Feeling eerie driving from Kano to Katsina

You are dead wrong if you think this is a travelogue! I know that just seeing and reading those three words – driving, Kano and

Katsina in the title of this piece, you must have thought it was time you sat down relaxingly to read what this chief indulgee has to say about travelling from Kano to Katsina. No, this is not a travelogue and I am very sorry to have to disappoint you at this highly charged political period of our mortal existence.

Yes, these are charged political times! And, indeed, at times like these, you’d wish, especially if you were apolitical, that this cup truly, does pass over you, indeed! Perish the thought though! The cup can never pass over you or anyone of us out here or  there. It has water inside and, the way it is, it must be spilt as it travels along on its way from nowhere to somewhere (excuse the pun, it’s the way of our world – making up words, trying so hard to create meaning. It’s our life, isn’t it? And that’s in no way an attempt to do a Dr Alban (the Swedish of Nigerian origin). Remember, he it was who once disturbed our airwaves on radio and during musical video sessions on television with that song: “It’s my life …It’s my life, my worries… it’s my life”).

But if you are very political, as an expression of the opposite of the word apolitical, then you must either be in one of two moods right now. With both the All Progressives Congress (hereinafter referred to as the unofficial opposition party – since this is not a two-party state, the type that military president, Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida tried to wish into being during his long years of maradonic rule when he awarded contracts for two gigantic political party offices to be built in every local government for the two parties he decreed into existence; as there are other parties) and the Peoples Democratic Party (you’ll think this was like a socialist/communist party, until you meet or read or hear about the people that have gathered around and inside it in the last sixteen years and have been governing this country in all that time) ready to square up in next year’s general elections, having gotten their primaries out of the way, there are now two moods pervading the entire space that we occupy.

You know how it is. Failure is an orphan; only success has space to occupy. So you are either feeling like an orphan or beaming with those things they call ear-to-ear grins.   

So, here were the outcomes. The old never-say-die Army General (you know what they say about soldiers – once a soldier, always a soldier; but once you are a General, then you are a General for life, always with troops to command), General Muhammadu is going to fly the flag of the APC against the incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan, the man from Otuoke, who went to school without shoes. Now, there isn’t going to be that story to use anymore. We all know now how people without shoes govern a country when they are lucky to find themselves in position to do so.

This is going to be a real fight to finish presidential election – but I believe that Nigeria will be better for it, either way. And that’s because Nigerians are going to step out and vote wisely. Let the real presidential campaigns begin! Let them begin so we can hear those who want to govern for the next four years say what they want to do and how they want to do the real transformation that this country needs and deserves.

The reason is not far-fetched. There’s a lot going down in this country nowadays that you can’t help but be amazed and concerned. You see, a few years ago when the Niger Delta was on the fire set by militants and militancy, the situation was troubling, very troubling. But that militancy was of a kind that appeared well articulated, even though there were many who did with it, like tends to be done with many things in this country, what is well regarded as a kill! Yes, that’s exactly from the phrase, “making a kill”. And you can trust that Nigerians are good at making kills, especially those kills that line their pockets and make the world really look like it wouldn’t stop but continue on its unending round robin.

But the narrative of the Niger Delta, its militancy and militants, was riddled with bomb blasts (targeted, I dare say, to inflict maximum economic damage on the Nigerian State, which was refusing to listen to the demands of the militants, for a reasonable share, for the region, of the wealth which was coming from its grounds – fair enough, I bet you’d say); and then kidnapping. These twin actions by the militants, I mean the particular actions that were meant to draw attention to the cause, did not really stop the region from having a ball. Bombs were not thrown at churches, for instance, or fun spots where people gathered to have a drink. If they exploded anywhere, there was always an economic attempt to make a statement with it. People travelled about in the region. I must have gone there a few times in those hey days, but never with a thought in my head that I was endangering myself.

However, last week, when my friend, brother and colleague, Bashir Hassan Ibrahim, went and arranged a session chairmanship for me at a workshop in Katsina, he sent the shivers down my spine. You know how certain things just hap on you and you begin to wish that you can visibly fall sick so that the person knows, seeing you throwing up, that you just can’t do this. From the time (three days before) he told me to when I got on the plane to first travel to Kano, I wished something would happen that would make me not to be able to travel. Tried as I did, it didn’t happen. So to Kano I flew.

I got to Kano and we had to travel by road, one and a half hours, to Katsina. From when we left Kano and began to really feel like we had left the city, an eerie feeling took over me. When we drove past areas without human existence, my heart jumped into my mouth. I kept imagining these different kinds of ‘militants’ jumping out of the bushes to do us harm, the type of which we have read a lot about and seen many pictures of what they left in their wake. When we seemed to be approaching a checkpoint, I would ask Bashir to slow down so we can be sure of the people manning the checkpoint. And you need to imagine how even more eerie the feeling is when you see all sorts of uniforms, apparently of both military and para-military personnel manning the checkpoints and sending even more chilling feeling of danger further down the spine! It’s not that you are afraid to die; it’s just that you don’t think you should die in the ways that you have read and been told about!

May 2015 and its politics usher in something much more befitting for this country!       

PHILLIP ISAKPA