Kano carnage and echoes of silence

By Adewole ADEBAYO

In Kano, our indigenous Medina, our Sahelian oasis of commerce and the potpourri of proletarian politics, compatriots are dropping like flies while officials are dropping lies.

As I write, 640 souls of Kano’s best have perished, without any accountability. As those who have answered the final calls are being buried, many more are in line to succumb to whatever death has swooned its morbid wings over our beloved City of Commerce. As I type this heart-piercing article, with shaky hands tremulous from rage against death and the government alike, I still must endeavour to hasten my typing speed as I suspect that death is killing faster in Kano than I am typing on my computer.

What then is killing people in Kano? No one seems to know, or want to know or if they know what want to let the nation know. The question of what is killing people in Kano is both pathological and pathetic but certainly rhetorical with respect to the Kano State Government who looks guilty as charged but is adept at denying the obvious.

I have been inundated with heartbreaking videos of burials sneaked out of Kano, as if we were dealing with North Korea. One dies in instalment merely from viewing these videos, showing freshly wounded Earth, yielding her soil to take in children, adolescents, men, women, rich and poor; each strike of the digger, wounding the living emotionally and psychologically. Yet, Ganduje denies. It is not as if video evidence has a good history of being admissible within the Ganduje administration, but please, these are human lives that cannot be tucked furtively in a flowing gubernatorial robe like wads of greenbacks.

What is killing my people? This is a question the Kano Government owes to all of us as Nigerians and to humanity. How can we sleep soundly, knowing that hundreds of our compatriots have been put to eternal sleep by a mass decimator whose nature and extent we do not know?

Kano is dying; the State Government is lying and the Federal Government is lying down, as if Kano were some far away place to be aware of by those with access to satellite television. Kano, we cannot afford to ignore. Kano is our heart, just as Lagos is our lungs and Abuja is our head. The blood that has kept us alive remains poisoned to the marrow in the narrow creeks of the Niger Delta. Down there, Wike is the lonesome python twisting and curling in an epic battle with its own tail.

Our food basket in the North Central has become a basket case of insecurity. The sun of federalism does not shine in the South East where the clouds of disquiet are darker than the smoke oozing darkly from the barrel of the gun. Our South West is arranging its affairs like own commonwealth, and death has morphed into an octopus in our North West. What are we doing? We are fiddling with our phones and posting memes and TikTok stunts. And the government denies.

Allah yaji kansu is competing with Assalam Alaikum in these sardonic times in Kano. Yet the Government denies. Governments in Nigeria from Federal to State, to Local Governments have never been caught unprepared to dish out lies. And a shortage of liars in power I have not heard of. It must take a lot of callousness to see corpses of own fellow citizens and say that they are not actually dead or that they died as at when due except that they happen to somehow manage to time their deaths within a week. People are dying everywhere.

That is not unheard of. What makes the Kano carnage unique are that the deaths are in high number, the causes of death are undisclosed, speculated cavalierly, and enquiries are aggressively dismissed
An autopsy of our collective deadness to death has to be conducted. Rare to have a peacetime nation more unconcerned than us regarding the urgency to determine the cause of death of any citizen, however highly or lowly placed.

I am ready to concede that religion has a role to play, especially for our brethren who are of the Islamic persuasion. As I do not belong to that Beautiful Faith, I claim not a standing to pontificate on its glorious tenets, except to say that from keen observation, other Islamic societies have managed to ensure that no one gets away with murder, and very few die unexplained by ensuring that the cause of death is rapidly investigated before internment. In some cases, where a crime is involved, burial is delayed or exhumation is permitted. I’m calling on the Chief Pathologist of Kano State to do the lawful duties of determining the cause of death and informing the public. It is a national emergency. Autopsy is not done for the benefit of the dead, for the dead has absolutely nothing to gain from the lessons of it. Autopsy is for the sake of the living to prevent future casualties and capture past crimes.

Talking of the living. What can we do for the living in Kano who are now on an unenviable, invisible queue of death that gets longer as I write? Partisan politics, administrative divisions and bureaucratic protocols must be set aside immediately and the entire nation must come as one and march on Kano to arrest the death by mysterious disease(s) that is claiming that pulsating city from us, as death by terror has laid claims against our North East corridor.

Where is the Nigerian Medical Association when one needs them? A public statement ought to have come out of the NMA by now. At least, there are no Chinese doctors to rail against here. In Kano, Nigerian doctors don’t have to compete with any Chinese import. I call on all the Moslem organisations to come together and form a Medical Crescent to carve a pathway to survival for the ambulated and beleaguered State of Kano. I call on the wealthy, of which Kano swims in surplusage, to provide resources to address this unparalleled and existential threat. We can return to ask questions of the Government later.

