REMEMBERING MY ONE YEAR STAY IN YOBE State

REMEMBERING MY ONE YEAR STAY IN YOBE State

By Afolabi Gbajumo

Reminiscently, I was one of the first batches of Graduate Youth Corpers posted by NYSC in 1992 (33years ago)to the then newly-created Yobe State after the FGN carved it out from Borno State. We had our rigorous Camp Training consisting of graduates from various tertiary institutions in Nigeria and overseas at the Institute of Management Studies,Potiskum, headquarters of Fika Emirates.

One funny scenario was as if NYSC inadvertently desirous to fine-tune or re-charge my mentoring tutelage on human rights’ advocacy/struggles allied to my boss the Great Gani Fawehinmi, SAM, SAN (of Blessed Memory) whom we earlier in 1988 honoured revolutionarily with Senior Advocate of the Masses (SAM) under our OAU Students’ Union at the then University of ife. (the Great Ife)

We equally started fighting for his release from the dreaded Gashua Prison the preceding few years in 1989 while I was in school. Surprisingly, NYSC posted me to the same Gashua where he was incarcerated which really gingered my spirit.

Incidentally, while some of our camp colleagues were pressing frivolous buttons of “man-know-man,” at the top echelon of NYSC for reposting from that very..very.. far-North back to the South, I deliberately in principle, refused that corrupt practice by preferring to spend my youth service year in Yobe state.
This was because I believed in conscientious sacrifice giving rise to true developmental interest of our dear Nigeria and Africa as a whole. Hence, without any objection or influencing anything,I, and another Great Ife colleague Bunmi Adamolekun moved to where we were posted for our primary duties and we were to serve as Lecturers at the College of Education, Gashua (COEGA),Yobe State (now Federal University).

Indeed, the terrain over there in the North-East Nigeria was quite arid with a lot of sand making it look almost like a desert. But the good news then was that there was no boko haram terrorists plying the Savanna.
Observably, however,I saw the build-up to that gangsterism from the body language of a huge number of under-aged innocent children thrown to the streets as beggars devoid of any parental or societal care in what they tagged “almajiri” (literally meaning the wandering disciples in quest of Islamic knowledge) wandering around the streets. I painstakingly initiated efforts to assist in reducing that menace by introducing an enlightening forum aimed at solving the issue of almajiri through a compulsory course named Citizenship Education I lectured in that COEGA.

There was a slight resistance from one of my students Usman a little older than others in the over100 of them students in that NCE 1 class who even boasted that he was 25-year-old and his male children were already almajiris in another place.But I was able to convincingly neutralize that slight resistance with my knowledge of the Qur’an and Islam which he was parochially referring to as source of that wandering syndrome.
But I enlightened him and others by bringing out my own Qur’an in Arabic as a practicing Muslim and told him to show me and the entire class where Allah (SWT) want him to surfer his male under-aged children of 5 to 9 years-old to travel far away to fend for themselves in a strange environment from where him the father/parent was residing.That almajiri syndrome was and is still the trend in virtually all parts of where I traversed in the north e.g.Katsina, Sokoto,Zamfara, Niger, Kaduna, Kano,
Jigawa, Yobe and Borno States. I was in Gashua (Bade LGA Hqtrs., Damaturu( Yobe Capital), Potiskum, Nguru, Jajere, Dapchi,etc., and Maiduguri the Borno State Capital including UNIMAID and traces of these kids roaming about for food was all over the place.

Funnily,as a youth Corp member 33 years ago,each of us received stipend allowances of #350 monthly in the midst of rising costs of living under the SAP economic policy of the barbaric regime of Gen.Babangida (rtd.) that ‘sapped’ the country since then.

Myself and other Corp members had to orchestrate legitimate protest agitating for increment to #1,000 before the jackboot regime had to jack-up our ‘allowance’ from N350 to N700 only.

Meanwhile, because the so-called “leaders” in government enjoyed diverting resources that ought to be used in helping those innocent kids educationally, socially and faithfully to be better in life from that tender age while they sent their own male and female children with those diverted commonwealths to better schools and trainings at developed cities at home and abroad.

What emanated from that experience rallied with my foresighted prediction while in Yobe based on those intimidating facts on the ground about those abandoned kids 33 years ago.There and then I said a time will come when those abandoned kids will be used by evil-minded elements to foment future calamities which later occurred unbearably since 2009 (16 years ago) till date when the so-called boko haram ( meaning western education is forbidden and condemning formal education) sprang-up their terrorisms like hell fireworks in that Borno then it spread to Yobe and then Adamawa States. Other variants and fall-outs of such violent-killers-crime today are banditry, abduction for ransom,cultism,rape, etc.

Final solution is simply that the so-called ‘leaders’ in the North, and across Nigeria, should stop diverting money and resources meant to sustainably educate,grow, develop, employ and productively engage the younger ones and others so as to finally abolish the present and future disasters of having a huge population of criminally enthrenched citizens and ‘leaders’ mis-governing the resourcefully-destined assets of Nigeria so that everyone will be pleasant to live in peace and not pieces that we have to-date.

REMEMBERING MY ONE YEAR STAY IN YOBE State