Nigeria’s meningitis is the North

THE enemy is always from outside. Murderous Boko Haram was caused by enemies of the north resident somewhere in the creeks. Fulani herdsmen are foreigners from Sahara desert. Epidemics are from God, angry at the sexual excesses of man. A deadly strain of meningitis kills old and young, men and women. This meningitis is divine thunder striking to death shameless fornicators. That is the latest homily from northern Nigeria where leaders easily invoke God to pass exams. Zamfara State governor, Abdulaziz Yari, said God is angry because unmarried boys and girls copulate in indiscriminate orgy. Meningitis is the divine annihilator of fornication and all who indulge in it. The dead suffered death because they sinned. Is it no longer true that the wages of sin is death? That is from a governor, a supposed problem solver.

Northern Nigeria is a shame. The unthinkable routinely happens there. It was there, in Katsina, that a governor last year mass purchased 300 coffins as democracy dividend for his people. It is in the north up there that organising of mass weddings has become a competition among governors. The north is not a problem for Nigeria, it is the problem of the nation. If Nigeria lives, it won’t be because it has boosted its immunity against viruses ravaging its system. If Nigeria survives, it will be because it has succeeded in finding a permanent cure for the disease of the north. Meningitis and other deadly scourges are not the real ailment of the north. They are nothing. They are just symptoms of an underlying cancer – disease of the mind.

The real disease of the north is its political leadership – constant and consistent in failure. Constant, consistent and shameless in passing the buck to man and to God. I have very many wonderful friends from the far north. I am sure they are appalled too by the enormous contributions of their region to the degradation of Nigeria. I did my youth service in Sokoto – made up of present-day Sokoto, Kebbi and Yari’s Zamfara state. I saw wonderful, ordinary people working hard daily to earn legitimate living. They are not the problem. The problem is a leadership whose thought process is constantly oiled by the desire to use religion to cheat the people. Other nationalities in the country have their own afflictions. Civil disorder is the disease of Ibadan. But the far north is Nigeria’s vector of disasters. They may not like this truth because it is not sweet. But one has to say it because the poison up there endangers fishes downstream. And I don’t think I am the first to use the harsh words I just deployed. Emir Muhammadu Sanusi of Kano with a degree in Islamic law is always embarrassed by what he sees around him; the use of religion and God to justify systemic failure. He, like you, also heard Yari’s theory of divine punishment in epidemics. His informed response was that his people are still locked up in the closet of 13th century Islam. Other Islamic nations and peoples have moved on to fulfill the mandate of progress and human development given them by their religion. Unfortunately, the fine arguments of Sanusi may not gel with the enslaved. Some with minds of sympathy are rallying for the governor. They claim he was overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. They say those words were droplets of frustration and a call for help from man and from God. But should a leader allow burdens of leadership crush the spine of his essence in office? The demagoguery from Zamfara is the language of the street and the market. It is what is bought by the afflicted and the bereaved. The acceptable explanation is not the long grammar from the emir. It is the (il)logic of the divine anger stinging the sinner with epidemics. The accepted will be the words rejecting scientific reasons for meningitis. The very reason anti-polio vaccines were asked to be rejected so that they would not render sterile the ones who wanted dozens of children.

Failed and failing leaders throughout history always find excuses for their failure. When in 64 AD, seventy-five percent of the city of Rome was badly burnt by a fire that lasted six days and seven nights, a fiddling, jittery Emperor Nero quickly rallied his addled senses to escape blame. He nailed the calamity on Christians and their God. History records it that “Therefore, to stop the rumor [that he had set Rome on fire], he [Emperor Nero] falsely charged with guilt, and punished with the most fearful tortures, the persons commonly called Christians, who were [generally] hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, in the reign of Tiberius…Accordingly first those were arrested who confessed they were Christians; next on their information, a vast multitude were convicted, not so much on the charge of burning the city, as of ‘hating the human race.’” Passing the buck is delusional, self deception. It solves no problem. It creates a guilty mind and makes way for vulnerability. Our people up north are used to their 13th century existence so much that they accept 21st century challenges as sanctioned by heaven. T. S. Eliot said “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” When things get really hot for the vulnerable, he puts on his sunglasses, pretending to himself that the sun does not scorch. Governor Yari has a very large congregation of contra-believers in what is not true. What is true is that meningitis is no venereal disease that can be blamed on sex and sexual behaviours.

Is the problem of the Muslim north religion? The answer cannot be yes. There are Muslims in the south. Again, Islam’s contributions to modernity are eternally, poignantly visible in the algebra, in medicine, in architecture, in every branch of knowledge, science and the arts. So, what is the problem? A Syrian poet and polemicist, Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber) was once confronted with the same question. His position was not different from Emir Sanusi’s argument for a reordering of the thinking of a people hooked to antiquity. The poet looks around him, does not like what he sees and hears. He wonders why progress is always spoken of in the past tense and why using divine endowments to fight existential problems has become a generational problem for his people. His response is a torrent of lines of corrective self rebuke: “Our modernity is behind us, the only way to reverse that is to reverse the path of our thinking. The best poets who moved from the language of the city and carved a new language that suits the metropolitan life like Abu Nawas, or those who restructured the poetics of the Arabic language, like Abu Tamam, and reinterpreted the inherited religious and social legacy, like Al-Maarri, all existed in the early era of Islam. Now the question is how all these achievements happened in the past and not the present is the big question that is challenging us….We lack critical thinking and we are very self-righteous, the Arab man is always right, he exists, grows up and dies infallible, innocent of every wrong, the other is always the one at fault, the real revolution has to be against ourselves first, and then we will know how to rebel against the world….I can’t say all that I’m thinking, even to myself.”

Why is it that one lacks the courage to sit up and tell oneself what goes on in one’s mind about Nigeria. A senior colleague took me up last Thursday. He wondered why I offer no hope in what I write. I kept quiet for seconds. Then I smiled. Then I asked: how do I offer what does not exist? Do people still expect sense where nonsense is the only celebrated word? Hope, Barack Obama says, is the belief in what is not yet; the faith in the better days that lie ahead. Where is that hope in the horizon when drivers of this system shamelessly put the reason for their serial, criminal failure at the feet of God?

The north needs leaders who would not blame God for their failures and failings. It needs not a leadership that accepts new ideas because they potentially increase its power over men and money. Not one that rejects a new way of thinking because it won’t allow it continue degrading the hapless citizen. Such strain of leadership is a recipe for what we see today and don’t like in the north. The problem of the north is internal and domestic. It cannot solve its problems by blaming them on some angry rains from the sky. And Nigeria is doomed if we do not see the north as a problem to be collectively solved. The first step is to encourage a crop of problem solvers to inhabit its leadership space. A scorpion remains a present danger until it is defanged. The north must be weaned of leaders who spread ignorance. Leadership is about proactivity. It is also about positive imagination. It is not about being overwhelmed and saying yes when you mean to say no. It is not about using the advantage of power to blame God for self-inflicted injuries.