By Henry Uche
Governor Abdullahi A. Sule of Nasarawa in this interview on Channels spoke on various issues
What is very critical to your people that you need to start doing?
One is education. One of the biggest problems we have in the North from the day I came is idea of education, and the one we are still pushing on. When people actually don’t have education, don’t have the education, don’t have the economic empowerment, these people will continue to behave the way these almajiris actually behave during this protest. So, education must be taken seriously in the North, we must be honest with one another. We must face one another and say, sir, marrying so, so and so, number of wives, having so, so and so, number of children when you cannot even take care of yourself, is wrong. No religion actually is promoting that. No religion is allowing that.
So Quran forbid irresponsibility, marrying wives and not catering for them, and allowing the children out of that wedlock to go on the street and start begging.
No, no, no. Islam does not allow them. Islam does not agree with them.
So, it’s important for you to educate the people.
It’s important for our tradition. That’s why I say our religious leaders should be part of our meeting. You know, you see the people are misusing the title of this almajiri. I’m an almajiri. Almajiri is just a student. If I’m sitting with somebody, like Professor Pantami, I will call myself his almajiri because I’m a student. I’m not as learned as he is.
But there are some other people that will say with me they’re my almajiri, so almajiri is just being misused as a title; somebody seeking education, Islamic education, so it is not necessary. It’s not not a beggar.
So the almajiri system that was created is actually a good idea?
Wonderful idea. But it has collapsed, long time ago.
So we need to go back to it?
No no, we must not go back to that particular one. What I’m saying is that, from the beginning, let us educate ourselves. Hey, China educated itself to say that you can have only this number of children. Okay, yes, they are not Muslims. They are more Muslims in India than in any country in the world. But they are following some of these Islamic teachers. But they are following some of these Islamic teachers. They don’t follow some of these things that we are doing. In Saudi Arabia, if you go, majority of the people have only one wife.
So our people are misguided?
I don’t want to use any wrong word: misguided or misinterpreted this and that, but I’m saying we need to be educated by our religious leaders. We need to rise up: The traditional rulers in northern Nigeria, anybody, including our governors, including the people, everybody.
It’s a time to declare a set of emergency in the northern region of the country.
Well, I don’t know if that’s the right word to use, but I’m saying that we must work. We must wake up as leaders, and do what we think is right for this country and for our region. Our region is good in agriculture, everyone of us should go back to the field. And I’m saying, if anybody is criticizing, we have started. For me, the background is there. When I was a group managing director in Dangote, I managed Savannah Sugar Company in Newman, I managed the Tonga Sugar Company. I was, in fact, the chairman of all the companies that are producing sugar in the country. So, I’m very familiar with agriculture. I love agriculture. I have my personal funds. But today, for Nasawara State, we have 5000, we are going to do our first harvest. You know, for rice, we have 5000 hectares that we have cultivated. Our first harvest is going to be end of October, early November, and so we are not just going to be talking. We have to show it.
Some governors may be doing more than myself, because they have more land probably, than I do. And those are the kinds of things. So we need to educate our people. We need to be serious about the almajiri system. We need to do agriculture. We need to do all this. And the money is there.
The urgency of now in the northern region of the country, number of out of school children has gone from about 10.3 million to 18 plus million
As far as education is concerned, education is free at the primary school level, but these are the kind of people that are not interested in going to any primary school. It doesn’t matter what you do. Majority; 90% of these alamajiri that you see in Lafia here are not even from Nasarawa State; they were brought from other states, in search of, according to them, education, Islamic education, and they spend most of the day actually roaming the streets. So, that’s what I’m saying, that we must go back, as governors, and revisit the idea that we had, what was the idea that we had then 2020, that it was Covid; these children were going everywhere they could actually contact Covid. Nobody cared about them because you see, their parents brought them and dropped them in Nasawara to fend for themselves. They don’t know what they eat, where they sleep, what clothes they wear, who takes care of them. They don’t know; they leave them in the hands of the teacher. The teacher himself cannot feed himself, so he sends him out to go looking for food. Those are the kinds of challenges that we are facing. So, I’m saying that this we must must face as a people and be honest with each other and resolve them. We are doing everything possible as far as education at the baseline level is concerned. We are accommodating the number. We are building more primary schools. In fact, we just attracted another school, the police secondary school in the state. We are building more and more of them in the villages. We are building even some of the primary schools for the Fulani, you know, call them full Bay Primary School. We follow them into the bush. We build some primary schools for them. That way we can get them educated, and things like that. But the problem that we are facing is not necessarily with our own Nasarawa State indigents; they are citizens of more or less people that were brought somewhere in search of education. You asked me a very important question earlier on, which I didn’t answer.
