Is The Silent North Self-Defeated? – by Hf Dauda MoiSoro
Are you a beggar with a ballot in your hand? Is this how democracy is expected to work? No, it is not!
Your voice is the primary instrument that will protect you, defend your right and ensure your equality among all people. Your ballot is your voice. Silence is a posture reserved for the docile. Why is the North always quiet? Why is it that only those who wish to sell us to the world, and be rewarded with a hallucinated pot of gold, disgracefully speak on our behalf? Why do we allow merchants of hate and bigots of faith and religion, to feel so empowered and speak for the proud North? Why are we Silent!?
We are silent while our leaders send their children to Ivy League’s and Oxford’s Universities, but Northern schools are in conditions unfit for animals, with no food, without teachers, without books or the materials needed, overwhelmed with pupils and students without the tools to learn the theory, nor enjoy available labs for the practicals!
We are silent while our leaders build fortresses to keep us out in poverty but inside they live in affluence. They have their own power plants, own water boards, and own perimeter security more fortified than that of Kirikiri prison!
We are silent while they travel out and globetrot as we travel on dead roads, in dead vehicles, facing bandits, arm robbers and Kidnappers!
We are silent while they collect our money in billions, buy dollars and hide it, to deny its use to benefit our economic life!
We are silent while our leaders pay themselves maddening amounts plus benefits, then ensure that all available jobs are reserved for their children and their family, but our youths are almost 75% unemployed!
We are silent while our leaders emasculate the political playground and monetize the election process such that only the corrupt political jobbers and the most fantastic thieves compete in our politics. The honest and patriotic Nigerian is denied and excluded from political participation, thereby guaranteeing we will never enjoy the good and focused leadership needed to make Nigeria great.
Well, the day has come when the North must Speak now, or forever hold its peace! The time has come when those who have the interest and the duty to protect our poor, our tired and old, our children and those yet unborn, must immediately declare that Silence is No Longer Golden! The region must find the strongest voice to be used in offering, preparing, and building a path to take us to peace, prosperity, security, food abundance, health, and good education.
Nigeria as a nation has fallen from its golden days, but I must specify that Northern Nigeria has sunk steeply into the abyss of despair. There is glaring fear, like that of a prey staring at a hungry lion. It is palpable fear and it is indeterminate. Never in the history of this region have it been forced to bury loved ones with eyes full of sorrowful tears, and mind numbed with despairing grief and the gnashing of teeth. With diminishing patience and minds denied the luxury of holding any thought, our fate has been reduced to negotiating with criminals, forcing families to part ways with life savings to free women and children, some mentally destroyed for life and others serially raped in captivity with bursting hearts. Add this to the biting economic hardship inter alia rising inflation, unemployment, lack of basic healthcare and illiteracy; then you have the chamber of anger more powerful than gunpowder and a cocktail of a defeated people!
Our silence over this and many matters dictates the quality of life we enjoy, pointing to the destroyed fortress and marketplace of ideas that is needed to save us. Our polished intellectuals and our best minds are under attack by armies of injuriously rampant evil forces. Our culture, which honours silence as good attribute has emaciated a once peaceful Northern Nigeria, into a recurring calamitous catastrophe. It is time for our barely used esophagus, backed by patriotic intellect, to open up and speak out.
I want to declare unequivocally that I will be among the noisemakers, the ‘speak out’ group’, the ones who refuse to be silent in the face of all these, I will be unrelenting in the pursuit of improved security and a better life for the common man. The deafening Silence that is deeper than that of the graveyard must be aggressively disturbed and urgently broken. We must speak loud and clear about the extreme poverty and illiteracy in our land and demand that every single man and woman must participate in a conversation to retrieve our lives and livelihood from the brink. Nobody will come to our rescue!
Silence in today’s Nigeria is defeatist. The binding principle of any participatory government is the voice of the people. Either by compromise or by force, but hopefully through elected representation. It must never be by silence. It must be loud and loudest when facing extreme economic hardship. The Silent Violence we endure is the unrelenting poverty of the striking human condition of post-colonial Arewa. The attainment of basic needs on a sustainable level remains an elusive goal and an unrewarding, frustrating quest for most of the population. Our voices must find usage in determining and rebuilding the guarantees of food security, and responses to scarcity, affordability and eliminating self-created famine. Those who delight in hoarding for profit while we wallow in hunger must be confronted and eliminated. Our voices must examine the roots of expanding and persistent poverty in northern Nigeria. The roots causes are elusive but the processes remain unnecessary, and easily predictable.
It is evident across the North that many of our neighbours think they are luckier, or wealthier, and or more educated and more civilized; so there is a renewed determination to separate from us because we are the world’s poorest undesirables. Is our civilization and entire survival as a people in Jeopardy? I doubt very much. The greatest astronomer and galactic Scientist Carl Sagan said (in one of his final Cosmos series episodes) “the civilization (which is) now in jeopardy is all humanity”. He added that “we are children equally of the earth and sky. In our tenure of this planet, we have accumulated dangerous, evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt.” “We have also acquired compassion for others, love for children and the unborn, a desire to learn from history and experience, and a great, soaring passionate intelligence, whici remain the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.” Therefore the quest for survival must not be specific only to our continent, or to Nigeria, or even to Northern Nigeria alone. It must be a quest for all of us supported by the inherent “soaring passionate intelligence” within every single one of us.
Why should we be beggars with ballots in our hand? How is keeping quiet, when the ‘war’ is all around us, going to help our despised land and people. The North is the most homogeneous in Culture and language; even the Bible belt will stand with us when the chips are down. We are still the brothers they need, not the propagandist neighbors who keep deceiving them with a non existent middle belt of Nigeria.
I am aware about the recent protest in some Northern cities. Unfortunately, they are unnecessary, misguided and misdirected. The anger should be directed at our local leaders, state leaders, and our National representatives who collect billions to build and develop our land, but openly convert almost everything to their personal use. We have become so clueless that they now donate our own money to us! DONATE!? We cheer them for announcing what they ‘will’ do for us, but never hold them to account for not doing it!
It is not enough to find your voice just because Tinubu is the president or feel you must pour out your vitriol against a president who is not from your village. No! The culture of collecting monthly allocation is defeatist. You can’t have any pride or any sense of accomplishment when you’re sure that every month, the FG will give you billions you never worked or challenged your brain for. It’s a tradition that promotes indolence and corruption.
Our protest must be directed at the people we put in the executive and representative offices form the North. They are the ones who continually deny us the right, and the path, to escape out of poverty. They live in unimaginable affluences while the capacity to feed our households with three square meals has become impossible! The leaders in the North are squarely responsible for the penury and pathetic lives we live.
When do we intend to open our mouths, raise our voices, and say enough is enough!?
Do not become a beggar with a ballot in your hand. Use it well!
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Hf Dauda MoiSoro
hdfika@gmail.com
February 14, 2024
