PART I 
A few weeks ago, Kaduna
State governor, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, delivered a bomb, and its
shrapnel ricocheted all over the media and the oil industry. It was at a
lecture organised by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative
Journalists. No stranger to controversy, the governor suggested that
the NNPC should be dissolved. It had become a cesspool of corruption,
and splurges close to half of its receipts on itself.
The speech caused quite a stir at the
Sheraton Hotels venue, and later all over the country. As a discussant
at the event, I intervened that such a prescription was rather sweeping.
The problem, I contended, was not NNPC, but us. If we scrapped the NNPC
and formed another corporation, we ran the risk of reincarnating the
scum.
NNPC did not materialise out of MARS.
The leeches in its entrails are Nigerians. We need to purge Nigerians of
our greed and impunity and set a standard for transparency before
deciding on what step to take on NNPC. If NNPC dies from an official
poison, we can bury it without instilling a new set of values. But it
will be like a real-life pastiche of a movie like Jaws. The monster is
killed, and a respite ensues. But in a cistern below, a little monster,
its child, is born.
It was a feisty debate before an
audience of journalists, technocrats and practitioners of oil. The
governor acquitted himself well as a master of broadsides.
What struck me about his suggestion was
its parallel with a step he had just taken in his home state of Kaduna.
He had banned the almajiri from the streets, and he promised to construct a colony for them worthy of their dignity.
The beggars kicked, and they did not beg
the governor. They lashed at him for taking what they regarded as a
high-handed step against an invaluable asset to the society.
The irony was not lost on me. Within a
week, he had taken a stand against two major heavyweights. The one, the
NNPC, was temporal, and the other, the al majiri, spiritual. The NNPC represented money and the flashy lifestyle, bread and butter. On the surface, the almajiri
represent bread and butter. But they are rooted in the faith of Islam,
and they began as apprentices of clerics sent out to proselytise the
ways of Allah and peace. They have morphed over decades as mere
mendicants in the eyes of many. But those who understand their history
and culture see them as integral to society’s conscience of charity.
So, El-Rufai slammed the NNPC for its
spiritual rottenness. In this regard, he wore the toga of a priest. On
the other hand, he took on the almajiri as a materialist, wearing the toga of a man of the flesh.
In both cases, he had good reasons. In
the case of NNPC, he ribbed them for corruption as a spiritual cesspit.
In the case of the almajiri, he wanted to save them to save the
society. He contended that Boko Haram goons were using the boys as
couriers of bombs and death without knowing it. So, if they were out of
the reach of the goons, the society will have its berth of peace.
The almajiri protested and they are appealing to a right often ignored by constitution mongers: the right to beg. Again, the story of the almajiri
calls to mind the African classic novel, The beggars strike, by
Senegalese writer, Aminata Sow Fall. It is the tradition of the power of
the open bowl. In her novel, an official bans beggars and consigns them
to a colony, just as El-Rufai proposed. Just as in the Kaduna case, the
beggars protest. In fact, the city dwellers miss them, and line up in a
long queue to give charity to the beggars. I am sure many in Kaduna,
who had done good to the al majiri, are happy to have them
back. Also in the novel, a holy cleric warns the government official
that if he does not have them back on the streets, he will not rise to
the post of vice president.
That is the dilemma of begging. It
became a case of the beggar becoming the nemesis of their tormentors who
must beg them to keep his career.
That, essentially, is the threat from
the Kaduna beggars association. Their leader, Abdullahi Jugunu, an
ebullient and visually- impaired figure, has become an instant celebrity
as an exponent of beggary. He said almajiri lined up behind
him and used their resources to fight for El-Rufai’s electoral victory,
and that the diminutive governor had promised to appoint a special
assistant on disability.
He argued that they did good to society. That was the premise in Fall’s novel. They said many gave zakat,
and it was essential as an article of faith. German writer Karl Kraus
once wrote that “there are people who can never forgive a beggar for
their not having given him anything.”
