(30): The Death of Peace; Grieving Kano at 54.

MA Iliasu.

Gone are becoming the days when hearing the name "Kano" puts on the mind the booming market society where harmony is a norm and both the commodious and experiential social vanity mature so much that the natives don't bother involuntary travelling, the captivation of which trigger envy from, and the pull of which never set free the desire of, other native inhabitants. Those existential foundations that have been holding the society together and helping the sustainability of the people and their culture fluctuates over time, and often, in different forms. One day it's politics shaking the peace, another it's economics threatening the welfare and in other days it's culture and geography experimenting on moral decadence and environmental pollution. However, none among the interdependent factors has proven irrecoverable over the 54 years old history of the state. Meanwhile, despite those subtle and blunt recoveries, the momentarily cancerous social dilemmas along our sociocultural, economic and political often leave behind unattended wounds that usually mature to create a far bigger problem than what popular opinion cares to notice. And in Kano, crime and violence are the emerging wounds growing from the unattended injuries sustained from the thuggish political culture, inept economics, nonchalant culture and careless management of our shrinking urban geography.

To take a tour into the making of any harmonious society, trustworthy peace that's consolidated by efficient law enforcement and accumulative economic prosperity that get solidified by centuries of hard work are the absolute principles that can neither be ignored nor skipped. Kano as the heart of Northern Nigeria is indifferent. With standard so high the response of development, prosperity, stagnation, disaster or tragedy takes place only in geometrical proportion when compared with others. That's to say wherever reaction doubles the effect,, it quadruples in Kano. And that might have delivered a platform to understand the extent of the phenomenon I'm attempting to tap into.

Disaster comes in many forms. Kano's version is currently in physical violence and moral hazard. And to give causal courtesy where it's due, nonchalance of the institution of family, the artificially-accelerated death of traditional authority and the avoidable handicapping of law enforcement by the government take the largest chunk when referencing the source of the menace. And so much as any optimist would love to commend the pace of the capital and entrepreneurial development taking place in the society, elementary observation skills would do well to acknowledge how the population of cunning pickpockets, shameless thieves, foolish burglars, armed phone-snatchers and merciless, organized mob gangs whose roaring, both provoked and unprovoked vendetta, that's inspired by Gladwellian culture of honor, are impeccably catching up with the population of the resourceful individuals. And we're speaking of millions of able-bodied people trying to hang in a balance of peace and violence, employment and unemployment, education and ignorance and anything that can establish an antonym of good and bad.

In Kano today, the rot in the state of Basic Education is enough to enlighten innocent kids to understand the immediate opportunity cost between audio-schooling and street hawking - the paradox of misfortune when ignorance gives birth to myopic rationality. Making a choice between attending a school that teach three subjects per week and hawking sachet water that brings ₦500 profit everyday has never been easier for lower class Kano state teenagers. Basic education has never been this bad anytime in history, anyplace in geography and in any wildness of imagination. And in spite of that being possibly the first move in the unfortunate chess board, it's not the skeleton of the problem.

The comfort parents retain in not knowing the whereabouts of their out of school children bring the ineptitude to a breaking point. How some of them proudly consume what the children bring home will shock any discerning mind. Some of them live at large, with no guide towards dissecting vice from virtue, peace from violence, shame from honor or any basic rules of polite society. Few of them are orphans whom fate crippled at young age. With the largest population being occupied by orphans whose parents are absolutely alive. Absence of schooling and responsible parenthood which results to nonchalant upbringing; Mario Puzo would agree if I say those are the elementary stages in the construction of any criminal society. Young people who suffer from that are in abundant supply, as populated as, and possibly more than what meets the eye. Audio Free Education policies that only boost the image of the government in the media while leaving the education on autopilot mode consumes most of the blame. The death of local government authority inclusive.

And that can never go unpunished. If not by the society itself then by the social indices guiding both the conscious and subconscious dynamics of physical environment. The teenagers that have been left at the mercy of ill potential own the future of the populous city. Their actions manifest on many fronts, not only in the future but today. The awful population of teenage beggars is evident. The comfort they derive in being allowed to remain so is more scary and tells everything one needs to know about our reality. The drug abuse is monumental. Data shows that we've the largest market for illicit drugs of any human settlement in West Africa. Gangsters are being groomed. More young adults are fancying mobbing than liking to go to school. What would become of that everyone knows but lends the tongue of pretense. Even the earlier generation of youths who comparatively had it better aren't looking any good. And they're the engineers and the soldiers of the immediate menace that's trying to consume us all. Let me narrate an experience.

