The failure of northern political leaders to borrow a leaf from Governor Nasir El-Rufai’s model of legislation which criminalizes begging, street trading and 10-year imprisonment of parents who allowed their kids to roam about at school hours is at the heart of the crisis. Without that, northern Nigeria will continue to contribute to Boko Haram militias, terrorist Fulani herders and functional illiteracy, as exemplified by IG Ibrahim Idris who cannot communicate in public. The failure of the Nigerian union is the inability or (sheer) selfishness of our leaders — past and present — to evolve a country where every part or section of the society can take care of itself. The APC and President Buhari government can easily redeem the system by making education compulsory at all levels and by ensuring that illiterates like IG Ibrahim Idris have no business in holding public offices.
[dropcap]N[/dropcap]IGERIA is in for collateral crisis of unimaginable proportion if the video clips of the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Ibrahim Idris tweaking in the social media is to be believed.
The video clips depicted where IG struggled and labored to read from a prepared speech in vain, even with the help of an aide in an audience in Kano State at a forum set aside to address the insecurity in the country. Nigerians can now understand why I wrote earlier that the IG Ibrahim Idris is deaf and dumb.
Kano State for Ibrahim Idris represents a land of fortune and disgrace. It was alleged that Mr. Idris owned his sudden promotion from Commissioner of Police to Inspector-General of Police as a result of manipulation of President Muhammadu Buhari’s 100% electoral victory in that state in 2015, where none of the registered voters either traveled or died!
It was alleged at the time that the fallout from the Kano 100% of two million votes for President Buhari which didn’t go down well with the Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), late Alhaji Munkaila Abdullahi who was roasted in his official residence along with his wife and two daughters was at the heart of Mr. Idris’s compensation for a job copiously executed.
Some neighbors, who declined to be named then for fear they might be harassed by the police, said the fire was strange, and suggested the police should not consider the incident an ordinary one.
But Mr. Idris — being the Commissioner of Police, dismissed the allegation then as untrue: “today (yesterday) at about 4.30am, the policemen on guard duty at the official residence of the Kano Resident Electoral Commissioner, Alhaji Munkaila Abdullahi located at 2 Sir Kashim Road observed a fire emanating from split air conditioners in the sitting room.“
What was not in doubt was that the official residence of the late REC is 500 meters away from Government House and 10 meters away from the heavily fortified security checkpoint in front of the official residence of the Assistant Inspector General of Police in Zone 1, Alhaji Tambari Yabo.
One incontrovertible fact was that Mr. Ibrahim Idris was swiftly promoted from Commissioner of Police to an Assistant Inspector-General of Police and then appointed IGP, an inordinate process that cost twelve brilliant AIGs their jobs.
This is not the first time IG Idris would be exhibiting stark illiteracy. Mr. Idris’s sterility came to the fore at the Senate confirmation section in 2016 where his hollowness was exposed as a man whose appointment was meant to pay back previous good done to the appointing authority.
Strictly speaking — on that occasion — Mr. Idris brought the Bachelor’s degree in Agriculture from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria and Bachelor’s degree in Law from the University of Maiduguri into disrepute, altogether.
As a product of quota system, Nigerians are not sure that the IG of Police couldn’t read from a prepared speech or directly engage the audience. It’s the wickedness of the northern Nigerian political leadership who deliberately, disgracefully and, of course criminally lowered and destroyed the standard of education in a bid to hold the country down.
The problem of educational backwardness in northern Nigeria goes to the core of acceptance of stupidity both by the leaders and the denizens who conspired to lower the mark for them to pass exams in a competitive society where everyone operates on the same plain.
This is the time every Nigerian and the global community should rise up and admonish fraudulent northern political leaders and charge them to stop thinking that something is wrong with the intellect of the northern child or their learning ability.
The northern youths should know that anybody who tells them they are not good enough is not doing them a favor. Anybody who tells you that you do not have the capacity to be the best that you can, isn’t doing you a favor.
But the travesty is when a government deliberately conscripts misfits like IG Ibrahim Idris into high public offices. The point that must be made is that the northern kids are intelligent and smart God’s creatures who have been terribly shortchanged by their heartless psychopathic leadership who are gradually becoming victims of their own wickedness, now seeking outsiders’ help.
The northern political elites shouldn’t think they’re doing the northern children any favor by lowering the standard of education. Rather, they’re creating educational mess in their part of the world so that those kids should not have hope so as to use them as a ready army for political proposes.
It’s pertinent that President Buhari’s administration has to step up to the plate and confront this inferiority plague which debases the northern child to the point of saying I cannot learn or do the right thing as a result of my sub-humanity.
The second-hand education or absence of it manifested when none of the kidnapped Dapchi secondary school girls in Yobe State could not communicate or write in English language! More tragic is the fact that 90% of the 12 million Nigerian children of school age who are roaming the streets and bushes according to UNESCO statistics are from the north.
The failure of northern political leaders to borrow a leaf from Governor Nasir El-Rufai’s model of legislation which criminalizes begging, street trading and 10-year imprisonment of parents who allowed their kids to roam about at school hours is at the heart of the crisis.
Without that, northern Nigeria will continue to contribute to Boko Haram militias, terrorist Fulani herders and functional illiteracy, as exemplified by IG Ibrahim Idris who cannot communicate in public.
The failure of the Nigerian union is the inability or (sheer) selfishness of our leaders — past and present — to evolve a country where every part or section of the society can take care of itself. The APC and President Buhari government can easily redeem the system by making education compulsory at all levels and by ensuring that illiterates like IG Ibrahim Idris have no business in holding public offices.
Erasmus, a Public Affairs Analyst writes from Lagos. Email: ikhideerasmus@gmail.com. I invite you to follow me on Twitter @ikhide_erasmus1
