communities? The NSCDC in Kano at the weekend complained that aliens, particularly Nigeriens, were among arrested protesters in Kano. I read that and asked what was wrong in citizens of Niger Republic lending a helping hand in bringing down their brother’s Wall of Jericho. Where were the security forces when the government of Niger Republic publicly interfered in our elections in 2019? Or have we forgotten that two governors from that country — Issa Moussa of Zinder and Zakiri Umar of Maradi — were part of those who came and campaigned for Buhari in Kano in January 2019 for his reelection? The alien governors came, wore APC attires, and members of the APC presidential campaign team in Kano celebrated and feted them.

Today’s president of Nigeria. Bola Tinubu, was the national leader of the APC when that brazen misadventure happened. I can’t remember hearing what he said against it. Abdullahi Ganduje, Tinubu’s party chairman today, was the Kano State governor who hosted those aliens. The Nigerian government celebrated the meddlesome interlopers in photographs wearing Pepsodent smiles. Thoughtful Nigerians loudly complained against that foreign interference; opposition PDP chairman, Uche Secondus, asked INEC to sanction APC and Buhari for that misadventure. “They came with monies and mercenaries to influence elections in Nigeria,” Secondus shouted. INEC promptly replied him: “Their presence does not violate the constitution.” Case closed – that time. Now, the Nigerien chicken has roamed back home to roost. The ruling people and their agents should just shut up and lick their wounds.

The president made a broadcast on Sunday (yesterday). He spoke with the chord of Lizard who fell from the top of the Iroko tree and shook its head: If no one praises me, I praise myself. Did he say anything on the painfully sore soles of Nigerians? If he did, I missed it. He will probably address that in his next broadcast.

Someone should tell the president that what he said on Sunday was what the Hausa man calls dogo turenchi (long grammar). The broadcast showed that Tinubu’s understanding of what Nigerians are going through is zero. He spoke about the #EndBadGovernance protest being some people’s political agenda. If there is indeed an agenda, it must be secondary to the real rebellion of the belly going on. My people say malevolent medicines don’t work unless believable stories are woven round the spell (ejo ni aa ro fun oogun ki o to je). There would not be popular support for the protest if there was no general anguish in town. The hundreds on the street are (were) those who had the strength to go out; the millions who are at home are even more trenchant in their protest. What they say are not prayers. The president needs to go out, feel the street and do another broadcast.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Protestant Greeks in Abuja [Monday Lines]

If what you eat is exhausted, you go for what is classed as taboo. That proverb sounds like what a leader of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, said about the last option of the hungry: “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich (Quand le peuple n’aura plus rien à manger, il mangera le riche).” From one end of the street to the other, a scary video shows children of the North blasting slabs fittingly placed on gutters, scavenging for iron rods. They did it with uncommonly calm fury, daring the state.

A government ICT centre in Kano was invaded and stripped of all its assets. Children without basic education can’t appreciate computers and their possibilities. There is a lesson there for our policy makers. First things first.

Kaduna’s Governor Sani said more: “If you look at the developmental indices, I made it clear to everyone last week that as far back as 2016 in the northwest part of Nigeria, there was nothing but kidnappings and banditry. We have found ourselves in this problem because of the lack of seriousness of the leaders, including myself.” That was a very candid admission of complicity in the tragedy that has unfurled in the north. Sani added that everyone in northern Nigeria who held a leadership position, including the business community, should reflect on why over 70 percent of adults are financially excluded, why 65 percent of people are living below the poverty line, and why 70 percent of Nigeria’s 18.3 million out-of-school children are domiciled in the north. “That is why, if you look at the protest today, most of the states that participated are from northern Nigeria…” the governor said.

