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Danjuma Musa
“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”
– Maya Angelou
There is an obligation to rebuke the Adara Development Association (ADA) for its incessant assault on truth, its failure to work for the collective good of all, and for constantly behaving like it has been wronged more than it has wronged. The ADA has become notorious with its fictional narratives and propensity for disinformation. Because the ADA leadership is detached from reality, it has failed to realise that its manifest actions pose a serious threat to the very people it claims to represent. The embarrassing shortsightedness and unwillingness of the very vocal minority of the Adara community to engage the Kaduna State government and other stakeholders in a constructive spirit to address the security issues that have turned the area into the new theatre of war is baffling.
On November 14, 2019, the ADA, which has acquired notoriety for its hardline Adara nationalism, wrote a scathing letter to Governor Nasir El-Rufai asking him to stop with immediate effect the “reopening and reconstruction of Kasuwan Magani Market,” due to what it termed unaddressed issues that are of “grave concern to its people.” The issues, in a nutshell, are: the “widespread criminality and dastardly attacks in Adaraland, the scrapping of Adara Chiefdom, the portioning of Adara community into two, the subordination of our people in Kachia LGA under a proposed Kachia Chiefdom, the subordination of the predominantly Christian population in Kajuru LGA under a tiny minority Muslim population in Kajuru Emirate, and the refusal of government to engage with or at least be sensitive to the concerns and feelings of the community in anyway during this dark period.”
Before the issues raised by the ADA are addressed point by point, it is absolutely important to state that the Awemi Dio Maisamari-led ADA is rabidly and instinctually irredentist and lacks the capacity to appreciate how its actions or inactions affect not just the Adara people he claims to lead but the entire state. More perplexing is that the Adara seem oblivious of the fact that the indigenes-versus-settler war has been tactically shifted from Kafanchan and Zangon – Kataf to Kajuru LGA. The Adara are the new canon fodder in the war against so-called “settlers.” It is also rather surprising that the ADA prefers to dwell in the tumultuous past that is vehemently opposed to peaceful coexistence, which goes to show that it has learnt nothing, in spite of the catastrophic consequences it has suffered due to its several ill-advised positions.
Kaduna State, like most other states, has security challenges. What makes that of Kaduna State more challenging is the fact that it is a gateway to several parts of the country. Kaduna State is bordered by Zamfara, Katsina, and Kano to the north, Bauchi and Plateau to the east, Nassawara to the south, Niger to the west, and Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, to the south-west, which explains the huge security challenges especially on its Abuja, Birnin-Gwari and Southern Kaduna borders. The only difference is that, while it is very convenient for victims of banditry in Southern Kaduna to allege genocide or portray the attacks as a “war on Christians,” the victims in the Birinin-Gwari axis have not been raising their voices like the Adara/Southern Kaduna people do at the slightest attack, but even when they do they have not attracted sympathy because the attackers are presumed to be their fellow Muslims. Assuming without conceding, that Muslims are behind the attacks, the fundamental question would naturally be: why are they attacking their fellow Muslims in the Birnin-Gwari axis? Isn’t the attacks an indication that the bandits are more concerned with looting than they care about religion?
The ADA is being economical with the truth by claiming that the attacks on its people have persisted, when in fact they have abated, because the Ministry of Internal Security and Home Affairs has been up and doing in ensuring that the menace of insecurity is brought under control. As expected in every human society, there would be minor skirmishes, disagreements, like we have had several times in the past. But, thankfully, the recent ones haven’t boiled over. Even the cold-blooded murder of Mujtaba on November 10, 2019, by suspected Adara militia in Chibiya town has not triggered the usual retaliatory killings, due to proactive intervention by the government and the cooperation of leaders from the affected communities.
The ADA is obviously not comfortable with the prevailing peace the Kajuru LGA Area is enjoying, which is why it is busy crying wolf where there is none and is hell-bent on fomenting trouble by demanding that the market that is the source of economic survival of its people and which was only reopened after due consultations with stakeholders be closed down immediately. ADA has confirmed clearly that it is out of touch and only uses the people for its narrow politics of hate.
It is a known fact that the ultimate agenda of the ADA is the relocation of the historic Kasuwan Maigani Market from its present site to Kufana, the ancestral headquarters of the Adara, which explains why the ADA has continued to tag the market as “Hausa market” and is fiercely opposed to the N2.78 billion redevelopment of the market by government in order to tackle the underlying factor behind the persistent crisis, which is inadequate shops for those who want to trade. Like El-Rufai rightly observed, “contentions over the location of markets and access to them have been implicated in the legacy of violence that has blighted some of our communities.”
The various commissions of inquiry reports that are the working documents confirm this fact and have provided the governor with the way forward,considering that the crisis always eventually assumes sectarian/ethnic dimensions.
The post-conflict assessment of the 2018 Kasuwan Magani crisis further convinced the Kaduna State government to frontally address the market issue due to its centrality in all conflicts. It consequently embarked on massive redevelopment of markets as a strategy of attacking the root cause of the various crisis that the state had witnessed and as part of the administration’s programme of promoting equal opportunity and economic development of the various communities. For instance, the new Kasuwan Magani will have more shops than can be occupied in the near future and will every sense be a model market with modern abattoirs, police post, clinic and fire service area, in compliance with health, safety and environment regulatory requirements. This is the market that the ADA wants the government to stop, so that another crisis can break out!
On the issue of Internally Displaced Persons, with the restoration of peace, those who were forced to abandon their homes due have been helped with cash and building materials by the State Emergency Management Agency and the Kajuru Council to go back home. Coincidentally the first camp to be closed is the Adara Town Hall located in Sabo in Kaduna metropolis, which had become a cash cow for the ADA leadership, a scam on which they were feeding fat on.
