You may not know what droved Emir Muhammadu Sanusi
II to depict the ugliness of our society in the open. Before his ascension to the
throne, the Emir might have been speaking as a private citizen, from a detached
position, with no contact with the real tragedy.
It is anger. It is pain. It is the deluge of human
tragedies reaching him as a royal father. Daily, he sees supposedly normal
humans do silly things. Daily, he sees incredible cases of irresponsibility. The
radical, militant stances he took will make sense to you if you take a deep
reflection, or imagine yourself in his shoes, or you experience one or two
scenarios. One nearly feels like justifying the Emir’s action but for the
channels, means and ways available to him.
The problem is deeper than we assume it on the media.
It is sad and painful to admit, but our society is an eyesore and in terrible
mess.
Of such irresponsibilities I have learnt recently is
a man who divorced his wife for not dropping at his sister’s after visiting the
area. Another man wanted to take a third wife through government-sponsored
marriage, beat his wife with a fracture in her hand. He already has two wives
living in different tenements. Feeding is no picnic, so also tenement paying. The
first wife, who was beaten, did not object to his new marriage but argued that as
pre-requisite for his marriage he should first of all assume his role as a
father and start paying the school fees of his kids.
In a society full of people who can barely feed themselves,
this man’s story is not the worst. Given a chance, each one of you can narrate thousand
and one stories that will sure eclipse this.
I have hard time with the idea of being rough to
women. Perhaps people who are willing to give up their male privileges and who can
feel shocked upon hearing disgusting words said about women, or nasty action done
to them, naively believe in the dignity of women. Someone asked me if I could
wake my wife up and ask her to do things for me. Oh, you mean like a dictator?
No, God forbid I become a despot or tyrant. Marriage is a partnership, not
acquisition. We shall work and earn a deserved respect. But the painful thing
is that women, even those who have been to colleges and universities, are made
to internalize their oppression.
Emir Sanusi overlooked other great tragedies of
human stories. What he overlooked is the plague of beggars and madmen in our
streets. And the loss of young adults and adolescents to drugs – wasted humans,
wasu sunci kai, wasu sunci rabin kai – largely due to parental failure.
When state failure is glaring, hopes must shift to community
and individual. But we are confused. Maybe used to seeing the ugliness of our
society made us internalize it and see it as normal. All that the Emir asked is
a move along with time, that women need education to live a decent, dignified
life even in marriage. For nothing, you need education to be a citizen of the
21st century.
Lack of ambition and total confusion stand the
society out. People lack techniques to survive the challenges of our time, they
make almost no effort to acquire them, and when they suffer, they relate their
suffering to God. That is the real tragedy, because if they know that their
condition is unnatural, there can be hope of making effort to act on it.
The way people relate their suffering to God often
makes me wonder: Has God hated us so much that He tests us so harshly than anybody?
Blaming everything to God is simply a cunning way of avoiding responsibilities.
Like believing that poverty is a good virtue. Or it is a sign of piety that
will endear you to God. By being content with bare existence, one can see that
there is something that kills ambition in our people.
We give birth to children and dump them to the mercy
of luck and auto-pilot. As if we don’t really believe that we need good life
for our sons and daughters. We fail to understand the simple fact that the more
educated a boy or a girl becomes the more chances of better life, and the
chances of swatting off irresponsible partners.
If your ancestors passed through a tragedy, and
generations after them passed through similar challenge, like persistent female
and child mortality, divorce and other social issues, and the same trend tends
to befall you, then there definitely is something wrong. You have newer knowledge
and techniques and newer, quicker access to them than your ancestors. For that,
your ancestors should look at you admiringly and wish they were you.
Twenty-First century does not require only the
ability to read and write. It needs more sophisticated techniques to enable one
to solve complex human problems. The challenges facing humanity are blind to
color, gender and belief and demand uniform skills from everyone. The reason why
every child, male or female, should be educated. But the saddest thing is that
in the next fifty years there would be some kids who would not be able to
attend school as their parents do not attend today.
Who loses if the status quo remains?
Many may mistake Emir Sanusi’s new stand as cowardice.
Their assumption cannot be dismissed outright. Careful observation, however,
will reveal that the Emir’s stand is born out of a mixture of resignation and
lost of hope in our people. But he does not lose if the status quo remains.
Northern governors and their elite enablers do not lose; they are in fact
beneficiaries of the hatch and breed system of the commoners’ kids that will
swell the numerical strength of their votes.
The Emir was rightly indignant and tuned down. There
won’t be rapid changes as he hoped for in a place where the visionless outweigh
the visionary. It will take a very long
time before most people become aware of the horrible consequence the Emir is
seeing now.
The sad reality in our society today makes it
necessary that focus must shift to the self. Influence those who can still be influenced to
get away from the grip of tyranny and exploitation.
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