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*Embrace national dialogue, harness indigenous languages – ex-MAJA presidential candidate
Ayo Ola
As there are reports of continuation of protests in some states for the sixth day , the Country President of the United Nations Positive Livelihood Award Centre (United Nations-POLAC), Prof. Mercy Funmilayo Adesanya-Davies, has called on the protesters to stop further protest and embrace peace.
There are reports that the protest with the hashtag: #EndBadGovernance and #EndHungerNow continued in some areas in the north and Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
The Professor also appealed to northern elites and politicians to look inwards and harness the power of national dialogue to bring to an end the protest. She further called on them to invest in education and family planning as well as attend to Farming.”
In statements on Tuesday, Adesanya-Davies, also appealed to those organising the protest dubbed #EndBadGovernance and #EndHungerNow and other protesters to kindly accept and obey the appeal of the President to give peace and dialogue a chance by calling off totally the protest.
The former presidential candidate of the Mass Action Joint Alliance (MAJA) in the 2019 election advised Nigerians to harness the power of language by the use of national dialogue to end the protest and embrace peace.
She stated that language has the transformative potential to address Nigeria’s societal challenges, especially the Nigerian indigenous languages.
Adesanya-Davies said: “The streets of Nigeria, north and south, are full of sad children of hunger and daring kids of anger. It is apparently worse in the North. The Almajirai who used to live on leftovers can’t get leftovers again. Everyone who still can afford some food is sticking to rations that serve their hunger. No excess food for excess children. The problem is real.
“Nigerians are very hungry but it appears the North is hungrier. It will be hungry. Because of the choices it made yesterday, it can’t go to the farm today, can’t go to the stream to fetch water; the willing among them can’t go school. When you add mass hunger to mass illiteracy, you get perfect poison. Thunder claps of hunger are celting the stomach of Nigeria and there is no rescuing the afflicted. No country has what we have as street children in northern Nigeria and knows peace. It is not possible.
“Like it happened in France of 1793, we’ve just heard a no for the very influential religious authority in northern Nigeria. The North’s feudal hierarchy, its autocracy and the clergy lost the street. The Ulama lost their command; the emirs lost their mane. The two lethal groups failed to convince the hungry that what they were feeling was politics and not hunger. The result, sadly, is the free reign of terror in that realm. If it was pupils of Muslim clerics that raged into a mosque and sacked the worship house from ceiling to floor, then the mallams should beware. Their domesticated lions have matured; the hungry cats want the wild and the food it offers.”
Adesanya-Davies, thus pleads with the organisers of the protest to suspend the protest and explore a dialogue channel with the government.
He stated that especially in Northern Nigeria; education, farming and family planning are matters of urgency.
Adesanya-Davies said: “I note the demands of the protesters which included: cutting down the size of government and governance; bringing down the price of petrol, food security, fiscal discipline and immediate reforms of the Independent National Electoral Commission and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
“UN-POLAC is an international autonomous institution established in 2001. It was founded alongside the UN and UNESCO, following a General Assembly resolution declaring 2001-2010 as a decade of peace and non-violence.
“UN-POLAC’s Mandate and primary goal is to enhance the effectiveness of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme, which includes promoting peace and security, as well as restoring human dignity.”
Adesanya-Davies alludes, “May I quote Lasisi Olagunju in a publication titled, “Protesters of the North.” He cited examples, “A government ICT centre in Kano was invaded and stripped of all its assets. Children without basic education can’t appreciate computers and their possibilities. There is a lesson there for our policy makers. First things first.
Kaduna’s Governor Sani said more: “If you look at the developmental indices, I made it clear to everyone last week that as far back as 2016 in the northwest part of Nigeria, there was nothing but kidnappings and banditry. We have found ourselves in this problem because of the lack of seriousness of the leaders, including myself.” That was a very candid admission of complicity in the tragedy that has unfurled in the north. Sani added that everyone in northern Nigeria who held a leadership position, including the business community, should reflect on why over 70 percent of adults are financially excluded, why 65 percent of people are living below the poverty line, and why 70 percent of Nigeria’s 18.3 million out-of-school children are domiciled in the north. “That is why, if you look at the protest today, most of the states that participated are from northern Nigeria…” the governor said.
Another instance is, “Kaduna where Governor Sani sits was where the maker of the North, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, sat and made a very sound difference in the lives of his people. Sardauna’s biographer, John Paden, says when Bello was a mere councillor in charge of the Sokoto districts, he ensured that “education was the key.” When he became the premier, he held on to that conviction that the system must run well in such a way that “there was no resentment from below.” Paden adds: “The Sardauna felt that if this system broke down, the whole of the society would break down.” What the Sardauna feared has happened. The system he built has broken down. Governor Sani said so. The fury on the streets of the North is the confirmation.
