Sir, from what I have been hearing about your fruitful and eventful life, you are no doubt a visionary leader imbued with extraordinary foresight. This much has been proved from the testimonies of your ardent enemies. You are indeed, a repository of wisdom that so effortlessly carried along every body irrespective of status or creed. You are an extra ordinary man whose life represented the finest tradition of excellence and perseverance.
You are a model of modesty and thoroughness, an enigma; an embodiment of humility and true personification of all that the sublimed caliphate of yore symbolized. I’m therefore writing this posthumous latter to you with the highest reverence deserving of a great and charismatic leader in protest against most of your trusted disciples!
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Forgive me if I disturb your peace. But the exigencies of the moment and the dangerous slide of the region and by extension the whole country onto the edge of the precipice had made it imperative for your humble grand son to inform your majesty. Indeed, you ought to know how unnerving, life has turned out to be in your absence. You deserved to be updated about the situation report on the ground. How your trusted allies whom you sacrificed so much to nurtured and empowered from a very humble status; have within a span of just four decades, succeeded in subjecting the once proud region into virtual doldrums!
With out mincing words sir, allow me to let many unpalatable iniquities of your trusted lieutenants out in the open, perhaps they may take heed. I know that many of them still do respect you dearly. But in so doing, I will try to list-out to you their many failings, their apparent lack of directions and several of their actions toward nation building which resulted into the present quagmires. I know that you loved them unconditionally too, and that expression of sincere love still remains with you even thought majority of them have over the years become so naughty( kunnen kashi).
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To start with, the educational structure you left behind have completely caved-in due to negligence. Today, the north has the largest concentration of beggars, almajiris and all those unwanted irritants. During your brief but eventful tenure as premier of northern region, there was nothing like the caste system in educational systems. But now, we have schools for the rich, and those for the poor. And most of their children are schooling abroad in some of the most expensive and most prestigious academic citadels; leaving behind vast majorities of the people to their own hopeless design. There are also hospitals for the rich and those for the hoi-polloi. The end result therefore, is the disparity and segregations akin to what used to be obtained in the apartheid era.
The legacy of quality education bequeathed to them, which transformed majority of them into what they are today, had become exclusively for the privilege few. I’m sure; this has never been what you envisaged for your children, grand children and great grand children yet un-born. The end results are the vast army of idle and ignorant youths who have become ready tools for recruitments by the deviants’ elements in the society-read Boko-Haram.
In your own time, I learnt that, there were conscious efforts to industrialize the region. And that singular effort resulted into the industrial centers we used to know and appreciates in Kano, Kaduna, Gusau and Jos among several other places. However, all that has now become history due to criminal negligence and lack of focus. In its place, the region now harbours the largest concentration of the unemployed youth in the country; with poverty level at an unacceptable height. Sir, the situation is so pathetic that if you were to come back again, I’m sure, you would readily curse them and disown them completely.
In your enlighten personal sacrifices, you brought about the nothenisation policy,
which seek to transfer ownership of enterprises into the hands of your people? And by that, you set out to make them equal stake-holders and entrepreneurs in their own right. But, to the chagrin of all right thinking minds, the north is today the most backward in terms of industrializations. It was reduced to mere consumers of materials made outside its borders! What is all the more troubling is that northerners have become second class citizens in their own country. They now constituted the largest armies of cobblers, mai shayis,maigadis,manicurist,street-cleaners,mai ruwas,yan jagaliyas,yan dabas,yan sara-sukas and so, on.And even these are seriously under threats. They also occupied less than one quarter of the federal civil service, ditto private enterprises and the like.
In short, the deciphering entities you succeeded in uniting as one family are now sharply divided along many cleavages. Every bit of the larger component is practically on its own. The elites and commoners have all recoiled back to their ethnic and religious cocoons in search of solace and protection. They no longer trust even their next door neighbours. The north as you used to know it exists only in name. The only things that keep reminding us of its glorious past are the annual or monthly jamborees by its supposed protectors who are no longer their brothers’ keepers by whatever definition. The sense of belonging and feeling of oneness has given way to mutual suspicion and mass attrition due to selfish elite’s manipulation.
As a matter of fact, your people have no dependable ally whether at home or abroad today. Their fate is solely predicated on the benevolence and mercy of the Supreme Being. There is no body around to sacrifices and wear your big shoe and be regarded as a leader in the strictest sense of the term. Consequently, they are now the most endangered species in Nigeria. And at every given opportunity, their numbers are mercilessly decimated with uncommon brutality. ‘Crush them’, ‘kill them’, ‘shoot them at sight’ they are fanatics; terrorist, fundamentalists etc. These are some of the over-used clichés and adjectives that usually rent the air once it’s your children that are involved! The have no right to fair hearing at all. While other Nigerians especially those across the Niger, have been treated with kid’s gloves for similar or even more grievous offences against the state.
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