That Kaduna where Governor Sani sits was where the maker of the North, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, sat and made a very sound difference in the lives of his people. Sardauna’s biographer, John Paden, says when Bello was a mere councillor in charge of the Sokoto districts, he ensured that “education was the key.” When he became the premier, he held on to that conviction that the system must run well in such a way that “there was no resentment from below.” Paden adds: “The Sardauna felt that if this system broke down, the whole of the society would break down.” What the Sardauna feared has happened. The system he built has broken down. Governor Sani said so. The fury on the streets of the North is the confirmation.

On Saturday, Borno State governor, Professor Babagana Umara Zulum, expressed shock over what he called the involvement of children in the protests in his state. He said over 95 percent of the protesters were under 14. To him, most of the children were unaware of the reasons behind their actions. He said the situation was “astonishing”. “It’s astonishing to see a six-year-old child carrying a placard. They must have been directed by someone.” Many of the children, he said, were not from Borno State. So, where did they come from? Were the unknown ones from Niger or Chad? The governor needs to tell us.

How many children of Borno do Borno and its governor know? Some people’s blessings are as limitless as the waters of the Atlantic. Children of northern Nigeria compete with the sands of the desert in matters of number. Sometimes you are tempted to ask what music they listen to in that very expansive clime?

Queen of songs, Onyeka Onwenu, died last week; God bless her sweet soul. With King Sunny Ade in 1989, Onyeka did a duet on life and the need to plan it well. They labelled the album ‘Wait For Me.’ The song suggests that if your loin is virile enough to sire a million children, your hands must be strong enough to make billions to feed them. You can’t have “plenty children” and offload their care to society. The duo sings that a nation can’t have sad families and still be a happy country. They sing:

Having babies, no be joke oh,

You go feed them

You go give them cloth

Bring them up too…

If you never ready to carry the load

Why put am for another person head?…

Plenty children dey, but no food to eat

Oh my friend, this kain life na so so wahala…

King Sunny Ade and Onyeka Onwenu are not done. They also have these lines which are even more national in aim:

Happy parents, na happy children

Happy family na happy country…

If you love life, you go plan am well…

The album is 35 years old. Nothing has changed since it was released. Indeed, if you sing that Sunny Ade/Onyeka Onwenu song in the north, you are not likely to escape the sanctimonious sanctions of the leaders there. The singers sang nonsense, they would say. When families are wracked by hunger and anger, a million presidential broadcasts will not make patriots of them. “Happy family na happy country” The streets of Nigeria, north and south, are full of sad children of hunger and daring kids of anger. It is apparently worse in the North. The Almajirai who used to live on leftovers can’t get leftovers again. Everyone who still can afford some food is sticking to rations that serve their hunger. No excess food for excess children. The problem is real.

Nigerians are very hungry but it appears the North is hungrier. It will be hungry. Because of the choices it made yesterday, it can’t go to the farm today, can’t go to the stream to fetch water; the willing among them can’t go school. When you add mass hunger to mass illiteracy, you get perfect poison. Thunder claps of hunger are celting the stomach of Nigeria and there is no rescuing the afflicted. No country has what we have as street children in northern Nigeria and knows peace. It is not possible.

Like it happened in France of 1793, we’ve just heard a no for the very influential religious authority in northern Nigeria. The North’s feudal hierarchy, its autocracy and the clergy lost the street. The Ulama lost their command; the emirs lost their mane. The two lethal groups failed to convince the hungry that what they were feeling was politics and not hunger. The result, sadly, is the free reign of terror in that realm. If it was pupils of Muslim clerics that raged into a mosque and sacked the worship house from ceiling to floor, then the mallams should beware. Their domesticated lions have matured; the hungry cats want the wild and the food it offers.

There were protests also in the South – particularly in the South-West. Everyone who lives there should thank the protesters for staying the course peacefully. We should thank the state governments, particularly the governors of highly combustible Oyo, Osun, and Lagos, for not sleeping on duty and for fencing off their states from violence. We should also thank the police and other security forces in these states for not craving the taste of blood.