On Saturday, “Borno State governor, Professor Babagana Umara Zulum, expressed shock over what he called, “The involvement of children in the protests in his state. He said over 95 percent of the protesters were under 14. To him, most of the children were unaware of the reasons behind their actions. He said the situation was “astonishing.” “It’s astonishing to see a six-year-old child carrying a placard. They must have been directed by someone.” Many of the children, he said, were not from Borno State. So, where did they come from? Were the unknown ones from Niger or Chad? The governor needs to tell us.
“How many children of Borno do Borno and its governor know? Some people’s blessings are as limitless as the waters of the Atlantic. Children of northern Nigeria compete with the sands of the desert in matters of number.
Queen of songs, Onyeka Onwenu, died last week; God bless her sweet soul and may her gentle soul rest in perfect peace. With King Sunny Ade in 1989, Onyeka did a duet on life and the need to plan it well. They labelled the album ‘Wait For Me.’ The song suggests that if your loin is virile enough to sire a million children, your hands must be strong enough to make billions to feed them. You can’t have “plenty children” and offload their care to society. The duo sings that a nation can’t have sad families and still be a happy country. They sing:
Having babies, no be joke oh,
You go feed them,
You go give them cloth,
Bring them up too…
If you never ready to carry the load,
Why put am for another person head?…
Plenty children dey, but no food to eat,
Oh my friend, this kain life na so so wahala…
King Sunny Ade and Onyeka Onwenu are not done. They also have these lines which are even more national in aim:
Happy parents, na happy children,
Happy family na happy country…
If you love life, you go plan am well…
The album is 35 years old. Nothing has changed since it was released. Indeed, if you sing that Sunny Ade/Onyeka Onwenu song in the north, you are not likely to escape the sanctimonious sanctions of the leaders there. The singers sang nonsense, they would say. When families are wracked by hunger and anger, a million presidential broadcasts will not make patriots of them. “Happy family na happy country” The streets of Nigeria, north and south, are full of sad children of hunger and daring kids of anger. It is apparently worse in the North. The Almajirai who used to live on leftovers can’t get leftovers again. Everyone who still can afford some food is sticking to rations that serve their hunger. No excess food for excess children. The problem is real.
“Nigerians are very hungry but it appears the North is hungrier. It will be hungry. Because of the choices it made yesterday, it can’t go to the farm today, can’t go to the stream to fetch water; the willing among them can’t go school. When you add mass hunger to mass illiteracy, you get perfect poison. Thunder claps of hunger are celting the stomach of Nigeria and there is no rescuing the afflicted. No country has what we have as street children in northern Nigeria and knows peace. It is not possible.
“Like it happened in France of 1793, we’ve just heard a no for the very influential religious authority in northern Nigeria. The North’s feudal hierarchy, its autocracy and the clergy lost the street. The Ulama lost their command; the emirs lost their mane. The two lethal groups failed to convince the hungry that what they were feeling was politics and not hunger. The result, sadly, is the free reign of terror in that realm. If it was pupils of Muslim clerics that raged into a mosque and sacked the worship house from ceiling to floor, then the mallams should beware. Their domesticated lions have matured; the hungry cats want the wild and the food it offers.
Adesanya-Davies further quotes Senator Shehu Sani’s article yesterday titled, “It’s time to probe ourselves as northerners, after blaming other regions” – Shehu Sani. “Former Senator representing Kaduna North Senatorial District, Shehu Sani, has said it’s time for northerners to look at themselves instead of blaming other regions.
“On Sunday, Shehu Sanni lamented that most public schools are free, yet our young ones still don’t want to go to school. He said, “Many of us don’t want our spouses to work or use their skills or talents to earn a living or contribute to the family. When we die, we leave them as helpless widows at the mercy of a hostile society. “Most young people don’t want to serve as apprentices in workshops or retail outlets because they lack the heart and patience to serve.
“Many parents in rural areas hand over their children to a religious teacher in the city, who depends on the children to beg or steal in order to feed himself and his family. For ethnic, religious, and sectional reasons, we have protected, defended, praised, and refused to hold accountable all our kinsmen who led the country at every wasted opportunity for five decades.
“The bandits and terrorists who kill and kidnap our people, deny our farmers access to their farms, and prevent our children from going to school are not from any foreign country or from the south; they come from our homes and families up north. We worship with them in the same mosque. We used to live together as one region in peace, brotherhood, and love, but then we divided and began to hate ourselves along religious lines.
