Maiduguri
November 17, 2002
Once upon a time, I hated travelling and my hatred usually began at the motor park.
No sooner than you had arrived at the park, a swarm of touts, thugs and thieves would surround you and attempt to pull you in different directions. ‘Kano, one passenger left’. ‘Come this way, come that way’. ‘This car, please’. ‘No, that one is better’. ‘Bring your bag, master’. ‘Here… there... this way…that way…’ The passenger was literally torn into pieces and feasted upon by the touting sharks and crocodiles.
In the motor park, the gentlest of passengers is often forced to be thuggish. Even as it has frightened me, the motor park has always fascinated me as a social laboratory of the urban milieu. As you enter the park, you notice all sorts of characters and several elements of human interaction reflective of the city.
In this relatively small social space, pedestrian religious preachers (who condemn, forbid and sentence people to hell fire according to their whims) share space with the petty and even the not so petty thieves and riff-raffs. Now you see a mentally deranged man walking about aimlessly or ferociously chasing provocative kids and ‘bus conductors’. Then you see the ‘bus conductor’ (who was moments ago jesting at the ‘mad man’) brazenly nibbling the pea size breasts of innocent hawkers.
Here you see a ‘doctor’ hawking all manner of medicine for all sorts of diseases and there you see a sick man or woman using his/her sickness as an excuse to beg. In the motor park, sickness is an asset, bringing money for both the doctor and the patient.
The all-knowing motor park ‘doctor’ reminds me of our miscreant adventures with roaming traditional herbalists on the streets of Maiduguri in the good olden days of the 1970s. Then we were in secondary school and bubbling with youthful exuberance. Idling away during holidays, we would often call these herbalists and ask them whether they had medicine ‘to cure the disease call geography or chemistry or physics’. In their stupid way, they would reply; ‘Oh, geographia, mugun chuta’, here is the medicine to cure it’. We would challenge them on and on and they were never short of medicines to cure our imaginary ailments.
In the motor park as in city streets, one often wonders who is mad and who is sane; in this environment, everybody experiences his obligatory, daily moment of madness.
As the muezzin is calling for the noon prayers, others are busy exchanging blows-cheered and jeered by a group of spectators. The group that has just returned from prayers (and declared its belief in Allah and disbelief in all falsehood including magic and magicians) stands by to watch the magician perform wonders reminiscent of the magicians of Pharaoh before their repentance.
Magic then and now has always been alluring but utterly fraudulent. It is even not surprising if, during the prayers, the Imam had recited the eternal Qur’anic verses related to the falsehood of magic and magicians: “What they have faked is but a magician’s trick and the magician thrives not (no matter) where he goes” (Ta-ha: 69). In the motor park, even the most tenacious of believers may be lured into a tormenting moment of disbelief.
Nigerian politics shares many things in common with the sociology of the motor park, especially the thuggery and violence that goes with it. The very language of politicking in Nigeria is one in common with those of thugs and touts. In recent years, politicians and their supporters are fond of using campaign slogans such as ‘Sai Bukar’, ‘Sai Ali’, ‘Sai Modu’, ‘Sai Fanna ‘Sai this’…Sai that…’ This language of insistence negates the basic and pristine principle of democracy, namely the freedom of choice among alternative parties, programmes and candidates.
By excluding the possibility of choice among alternatives, the voter experiences a sense of compulsion and the whole democratic space becomes constricted. The language of electioneering campaigns and the slogans crafted to market candidates all show some portrayal of Motor Park culture. If the language of electioneering campaigns is thuggish, the campaign rallies and procession are boorish and violent.
The processions are often disorderly and noisy like the motor park. A rag tag army of children, youth and cheer ladies often accompanies a few seemingly responsible politicians. The children and youth often dangle dangerously like wild monkeys from cars, buses and race roughly on motorbikes.
Many of these youth have been known to die in this wilderness only for their patrons to jet out of town the next day. The campaigning politician, like the leader of a teenage gang, proudly waves his forlorn hands, all the while spraying his acidic smiles across the streets in the midst of all the hoopla and lawlessness exhibited by his so-called supporters. All that can be heard are noisy drums, curses, and jeers, cheers, cheap cliches, praises and discordant flutes.