The biggest casualties of the protest in Yoruba land are, however, the pro-government political elite to whom double standards is honourable. They shaved clean the head of Agbe, bird of the creeks; they scraped clean the hairs of Àlùkò, bird of the desert; when it was the turn of their own bird, Àtíòro, they said their blade had lost its sharp edge. There is one word for that behaviour in Yoruba – it is Àgàbàgebè. We wait to see how they will find their vociferous voice again after this era.

News

OPINION: Children’s Day And The Scam Of Tomorrow

Published

2 days ago

May 28, 2025

Editor

By Israel Adebiyi

Once upon a time in many Nigerian homes, there was a rhythm to childhood. It echoed in the laughter of children gathered under the moonlight, listening to folktales from wise grandmothers—stories of Tortoise and the hare, morality and mischief, hard work and honesty. It echoed in warm evenings of family dinners, morning treks to school in uniforms neatly ironed, and the comfort of knowing that adults were in charge—parents, teachers, and a government that at least pretended to care. That rhythm has long faded.

Today, the Nigerian child is born into chaos, grows up amid contradictions, and learns too early that promises mean nothing. Each May 27, we gather to recite that children are “the leaders of tomorrow,” but what we fail to admit is that this tomorrow is deliberately being sabotaged. It is not just lost; it is being stolen in broad daylight.

Let’s Begin with Education. Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world—an estimated 18.5 million. That number alone should spark a national emergency, yet it is spoken of with such casualness you’d think it were a weather forecast. Millions of children roam the streets hawking sachet water, fruits, or plastic wares when they should be in classrooms. In the North, Almajiri children continue to be abandoned in large numbers under a system that provides neither education nor security. In many Southern states, children are seen as economic props, pushed into trade or house help servitude.

Those who make it to school are not necessarily lucky. Public schools across the country are crumbling. From leaking roofs and broken chairs to the absence of toilets, blackboards, and learning aids, many Nigerian classrooms are not places of learning but sites of struggle. The curriculum remains outdated, irrelevant to modern realities, and poorly delivered. While the world is building coding academies for toddlers, we are still teaching children to cram colonial poetry and 1980s textbook diagrams.

Teachers, the supposed nation-builders, are grossly underpaid and in many cases, underqualified. In some schools, a single teacher manages four to six classes. Training and capacity development are either nonexistent or political rituals. How does a child receive quality education when their teacher is themselves a victim of a broken system?

Worse still, our schools are no longer safe. With rising cases of abductions—from Chibok to Kagara to Dapchi—parents are forced to weigh the risk of education against the price of safety. This is a dilemma that should never exist in a sane society. A government that cannot secure its schools has no business sermonizing about the importance of education.

In the health sector, Nigeria’s infant and child mortality rates remain among the highest globally. According to UNICEF, one in ten Nigerian children dies before their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable causes. Many Nigerian children still die from diarrhoea, malaria, pneumonia, and malnutrition—ailments the world conquered decades ago. Our immunization coverage is poor, especially in rural areas where vaccine hesitancy and infrastructural gaps persist.

Traditional birth attendants continue to thrive in areas where government clinics are either too far, too expensive, or simply unavailable. Expectant mothers still deliver on floors or with torchlight. Where children are born into such conditions, the cycle of vulnerability begins at birth.

Here are the unspoken scars of the Nigerian Child – Abuse and Rights Violations. The Nigerian Child Rights Act (2003) is a comprehensive legal document that affirms the rights of every Nigerian child to survival, development, protection, and participation. Yet, over 20 years later, some states have still not domesticated this law. And in states where it exists, enforcement is patchy at best.

Children suffer physical abuse, sexual exploitation, forced labour, trafficking, and emotional neglect daily. From baby factories to underage marriages to child soldiers in conflict zones, Nigeria has become a theatre of child rights violations. It is one thing to be poor. It is another to be unprotected.

