The General Secretary, Conference of Autochthonous Ethnic Nationalities Community Development Association (CONAECDA), Dr. Suleiman Sukukum, in an interview with ISAAC SHOBAYO, speaks on the recent violent protests against bad governance in the northern part of the country. Excerpt:
THE #Endbadgovernance protest took place in different parts of the country but assumed dangerous dimensions in the northern parts of the country, precisely in the North-West and North-East where both government and private properties were vandalised. In your own perspective, what is responsible for this?
I wouldn’t be able to say categorically that this is the reason it became violent, but I think those people who were actually behind the protest… some of them had that as part of their premeditated intention. It is not as if the violence just happened. Some of them already had this in their minds. Our youths who issued an earlier communiqué indicated that they had discussions and had been engaged in discussions with certain youth groups who had indicated their intentions to go violent. That was one of the reasons why they decided they were not going to be part of it, even though they knew that there are genuine concerns of hunger in the land and genuine concerns about insecurity of which our communities, of course, have been at the larger receiving end.
There are also the issues we have been warning about. We have stated several times for many years that hunger is going to come because our people are not able to farm, and many of our communities, of course, are not able to produce. So, coupled with other factors, these are also part of the contributing factors. So, I think that those who planned the protest had it in mind ahead of time to go violent; so it is not as if the violence just happened.
Some people see it as a protest against the government…
(Cuts in) In our opinion, I don’t think this is the case. The hunger is there, but it is not just the hunger because people were flying the flags of Russia. People were flying flags and people were calling for a violent change of government by the armed forces and things like that. I don’t think that it is just hunger alone.
Looking at the number of people that came out for protests in the North, many of them are minors, underage children. Don’t you think this should be of concern to the elite, especially the governors?
No,… but what do you mean by the North? That is a question you need to ask yourself. If you say the North, are you talking from Kwara to Sokoto and from Taraba to Maiduguri? This is because most of our communities have indicated they were not going to actively participate. Here in Jos, most people did not go out. Just a small group of people led by the former minister came out. If people in Jos had come out for a demonstration, it would have been a different story. The few other people that came out around Bauchi Road were miscreants who attacked people. There were no major demonstrations on the plateau. They were just making noise on social media.
But when you go to the fringes of what is called the Middle Belt, states bordering the far North, like Kaduna, where you have the Hausa and the minority people, and in Bauchi, in Gombe—these are the largest places within the Middle Belt where we had significant demonstrations. The major places where people came out demonstrating were largely in Sokoto, Zaria, Kaduna, Kano, Zamfara, and Katsina. These are the places where people came out in massive number, and those are the places where most of the destructions took place. In Abuja, from the reports we have, most of the original inhabitants of Abuja did not participate in those demonstrations. You see, they were largely carried out by a mixture of some of our people from the South who are condemning bad governance, coupled with the large numbers of people from the far North who were there. But the majority of our minority people did not participate.
The reason they did not participate is not because there is no hunger, but because there are already clear indications that these things will only lead to violence. And we have lost so many lives and so many properties. I think you need to make a distinction in what you mean by that. There were many underage children. It is typical of all the violence that has been taking place in the North. Whenever there is any ethno-religious violence in the North, whenever there is religious violence in Kano, most of those who carried out these acts are youths and/or young people. Older people hardly come out to participate, because, by age, they begin to reason and they don’t get involved. So as they grow older, they don’t actively participate.
But looking at the people who have rioted since 1992 in Bauchi, it is always a mixture of underage children who are not under the custody of their parents and the youths that are there. It has always been like that. Nothing has changed. It has always been there. But you see, there is a big problem in the North that needs to be addressed: the population bulge. In the far northern part of the country, it is higher than the population bulge in other parts of the country. And this population bulge has ideological, religious, ethnic, and political reasoning behind it. However, it does not meet with a commensurate plan for those children being born to be educated, trained, and skilled. If you choose to have a very high population birth rate for whatever reasons, which I don’t support, but I cannot say people should stop that, there must be a commensurate developmental strategy and plan to train them, give them skills, educate them, and provide employment for them.
And I can tell you, all available data from the international community on Nigeria has shown that this is a time bomb. The drought you have seen of hunger is just minimal. It will increase because most of these children have not been taken care of by their parents. They are, let me use the word, unemployable in any meaningful way. They are unskilled, uneducated, untrained and undisciplined. So how do you deal with that kind of situation? Of course, as I said, the problem of hunger is everywhere, but the situation in the far North is worse. It is worse because these are children that, even when you want to intervene, it is difficult to do so.
So, if the government increases salaries based on the minimum wage, they are not going to benefit from it because they are not employable. If the government decides to give them conditional grants like Buhari was doing, for how long will you do that and how sustainable will that be? And the population just keeps increasing. How much will you keep giving these people for doing nothing and moving around without going to school or acquiring the necessary skills? The ancient Almajiri system is not even working the way it used to because, in the early days, as they were being trained, they were also made to farm.
They farmed the lands of the mallams. And later on, as they were in the Almajiri system, some of them learnt trades. They learnt how to do one kind of trade or another. So they left with Islamic education and skills. Now they do not get any skills.
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