Koda me kazo (II)

Living in Kano today, and being alive in the world today… that has been one hell of a ride. I am in the phase of life when you realise, or at least think, that you have seen everything, and have heard everything. It was a perfect storm of wonder.

I came of age living in Kano. Maybe it was the rush of living in a city where I am truly on my own under my own roof. I left Abuja three years ago as a newly minted “ango”, a bridegroom that is. Where I lived in Abuja was walking distance from my parents and I was, therefore, still within the orbit of their control, or influence.

Maybe when I get about writing my own memoirs, if I ever get that far along maybe, I will get around to writing how I became who I am living in Kano. In my culture, they say that someone becomes a full man when they are 40. If that is true, maybe that will explain why Nigeria’s early leaders inadvertently left us on a headlong collision course with the emergent spirit of the Nigerian project. After “Buhariyya”, what came forth was not Tinubiyya but what my Kano circle of friends called “Ibtila’iyya” – that is Buhariyya on a steroidal overdose. The sheer context required for this tale alone, which at the end of the day might ring flimsy to many ears I think, might go beyond the word limit I have for this piece, so.

I waited till the next time I am around in Kano to write the second installment of this series. There is something about Kano, and maybe that is what drew people from where I come from to Kano the same way the whiff of fructose draws in the honeybee. I have already been tired out by the pleasantly intractable stereotype of the “Kano-resident”. I now bask on those coattails willfully. I now let people go right ahead and think of me as one of those textile tycoons from Jega living in Kano. The most successful people there are those who cashed out big time in Kano.

Yar’adua’s mother: Abdulsalami visits Katsina

Obasanjo, Sambo, Osinbajo, Zulum condole Yar’Adua’s family in Katsina

My friends and peer relatives would accuse and laugh at me at the same time because I have been transformed into a “Kanonian” man-of-the-people. Apparently, everyone who speaks the western Hausa dialect in Kano is called a baSokkwace and the baSokkwace is supposed to be a witless cretin. I found that humorously amusing, and I am guilty of using that to my advantage. Conversely, in tri-state Sokotosphere of Sokoto, Kebbi and Zamfara, they find people from eastern Hausaland haughty and arrogant. I was very demure and introverted before Kano, but apparently, I am quite confident and assertive now.

God help me should I ever make the mistake of absentmindedly throwing in the few slangs, orthologies and morphologies of the western (Kano) spoken Hausa I have picked up while in Kebbi or Sokoto. “Ko da me kazo an fika” – that is the title of my profile on the phone contacts of one of my friends in Kebbi. I would be mercilessly mocked and made the butt of every hijink for the rest of the day.

I wanted to write about what made Kano special for me. I will spare you the long and winding tale and cut to the chase.  The tik-tok and mishmash of what made me what I think I might have become is the outcome of everything that defines me. My experiences so far, my interactions and sociological consciousness so far, the epiphanies I have had so far come from the spring that led me to where I am so far, having the amusing stories I have being a clueless baSokkwace privileged to live on the fast lanes of Kano for three years, and living every bit of the life I have lived so far up till this moment and knowing the people I know. I have forgotten some things and have remembered others.

And who I am today is someone who is now conscious of the greater responsibility and expectation on me than on some of our First-world peers. We once had some of those as part of the so-called “Kano Circle”. While every move to us must be scheduled and calculated, strategic in a make-it-or-break-it type of way if we were ever serious about any objectives, those people could always afford to wing it. We were Africans and they were European, American and Japanese.

At some point, some of us never had a lot of faith in things we did with this lot. For a long time, they were considered guests being entertained – guests being waited on to get tired, pack up and leave so we could get to work. But one thing led to the other and before we knew it, we were deep with work all together.

The pressure in us, a lifetime of grooming by late parents, mosque and church elders, teachers and psychological pressures from the realities of our identity simmered so much it could tear us apart. When ideas are discussed, we only went along with them, still sure that their breaking points were around the corner. But these ideas were almost always fleshed out in bounds and leaps, and courtesy of the frantic Chinese soft power grab and of course the restless African forward heave, some of these ideas sometimes threaten to be grand successes.

It is the end of an era for the Kano Circle. I am the last of us to leave. This circle is now the nucleus of an entity that will soon be launched formally as a think tank. Insha Allah, our focus will be the development of a culture of long-term thinking: the mission is the contribution of substantive ideas to public debate while fostering new, viable policy networks. The vision is a knowledge-value revolution and that will essentially entail closing the circuit between the exponential energy potential of the African, Nigerian blank canvas and the catch-up effect of industrial macroeconomics.

This circle will now be known as the “Kano Circuit”.

(To be continued)