Mariam Mariam
Professor Ali Mazrui once quoted one of the founding father of African Independence, Doctor Julius Nyerere, as saying that one of the paradoxes of African existence was that while the advanced countries of the world were finding the way to go into space, on the African continent, we are still looking for the way to get to the village. Last week, I was reminded of that pithy observation, when I travelled to Kaiama, the headquarters of the Kaiama Local Governemtn Area of Kwara State. The last time that I visited Kaiama was in the year 2000, and that had been overshadowed by the accident which kept me in hospital for months and so over seven years after the last visit, in the company of Nurudeen Abdulrahim and Bello Shehu, I hit the road to Kaiama again. We were to attend the wedding ceremony of one of the daughters of Alhaji Jurudee Mohammed, Tafidan Kaiama, politician and former Commissioner of Finance in Kwara State.
I have always wondered about the absurdity of the situation in respect of this journey. The Kasima-Baruten areas of Kwara State are close to the border with the Republic of Benin, they share historical and cultural links with the Batonbu people of the neightbouring country, and by general consensus, are the most underdeveloped parts of Kwara State (without sounding immodest, I was the first person to broadcast Bokobaru, the language of Kaiama, on television as General Manager of KWTV!). Forty-one years after the creation of Kwara State, in 1967, a traveller to these parts of Kwara State, would have to go through Oyo or Niger States, in circuitous routes, to get to these parts of the Kwara State. The last time any regime attempted to integrate Kwara State, by attempting to construct the Bode Sa’adu to Kaiama road, was during the resourceful regime of Airforce Officer Ibrahim Alkali; unfortunately, the road was abandoned and Kwara State and Nigeria, lost the opportunity to open up the very rich agricultural potentials of the area for further development.
The inability to integrate Kwara State with the construction of that road, had some security implication during the height of the emotions that were stirred by the annulment of the June 12 elections, in 1993/1994. There were many stories of demonstrations in the Oyo State towns along the route, stopping and harassing travellers going to and coming from these areas of Kwara State, including the traditional rulers. So seven years after my last visit, it was very depressing to go through the same problem of very bad roads that nobody has bothered to rehabilitate, from Ilorin through the Old Oyo National Part, Igbetti and Ksis and then the nightmarish drive through a dusty stretch to Kaiama.
The bridges date back to late colonialism and the early days of the Northern Regional government of the Sardauna. It is obvious that these neglected rural communities cannot even become part of the twenty-first century. There are households dotting the landscape that will be familiar to a visitor from five hundred years ago and of cours the Nigerian child is still overburdened with his distended belly, unwashed body and the early introduction to a world of toil, at an age that he ought to be harvesting knowledge.
Our governments at the local, state and national levels spend a lot of money on advertorials to announce what they have done for our peoples around the country. When I worked in government between 1999 and 2002, it was standard practice to get communities to write praises of the governor of the state for every borehole drilled, every culvert constructed or maternity ward commissioned. Governance was turned into a faour done to the people of the state by the helmsman in power, who sits atop funds that belong to the people of the state alright, but who chooses what to spend the money on. The fact that the governor has a social contract with the people in the first place, has been consigned aside and in place of a modest fulfillment of an electoral pact with the people, is an elaborate scam of televised performance. Not much has changed in this style of governance of our country by conmen parading as local government chairmen, governors or as president, as we witnessed in the eight years of the bandit rule of Olusegun Obasanjo, the disgraced despot.
The trip to Kaiama last weekend brought into sharp focus for me, the truism that it is far more important to focus on what the various tiers of government have not done than on the chest-beating, over-publicized show case that we have been inundated with, especially in the past eight years in our country. I have spent the past ten days in Kwara State, and I do feel really frightened about just how much work that needs to be done to change the shape of the state and by extension, our country. Take the traffic situation for example; Ilorin now suffers regular traffic jams, largely because the number of vehicles on the roads had multiplied many times over and the amin roads were constructed during the days of Governor George Innih, to cater for traffic, maybe one tenth of what they now service. Urban space usage and control are not being given serious attention, and one gets the feeling that there is nothing like a development control outfit in government. Development is anarchic and many areas of the old GRA that were carefully laid out as residential areas are increasingly turning into guest houses and hotels.
We are not thinking proactively about the problems of urban development nor making our urban areas habitable in the twenty-first century. The problem is related to the fact that there is not much thought put into planning and the enforcement of standards. We also suffer from an inability to retain history in our construction effort and design, so it becomes very difficult to have a historical and visual continuity between architectural pieces from one era to the other. Governors come with all manners of fanciful, often asteless architectural ideas; they knock down old historical pieces and replace them with monstrosities.