In one of the Thursday afternoons of March, 2021, I get caught in a middle of mob war on Ibrahim Taiwo Road between the mob gang in Ajasa and it's counterpart from the outskirts of Kantin Kwari. The encounter resembled a medieval battlefield where warriors put up swords in defense of, or in attempt to conquer, a land. The gangsters were indifferent. Cutlasses, swords, rotten axes and many deadly arms that English grammar may not describe were in open display. They injured themselves and ran at the sound of police arrival. I'm so thankful to God I didn't get a scratch, and for lending me Olympics-winning pace. Usain Bolt got nothing. It was barely 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

On 5th May, 2021, I came home from a literary gathering only to discover a self-advised lockdown of my neighborhood in anticipation of mob counterattack. I later learnt that a gangster was slaughtered like a sacrificial goat in a broad daylight by a mob gang from the nearby neighborhood. The event took place at exactly 12 o'clock pm.

A week earlier, a group of mobs blocked a traffic light at Ƙofar Na'isa with deadly weapons robbing people of their mobile phones. They carried a sack and their word was: "Drop your phone inside we're in a hurry". Whoever refuses takes a knife in the belly.

In the Ramadan, a local vigilante group disagreed with my pace while trying to reach a Tahajjud gathering and stopped me with eye-catching torchlights. When they discovered I was harmless, they let me go. However, little did both of us know that there was an army of mob monitoring the encounter from the sidelines. They understood I came from where they came from and thought I was being hurt by another mob group, so they carried arms and anticipated progress. Thankfully they were wrong. But fact is had it been they were right, it would mark the beginning of a mob war that only God knows when it'll stop and how many people will die and get hurt. I lost counts of how many times I learnt about mobs monitoring people's steps in search for a reason to start a war.

Many quotas within the core metropolis have to live with mob groups that operate on such Gladwellian culture of honor. Fighting imaginative wars, for people who don't know about their existence, for a reason too shallow to define, and with a strength too powerful for the containment of our weak security structure. The police have done the best they could with the limited resources and personnel. The local vigilante groups licensed by the police are also doing their extrajudicial best with zero security expertise, disregard for human rights and dumbfounding predatory foolishness that not only add fuel to the fire but also create further provocation for the elevation of crime in Kano society.

It hurts the spirit of Kano nationalism and goes beyond the motive of propagandism to say any sane Kano inhabitant can agree that turning into a booming criminal enterprise is how Kano society is reconstructing it's norm going into a new decade. The reality is hitting hard, despite the protest of romantics who cultivate unwarranted, unprovoked and unreasonable optimism beyond the backing of evidential logic and common sense. I see no basis in celebrating the ill-structured despite being massive, myopic despite being vivid, gullible despite being attractive public and private welfare compensation investment when it doesn't stop our rot from the grass roots. Ours is a grief as the state turned 54 on Thursday, 27th May, 2021. The cancer that's destroying the state need our collective effort to secure a viable chemotherapy.

It's beyond needed for authorities in charge of the fate of Kano state to sit down and find lasting solution to the problems of begging, schooling, drug abuse, stealing, pickpocketing, burglary, snatching and stabbing. The problems have not started recently. They've been maturing over the years. Only that it's now they're peaking courtesy of our inarguable reaching into the Malthusian trap. The population of Kano grows at the rate nobody can accurately trace. The disorganization of the age bracket is worrying. The sensitivity of human development with respect to age bracket is unconscious.

The city is turning into an inevitable capital society in more bad way than good. One that is sensitive to class struggles due to massive population of growing incapable poor, where the rich has it geometrically better as the poor has it worse. It has never been better for the rich to live in Kano same way it has never been worse for the poor to survive. Observation may thank the state laws that are adopting Austrian market philosophy of selling economic rights to the highest bidder to create monopolistic competitions in an effort to build economic infrastructure. Which is a suicidal revolution against a traditionally hit-and-run market society where the egalitarian democracy of trade and commerce groomed many nobodies into somebodies.

The pessimism is warranted. For surely when the attitude of society involves a large population of 35-years-olds giving up about life generally or any standard for that matter, 20-years-olds engaging drug abuse like God sent them and 14-years-olds hawking whatever they can on the streets due to hunger, ignorance and nonchalance, the future does certainly look bleak. While the present heads to the way of anything that goes against the agreement of sanity, fear of God and egalitarianism.

MA Iliasu writes from Kano. And can be reached through his email address: Muhada102@gmail.com