When we say children are “the leaders of tomorrow,” what exactly do we mean? A child growing up amid poverty, violence, abuse, and hunger will not suddenly blossom into a competent leader because we proclaimed it. Leadership is cultivated. And cultivation requires care, systems, and consistent investment. We are not preparing children for tomorrow; we are abandoning them to survive today.

In many homes, the idea of parenting has become largely transactional. Economic hardship has eroded family bonding. Tales by moonlight have been replaced by cartoons on phones. Parents, stressed and underpaid, often have nothing left to give emotionally. We are raising children in isolation—physically present but emotionally disconnected. The result is a generation growing up without empathy, values, or vision.

Parents and communities must take back the moral responsibility of shaping children. Government cannot parent our children for us. But government must provide the basic scaffolding—schools, clinics, protection, and justice.

In the final analysis, May 27 must stop being a day of sugar-coated statements. It must become a mirror—a day of national reflection, policy accountability, and renewed investment in our children’s future.

The Nigerian child is not asking for luxuries. They are asking for classrooms with roofs, teachers who show up, clinics that work, and laws that protect. They are asking for the basic dignity of being raised in a country that sees them not as statistics, but as citizens. Until then, the phrase “leaders of tomorrow” remains a grand deception—a scam coated in celebration.

It is time to give children more than cake and fanfare. It is time to give them a future.

News

CBN Donates Motorized Fire Caddy To Federal Fire Service In Bauchi

Published

2 days ago

May 28, 2025

Editor

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Bauchi State Branch has donated a Motorised Fire Caddy to the Federal Fire Service (FFS) Headquarters, Bauchi State Command.

Speaking during the handing over of the mobile fire suppression system on Tuesday, Mr James Laburta, the CBN Bauchi Branch Controller, said the gesture was part of its corporate social responsibility.

He commended the Federal Fire Service for its dedication toward fighting fire outbreaks in the state and reaffirmed the bank’s commitment to community safety.

According to him, the gesture underscored the importance of partnerships between government agencies and corporate institutions in safeguarding lives and property.

Responding, DCF Babangida Abba, the Acting State Controller of the Federal Fire Service in the state, expressed profound gratitude toward the gesture.

He emphasised the critical role of such support in enhancing the command’s capacity to respond swiftly to fire emergencies, especially in hard-to-reach areas.

Abba noted that the donation came at a crucial time, given the recent surge in fire incidents across the state.

While encouraging the general public to remain vigilant and proactive about fire safety, he assured that the equipment would be effectively deployed for emergency response and training.

Also, speaking at the sideline of the event, ASF Umar Lawal, the Public Relations Officer of the Fire Service, said the equipment is used in areas where traditional fire hydrants or fixed systems are not readily available.

“This unit is typically portable and easy to maneuver, making it suitable for various locations.

“The motorised fire caddy is designed for skilled and unskilled Firefighters to use as a quick-response method for Firefighting in their early stages.

“As it beats response time to emergencies, it’s also used for institutional training reaching out to incident ground scene especially in hard-to-reach areas where our Fire truck can’t have access to the fire ground,” he said.

News

75-year-old Edo Pilgrim Dies During Hajj In S’Arabia

Published

2 days ago

May 27, 2025

Editor

A 75-year-old woman from Edo State, Adizatu Dazumi, died during the 2025 Hajj in Saudi Arabia.

Dazumi was from Jattu Uzairue in Etsako West Local Government Area.

According to The PUNCH, pilgrim died on Monday at King Fahad General Hospital in Makkah after a short illness.

The Chairman of the Edo State Muslim Pilgrims Welfare Board, Musah Uduimoh, confirmed her death on Tuesday.

Uduimoh said Dazumi became ill shortly after performing Tawaaf (walking around the Kaaba) and was taken to the hospital on Sunday. She passed away the next day.

“She was buried in Makkah on the same day, according to Islamic tradition, and her family in Jattu Uzairue has been informed,” Uduimoh said.

He sent his condolences to her family and assured other pilgrims that the board is committed to their health and safety.