Sometimes, a matter one thinks is pregnant with an elephant delivers only a rat.
Last week, I was on my knees begging Northern Nigeria to save Nigeria from a catastrophe already visible on the horizon. The piece was a code, a shock treatment meant to reset a misbehaving social cell that has become dangerously comfortable with its afflictions. It was the columnist’s own war against terror and its offspring; it was his way of pleading for the release of abducted Yoruba schoolchildren and their teachers held captive in the forests by terrorists.
I had thought my cry would provoke introspection. Instead, it provoked a defence brief. I expected a robust response to a grave problem; an examination of the roots of terror, the social conditions that sustain it, the responsibilities of parenthood and society. What arrived instead was something much smaller: an argument about where the burden of blame should rest.
One nuanced response argued that it is not the North that will kill Nigeria but bad leadership.
Some retired northern Generals addressed a press conference in Kaduna and accused “southern commentators” of blaming the North for the crimes of terror and banditry.
Before those ripostes came a direct accusation that I was transforming “the criminal actions of a few into the collective guilt of innocent millions, many of whom are themselves victims of those same crimes.”
Urbane, brilliant, and a deep lover of Northern Nigeria, Professor Rufa’i Ahmed Alkali is my friend, and we share a relationship of mutual respect. He wrote those words and expanded on them. His central argument was that the first and biggest victims of terrorism and banditry are northerners themselves.
For Professor Alkali, these realities make it “illogical and unjust” to suggest that Northern Nigeria bears collective responsibility for crimes committed on its soil. Yet, his argument focused on the victims of terror rather than on the environment that breeds the terrorists, replenishes their ranks and increasingly exports their violence beyond the North.
I do not dispute that northerners are victims. They are. My contention is different. The Yoruba anticipated this argument long ago. They say, “Ẹni bí ọmọ ọ̀ràn ní í pon ọ́n.” The parent of a troublesome child must carry that child’s troubles. A society may bleed from a wound and still be the place where the knife was forged. It may suffer from a plague and still be the swamp where the mosquitoes breed. A people may be victims of a problem and at the same time incubate it. That is my thesis about Northern Nigeria.
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The professor was the first, but not the last. Others have made similar interventions. I have read them all. The matter has become what the Yoruba call ìlù àgídìgbo—a drum whose language is understood only by the wise, its cadence discernible only to the truly attentive. For Professor Alkali, the retired Generals, and every other participant in this debate, I have only one response: A story, and a history.
Do you remember Kako, the strongman in D.O. Fagunwa’s Igbo Irunmalẹ̀? The name is almost an onomatopoeia for toughness. It lands on the ear with the force of a rod striking wood. There was once a farmer named Kako who lived in a village at the southern edge of a vast forest. Across that same forest, on its northern fringe, lived another farmer named Bako, a farmer blessed with children.
At a point, Bako’s children became notorious. They raided yam barns at night, stole goats, plucked fruits from other people’s farms and sometimes set traps on footpaths where innocent travellers got injured.
The villagers complained repeatedly to Bako.
“Your children stole my goat,” a man told Bako.
Bako replied, “You think you suffer? Last week they stole two of my goats.”
Another villager said, “Your children uprooted my yams.”
Bako answered, “They uprooted more yams from my own farm.”
A widow came weeping. “One of your sons entered my hut and carried away my food.”
Bako shook his head sadly. “Ah, mother, he has stolen even more food from his own mother’s kitchen.”
Years passed. The children abandoned farming and learnt no trade; they grew bolder because nobody stopped them. Whenever the village elders demanded action, Bako would spread his hands and remind everyone that he too was a victim.
One day, Bako’s children gathered other troublesome youths around. They became a gang. They robbed and pillaged their village; they then moved to the roads and waylaid travellers; they seized livestock and drove farmers from their lands.
Again the villagers ran to Bako.
“Now your children have become a menace to the whole district.”
Bako sighed deeply and said, “But they trouble me more than anyone. Surely you can see that I suffer most.”
The elders looked at one another in disbelief.
Finally, Kako rose from his southern seat and struck his staff on the ground.
“Enough!” he said.
“When a man’s dog bites the whole town, he cannot escape responsibility by showing us the marks of the dog’s teeth on his own leg. Your suffering does not erase your duty. In fact, it increases it.”
Bako’s challenger continued:
“If your son steals from me and steals even more from you, that is not a defence. It is proof that the problem is in your house and in the way you raised your child.”
The whole district nodded and fell silent.
For the first time, Bako understood that victimhood was not a defence against responsibility. The fact that his children harmed him most did not make them less dangerous; it made the danger more obvious.
The excesses of Bako’s children exposed the moral foundation upon which Bako had built his house. A child’s conduct often reveals what a parent has tolerated, excused or encouraged.
And the elders would later say: “The smoke that darkens its owner’s roof will, if unchecked, eventually burn the roofs of the neighbours.”
They would add that when trouble comes from a house, the owner of the house must not merely count how much it hurts him. He must help stop it before the whole village burns.
Those children in Bako’s home are Nigeria’s bandits.
There is a big dam in Ogun State called Oyan River Dam. Controlled releases of water from the reservoir cause yearly flooding and disruption. The long bridge on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and several surrounding communities often bear the consequences. But imagine the catastrophe if the dam were to collapse completely. That is what has happened to Nigeria’s security.
