Prof Nok: Symbol Of The ‘Real’ Struggle

BY FRANCIS DAMINA

Growing up as a child, I noticed how impoverished we were in Southern Kaduna, and like the Athenian philosophers, I would often asked questions. For instance, I was amazed at to why the Hausa-Fulani people were economically better than our people who were always hard working in the farms? In my immediate village in Ikulu Chiefdom, for instance, only the ‘Hausa’ people owned buses and trucks used for transportation. They were equally owners of grinding mills. Every morning and evening, our mothers carried firewood on their heads, sometime from long distances like Bakin Lamba, Tintim, Fadan Ikulu, Gukwu, Gidan Bako, etc, to sell to Hausa women in order to have the little money that would eventually determined our  next meal. The little amount of money left would also be used in purchasing soap, medicine, among other essentials. The wood sold on Fridays and mostly on Saturdays, would also determine the amount we gave to God as offerings on Sundays, depending if there was either a mandatory collection or a mini-launching to meet up with some parish demands.

I can’t also forget that at harvest seasons, only the Hausa-Fulani people had the money to buy our goods which they themselves determined the prices. I suspect that this is still happening, especially to our God-given ginger, with people coming from far away Kano to determine the price. Was it our school fees that were not paid from what we sold to them? Even our girls were always in a hurry to fall in love with them. At least, they were sure of sticks of suya, especially on market days. Little wonder, many girls of our sisters abandoned Christianity and got married to them. Some of our sisters who later abandoned our religion ended up becoming more Muslims than the Muslims themselves.

In the year 2000, I listened to a lecture, delivered off-the-cuff, by then Rev. Fr. Matthew Hassan Kukah, now Bishop of Sokoto Catholic Diocese, to the CARITAS of Kaduna Catholic Archdiocese. He said something like this: Apart from the United States of America, no empire had the highest concentration of slaves that the Sokoto caliphate had. Every emir was expected to take no fewer than a thousand slaves annually to the caliphate.

“And these slaves”, he categorically said, “were not Muslims since in Islamic Law, one cannot enslave a fellow Muslim.” I felt as if a needle had passed through my head. Before that day, I had heard, through moonlight stories told by my grandparents, how they suffered as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Hausa-Fulani in Zaria. This left a thought of “we” and “them” in me, especially as these stories still explain the rationale behind the alienation and impoverishment of particularly the Southern Kaduna people.

In 2005, I came across a book entitled, ‘The Folly of a Nation: The Zango- Kataf Crises in Perspective.’ The book edited by Fr. Philip Gaiya, is a compilation of articles written by academics of Southern Kaduna origin in defence of their kinsmen against injustices by their local oppressors and their acolytes in the Zango Kataf crises of 1992. Without a newspaper or a radio station, Frs. Kukah, Bagobiri, Gaiya, Bakut, Mr. Francis Mutuah, and the late HRH Yusuf Bungon, among others, deployed the southern owned media to tell their story in defense of the fundamental rights of their people.

It is almost 26 years since the Zango- Kataf debacle, and 18 years since the advent of democracy that promises freedom and equality for all. It is amazing to know that those issues that made us raised eyebrows against each other in the past are still very much preserved in our mental archives. What is evident is the national call for the restructuring of the country. And only some few weeks back, the Southern Kaduna people, officially joined the fray in a conference they had at Hamdala hotel.

Today, there is a myriad of instances and structures that quickly remind one that there is a large chunk of our yesterday in our today. Posterity, I think, will ask why the uncritical nuances in infrastructural development between Malali or Ungwan Rimi in Kaduna North that is predominantly Hausa-Fulani, and Sabon Tasha or Narayi in Kaduna South that is not? Only yesterday, I was in a business centre where students were applying for admissions and employment, but most of them would not be identified as being indigenes form of Zango Kataf Local Government Area. The reason is obvious: the Zango crises where many Hausa Fulani Muslims were killed. In the Ivory tower, especially the Ahmadu Bello University, for instance, there are stories of how academics were denied privileges; and even what they merited, because of either where they worship or come from. The case of the late Dr. Sylva Manti Ngu, an accomplished teacher of Public Administration in the ABU, quickly comes to mind, among others. Some of them, like Ngu, rejected the professorial title, insisting that it must be backdated. They simply saw it as “an administrative sin.”