Begging is necessary, according to the
thesis, because charity will vanish without them. The givers need the
blessing of charity. It is a spiritual need. Even the Bible says those
that give to the poor lend to God. The almajiri, I think,
created a problem for El-Rufai, whose profile in politics rose with some
of his actions as he ascended the throne. He has appointed a blind man,
Mallam Aliyua Salisu, as special assistant on disability, and without a
wink or nod he has allowed the almajiri back on the streets.
That is where governance collides with culture. How does the governor handle the use of the almajiri
as couriers without touching the sensitive button of faith and the poor
as a class? Just as the beggars in Fall’s novel threatened to puncture
their tormentor’s career, Jugunu railed that they would support his
impeachment. It was life imitating art.
It also shows how an organised lower
class is more dangerous than upper class resentment. The NNPC
dissolution may not have been easy if, perhaps, a Buhari dissolves it.
But to flush out such a group as the almajiri takes a lot of
guts. It is like standing in front of a wave. El-Rufai, never naïve in
matters of politics, knows when politics flashes danger signals. Now he
has to hope and pray that Boko Haram does not hit a market, a school, a
prayer ground, etc. It is ironically a smaller headache than having the
army of beggars erupt. Shakespeare knew that beggars are never meek. In
the play King John, a character roars: “whiles I am a beggar I will
rail.”
In fact, beggars are dangerous because
they organise themselves in bodies, and they have nothing to lose. Their
leaders are usually fierce. Jugunu may not have the devilry of the
beggars’ leader in John Jay’s play The Beggar’s Opera and its adaption
by Bertolt Brecht in Three Penny opera. Both plays take jibes at the
hypocrisies of capitalism, which I noted when former Jigawa State
governor, Sule Lamido, cynically turned the almajiri into a class of official charity.
The point though is that beggars are
everywhere in the society, and the worst are the drones who parade the
vaults of power. They offer nothing but cart away billions. NNPC was
their charity. Some of them go to banks, take loans, never pay, buy jets
and laugh at us from above. Those are the beggars we need to flush out
first. They help sustain the almajiri system by not allowing us
focus on how to mate merit to industry. Soyinka’s play, Opera Wonyosi,
also adapted from Jay’s Opera, mocks both executive and plebian beggary
in Nigeria.
Perhaps El-Rufai the priest will now
focus on NNPC. But he must first deliver the sinners and not point the
way to hell, a la dissolve NNPC. He is one of four governors assigned to
look at the maggoty edifice. We are waiting for a sustainable solution.
Meanwhile, the almajiri exercise their right to beg.
PART II
I was already contemplating this second instalment of my last week’s comment when Sani’s broadsides hit the news waves. I expected something new, sudden and even rigorous from his cerebral mind. He has been a mainstay of the civic battles of the North and has managed to present himself as a fighter not only with dignity but also for the dignity of others.
We recall with gratitude his interventions in the tempestuous days of Boko Haram when they hoisted flags and burned towns and slaughtered human flesh and skewered virgins. He earned the people’s right and other Nigerians’ nod in his election as senator.
But his words on El-Rufai’s policy on beggars reflect what happens to men when they swivel from activists to partisans. They lose the virtue of evenhandedness and fall into temptation. He said El-Rufai’s policies were anti-people, and the governor had decided not to appoint his (Sani’s) loyalists in office. Cutting bureaucracy, bringing faith rather than fraud to hajj, pruning expenditure and other El-Rufai policies cannot amount to anti-people policies.
I expected his take on the almajiri issue to come with the candour of detachment and reflect legitimate logic. But the partisan wars between him and El-Rufai will unveil in the coming years. But my concern here is the almajiri hobgoblin.
The El-Rufai take brings to mind the crises of change, and the way we effect change determines whether it works or not. It invokes Wole Soyinka’s play, Death and The King’s Horseman, a play some critics regard as the best work of his career. I think differently though. But it is a matter for another day. In his introduction to the play, the Nobel laureate ribbed commentators who reduced the theme to a “clash of cultures” and he described them as lazy. He, however, saw his work as embodying various themes relating to the tension of transition, and that is how I have seen that great play of audacious experimenting, poetic flourish and luminous characters.
