Enter Sultan Sa’ad Abubakar III, the newest wailer in town!

THE arms are not as swift as the brain. My grandfather once told me that is the story of a downed antelope. The game would want to escape from the hunter, and his darts as fast and skillful as his thoughts could conceive, but his limbs could not interpret and implement his thoughts in like manner. That is the story of the suffering Nigerian. That is the story of our constitution which has kept us perpetually in servitude.

What we have in our hands as a constitution is a hamper to what we have in our hearts as a forward-looking people. By a forward-looking people, I mean those who want an egalitarian Nigeria and who also know that most of the troubles bedeviling the country are products of our numero uno set of laws. Our constitution is full of guile, like the powers behind it. Forget the “we the people…” lie that opens the book.

Many Nigerians have called fruitlessly for a comprehensive rework of the document not once, not twice, not thrice… Those who work with the document have called for its overhaul to no avail. Businesses, development-minded citizens, state governments, local governments and some agencies of government know that the flaws in the 1999 constitution are holding the country back. A set of laws that deliberately ties the hands of the federating units to the back and unabashedly scream against probable path of development, is obviously nothing to cherish. To adjust or amend the constitution is a Herculean task and we must realise that, ab initio, this was carefully crafted by its designers to keep the book as what it is: A tool of the oligarchs.

Security and infrastructure are two issues that have now turned our country into a laughing stock. Our ratings are simply abysmal everywhere, including in healthcare and economy, but we are helpless because we have laws that heap all the solutions at the door of an equally helpless central government. The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Saad Abubakar, is the latest man to publicly cry out. And we will wait to see how Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Mr. Femi Adesina or Alhaji Garba Shehu would react to the latest wailer in the person of His Eminence, Sultan Sa’ad Abubakar. Apart from insecurity, the sultan also lamented the high, debilitating inflation and decried the ravaging hunger in the land.

The Sultan spoke up, and I dare say finally, at the fourth quarterly meeting of the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC), on Thursday. NIREC is a body of eminent religious leaders the Sultan co-chairs with the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Dr. Samson ‘Supo Ayokunle. Reverend Ayokunle had been crying for years that banditry was fast engulfing us, and that in the near future it could become a monster we might not be able to take on. Not many took him serious. Even some of his colleagues in NIREC saw Ayokunle as a wailing noisemaker who was disturbing the peace. He relentlessly cried that something should be done. He sometimes spoke up after going to the corners of the northern part of the country to bury prominent members of CAN who had been kidnapped and murdered by bandits or to console their families.

Now that we have a new wailer among us, shall we welcome him among us? Or shall we hope that our cries as represented by the Sultan will be heeded? The Sultan said: “Now North is not secure at all. In fact, it is the worst place to be in this country because bandits go about in the villages with their AK-47 and nobody talks to them. They stop at the markets and buy things and even collect change with their weapons.

“We have security problems in the country. Bandits now go into people’s houses to kidnap, not on the highway anymore. Of recent, in the last couple of days, they are going into institutions, in Zaria ABU, the Polytechnic and took away people.

“The insecurity in the North is so high that people are even afraid of travelling from Funtua to Zaria, a journey of about 48 or 50 miles; not to talk of Sokoto to Abuja or to Kano.

“We know what we are going through. We are so insecure in the North that people are losing hope. People keep things in the house so that when the bandits come, they would let them be free.

“A couple of weeks ago, 76 people were killed in Sokoto by bandits in a day. It is not a story because I went there with the governor in the eastern part of Sokoto, but you don’t hear these stories because it happened in the North.

“And we don’t have media that is strong enough to bring out these atrocities about the bandits so people think that the North is secure.

“Food prices are on the increase and we need to do something about it. The cost of onion is too high and beyond the reach of many people.

“A hungry man is an angry man. The rising cost of foodstuff in the markets is an issue. The amount an onion costs in Nigeria today is an insight into the current economic hardship in the country.

“I think we really need to sit down and look at these issues because a hungry man is an angry man. We do not lack recommendations and solutions to our problems.”

The sultan raised two major issues: inflation and insecurity. Your Eminence, we have been crying about these for eons sir! We have been reporting the activities of bandits in the North and elsewhere in the country for years. Only last week, the kidnap of a dozen senior police officers in nearby Zamfara State was a major story for nearly the whole week. We were, as usual, hushed into silence. Even the police issued a statement that depicted that we were telling lies. It meant that rather than cry out and seek help, the police is saying we are telling lies. Sir, the federal government calls us names when we report these inadequacies.

Your Eminence, when the news of the kidnap of the 12 officers broke, the Minister of Police Affairs, Alhaji Muhammad Dingyadi, said bandits had been degraded. He dismissed any weakness in Nigeria’s security architecture and boasted that the bandits were only left with “hit-and-run kind of tactics.” I know the sultan must have heard this kind of language before, “Degraded”, “technically defeated” etc.

Now, we are reeling in helplessness. We need help all round because our country is in tatters!

 

 

 

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