Recently, we had lamented the deplorable state of the Northern region, in spite of the many God given assets of that region. It is paradoxical that whereas the region is rich in arable land and other natural resources, yet it accounts for the greater percentage in all indexes of negative growth and development. Extreme poverty lives on the streets of the north; drug abuse, increasing figures of out-of-school children, insecurity, outbreaks in diseases, the problem of almajiri etc.
Place this reality side by side with the fact that the region has produced more presidents and held that office more than any other region, and has continued to insist on its grip on power. The next logical question to ask is: Of what use has the hold on power benefitted the people on the streets of the region?
Perhaps, ashamed of the negative narrative on the region, some governors’ wives in the north met recently to brainstorm on how to change those narratives of gloom and deprivation.
The wives of these 14 governors spent two days in Gombe brainstorming on how to support their husbands and address the challenges that have given the region a negative perception.
Among issues that were in the front burner in their discussions and activities were the issues of out of school children, almajiri syndrome, banditry and kidnapping, drug abuse and the use of narcotics, insurgency, educational backwardness, poor healthcare and other socioeconomic issues.
The women who met under the chairmanship of the wife of the Gombe State Governor, Hajiya Asma’u Inuwa Yahaya, told Governor Inuwa during a courtesy call at the commencement of their activities that the Gombe gathering was their first quarterly meeting.
She outlined a number of challenges facing the North which the Forum, with the support of their husbands, seeks to address. Particularly, she identified the issue of almajiri and drug abuse where the Forum planned support and a public paper presentation on the dangers of drug abuse in the society.
Responding, Governor Muhammadu Inuwa Yahaya, expressed delight in the efforts of the First Ladies to support their husbands to uplift the lives of the people of the region whose challenges he described as one of the worst in the world.
According to him, “it is very unfortunate that almost a quarter of the 21st century is gone, we are yet to key into the development agenda of the world,” stressing that, “nothing happens without education.
“It is education that brings development, changes lives and brings good life to the people. Education helps to modernise, enabling us to understand God and religion. Without education, you will not even worship God well,” he pointed out.
It is difficult to tell if these women and their husbands are sincerely troubled by these every-day increasing problems. This is more troubling when you realise that this is not the first time these women and their husbands would be mouthing this desire to break the jinx of backwardness and retardation in the region.
You would have thought realising the need and importance of education in addressing these problems, that education would be given priority in most of these states, but no, some states are more interested in celebrating mass marriages as a dividend of democracy.
Kano State seems to take the lead in this regard. For Kano, regularly marrying people off and providing beds and pots with a paltry sum, is priority over and above education and providing them with money and grants to set up small businesses.
In Kano, Sheik Aminu Daurawa, Commander-General of the Kano State Hisbah Board gleefully announced that the previous mass marriage during which 1,800 women were married off was a huge success. He disclosed that the Hisbah Board had decided to expand the scope by including professional bodies as beneficiaries of the mass wedding, and he was generous enough to allocate 50 women to journalists in Kano State.
According to Daurawa, journalists practising in the state had been allotted 50 females out of the number of women that would be given out in mass marriage in the state.
Before you begin to think that is peculiar to Kano, the Speaker of the Niger State House of Assembly, Abdulmalik Sarkin-Daji, has announced that on 24th of this month, dignitaries from all walks of life will be gathering in Mariga Local Government Area of Niger State, for the marrying off of 100 girls in a mass wedding.
On the one hand, the wives of the governors are crying of the alarming state of the masses of the people in the region, while on the other hand, their husbands through state-sponsored programmes, are marrying people en mass, with little or no preparation or opportunity to help them confront the challenges that comes with all of that.
Since it is agreed that education is a veritable way to fight most of the challenges, what level of education and training were provided for these would-be suitors?
What the governors’ wives must confront first is not the consequences of the bad judgements of their husbands, but the sincerity of their husbands and elite in the region to lift the mass of the people of the region from squalor and misery.
The children of these elite and leaders of the region do not marry unprepared. They are given the best of education and opportunities from all over the world. Yet they tend to create a mass population of people that are readily deployed to serve as their foot soldiers and thugs from among children of the poor and the less privileged, during politicking.
The governors’ wives should tell their husbands to start providing education and technical-know-how to their population and let them marry their choices when they are prepared for that.
And as Governor Yahaya has said “nothing happens without education” and that should be the priority of the governors of the region not mass marriages. They should by now have realised that the problems they create with these wrong choices are not borne by them alone, but the entire nation. How do they consciously continue to create problems for the rest of the nation to bear?
Until these hypocritical northern elite include their own children in child-marriages and mass marriages as well as the almajiri scheme, they cannot convince the rest of the world that these are cultural or religious issues. It’s subservience and subjugation that are the motives here.