In the play, the royal is on his way from the world of flesh to paradise. A seductive beauty entraps him. So paradise can wait.
Whether it is decadent or draconian, societies are often unwilling to accommodate the demands of change. That is why sudden revolutions are bloody and often fail. The French, Chinese, the so-called revolutions of the Europe in the mid-19th century did not rise up to the idealisms of their foot soldiers and dreamers. The American Revolution was not a revolution in the sense of the others because they sought to own their country. The others wanted to overthrow even the magna carta. Garibaldi. Bismarck. Cavour. Metternich.
So El-Rufai had his heart in the almajiri’s place when he wanted them off the streets. He had done something exemplary in Abuja as minister.
But in Kaduna, his action was too sweeping. But everyone, including Shehu Sani, should cavil at today’s incarnation of the almajiri. Ironically, it was the clerics who started it that bastardised it. The almajiri were not supposed to beg when it started in the Borno area many decades ago. They were supposed to be scholars. Jesus sent his disciples out to preach. He asked them not to go from house to house for sustenance. But they should remain in the place where they had food and shelter.
The universal beggary of today’s almajiri is an abuse of its original concept. I visited Kaduna a few years ago and studied the system and even spoke with then governor, Namadi Sambo. It was clear he was thinking a policy of gradually getting the boys of the street, and his predecessor also had begun a programme that his wife pursued as an NGO after they left office. I visited one of the schools in Kaduna devoted to some of the boys. It was a full boarding school with laboratories, libraries, etc. Some of the students told me they dreamed of the professions. Pilot, teacher, engineer, etc.
The modest gains then had started attracting some almajiri from outside Kaduna.
It is therefore fraudulent to say that the policy of al majiri does not need expunging. What El-Rufai needs is a strategy of containment and elimination. I also observed that a northern state alone cannot deal with the issue. It is not a Kaduna problem. It is a northern problem rooted in its feudal history. First politicians, then Boko Haram recruited them.
As El-Rufai has noted, they are bomb couriers. Calling them suicide bombers is to incriminate them. They did not know the evil they committed.
The children would rather be an El-Rufai or Shehu Sani than a Jugunu who leads the colony of beggars. That was the shortcoming of Aminata Sow Fall’s novel, The Beggars Strike. It does not interrogate the morality of the priests and almsgivers. If we want to give alms today, we don’t need the almajiri on the street to sate our spiritual cravings. What are the babies’ homes for, the house of the blind, deaf, disabled? What of the scholarships that we need to give to many indigent ones in our midst, and the hospital patients, etc. Such giving ennobles. To give to the al majiri is to stunt their dignity. Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi shows no sympathy for the head of the colony, and his play looks at both the street and executive beggary. Also, John Jay’s Beggar’s Opera and Brecht’s Three Penny Opera excoriate a capitalism that enriches a few and exploits the poor.
It is the hypocrisy of the wallet against the bowl. The rich and mighty endorse begging out of naivety. The western society found a solution by creating the welfare state, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War when more than half of Europe was flirting with communism. The Marshall Plan created a first crutch, and a well-organised system to cushion the weak followed.
In 16th century, Holland broke out of the hold of Spain when the leaders, including William of Orange, gave their party the symbol of the wallet and the bowl. They had written a petition and a senior Spanish officer said to the woman representing Phillip 11: “Fear not madam, they are nothing but beggars.” The so-called beggars overthrew Spain and reclaimed their country. In the novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo writes an evocative chapter of the revolt of the vagabonds, including beggars and the lame to mock an insensitive society. We have to save and integrate them before they rise. That is when revolutions are sudden. Even if they fail, they carry cargoes of blood and death and years of pain.
So to effect change, it has to be gradual, not the sort of wholesale style of El-Rufai. Yet he needs our sympathy for confronting a great wrong to a generation and a scar on our conscience. The whole North should approach it in concert and as a conscience.
Ref: http://thenationonlineng.net/the-right-to-beg/ http://thenationonlineng.net/the-right-to-beg-2/
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