“The only cure for grief is action.”
G.H Lewes.
He is somewhere near sixteen, no one is sure. Actually no
one has bothered to register or record his actual date of birth. Police have
different ages for him taken from his many detentions. He has a home with a
father and mother and siblings, but no one will go out looking for him if he is
not seen for days, or forever. He is tough and scary, but he is also very
scared. He fears the beatings and torture from police, but he fears the
violence of members of his gang and rival gangs more. He lives every day as if
it could be his last, because it actually could. He has no faith in anything or
anyone. He trusts no one, and no one trusts him. He has bruises going back to
when he was about 13 years old. He has beaten people to death, or near death,
and he expects that his end may be violent.
He is available to politicians and religious enforcers, when
he stays off drugs long enough to be told what to do. He floats in and out of
gangs. The local police and local vigilante’ know him, and he knows them.
Children fear him; adults shun and curse him, and peers keep him on a tight
leash. He is the face of half of Northerners under 18. The other half know of
him. They did not go to school with him, but he was always there when they went
and came back from school. They grew up in the same neighbourhood, but their
worlds grew further apart as they got older. They were taught subjects in
schools, he learnt his lessons in streets. He is half almajiri, half
illiterate, available for anything that will give him a meal and some
excitement. They could graduate and go further than secondary schools, or they
could fail to get any further, and live on similar circumstances as him. They
have hopes for a future with education and jobs and families. He hopes for the
next meal and the next fix.
He is in all the towns and cities of the North, an alarming
reminder of the decaying social and economic assets of the North. Politicians
who used him during election campaigns now zoom past him in big jeeps with
tinted glasses. They do not know him. They should not. He was brought to them,
drugged and armed, to be mobilized to break heads and chase away crowds. They
bought him a knife and lots of drugs, and sent him forth to steal political
mandates.
A few of his mates have found accommodation in corridors
of power as quasi-vigilante and political enforcers. They appeal to him to wait
for the next elections. The next elections are too far to wait for on an empty
stomach without a fix. So a gang which fights other gangs and the community
provide an alternative source of engagement. It promises some form of identity,
protection, excitement, people to rob, women to rape, and endless sources of
drugs. Police shows no mercy, many times killing his mates. His gang shows no
mercy, protecting its turf with knives, cutlasses and blood. Community leaders
shut their doors when gangs fight. Police do not come until it is all over, and
casualties are registered. Kids admire or fear them. Some request to join.
When Northerners contemplate their future, they should
start from their substantial army of alienated and angry youth. That category
with no education, no skills, no future and no faith in anyone or anything.
They should ask searching questions over what happens to the tens of millions
of school-age children who do not go to school. They should ask what happens to
10 million almajirai when they become adults and have to find space in a
nation which has zero-tolerance for anyone without education or skills. They
should ask how the millions of young married girls manage families without physical
and emotional maturity, education or resources. They should ask what type of
wives and mothers they make; what type of children they bring up; and what the
community loses by not allowing them to go to school, even if married.
The juvenile, drugged and armed young gang member that
terrorises urban communities is a blight on the North’s landscape. He feeds the
marauding criminals who live in forests and attack villages at will. He was a
member of the lowest ranks of the Jamaatu Ahlil Sunnah Lid Daawati Wal Jihad
(a.k.a. Boko Haram), and would have been shot dead hundreds of times or is
incarcerated in detention facilities all over the nation. He joins fights
between rural communities, for little more than the desire to shed blood and
settle petty scores. He lurks around streets, robs and maims and rapes because
he can. He is untouchable, a link in a long chain of untouchables who remind
the powerful and the wealthy that they have failed. He is the reason why
politicians zoom past the public at frightening speed; why the rich build high
walls around their residences and why our towns and cities are dotted with
military and police checkpoints.
The angry and hopeless youth is now being joined by those
in universities who see a diminishing prospect for the good life. Hundreds of
thousands of young undergraduates now sit idly in seething anger, feeling
abandoned by government, the community and their teachers represented by ASUU.
They now have a grievance almost the size of their neighbour who never went to
school. The system has failed them. They will now graduate at a much later date
than planned. The months of strike are not likely to revolutionize the quality
of the instructions they receive, their learning environment or their welfare.
Even when they graduate, the prospect of getting jobs are becoming dimmer by
the day. They will join millions of other young people who will be bitter that
a nation which should do much better by them has failed them woefully.
The nation is breeding entire generations which are fed
on heavy doses of frustrations, bitterness and hopelessness. They grow up with
no sense of obligation to a nation which has done nothing for them. Those who
have received little of very poor education learn to resent the rich, the powerful
and the well-connected peers who will zoom past them into expensive education
and guaranteed employment. They are taught to blame others, and hate other
ethnic groups because they are responsible for their conditions. They hate
politicians who milk their future dry; they resent the hypocrisy of religions
leaders who preach honesty, sacrifice and humility, but live opulent lives.
They resent every form of authority because it has been corrupted, and because
it reminds them of the conspiracy of the powerful and the wealthy to keep them
out of the good life.
The expanding numbers of unemployed, unskilled, bitter
and desperate youth in much of the North will provide the tinder for explosion
when political competition and disputes go searching for foot soldiers. For a
brief moment, the millions of alienated and bitter youth with no future will
find relevance as heads are broken, houses razed, and whole communities
destroyed. Leaders who failed to give them hope and a future may perish at
their hands, or they may build higher fences while those who have no future
fight for a pittance.
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