In one of our secondary school English textbooks in the 1970s, we read about a New Year message that the old schoolmaster Tai Solarin wrote on January 1, 1964. He wrote, “I am not cursing you… May you have a hard time this year. May there be plenty of troubles for you this year! If you are not sure what you should say back, why not just say, ‘Same to you’?
Tai’s wish for a rough New Year was not as cruel as it seemed. His belief was that life is not a bed of roses and overcoming tough situations was needed for success. I have no personal knowledge of what conditions in Nigeria were like in 1964. I however feel that if Tai Solarin had lived through this outgoing year 2020, he would have thought twice before wishing for his countrymen to have a rough New Year.
A year rougher than 2020 would be hard to imagine. There have been epidemics in the past, but the world’s last pandemic was 100 years ago in 1918. There have never been lockdowns in most parts of the world, with wholesale closure of offices, factories and markets, grounding of airlines and trains, empty hotels and restaurants, collapse of tourism, suspension of major football leagues, closure of schools and overwhelmed hospital spaces. The last time that our schools in Nigeria closed for this long was in 1936, when they closed for a year due to a CSM epidemic.
It is not beyond the human mind to imagine and carry out the most senseless atrocity, but we do not expect any rough New Year package to exceed Zabarmari in sheer cruelty and senselessness. The heads of 67 beheaded farmers placed on their bodies; it is enough to melt every heart except perhaps Adolf Hitler’s and Pol Pot’s. Nor Tai Solarian rough New Year package should include Kankara, the largest mass abduction in Nigerian history, surpassing even the records of Chibok and Dapchi. Kankara, however, had a happier ending. Still, it was a national trauma that even Tai will not envisage in his rough New Year package.
A second economic recession in five years. Nigerians were still struggling to shake off the effects of the last recession when we plunged into this new one. Ok, it was precipitated by pandemic and lockdown but since a new pandemic wave hit as 2020 drew to a close, must it be part of a 2021 rough New Year package? Instead of coming out tougher and wiser from rough patches, as Tai Solarin hoped, Nigerians actually emerged from them weaker and less wise, as the #EndSARS protests’ aftermath showed. The Yola man who drove away a tractor in the name of palliative; the Lagos youth who ran away with the Oba of Lagos’ staff of office; Ibadan youths that ran away with motorcycles from a senator’s house; the Abuja civil defence officer who joined looters and carried a bag of rice through a garden, were those the lessons that Tai expected us to learn from rough patches?
I don’t think Tai Solarin, who was a stickler for quality education through his Mayflower School, envisaged a university lecturers’ strike lasting nine months, continuing even after the lockdown ended. The rumour in 1979 was that had Chief Obafemi Awolowo won the presidential election, he would have made Tai the Minister of Education. That was why Archbishop Olubunmi Okogie rose in arms against Awo because Tai did not believe in mission schools or religious education. Could he have believed in a nine months’ strike, and paying people their salaries for all the months that they refused to work, whatever their reasons were?
I do not wish Nigerians a rough New Year. My wish is for a New Year without pandemic, lockdown, recession, kidnapping, insurgency, banditry, Zabarmari, Kankara or prolonged strikes.
A boarding pass for 9 years
Just when I thought that there had been enough painful deaths in 2020, two more persons who had an impact on my childhood departed recently. One was Alhaji Usman Faruk, former Military Governor of the old North Western State. I was in primary and early secondary school when Faruk governed our state. My family lived just across the road from Government House in Sokoto. On many occasions we went into his Government House to retrieve our peafowls which flew into it to join Faruk’s large flock of fowls, geese and guinea fowls. When another military governor arrived in 1975, soldiers stopped us from retrieving them.
My younger siblings were also regularly invited to Faruk’s family residence on Saturdays to watch film shows staged by a Ministry of Information Landrover. There was no television in Sokoto in those days. Luckily, Alhaji Usman Faruk wrote several books, including his autobiography, From Farmhouse to Government House. In it he told the story of how he was nearly eaten by a hyena when he was left in a farmhouse overnight to guard the farm from monkeys that often dug up the planted seeds in the rocky Pindiga area.
Five years ago, I received a phone call for the first time from Alhaji Usman Faruk. He never knew the impact it had on me. I who, as a primary school kid, lined up the road and waved flags in 1971 as Usman Faruk passed through Jega on his way to present a first class staff of office to the Emir of Yauri. Days before he arrived, folks from all over the district took chicken and eggs to the Sarkin Kabin Jega’s palace to feed the Military Governor. Here I am, now talking to him on phone!
In 1975, we used to cross the road from our secondary school to an old Health Centre, venue of the sittings of the Justice Usman Mohammed commission of inquiry that probed Usman Faruk’s tenure. The most sensational corruption allegation then was that a Ministry of Works drilling rig bought by the North Western State government to drill boreholes across the vast state was sent to Gombe, where it drilled a borehole in the governor’s farm. The rig was not stolen; it returned to Sokoto. Compare that to what happens these days.
A week after Alhaji Usman Faruk, former Grand Khadi of Niger State Sheikh Ahmed Lemu passed on in Minna. I first knew Malam Ahmed Lemu in Sokoto in 1970. My siblings and I had arrived in Sokoto for the holidays from Jega, only for our father to immediately send us to attend the Islamic Education Vacation Course that Lemu and his British wife, Bridget Aisha, organised at the Arabic Teachers’ College. There was one class for primary school pupils and another for secondary school students. After only two days in the primary section, Malam Ahmed Lemu personally promoted me to the secondary section, perhaps because I had memorised his entire book, The Young Muslim. We were taught in the secondary section by Lemu and Sheikh Sulaiman, a Saudi Arabian.
Around the same time, I used to accompany my father to the Islamic Education Trust [IET] office along Kalambaina Road in Sokoto. Sheikh Lemu founded it; my father was the Treasurer. They used to meet on Saturdays, perhaps once a month. Mrs. Bridget Lemu later became principal of Government Girls College, Sokoto and was famous for her disciplinarian ways. They relocated to Niger State after its creation in 1976 but both of them had made such a big impact in Sokoto.
In 2011 when President Goodluck Jonathan appointed him to head the presidential panel that probed the post-election violence, some people insinuated that it will do the president’s bidding. Sheikh Lemu replied that at 82, he had already collected his boarding pass and was waiting for his flight [to the hereafter]. The flight was delayed for nine years. May Allah grant Faruk and Lemu Aljannat Firdaus.