Almost 9 million were added to the out of school children in a decade, what could be the cost?
Because we have continued to actually have more families, more birth. Let me tell you, I just got back from India. India’s population was about 800 million people, less than the 1 billion in China, because India has no control about birth like China. India has now moved to about number one position, with a population of almost twice when they used to have about 1.4 1.3 in the streets of Mumbai. So, the problem is, India is also looking at some of those things. It is because of birth. When you are giving birth, and your rate of giving birth to people, it’s less than the people dying, you will come across this.
Can we criminalize and even arrest parents who gave birth to children and allow them to roam streets?
Well, I think they should be educated first, and I don’t want to take a very hard-line now, before people will misunderstand what is happening. But there is need for people to understand their responsibility even according to the teaching if Islam. It’s not right to give birth to a child and throw him away in the streets and all your responsibility on that child you are not doing that. They need to even ensure that people are educated. The number of women you marry, your responsibility as a husband to that woman, feeding her, her education, her clothing, her health and the rest of them. So, it’s important that we get people educated first. It’s easy to marry, but more difficult to take the responsibility of marriage. So those are the kind of things I believe we leaders, need to sit down and look into our eyes and say, how did we come to this point? How do we solve this problem? Is it by criminalizing it, or by what? You know I grew up in the military time. There are people who do things as they want, no restrictions.
Can we go back to arrest parents and pick those children from the streets as Ganduje was doing?
If you don’t have education, you won’t do much. During the COVID-19, I was very vocal about this, that these children we must take them back to their states of origin so that we can connect them back to their parents. They need the love of their parents, this and that. And we did. To Katsina, to Yobe, and the ones for Nasawara from Kaduna, they brought them. Let me tell you, the moment this was relaxed, maybe they were angry, the number of almajiri became double of what we used to have. Maybe they were punishing me to say, since you don’t want us here, we send them more. I think the idea is about education, you can take the ones in the street today back to school; believe you me, by tomorrow, you see another set in the street. So until we go to the foundation of the problem and solve it, it doesn’t make any sense to do what we’re doing right now and solve the problem now. Because they will bring another trailer of almajiri at night and drop them. In the morning, you see them. It’s an issue for us as governors of northern region and invite all the major stakeholders; everybody must be involved in solving this problem. Then we move forward.
Political leaders in the North are responsible for all the problems besetting them, where do you start from?
That’s why I started by telling you about the interview with a senator two days ago. When he said it’s time to use the mirror. And I think that’s why we are using the mirror now. We can’t continue like this. For instance, if there is less development in a particular state in northern Nigeria, you cannot continue to blame Mr. President or to blame any minister, what are we doing? It’s not just about the governors, it goes down to traditional lenders, community leaders, and parents, as I mentioned to you that parents who gives birth to children that they cannot take care of, just drop those in the street, you can’t blame anybody for that one. The blame game is all the way through, that is why I said we must look at one another in the face, this is my own role in the failure, this is your own role of failure, how do we go about solving it. I love what the governor of Kaduna mentioned recently, that all the leaders of this and that are responsible for our failure. With due respect, I’ll say all of us, including us, including the followers because we all must accept our responsibilities and pick it up from there and then move forward. That is my view.