As for the National Centre for Disease Control [NCDC], it is evidentially transparent that the NCDC is diseased and has lost control. There are many problems sickening that agency even before COVID-19, including its ghosting into the shadows during the lassa fever epidemic debacle, a parallel line of death which is still operative even if beaten to the minor league by the more operatic COVID-19. As the clarion call by now Nigerian’s most famous grandmother, Hajia Salma Ahmed has shown to the world, NCDC is a pecuniary caucus of somnambulistic bureaucrats, staffed by lie-in-your-face zombies under a leadership teleguided by unsteady puppeteers who control the purse string and narrowly focused on maintaining the monopoly of procurement, without the scantiest familiarity with epidemiology. So it happens that we are all imprisoned at home and the gatekeepers of our health and well-being are asleep at the gate, letting death and destruction swoop on us unchallenged.

The Minister of Health is either silent over Kano or mumbling incoherence that makes one question his own health. Apart from adorning N95 face masks all over the place, to mark their status in the upper echelon of the masking order, and pointing vacantly at hastily arranged isolation camps for the benefit of the press cameras, with nothing on ground and the numbers on the papers to suggest that the Ministers of Health even know basic medicine along the line of frontline management of mass illness. We have tested in total in two months, less than is needed to test in one day. Lagos, though far from being ideal, has become the only showroom for the entire taskforce to parade incessantly. The rest of the country is left to pasture.

Kano is where either the seemingly lost Ehanire or obviously grumpy Mamora, largely from marginal redundancy, ought to be headquartered now, instead of their pathetic peripatetic junkets around States seeking the low hanging fruits of fake achievements.

The President and Commander in Chief, Muhammadu Buhari is forming a regency over his own incumbency. There is no thespian term in all lexicon of the theatre for a tragicomedy of a living government simulating its own death while still alive, than one in which the President is alive and makes speeches merely to announce by how many more weeks citizens remain grounded, a Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, who lives in the presidential basement like a fresh school leaver awaiting his UTME results, while tweeting out photos of himself beginning to relish the pleasure of chatting over zoom.

We have on our hand a Secretary to the Federal Government, Boss Mustapha who seems more bored than he is a boss over anything at all. He is not even a boss over basic knowledge of our healthcare system. More crushing, is the calamity of knowing that he is not even a boss over his own mouth and confessed his abject ignorance on all television networks.

He hasn’t resigned yet and it could be because he doesn’t know where to turn his resignation letter in, even if one were to be written for him. Kano is calling Boss Mustapha. The fact that people are dying there is not one of the many facts a Secretary to the Government of the Federation should be unaware of. Kano matters. And lives matter even more.

We cannot afford to fail the people of Kano. They do not need our prayers for the repose of their souls. Kano needs us to save their souls. Kano needs medics and medical supplies. Kano needs pathologists, not prayers. Kano needs relief, not grief. Kano needs a government, not a torment. Kano should not be a basket of votes, real and imaginary swallowed like Jonah in the whale-like belly of INEC, merely to be regurgitated into ballot boxes during elections.

Kano needs proof of life, that the people deserve to be alive and served by a government that is alive.

Even the dead of Kano, buried, about to be buried and those whose graves we shall never sight and over whose passing we shall never sigh, deserve better than hollow mouthing of heartless prayers from those who are complacent President, Vice President, Secretary, Ministers as well as Governor and commissioners in the Government and Ministry of Death. And don’t argue over whether their deaths were caused by COVID-19, malaria, heat or some other excuses.

Are they dead or are they not? That is the first question. What did we do to stop them from dying, even if by we just crying? Crying to the world as their families are crying to the government. A single telephone cry by a distraught grandmother in Abuja, Salma Ahmed over the loss of a son-in-law, Abdullahi Lawal in Kano, and the lives of a daughter and grandchildren in peril, is greater on the scale of humanity than the facetious billions announced by governments. I’m not a surgeon, nor a cardiologist who can manage a heart transplant. I can only pray that the Divine Cardiologist of the Universe should take away the villainous hearts of our public functionaries and in their places, replicate and implant the heart of the heroic grandmother from Abuja, Salma Ahmed.

Go to Kano and redeem yourselves; all those in government. And every Nigerian is a citizen of Kano today at law and in spirit. We must take non-governmental actions to save Kano today. If we do not go to Kano to confront death, death will defeat Kano and come for us. I’m not doing Kano a favour. I’m a doing my duty to Kano, Nigeria, humanity and myself. Until then, your hearts are not fit to pray for anyone, not the least, the repose of the souls of innocent dead.

Dead hearts cannot pray for the repose of the souls of the dead.