I sometimes watch these politicians with a sense of pity for their moment of madness. More often than not, however, I disdain their exploitation of the people’s ignorance and poverty-two conditions the Nigerian political class (both military and civil) has deliberately manufactured over the years to circulate them in power. There is little wonder that this once prosperous and promising country is now one of the most corrupt and therefore, also one of the poorest in the world.
Nigerian poverty, unlike the poverty of many other nations, is poverty created out of wealth, a manufactured poverty. Nigerian poverty is socially manufactured and politically distributed. The raw material from which the poverty monster is created is the vast wealth of the nation. Its treasury is being brazenly looted in broad day -light by a tiny class and the rest of the nation, especially the youth, is reduced to white and blue-collar beggars. Majority of the people is forced to eat sand while seating on a heap of gold.
The politicians recruit the youth, the pillars of society but also the most vulnerable to the manufactured poverty, as their thugs and touts. Politically, the youth and children, as it is often said, are the future leaders. ‘In much of politics as in much of all else’, argues Massey (1976:1), ‘the child is the father of the man’.
What needs to be added, though, is that, they can also be society’s present and future nightmare. They can be vanguards of positive social change or villains destroying democracy. They can be heroes or hydras. Nigerian politicians would rather use the youth to destroy society. The recruitment and use of the youth as political thugs across the country directly undermines the contribution of this vital group to the cause of democracy and good governance.
In Borno State, for example, such youths have earned a notorious name as ‘ECOMOG’. Every big politician in the state has a private ‘ECOMOG’ army. These motor park politicians drug the hungry and ignorant children of the poor to achieve their selfish political aims. In their vileness, the politicians regard the recruitment of the youth into ‘ECOMOG’ as a form of employment and the remuneration include a drug allowance!
This, indeed, is not really surprising in a country where the only known industry is government and the government is simply the personal fiefdom of those in power. These politicians are not different from motor park touts. They are inhuman and not worthy of any leadership position.
I am not aware of any politician who has enlisted his or her children/siblings in his/her ‘ECOMOG’. Members of ‘ECOMOG’ have been known to harass, maim and kill at will, including settling matters of petty bedroom politics. Across the country such private armies abound in the form of ethnic militias like the OPC, the Egbesu Boys, the Igbo Youth Movement and so on.
Democracy is the very anti-thesis of violence and therefore, political thugs and their patrons are villains of democracy and good governance. Indeed, there can be no free and fair elections in an atmosphere of Motor Park -type madness, violence and thuggery.
The campaign rallies do not differ significantly from the usual motley of wretched crowd watching a snake charmer or other types of magician in a motor park. Nigerian politicians share many things in common with the motor park magician. Surrounded by the usually noisy and empty-headed supporters (and this can include pickpockets and other riff raffs), they promise to deliver the impossible and keep mute on the essential and the possible.
Many of them would talk aimlessly and shout useless praises of self-glorification for hours on end without addressing the fundamental problems of the people-water, education, health, agriculture, youth unemployment, housing, roads, security etc. They would pour torrents of personal invectives on their opponents rather than offer any constructive criticism.
One such young politician in Borno state, seeking to destroy the excellent legacy of the nationally acclaimed chairman of Konduga Local Government, Alhaji Kaka Mallam Yale, on a campaign to the village of the latter, Yale, sought to convince the people why they should not vote again for their son. ‘What has he done for you?’ ‘How many people have built brick houses in this village?’ ‘How many people have bought cars’ etc. etc.
Like a soothsayer or an astrologer in a motor park, the young politician did his best to win the gullible crowd by employing hypnosis rather than by addressing the more fundamental problems of their community. In their induced stupor, some of the motor park like crowd walked away drowsily and momentarily convinced by the political magician and blind to all the developmental efforts of Alhaji Kaka Mallam Yale.
This young politician reminds me of a Hausa drama I watched many years ago. In that drama, a politician was shown during an electioneering campaign promising to deliver ‘fura da nono’ directly through peoples’ water pipes, into the comfort of their homes. This is in a country where water hardly flows from the taps. So much for motor park type politics!
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