Striding Into Our Future

As each generation evolves; it comes with its challenges and opportunities. While some of these experiences have become a nightmare, fraught with harrowing memories of disturbing realities, the struggle for a better future has never been a finished task.
Despite being mocked, short-changed and unjustifiably disenfranchised, using all subterranean methods from the backdoor, we have never allowed our enemies see us kiss the dust. Our oppressors have never grown weary at scorning and ridiculing us with tales of how our ancient fathers were never anything better than hewers of woods and fetchers of water. Our task masters had disdained our beliefs and traditions and sing disparaging stories of how our ancient fathers stood for justice and freedom. In their disparagement, they sought to humiliate and throw our self-worth into an abyss of nothingness.
Despite the revolution that has given us chiefdoms and right to appoint our monarchs, we are still being told we cannot sit on the table of power sharing as equal partners. When we enquire why we cannot seek to occupy the pinnacle of political power in the state, we are told that poverty does not give us a chance.
Sometimes, the loud silence from our political representatives reduces our chances to effectively articulate our story to the world. Our elder statesmen, who should be mentors to younger aspiring leaders, now compete for positions and promote ethnic bickering to realise their pecuniary interest. Our politicians see their elective offices as an opportunity to improve only their economic wellbeing and their nuclear families. In their exalted offices made possible by the votes of the common people, they see in us less human beings that have been reduced into struggling objects.
The APC Government in Kaduna State has reduced us into political nothingness, just as our communities have been reduced into rubbles of annihilation. In the information age where access to its management is power, we have allowed our oppressors to be miles ahead of us.
Most of our elected representatives have never been faithful in standing up for us. They prefer being comfortable partners in bed with our tormentors. Under their keen watch, they have witnessed the killing of no fewer than 1,000 of our people since the commencement of herdsmen’s attacks on our communities without rallying forces to stop the killings. Instead of confronting the power at Sir Kashim House to stop the carnage, they ride the wings of night to condole with victims of the attacks and raise their hands in helplessness as they prayed for the intervention of divine power.
Our political leadership has become diseased and leprous. We need a new political leadership that places premium on the general good, rather than personal interest. Such a new leadership is the only one that can ask some pertinent questions: Why is Southern Kaduna denied a single IDP camp when nearly 1,000 persons have been killed and thousands rendered homeless by activities of armed bandits? Why are lands being seized in the name of grazing reserve and investment, with no compensation paid? Why are development projects absent in the southern axis? What must be done to ensure the resolution of the current insurgence plaguing the area?
Those we have elected have abandoned us to our fate. Those we expected to stand up and articulate our problems are nowhere to be seen when needed the most. In their absence, the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union (SOKAPU) and other prominent persons have stood in the gap to tell the world our tragic stories. They risked everything to tell the world of our sufferings made worse by Governor Nasir Ahmad el-Rufai who told the world that we are just 30 percent of the state population.
To turn the tables against those who seek to destroy us politically, we need a new leadership that is far less greedy, but more focused on issues of development. We need politicians who see politics, not just as a platform for advancing personal interest, but adding value to society. No doubt, we have acquired an enormous intellectual prowess that can be deployed for the general good.
As victims of injustice, we must elect leaders that would not only guarantee healthy diversity, but also ensure the majority does not exploit the minority. We must come out of our cocoons and work towards building a more inclusive society, irrespective of ethnic, religious and political divide, are secured. We must be committed to pulling down the ancient altar of this old politics that has always reminded us that we were destined for the backwaters.
As endangered people, let us relegate our pecuniary interest and collaborate with other zones to build a state we all can be proud of. Let us in unity of brotherhood walk towards a new era in order to change our long nightmare of despair into a sunrise of refreshing hope.