Two examples will suffice, from the Ilorin area. During his time as governor, the late Muhammed Lawal, knocked down one of the last three houses which represented the colonial architecture of the 1950s, on Ahmadu Bello Way in the GRA. It was the residence of the late Alhaji Liman Umaru, who was the Chairman of the Civil Service Commission in the old Kwara State. Lawal constructed an architectural monstrosity which he called a Presidential Lodge, never mind the fact that there was an extant presidential lodge that was better located, a few meters away from the government house. Well, the important thing in such matters, was that the contract was awarded (and we all know about contracts in Nigeria). But that old building was lost forever! Not to be outdone in these matters, house no. 35 on the same Ahmadu Bello Way, was recently knocked down by Governor Bukola Saraki, to give way to a banquet hall! That house was located opposite the Government house, and we lived in there for may years during the 1980s. it was one of the late colonial pieces from the same 1950s, and its removal means that there is just one remaining example of those pieces on Ahamadu Bello way; the governors deprived us of an aspect of our architectural history and wiped off a bit of our memory, in a most unforgivable and undemocratic manner. It is instructive that telling history through architecture has not become a significant part of our existence in Nigeria.
The story that I have told here about Ilorin is replicated all across Nigeria. Anybody familiar with Kaduna and its history as a colonial capital city will be sad about how the systematic parceling out of the reserved areas’ plots has contributed to the distorting of the development of the city. Our rulers are not putting resources into the opening up of new lay outs of our cities, that are will planned and serviced with infrastructural facilities; instead they distort what was handed down by previous regimes, especially the colonial. We end up having urban spaces that are not conducive to modern existence, where culture is non-existent and a philistine environment reigns: beer parlours, badly designed and poorly constructed hovels, decayed public utilities, etc. The urban space in such cities as Kaduna and Kano are almost dead, given up to the construction of shops, as Nigeria has gradually become the dumping found for mass-produced goods from the industries of China, Euro-America and other newly-industrialized countries.
The loss of the urban space and open playing grounds in Nigerian cities has a direct co-relationship in my view, with the incremental involvement of young people in crimes. When young people cannot find creative outlets for their energy in open spaces of our cities, they burn these energies negatively, in the same way that nature is said to abhor a vacuum. I have seen how this death of the urban open space has led to negative consequences in Ilorin and Kano, the two Nigerian cities that I am most familiar with.
Taking further the theme of preservation of history through architecture, I was fascinated by the presence of so many town houses of the 1960s in the Igbetti and Kisi areas of Oyo State. These houses with their exquisitely designed verandas speak volumes about the taste of those times as well as celebrate the hard work and legitimately earned money of those years by men of the trading environments of those years. Within the idyllic settings of these towns, they represent construction and taste from a period in our national life that we must endeavour to preserve, to learn from and also to be able to teach lesson about our national evolution. The country must not lose its sense of history, and architecture is a major terrain of historical memory.
Anybody familiar with the Kaiama area will also discover the troubling problem of tree-felling and the presence of saw milling concessions that litter the place. Tress are being felled at an alarming state, and I am not too sure that any regulatory mechanism is in place to protect the environment there, and what makes it even more poignant is that most of the sawmilling concessions are not owned by the people of the area. The movement of these logs and other products from the area, is also threatening the old bridges on the road to Kaiama from the Kisi end to Ilorin. The danger is that the collapse of those bridges will cut off the communities in those areas.
Maybe one of the problems we must put into context, is the fact that we tend to play two much politics with the development process. I am not having any illusions that governance is a process of politicking, and parties and individual are in politics to acquire power ostensibly to serve the common good. The practice in Nigerian has been for the elements who acquire power to become conceited and arrogant; they fritter away the opportunity to serve the common good and steal us into a stupor. It is this reality that has aided the tradition of decay in the urban area, the chaos of urban existence and the Hobbesian deluge which threatens life in our country.
The Urban complex of crime and decay is a twin of the rural neglect, superstition and squalor which re-inforce our underdevelopment. These very much were thoughts which came in the wake of my visit ot Kaiama Local Government of Kwara State last week.
Kaiama is very rich agricultural country, with open land, that support settled agricultural communities well-known for the cultivation of yams and grains as well as open grazing areas that delight the nomadic herdsman. But there has never been a major effort to bring the vast expanse of land into more intensive and modern agricultural use, because of the inability of the State to open up the area in a sustained manner. That can only happen when that long abandoned Bode Sa’adu to Kaiama road is constructed vy the government to achieve an integration of the state as an economic unit and help to improve the overall social-economic well-being of the people of the area.
In the recent history of Kwara State, no government has made a point of focusing on the rural basis of the state as the lynchpin for development, as the government of Bukola Saraki. His perspective has largely been that there is the need to take modern.
