By Sam Omatseye
No one begrudges Bala Mohammed his right to rise, especially now that he eyes the presidency. But he does not have a right to lie. We just need a few morsels of truth from his mouth about some jibes from Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar, who has acted as a frontline minister and an avenger of a bigot.
He needs to account for two stewardships. One before, and the one now. He needs to cleanse all the charges against him.
Is it true that in May 2017, the former Minister was in Kuje Maximum Security Prison, facing charges of graft and breach of public trust after an EFCC investigation? Was his son, Shamsudeen, tackled by the EFCC for seizing 10 mansions, many plots of land, and a twin plaza in Wuse Zone 3 when Bala was Minister. Did he award fantastical contracts worth N1 billion? Did he allocate 12 choice plots of land to his son? Did he facilitate a N1 trillion Abuja land swap deal?
Tuggar is not sparing the man even now in Bauchi where he is governor. Tuggar implies Bala Mohammed is a land wanderer who goes about scooping up land from the poor. It is his version of Cyprian Ekwensi’s disease for wanderers known as Sokugo in his novel, The Burning Grass. In fact, he has wandered from the poor to the sacred. Now, he is accused of collapsing even a mosque to build a property for himself. He is a bulldozer, just like his Kano counterpart. He does not respect his God. How would he respect the people Allah made?
Tuggar has exposed the foul farts of a pharisee of a governor. Bala has taken it upon himself to be the voice of the north. But he is a phony voice. He is accusing the president of causing hardships by removing subsidies. Yet, he was on a television show saying that he had asked Buhari to remove the subsidies, even adding that the beneficiaries told him they were tired of benefitting from the scam. He was Abuja minister then, where his successor is making an exhibition on how to govern the city.
He should be quiet today, unless he goes to doff his hat to Nyesom Wike for repairing all his damages as the chief steward of the FCT. What Tuggar has done is to take Mohammed head-on. Mohammed once said the northern borders should be open because those coming through are his kinsmen. If that is the case, we should do same in the Southwest and Eastern borders and turn Nigeria into a dumping ground. Bala does not care about safety or security. He is an empty, noisy barrel who hears titillating rhythms from his coarse voice. It means he is an irridentist and bigot, a mind closed to the soothing symphonies of fact and social harmonies. A feudal upstart, Bala Mohammed loves the life of plenty without empathy, power as ally of contempt, rhetoric without reason, a cynic in mien and speech with the flamboyance of a man of politics even while he desecrates the house of worship.
Men like him, Kano governor the bulldozer and his shadow master Kwakwanso , have been erring. Tinubu’s ministers need to emulate Tuggar. What the foreign affairs minister did was to use a medium that spoke to the people: the radio. It is the ear and sounding board of the talakawa.
This essayist has, in the past, drawn my readers to the strategy of President Bola Tinubu appointing ministers from the north in the critical areas of the region’s pain and fragility. Recently, Senator Shehu Sani did same, although the areas he focused were security, agriculture and education. But the breadth is even wider.
We have for security the Minister of Defence, Mohammed Abubakar Badaru, Minister of State Bello Matawalle. They will also work with Chief of Defence Staff from Southern Kaduna, General Chris Musa. The Minister of Police Affairs is Ibrahim Geidam. At the head of the security architecture is the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu.
Before Alausa was moved to education, the minster was from the north. But the Minister of State is Suwaiba Ahmad, also a northerner. Another critical area is agriculture, and the minister is Abubakar Kyari and the Minister of State is Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, both from the North. The third critical part is Health, and Muhammadu Ali Pate is the well-known minister in that forte. If all these people do the hard part, the soft and gentle touch is from the Humanitarian Minister and the person in charge is Imaan Suleiman, a northern woman.
The president has never conveyed it as strategy to tackle the problems of the north. But he does not have to. The men and women ought to take on that task themselves. They are the northern missionaries of the north from the Tinubu administration. They are to feed the poor, heal the sick, guard the weak, illumine the dark regions of the young mind.
Their tasks are not for the north alone. But they know that, in all the indices, the north lags by a mile behind the South. Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State has been at this from the very beginning, asking his region to wake up from its slumber. He is urging his region to rise from its feudal somnolence and turn a kind eye to the poor. He is doing his task as governor.
But the ministers do not only have to work, they have to act like Tuggar and Governor Sani, and jump in the ring. This is so because of strident voices from that region who want to twist the narrative. They want to give a tendentious lie to the vision of the head of their cabinet.
They do not always have to contend in battle. They can do with a charm offensive. They can start by trying a northern summit, in which the cabinet members engage with critical stakeholders and organisations, and they can hold meetings to raise and answer questions. It is a northern town hall meeting. The street can fume there, and so the elite can explain to soothe. It should be a platform of understanding rather than rancour.
Dialogue supersedes demagogues. It segues from bitterness to a listening ear, from that to sympathy, and from that to empathy, and from that to action. As Fredrich Nietzsche wrote, a will to truth leads to a will to power. We have to know first before we act. Every actor of ignorance believes he knows the facts, hence ignorance is expensive. That is why dialogue predates action better than the bitterness that fuels rage.
The Information Minister, Mohammed Idris, is also a northerner, and he has the machine to roll the idea into a momentum.
Already they have a lot to say. On security, many need to know, even if they don’t know so well, how much has happened in the last year. How come Birnin Gwari in Kaduna State is back to life after over a decade of deathly fear. Many places that ran into ruins are alive again, including sour spots in Nasarawa, Zamfara, Kogi, etc. Ribadu and his men have a lot to exhale about and a lot to promise.
We have same in agriculture and health care, and Ali Pate has been doing a lot to tell his story. A story told together in various voices often reinforces itself. They will not just talk, they will also hear. And that is why a town hall or summit will help not only the cabinet’s cause but the north.
Culled from The Nation
