Signs of a fraying society fabric

When newsmen interviewed his relations they revealed that he had been depressed since he lost his means of livelihood, commercial motorcycling, or achaba.Kano State government banned the use of motorcycles for commercial for security reasons. And certainly it was not the only state that took such course of action.If there is one social problem that […]

When newsmen interviewed his relations they revealed that he had been depressed since he lost his means of livelihood, commercial motorcycling, or achaba.
Kano State government banned the use of motorcycles for commercial for security reasons. And certainly it was not the only state that took such course of action.
If there is one social problem that has been allowed to fester for more than forty years, it is that of bad governance.
Bad governance had been what caused the explosion of achaba in the first instance. Governments, from military to civilian had come and gone abetting the explosion of achaba business. Later day politicians found to their pleasure that it took only fifty to seventy thousand naira to purchase a motorcycle for a party supporter to use for achaba business. Hundreds of thousands joined.
What this translated into was that society found the teaching of life’s skills burdensome; such that a two-day trial and error use of motorcycle, (built on the ability to ride a bicycle) was sufficient for one to build a life upon.
The case of the suicide victim was doubly appalling: before he hanged himself he reportedly lost his wives: he either divorced them or they divorced him. Then as a Muslim, by hanging himself he also hanged his faith.
 In Kano, you cannot count the number of mosques: wherever a group of three to five men gather to while away the time it becomes a mosque. But the conventionally built mosques are in thousands; with faithful trooping daily to do what one Igbo man was quoted saying, aikin banza.
Before your adrenalin pushes you into the ‘jihad mode’ hear me out.
The Igbo man was said to have made the comment when he observed thousands of Muslims coming out of Friday prayers. Here were thousands of people, unified by faith, repeating one exercise five times daily, and one weekly, but the problems facing them as a society remain! The deceased must have undertaken the “aikin banza” with his ‘brothers’ in faith thousands of times; but they allowed his problems to kill him.
But while he was alive doing achaba, and marrying wives on it, non-indigenes have been running successful carpentry business, whose products are 99.99% purchased by Hausa-Fulani families for the marriage of their daughters. And no government would ever ban such business.
 I was tempted in my thoughts to visit a Church on Sunday: to see whether the blind, the lame, and the lepers of Christianity gather every week to receive alms. Is there even a leper who is Christian? I would not be surprised to find that the only beggars you would find at Churches on Sunday could be Muslims, who believe they are destined for Paradise, begging from those they believe are destined for hell. Why does CAN’s Ayo Oritsejafor bother fighting the dead?
The deceased dan achaba will, from orthodox interpretation go to hell for taking his own life.  But the Imam in whose mosque he used to pray should take some responsibility too for failing to establish communication channels with troubled souls.

Abdullahi Musa<[email protected]>;