“We don’t vote for people who will serve us; we vote for those who will provide us with spaghetti and grains. We concoct and spread all sorts of religiously inclined conspiracies to deny our children free health immunization against diseases, resulting in hundreds of thousands of blind, lame, crippled, and deaf children who grow up as victims of polio, glaucoma, or leprosy, begging in northern and southern cities.
“Many of our women and girls don’t have a business capital of 100k but own an iPhone worth N1.5m. They don’t have a capital of 100k but can ‘struggle’ to meet up with a wedding asoebi of 500k.
We deny most of our girls the right to go beyond secondary school due to negative perceptions about higher education. We don’t want our female children to wear uniforms. Whenever recruitment portals for the Army, Police, Customs, Immigration, and Civil Defence open, we don’t want our female wards to apply.
“When our children graduate from universities, especially public universities, most of the parents who attend to celebrate and appreciate their children are from the southern regions. Most of our industries and factories in Kano, Kaduna, and Jos have since closed down when our kinsmen were in power.
Our farmers in rural areas are still farming with hoes throughout the period our kinsmen were in power. The groundnut and cotton pyramids disappeared long ago when our kinsmen were at the helm.
All the spare parts, building materials, and pharmaceutical stores in the north are private businesses owned by people from other regions who were not backed, funded, or supported by any government. When our kinsmen were in power, we attributed our poverty and insecurity to God and to our sins; when our kinsmen were out of power, we attributed our sufferings to the King.
“The FCT is in the north. Can anyone explain why people from the region couldn’t dominate the private businesses in the FCT, Suleja, and Mararaba? Who should be blamed for this?
“God gave us the largest land mass, the largest number of people, most of the rivers, and resources and livestock, and gave us power for the most part of our history. Which of the favours of our Lord can we deny? The North; eighty percent of our problems are ourselves and not anyone ‘outside of ourselves.’”
Prof. Funmilayo Adesanya-Davies,who also is a Professor of Applied linguistics has called on Nigerians, to harness the power of language by the use of national dialogue to end the ongoing protest and embrace Peace.
She appealed to the organisers of the national protest dubbed #EndBadGovernance and #EndHungerNow and other protesters to kindly accept and obey the appeal of the President to give peace and dialogue a chance by calling off the protest.
Prof. Funmilayo Adesanya-Davies is of the Department of English and Communication Art, Faculty of Humanities. She delivered the 57th Inaugural Lecture of Ignatius Ajuru University of Education (IAUE), Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria, on Thursday, July 25, 2024, last week, which was titled: “Leveraging the Transformative Potential of Language on Nigeria’s Societal Challenges.” She says, “National dialogue would certainly work better than protest.”
At the Inaugural lecture, “Nigerians were urged, ‘To create a conducive environment where everyone could access their rights and protections enshrined in the Constitution; and harness the power of Language and Linguistics.” She added, “All evil vices in the country would have to be shunned from corruption to insecurity, terrorism, banditry, that has been leading to retrogression, lack of peace, unity and progress.”
Again, “Professor Mercy Adesanya stated that, “Language has the transformative potential to address Nigeria’s societal challenges, especially the Nigerian indigenous languages,” and she explored the impact of the use of indigenous languages on Nigeria’s societal challenge.”
Prof. Adesanya further explained, “Nigerian indigenous languages are vital to the country’s cultural, social, economic, and political development. Their preservation and promotion are essential for maintaining cultural diversity, improving education, building communities, promoting economic growth and fostering national pride.”
Following the ongoing protest, President Bola Tinubu had in his nationwide broadcast appealed to the organisers of the protest and the protesters to suspend further protest and embrace dialogue.
He said: “I hereby enjoin protesters and the organisers to suspend any further protest and create room for dialogue, which I have always acceded to at the slightest opportunity.
“Nigeria requires all hands on deck and needs us all – regardless of age, party, tribe, religion or other divides, to work together in reshaping our destiny as a nation.”
Adesanya-Davies, thus pleads with the organisers of the protest and the protesters to suspend the protest and explore a dialogue channel with the government.
The Don and President of UN-POLAC noted the demands of the protesters which included: Cutting down the size of government and governance; bringing down the price of petrol, food security, fiscal discipline and immediate reforms of the Independent National Electoral Commission and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
UN-POLAC is an international autonomous institution established in 2001. It was founded alongside the UN and UNESCO, following a General Assembly resolution declaring 2001-2010 as a decade of peace and non-violence.
UN-POLAC’s Mandate and primary goal is to enhance the effectiveness of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme, which includes promoting peace and security, as well as restoring human dignity.