Capitalist methods into the rural area, to turn around agricultural practice, improve farming methods, generate employment and export food. To this end, he has brought in commercial farmers into the state and he has also instituted a farming training program for the young people in one of the rural settlements in the state. Although the nursery is still out on the efficacy of these projects, it is important to also emphasize that there are structural and long standing problems which need to be addressed in a sustained, long-term manner, to turn around the rural economy, not only in Kwara State, but all across Nigeria. The underlining current of a massive peasant-based agricultural system, the poverty of that sector as well as the potentials inherent in them, as well as the need to find a realistic interface between the peasant sector and modernity must also be thought through. Unfortunately, I am not too sure this is the case at the moment. It seems clear to me, that the vital link between the rural areas as production centres for food and industrial crops, the need to modernize technique to cater for ever growing populations and the need to develop a national industrial base which is fed by the rural economy and which in turn produces consumer good and implements for the rural economy are issues which need to be properly studies and ought to guide policy action by government. If we continue on the adhoc path of expediency, whereby choices are made not on the basis of the long term sustainable progress of the nation but the interest of the common weal, we are sowing great problems for our future. As I indicate earlier whit I have written here, were thoughts that I wrestled with as we made the trip to Kaiama and back to Ilorin.
Our country has been taken for a ride for too long by common and bandits who have had the privilege of getting access to power. For these common and bandits, the access they have has never really been about the struggle against underdevelopment.
They have used that access to steal and even where they have accidentally provided amenities, these have never been properly thought through and these have ended up more as liabilities than assets. The past eight years were wasted under the most unconscionable regime Nigeria has even known, headed by a common thief given to preachments because of his delusion that he was touched by some divine vision to rule Nigeria. So a remarkable scenario emerged whereby the more money Nigeria made the poorer its people became in real terms. The eight year regime of Olusegun Obasanjo spent N450billion patching roads, yet the roads are worse today than at any point in our history. The governors of various state have become billionaire many times ove; individuals declare assets based on how much they have stolen or will steal, from the coffers of the state they rule like fiefdoms. And everywhere, from the local government to the state level, we have local tyrants in power, who ask to be propitiated as small gods, not our of any competence or as a result of commitment to the common good, but because they control the funds that accrue to the state and local governments they preside over, and they determine who gets what access to finances.
In most states in Nigeria today, poverty and its manipulation have become state policy and weapons of control. This is the reason why issue-based politics does not thrive and it explains the emasculation of opposition all round the country. I met a very vocal former member of the opposition in Kwara State at Kaiama, who frankly confessed to me that he has decamped to the ruling party in the state. The reason he gave was that opposition politics has led to the deepening of frustration and poverty. Those who financed opposition, such as the late General Abdulkarim Adisa and Admiral Muhammed Lawal are no longer on the scene, while Chilf C.O.Adebayo is very stingy with all the money he made in Abuja, preferring to use his money only for members of his household. This scenario is replicated across the country and a de-facto one party state is really on our hands, thus impoverishing the political process and increasingly turning governors of our states into little emperors. So bad has the situation become in one of the state, that things are done only to satisfy the whims of the little tyrant in the state in question. One of the personal assistants of a governor in one of the state I visited recently confessed to me that everybody around “Oga” as these local despots are addressed, now supports the football team the man likes, so as not to be in trouble when English premiership matches are broadcast on television.
Yet Nigeria is a country of very incredible potentials, and one of the strongest of these potentials is the capacity for change. On New Year’s Day, I received a text message from Kayode Fayemi, the Governoship candidate of the Action CONGRESS, WIDELY believed to have won the election in Ekiti State, before INEC and PDP stole the people’s mandate. Kayode is still in court, and very hopeful, that he would eventually reclaim the governorship. We discussed the various problems facing our country, from politics to the degradation of health carre facilities, amongst others. What underlined the sadness about our situation was the incurable optimism that the Nigerian situation cannot be hopeless, because our people deserve far better that we have received from the ruling class. The genuine patriot must not lose hope about the potentials of Nigeria, and the possibility that we can wrest its fortunes away from the conmen who for too long have subjected the amiden of Nigerian development to serial rape and all manners of abuse.
This is the context within which I have enjoined all patriots to renew their resolve to make Nigeria a better country. Surely, it cannot be our fate to be a nation of hopeless young people whose only dreams consist in finding the desperate means to run away to other countries, or to dream schemes to commit internet and other forms of crime, only because they have been out of university for years, without any hope of finding decent livelihoods. Neither can Nigeria’s future be one of a generation of young ladies who live in a world of clandestine and not too clandestine prostitution, because the ruling class has made choices in the political economy which make it difficult of impossible to live a decent life as citizens of a developing country, proud of its potentials and making decent contributions to actualize those potentials. The outrage which greeted the massive fraud which the PDP and INEC perpetrated during last year’s elections show a glimpse of the future possibilities of the creative channeling of dissent to assist the liberation of Nigeria. It is such glimpses which keep me incurably optimistic about the future of Nigeria.