Though Nok unstoppably became the youngest Professor in ABU, his predicament came in a different form:  He was twice denied the oath of office after he apparently emerged the vice chancellor of the institution twice. Commenting on it then, Ngu said: “The recent experience by Professor Andrew Nok ‘who spoke with the strong accent’ of Nok, from Southern Kaduna, an erudite scholar, a highly reputable publisher, and one of the internationally highly esteemed rare gems in the academia, was recently denied occupancy of the office of the Vice Chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in favour of the present incumbent, Professor Abdullahi from Katsina State of Nigeria, under the disguise of ” consensus candidate “( not ” us” or ” namu”?).

Indeed, this is the experience of many from Nok’s axis with the young not excepted. But as a consummate scholar deeply steeped in humility, gentleness, integrity, contentment and a natural instinct to serve, the late Professor, as Ahmed Yahaya Joe said, didn’t protest the apparent injustice. And this might be a peeping hole into why he, to the amazement of many, accepted to serve as a mere commissioner. He saw the position not for what it was; but as an opportunity to render service to humanity at home. Not long ago, Nok himself told me: “el-Rufai is my childhood friend with whom I bonded well.”

As childhood friends, he recalled: “I usually left Ungwan Rimi to his house, as he also did. So we know each other very well.” That was Professor Nok. Like the late Yakowa, he hardly forgot his friends and was ready to render help each time they sought for his services despite the difficulties of the perennial interreligious suspicion. And this is the kind of environment that the incumbent Governor Malam Nasir el-Rufai operates in. An environment filled with inter-religious suspicion. Little wonder the late Yakowa painfully took almost the whole of his time trying to make himself acceptable to Muslims. But on the contrary, el-Rufai, unlike the late Yakowa, rather armed his adversaries by aggravating the suspicion. And that was the beginning of his crisis with the Southern Kaduna people. As a man of intellect, he should have known that by saying Christians are merely 30 percent in the state, among many other statements he allegedly made, he was merely adding salt to injury. He ought to have known that as the situation warrants, it is not enough to have good intentions as a politician; you must be politically correct. While Ibe Kachikwu had since learnt this, His Excellency has chosen to act like an accidental politician.

But in spite of this broad day apartheid treatment meted on Nok as an educated fellow, the globally acclaimed scientist was able to make the distinction. And he did this by seeing his predicament not as part of the so-called Islamic agenda as those who know better are today telling us, but like some of us, he rather saw it as an expression of the remains of feudal practices and survival strategy deployed by those who have been riding on the noble religion of Islam for control, relevance and survival. He was not unaware of many of our kinsmen who are indebted to many Muslims for what they have become. The academic icon may have listened to Bishop Kukah’s homily at Yakowa’s funeral when the cleric said: “Can those who know more than God and are weaving the conspiracy theories, claiming that Mr. Yakowa was a victim of dark forces answer just two questions? Was it Christians, the people of Southern Kaduna, or his kinsmen and women from Fadan Kagoma that guided his life? He owes his entire meteoric rise in the civil service and his political life to good men who had the discernment and whom God used when it mattered. Interestingly, good, God fearing and honest men who found themselves in power from Brigadier General Ja’afaru Isa, Governor Ahmed Makarfi, and Architect Namadi Sambo are not Christians. Neither is General Abdulsalami Abubakar and Alhaji Idris Gidado who appointed him Federal Minister and Federal Permanent Secretary respectively.”

Today, the sudden death of Nok has resurrected in some of us the commentary of a late Southern Kaduna son – a consummate sociologist, Professor Steve Nkom, on what he referred to as “The agents of the sinister thesis of assassination plot” to refer to those who at the death of Sir Patrick Yakowa wanted to invoke sentiments as bricks in building their political empire.  Nkom said:” A particularly appealing line of lamentation already being spread among the people was the well-embellished suspicion that Yakowa was the victim of a carefully planned assassination by some unnamed interest groups.”