The dam has collapsed. Because the dam collapsed, those who live downstream, especially in Southern Nigeria, can no longer sleep peacefully. And they will not sleep peacefully again until the breach is repaired and the flood checked at its source.
In human affairs, as in engineering, collapse is usually the last chapter of a much longer story. Which takes us to the question of foundations. Whether in families, communities or nations, catastrophes rarely begin on the day they become visible. Long before the collapse comes the defect; long before the flood comes the crack in the wall.
History tells a story.
Shortly before midnight on March 12, 1928, the 208-foot St. Francis Dam in California, United States, collapsed. More than 12 billion gallons of water tore through valleys and settlements, crushing bridges, destroying homes and leaving more than 400 people dead and properties worth millions of dollars swept away.
In his book, ‘Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th-Century America’, Jon Wilkman recounts that tragedy. Investigators later blamed the catastrophe on what one review called “the delinquency of the foundation.”
In other words, the dam did not fail on the night it collapsed. It failed years earlier, when defects in its foundation were ignored or unseen. As Shakespeare wrote, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Long before the waters broke loose, the crack was already there. The collapse merely revealed what had been hidden beneath the surface.
Dams do not collapse by themselves. Something causes their collapse. Foundations fail because they are weak; because warning signs are ignored, responsibilities are neglected and defects are excused until they become disasters.
And there are always warning signs. In the Yoruba village, a building does not collapse without first throwing stones from its walls to warn its occupants. When trouble originates in a house, the owner cannot silence criticism by claiming to be its biggest victim. His first duty is to repair the house before the wall falls on the neighbours.
If one’s child steals in the marketplace, it is no defence to say that he also steals at home. Suffering most from a problem does not absolve one of responsibility to control its explosion. Indeed, it may be the strongest evidence that the source requires urgent attention.
That is the lesson of Kako and Bako. It is also the lesson of every collapsed dam.
There are also those who argue that because the President is Yoruba and I am Yoruba, I have merely shifted the President’s responsibility to the North. They are wrong.
The President swore to keep us safe and secure; it is a job he applied to do and he must do it. Has he been doing it? Maybe not as effectively as he does his politics. But we will be unfair to say the armed forces, the police and other security forces have not applied themselves absolutely to taming the flood. Now, let me say this: even if the Commander-in-Chief and his soldiers were to eliminate every bandit and terrorist in Nigeria today, would banditry and terrorism disappear tomorrow? It would not. The womb that carries terror in Nigeria is fertile. The market that recruits, trains and replenishes the soldiers of terror remains open day and night. It is kill one, get ten.
That is my point which critics of the words I uttered last week did not consider.
It is like a farmer who spends every morning crushing locusts one by one while ignoring the breeding grounds where they multiply. He should prepare for the next invasion.
Anyone who has dealt with lice knows that crushing them one by one is futile. Unless the conditions that breed them are eliminated, new lice will replace those that have been killed. The thumbnails will remain stained with blood while the infestation endures.
Security operations may kill terrorists; only social reform prevents their replacement.
In my Kako-and-Bako story, the villagers insist that Bako’s suffering was not the issue. The issue was Bako’s children and their ways. Nations learn the same lesson the hard way. The flood is not the problem. The breach is. The smoke is not the problem. The fire is. And when a child grows into a menace, the first duty of a responsible father is not to count his own wounds but to stop the child before he burns down the whole village.
The challenge before Nigeria is therefore larger than the battlefield. It is the challenge of closing the factories that manufacture despair, ignorance, criminality and extremism. Until that is done, every victory will be temporary, every success reversible and every battlefield triumph vulnerable to reversal. New recruits will continue to emerge from the same neglected ground.
So, as I wrote last week, what the children of the North—and indeed of the South—need is the right education, the kind that equips them with marketable skills, productive values and a stake in society. What they do not need is the denial of their vulnerability. A people who mistake denial for compassion merely postpone the day of reckoning.
I spoke of oases last week. From the North emerged last week a certain Dr. Zainab Suleiman Buhari—medical doctor, bold, brilliant and unsparing. She has been trending with her last-minute warning to Northern Nigeria to reform and safe Nigeria.
In an open letter to northern political leaders, Dr. Zainab pointed at the streets of Abuja as her Exhibit A. “See the result daily,” she wrote: “beggars at Area 1, almajirai at traffic lights, mothers selling sachet water with babies on their backs. That is not ‘the poor’. That is the child of the (mass) wedding we cheered ten years ago.”
Exactly what I wrote.
She reminded the North that choices have consequences.
Exactly my point.
Then came the most devastating passage in her intervention:
“Street Kid Factory. Marry two people with no income → have six kids → cannot feed them → children hit the street. Those street kids don’t disappear. In 15 years, they become the statistics for crime, drug abuse, banditry and terrorism we cry over today. We are not having babies. We are manufacturing future headlines for NBS and UN reports.”
Dr. Zainab’s conclusion was as blunt as it was profound. The North, she said, does not lack faith; what it lacks is foresight. “If we want a North that leads Nigeria, we must stop producing children without infrastructure. We must stop treating population as wealth.”
God bless Dr. Zainab.ax
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
