The inhuman burning to death last week of March of 16 Northern youths returning home to celebrate sallah with their families was something more of deja vu than a happenstance. Yet many of us thought it weird that such horror would occur in this country. And because we failed to see it coming we also failed to locate the blame where it belonged. We blamed the Uromi villagers in Edo state who lit the fire that killed those young men and didn’t see the hands that pushed them to go in search of decent life far away from home.
It is understandable that the rush of adrenaline to the head will produce a reaction close to mass hysteria. Intuition rather than reason will determine the course of action to take. That was the case when some Northerners first reacted to the mass murders. Many, without thinking, immediately called for reprisals against Southerners residing in the North to avenge their dead brothers. Northern State governors just managed to stop from exploding in consternation but their call for a “full and thorough” inquiry and for rule of law to prevail didn’t succeed in veiling their anger. “This appalling act undermines the rule of law and the very fabric of our society. It is imperative that the relevant authorities conduct a full and thorough investigation into this senseless act. The perpetrators must be identified, arrested, and brought to justice swiftly,” their chairman Muhammadu Inuwa Yahaya said in a statement.
The perpetrators, who are they? I see immediately two kinds of people. The vigilantes of Uromi and political leadership in the North, the latter with culpability that goes back many decades. Firstly, the Uromi killers. Their excuse was they saw the young men who arrived their community with weapons and “a lot of money” and took them for the “bandits killing our people.” But one thing was clearly not right. The bandits they mentioned attacked mostly at night but the 21 young men who came from Port Harcourt en route Kano State surfaced in the daytime. Secondly, they travelled in a truck owned by Dangote Group, a reputable firm every Nigerian knows. It couldn’t have agreed to carry killers in its truck. Thirdly, the men travelled through Rivers, Abia and Imo States where they were neither stopped nor questioned about the dane guns they possessed because they were licensed. Fourthly, the vigilantes were wrong not to have handed the suspects to the police as the law says. Killing them in a savage manner and burning their bodies was resort to self help which the law considers criminal. This is why they must be fished out to face the law. This is what we expect the Edo governor to have done first before rushing off to Kano to condole with families of the young men killed in his domain.
Now we come to the real killers: the 19 northern state governments. I’m not referring to the present crop of the governors only but all of them who had been in power since the death of the late Premier Ahmadu Bello. They were the ones who fawned the brood of uneducated, vagrant youngsters that Maitatsine recruited his murderous foot soldiers from, the child soldiers that Boko Haram assembled and the band of young bandits and kidnappers that terrorize our communities. They all are the outcome of a failure of governance in our part of Nigeria. When you have over 11 million school age children roaming the streets when they should be in the classroom, what do you think you’re doing? You’re building a potential army of very angry young men who have only one way of directing their energy – against the system that condemns them to a life of vagrancy. Even the very few that are fortunate to get an education cannot find a job at home because the economy is wrecked. The economic success story of the Sardauna era is today one of suffocation and widespread poverty leading to the rising crime rate in the region. The flourishing textile mills and the once very strong regional bank that employed hundreds of thousands of young men all have gone in the wind of bad governance. Now the only “exports” from the North to other parts of country are bandits, kidnappers, hunters and menial labourers that are expendable. The blame should go to nobody but our leaders who measure progress by the depth of their pockets, not the wellbeing of their people. They must take the blame for Uromi and the “fire next time” – which must come.
