By Ahmad Musa Hussain
Our people love distractions, love easy struggles. That’s why you see a people whose communities are being ravaged daily by bandits hyperventilating over what a young bride choose to wear on her wedding day, or rising in unison to punish an alleged blasphemer.
But there’s no bigger crime, no bigger blasphemy than killing an innocent human being. But as humans, we love deflection. To focus on the wanton killings happening in our communities would require us to face some inconvenient truths, to look ourselves in the mirror and ask some difficult questions.
Granted that people have the right to form an opinion on almost everything, but it is the cumulative representation of societal public opinion that determines the priorities of a people. The art of societal memory, of choosing what to focus on, what to accept, what to feel offended about, what to remember or discard, is directly proportionate to the quality of vision of any given society.
The three vices of Northern Nigeria are ignorance, poverty and violence. All three are interlinked and addressing them will require a longterm generational approach and not the disjointed attempts of one single governor or president over a single term or two. The only way to solving all three is through education, the kind of education that will equip our people to compete and excel in our rapidly changing 21st century environment.
But do we even agree these are our problems? As the adage says, admitting to a problem is a halfway of solving it. Do we show the required outrage over the killings in our communities, or over the fate of our almajiri children, or over rights of women, or the condition of our social justice system? Instead, we decided to choose appearance over substance, to tackle symptoms and not the entire disease!
Do we even understand our past, we we came from? Do we equally understand the present, where we are at the moment? Do we have any aspiration or vision for the future, where we are heading to or where we want to be? Was the past good enough? How do we avoid its mistakes? How adequate is our present and how better do we harness opportunities or respond to challenges today? How ambitious is the future and what capabilities are we building to realize it?
Even by religious standards (as we like to pretend), is the ‘immoral’ outfit of Zahra Nasir Bayero more distasteful than the displaced communities in Zamfara, or the starving children loitering our northern streets, or the murdered families in Katsina, Plateau of Birnin Gwari? Between the two cases, what generates a more heated debate? Which one should occupy our collective conscience!
Worse still, we feign suprise that our communities are heading towards a cliff. But there’s nothing surprising here. Anyone closely following the trajectory of Nigeria’s leadership development know that our present situation is directly the result of the choices we made yesterday. And as long us we continue making similar choices, our tomorrow will not be any different. Things will only get worse.
No amount of prayers nor spoken pleas will solve our problems. God has already given us incredible intellectual attributes to surmount our challenges, in addition to the tremendous endowment of natural resources at our disposal. What more do we want?