According to the Social scientist: “Some selfish groups stood good chances of cashing into this poisoned atmosphere, probably at great harm to the order and tranquillity of the state, if this conspiracy thesis was not punctured.”

Unfortunately, the death of Nok, who all his life stood against this narrative of “we” vs “them”, is now being greeted with the same virus by people whose stock in trade is greed. They are now telling us that Nok was killed by those who hate us. But when have they suddenly become Nok’s fans?  Ever since he accepted to work with Governor el-Rufai, the late Professor on three occasions told me how his kinsmen had made things difficult for him. On one occasion when he called me on the telephone he said: ‘Francis, where are you? Bishop Bagobiri has just sent me an article you wrote. I am very happy and I feel vindicated by the piece. Arrange for us to see in the office on Tuesday.’

During the meeting, the cerebral scientist said: “Do you know that ever since the noise that the Kafanchan Campus of KASU has been removed started, nobody from our axis has called to ask me what is actually happening as you said in your article? Yet I come from Southern Kaduna.” During the long meeting, he further disclosed to me: “I can show you many application letters for contracts written by those who criticize us in the day, but come in the night to ask for favours.”

Two, ” When I was the Commissioner for Health, I paid attention to the Kafanchan General Hospital which is today more equipped than Barau Dikko.” Three, “I gave contracts of over N2 billion to young people from Southern Kaduna. Do you know that many of them didn’t execute the contracts?” At the end, he said: “We must move from this victimhood posture to increasing our human capacity. It is not as if I don’t know how to write to respond to these empty criticisms; the problem is that I can easily lose my cool.”

He told me how recipients of the Nobel Prize around the world communicate with him, as well as his plans to revamp the education sector in Kaduna state. Unfortunately, the grim reaper took an axe to the root of his life, thereby putting an end to his dreams. Since his obituary, we have seen the worst in our people. The social media is splashed with the inhuman narrative by his own people that his death was merely God’s own way of eliminating wicked kinsmen who are in league with conniving governor to inflict injustice on the people.

The Ham people should hold their heads high for given the world this rare gem. Apart from millions, if not billions, of people whose lives will daily benefit from his investigations on the scourge of malaria, snake venom and Tryponomiasis, some 75 million cattle who are annually exposed to Tryponomiasis on the continent are now on the path of redemption.  And being the first black African to win the George Forster prize, Nok was just a step away from winning the Nobel Prize. What this means is that: he would have beaten all other Nigerian Intellectuals, both living and dead, including all  those sound professors of Yoruba descent home and abroad, plus those literary giants like the Chinua Achebes, Cyprian Ekwensis, Saro Wiwa, etc, to become Nigeria’s second Nobel Prize winner. And this is somebody who came from a region ridiculed by the rest of the country as being cursed by the gods not to excel in academics. Yet, his legacies would outlive us all, while posterity will sing songs in his praise.

That was Professor Nok; a symbol of the ‘real ‘ struggle. A struggle he himself had demonstrated to mean doing our best and leaving the rest for God.

Similarly, unless we quickly realize that this is what the struggle is all about, we might wake up one day to see it’s another night; a night with more darkness and even longer than the previous night.

Finally, as a mark of honour, the Kaduna state Governor el-Rufai, the Federal Government and the international community, should, as a matter of fact, begin to investigate why the late Professor was twice denied the vice chancellorship of the ABU, even when it was apparently clear that he won. This might be a way of ending the injustice that minorities in the North and in other parts of the country suffer.

From this day forward, Nok will be remembered in history books, and in the hearts of men of conscience, as the greatest victim of modern day feudalism in the North.

With tears in my eyes, I pray for the repose of this unusual gift.

Damina, a student of Religion and Society, can be reached via francisdamina@gmail.com