"The only cure for grief is action".
G.H. Lewis
By the
time your are reading this, the story behind the video showing the lynching and
burning of a seven-year old Nigerian child for stealing Garri would have
assumed many versions, including some which will maintain that it was all a
work of fiction. Whatever you believe, it is difficult to ignore the fact that
adults filmed and posted a murder. There was no
evidence of anyone among on-lookers attempting to intervene. No police.
No samaritans. Just a child helplessly begging for mercy and our shrinking
soul. These types of videos and pictures rob us of more of the very thin layer
of our sensitivity to violence, blood, guts and designed evil. They remind us
of how low we have sunk as a people. Neither our faith nor our laws keep
us restrained. We kill and maim and melt into a society that just moves
on. I published the material below in November,2013 (admittedly in
some anger) when I thought the legion of the unloved, unprotected and desperate
younger northern generation we are all responsible for will eventually be
the undoing of us all. I reproduce it today to appeal to President Buhari:
please, sir, find the people who murdered that child and bring them to justice.
He is somewhere near
sixteen, but no one is sure. Actually no one has bothered to register his
actual date of birth. Police have different ages for him taken from his many
detentions. He has a home and a family, 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. They grew up in the same
neighbourhood, but their worlds grew further apart as they got older. They
learnt lessons in schools, he learnt his 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 lives for the
next meal and the next fix.
He is in all the towns
and cities of the North, an alarming reminder of our decaying social and
economic assets. 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 willing, 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 and vigilante show
no mercy, many times killing his mates. His gang also 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, 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 for a pittance and small 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 speed 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 or very poor education
learn to resent the rich, the powerful and the well-connected peers who will
rush 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 scramble for their pittance.
If you are not worried about 2019,
begin to worry now.
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