From Rapa Nui to Rapa North

For decades, most of the world has been fascinated by the Rapa Nui Island in the South eastern Pacific Ocean and what happened there. The 1000 or so giant Moai statues, with thick lips set in angular heads, found half-buried in the stark earth of the island added to the mystery. Once an industrious civilisation […]

For decades, most of the world has been fascinated by the Rapa Nui Island in the South eastern Pacific Ocean and what happened there. The 1000 or so giant Moai statues, with thick lips set in angular heads, found half-buried in the stark earth of the island added to the mystery. Once an industrious civilisation thrived there. But by 1877, the population had shrunk to exactly 111 persons with all the trees and vegetations gone.

What happened? 

Well, in a nutshell, indiscriminate land clearing killed most of the trees. This affected the weather, which led to famine, which led to conflict amongst the population. By the 15th century, two social groups emerged and by 1750, bitter strife between them for control of the island’s scant resources saw them decimate each other, burning the fields, the crops and each other’s huts. They toppled each other’s statues to kill each other’s gods. Between 1862 and 1888, 94 per cent of the population perished or emigrated.

In 1995, UNESCO named Rapa Nui (or Easter Island, as European visitors decided to call it) a World Heritage Site. Today, Rapa Nui sticks out in the Pacific Ocean like a sore thumb, a barren land of murdered, half-buried gods, a grim warning to the rest of humanity about what happens when a civilisation turns against itself.

What is the point of this story, you may ask?

Well, because the unfortunate events that happened on that island are playing out again in Northern Nigeria. For the past decade and a half, Boko Haram has killed thousands of people and bandits are running wild, genociding people and routing towns and villages, unchallenged in most instances.

Recently, the Secretary to the Niger State Government, Ahmed Ibrahim Matane, announced that Boko Haram or people with ideologies like theirs are forcing children out of schools while their activities and those of bandits have displaced some 151, 380 people from 30 communities. Bandits have imposed levies on farmers to access their farms for harvest. 

Where villagers refused to pay in some instances, he said, their farms were torched. 

In Sokoto, further North of Niger, between Sunday and Monday, gunmen massacred 52 villagers. On the same day, the touch-and-go situation on the ever perilous Kaduna-Abuja road flared up again. This time, kidnappers for ransom opened fire on travellers, killing some and carrying off about a dozen persons. Two attacks in nearly the same spot over 24 hours. The victims’ bullet-ridden cars lay abandoned in the middle of the road, tyres flattened, windshields shattered, doors hanging open like a scene from a zombie-apocalypse movie. Yet, this is Nigeria.

Incidents like these are all too common across the country. But what is happening in the North is a real and present danger that has overwhelmed authorities, leaving the region facing an existential crisis.

The decade-long Boko Haram insurgency and now the chronic banditry endemic in the region is debasing the little human capital gains made in the region. The massacre of students, as happened in Buni Yadi, the abductions of thousands of students, sometimes up to 600 at a time, the bombing of schools, and killings of teachers are already threatening the future of education in a region that has since independence been playing catchup to the rest of the country.

Lest we forget, this region, due to a pre-existing education system, was reluctant to embrace Western education and when it realised it had to, it had already been left behind. Because of this, the federal quota system, the system of catchment areas in university education, was put in place to give the North a chance to catch up and retain a fair representation in the public sector. A rash of schools was built to fast-track this catchup. Unfortunately, the region largely rested on its laurels, somewhat being content with these strange mechanisms put in place to secure its fair participation in governance and national growth. 

Of course, it is to the advantage of a few that the status quo remained. A family friend, who served in a village in Kebbi State in the late 1990s, could not understand the message of the village elites. 

“Just leave them the way you see them,” was a common refrain these men used. 

He was puzzled by the apathy towards education in that village and the fact that the educated few did nothing to encourage others to learn. Until he realised that these persons were the ones who, by virtue of their education, had access to government allocations in the area. They controlled the finances that came in from the state government and doled out handouts to some villagers while keeping the rest for themselves. An educated populace would naturally question them and demand better utilisation of their commonwealth.

With regards to quota, a temporary system somehow remained permanently in place. It was comforting working with a low bar. And the aggressive push in the early days have slowed and even when there has been a proliferation of schools in the region, standards have generally remained low, almost as if the region has become content with mediocrity.

The violent chaos being witnessed today has set the region backwards by decades. The streets of Maiduguri are swarming with thousands of school-age children, orphaned by Boko Haram, who rely, not on education, but street begging for a livelihood. Throughout this North, parents who have the means to put their children through schools are afraid of doing so. Not many of them have houses or farmlands to sell to pay the ransom when their children are kidnapped.

The North is being torn apart, ironically, under the watch of a president from the North. And if this is not checked, the North will turn on itself—just like the people of Rapa Nui did. This is, of course, disregarding the fact that the criminality being unleashed on the North is by Northerners themselves.

But fractions are emerging. A recent post on social media by an ethnic jingoist has trended to a significant degree. In the post, the person, a Hausa man, whose name is not worth mentioning, tried to shift the blame for all the episodes of violence in the region, from Maitatsine to today’s banditry, to every other tribe except his. There have been shocked and angry reactions to this. Justifiably so. Others have echoed those sentiments and applauded its author.

When narratives like this start to emerge, it is a reflection of sentiments, often misguided, that have been simmering beneath the surface. The North is already deeply fractured. Ethnic violence between Tivs and Jukuns, Northern Muslims and Northern Christians, farmers and herders and all the other sub-groups in the region have been persistent. One cannot underestimate the powers of such dangerous ideas. In a populace of poorly educated people, such notions could catch on like wildfire. The author of that text, from its composition to its diction, clearly is not well-schooled. Those who endorsed it mostly fall into the same category. The dangerous thing is that this North has a horde of people like that. And an even larger number of out-of-school children who in the next 10 years will be looking for avenues to vent their frustration on a society that has left them totally unequipped educationally for life in the 21st century.

The erasure of whatever little progress has been made in the last 50 years is already in full swing. It must be stopped. The government of Borno State, from Kashim Shettima and now to Babagana Zulum have decided to counter the Boko Haram narrative building standard schools across the state.

Most parts of the region are far too insecure for such a campaign of school building to commence. The economic and educational future of the region is at stake and if the North, this vast North, is not going to be another Rapa Nui or Rapa North, this dangerous plague of violence in the region must be stopped immediately. And then the seed for regrowth can be planted. It might take a long to grow, but it will be a start.