“Your great power lies not in your surface but deep within your being.”
—Roger Mcdonald
By Omoniyi Salaudeen
It’s a season of joy in Hon Alhassan Ado Doguwa’s country home in Kano. All things are working together for good for him. This past week, the lawmaker representing Tudun Wada/Doguwa Federal Constituency of Kano State welcomed into the world a new baby girl, putting the total number of his children at 28, while he is still counting.
For those who are not too conversant with the record of his activities in the Green Chamber, Doguwa has severally demonstrated a gift for comedy depicting an unusual character; unusual to the point of eccentricity. Eccentricity is often associated with genius, intellectual prowess, or creativity. Depending on the character involved, it is also associated with what could be considered as signs of insanity, especially in a bizarre manifestation of absurdity or irrationality.
Doguwa’s sense of humour is manifestly out of the ordinary. And for that ostensible lifestyle, he has become a reference figure in the House of Representatives partly because of his idiosyncrasies and partly for his sense of humour. You often find his eccentricities amusing rather than irritating.
Exactly two years ago, on January 30, 2020, to be precise, he carried his tragic-comedy drama to a level of national embarrassment when, like a Platoon Commander, he marched his four wives in successive order into the Hallowed Chamber to prove to his colleagues that “he is a powerful man” both at home and in the parliament.
In doing so, he presented the innocent women to the whole world in the image of what the Yoruba would call Alabodo, a derogatory word for “good for sex only.” While showing them off to the chagrin of the lawmakers, Doguwa disclosed that God had blessed him with 27 children, aiming to hit 30 in no distant time.
Hear him: “Mr. Speaker, I will let you know that with me today here are my four respected wives – he called on the women to rise. Mr. Speaker and Honourable Members, I have asked them to rise to respect the House on behalf of my family. One other reason is to let you know that when members call me a powerful man, I am not only powerful on the floor of the House; I am also powerful at home because I deal with four wives. These four wives have produced 27 children for me and I’m still counting.”
Consequent upon the theatre of the absurd, Doguwa had presumably intensified regular discharge of his nocturnal duty in the ‘order room’ in accordance with the family arrangement or his personal preference to meet his target. The result is the newborn baby girl being celebrated by his family and other well-wishers. And he must have been inundated with torrents of goodwill messages from across his Senatorial District and beyond.
This is even more so that there is no known cultural or religious inhibition to the marriage of many wives in his part of the country. But beyond the comic relief, the scenario interrogates a genuine understanding of developmental challenges confronting Nigeria as a nation and the North in particular.
It was the deposed Emir of Kano, Muhammad Sanusi 11, who took the campaign for socio-cultural re-engineering of the Northern region upon himself, alerting the people of the dire consequences of marrying many wives and bearing children that were largely thrown into the streets to fend for themselves. He told the authorities the bitter truth and caught the anger of the state establishment.
Whether the campaign sank or not, whether he lost his traditional title or not, the figure of out-of-school children remains highest in the country.
Analytical statistics for 2021 put the number of school dropouts in Nigeria at 12, 320, 529. The bulk of this figure is from the North.
According to UNICEF, one in every five of the world’s out-of-school children is in Nigeria, stating that the education deprivation in northern Nigeria is driven by various factors, including economic barriers and socio-cultural norms and practices that discourage attendance in formal education, especially for girls.
For the Northeast, about 2.8 million children are said to be in need of education-in-emergencies support in three conflicts prone states – Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa. In the Northwest, 35 per cent of Muslim children only receive Quranic education which does not include literacy and numeracy.
The projection for Nigeria’s population is even more staggering. By 2050, it is forecast that the population in Nigeria will double, reaching over 400 million people. Isn’t that alarming? Yet, Nigeria has a large but predominantly unproductive population that’s growing at a faster rate than its national output. At present, Nigeria’s annual GDP growth rate averages 1.9 per cent, while its population growth rate is 2.6 per cent per year, resulting in a negative per capita income. As of February 2019, an estimated 91 million Nigerians were said to be living in extreme poverty and there is clear evidence that the figure is on a steady increase with the adverse consequences of the economic policy of the Buhari administration.
With all of these, development indices for Nigeria present a bleak future as the nation ranks 157 out of 189 countries in the 2018 Human Development Index – a UN tool that measures achievements in key dimensions of human development.
How much of these issues had Doguwa brought to the attention of the parliament before he took the National Assembly by storm with his wives to demonstrate his eccentricity? Ordinarily, these are the basic fundamentals that should engage the minds of lawmakers to show the seriousness of a nation that cares about the future of its youths. The country has been unable to maintain a trajectory of improving economic development not only because it’s been unable to provide the education needs for more school-age children, but also owing to the fact that its productivity is far lower than the rate of population growth.
Whether now or in the future, all of the children produced in Doguwa’s “baby factory” will need security to stay safe and be alive. But how would he guarantee their safety when there is no plan for the looming population explosion? They will need access to qualitative education, healthcare delivery, basic infrastructure, and services, such as roads, bridges, water supplies, electricity, and stable food supplies. No magic can make these things happen without planning. In the final analysis, all this shameless show of power and affluence will boil down to vanity.
Alhassan Ado Garba, a First-Class Graduate of Mass Communications from Bayero University Kano, is one of the few crass opportunists who have lived parasitic life on the government. Since he took a plunge into politics immediately after his graduation in1992 when he was elected into the House of Representatives on the platform of the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP), he has never tried his hands in any other thing outside of politics which has now become a goldmine for many political jobbers. He is currently serving his fourth term in the lower chamber of the National Assembly.