Burji Foundation: A Challenge To Kano’s Nouveau Riche
BRASS TACKS
with Suleiman Uba Gaya
0803 567 6295 (Text Message Only)
From time immemorial, all successful people across the globe have one or two turning points in their lives. For Badamasi Shu’aibu Burji, editor, publisher and entrepreneur, his turning point started during the 2013 All Nigeria Editors Conference that held in Asaba, the capital of Delta State, with the theme: “Nigeria Beyond Oil: Role of the Editor.”
Experts at that annual conference minced no words in advising Nigeria to walk the talk and move the country beyond its over-dependence in oil money, citing an example with Saudi Arabia, world’s largest oil producer, working on all fronts to diversify its economy far beyond oil. That was followed three years later by yet another editors conference in the city of Port Harcourt, whose theme centered on the need for editors to critically examine life beyond the chair and immediately start to make hay while the sun shines.
In Nigeria, there have been cases of editors living a life of deep penury after serving as gatekeepers in some of the country’s foremost media platforms. Courtesy of that conference, many editors took to farming and other small businesses, preparatory to the day of their retirement.
Editor Badamasi Burji’s creative mind however, saw him converting an ordinary, ancient peanut crunch in Hausa called kulikuli to a delicious, healthy snack that in no time started fetching him good fortune. It soon became his export of northern Nigerian food to other parts of the country, as compatriots of all tribes easily fell in love with the product. He soon diversified to other sectors in the food industry, introducing other products, and establishing restaurant outlets in Kano and Kaduna. He also registered as a printer and publisher who made quality, reliability and integrity his watchwords, and soon started attracting big corporate clients.
Now, instead of Badamasi, who was never born with any silver spoon in his mouth to sit back and enjoy his new-found wealth, he decided to set up a foundation in his own name. Perhaps to give life to the adage, charity begins at home, he went back to Burji, his village, a quite settlement about 150 kilometers south of metropolitan Kano, to set up a group of schools that he built from the scratch and furnished all alone, with fortune earned through his own sweat.
Even if this was a private school that charges school fees, it is an achievement on its own right. For if he were after making all the money, good business sense will dictate he sets it up in Kano metropolis where the rich and the mighty that could afford any kind of school fees reside. But the young man will have none of that. He wants the best for the society that gave rise to his being. As Nelson Mandela would say, education is the only weapon with which to conquer the world. Badamasi has conquered his own world, and is so selfless as to want his kinsmen to also do the same.
Penultimate week, he conducted journalists and many well wishers round the big edifice and they counted four thousand pupils all under his full scholarship. Let’s not forget: Badamasi built the school. Equips it. Furnishes it. Pays the teachers and is picking the bill for other overhead expenses. And lest I forget, he also provides the four thousand pupils with school uniform, instructional materials, etc. All alone, This must run into hundreds of millions of naira that he could choose to spend in holidaying with his family in the Caribbean.
For us members of the Fourth Estate of the Realm, Badamasi is an ambassador like no other. He still publishes Concern, his own magazine that I was privileged to serve as first editor twenty years ago. And he has not forgotten his roots. He still remains his humble self, and he could still pass by you largely unnoticed. He carries no airs, and his doors are always open to the low and the mighty.
If the nouveau riche from Kano were to be like Badamasi, giving back to the society even a fraction of their vast wealth, Kano will have enlisted among the most educated in Africa. Sadly, as far as I can remember, Badamasi is only the second Nigerian to set up an educational foundation in Kano and sponsoring hundreds of students at his own expense. Of course there exists in Kano, some other schools being sponsored by religious or family foundations. But they charge school fees, and some of them even draw foreign funding.
Even worse is the fact that though Kano is home to some of the richest Nigerians, it takes a Rochas Okorocha, now senator and former governor of Imo State, to set up the Rochas Okorocha Foundation Group of Schools in Kano, catering for hundreds of children of the poor. And what is more! He did that before he became governor. The only other illustrious son of Kano that does quite a lot in educating children of the poor is the respected billionaire, Alhaji Aminu Alhassan Dantata, who has been donating hostels, lecture halls and educational equipment to tertiary institutions in Kano and some other places.
Now, Badamasi has expanded the scope by educating not only hundreds, but thousands of students who could in future rise to become governors, senators and perhaps even presidents. What makes his case even more special is the fact that he is not even a billionaire, but someone with the heart and mind of trillionaires.
There is simply no way northern Nigeria could ever catch up with its southern counterpart especially in the development of education unless it has the fortune of producing more Badamasi Burjis in its fold. This is a young man I have known since childhood, but with all the riches now at his disposal, Badamasi is still not riding the best car in town. He told me he prefers putting a smile on the sad faces of the less privileged members of the society by catering for their needs. Little wonder they always hang around him, rightfully seeing in him a father representing their best hope for survival.
It is not for nothing, therefore, that more and more Nigerians are rightfully calling on the Federal Government to bestow a big national award on Badamasi Burji, even if only to encourage more well to do compatriots to be like him, or perhaps even more of him.
CONVERSION OF MUSLIM CHILDREN TO CHRISTIANITY: WHY THE MEDIA IS SILENT
Penultimate week, the Kano Command of the Nigerian Police Force revealed to a shocked nation, how some Christians of Igbo extraction have found a lucrative business in kidnapping very young Muslim children and converting them to Christianity, a religion that is different from that of their parents. The criminals perpetrating this do not stop at that. They will also change the names and identity of their young victims, and take about three months to get them to learn the Igbo language and etiquette, after which they sell them into slavery. So far, findings by the police have indicated that those children were kidnapped from the commercial city of Kano to yet another commercial city, Onitsha, In Anambra State.
Most of the children rescued so far were kidnapped five years ago, with some of them as young as two or three years in age, at the time they were captured and sold. Perhaps the most heart-wrenching of the lot is the story of a young girl, now eleven years old, who was kidnapped six years ago, and the person who acquired her heartlessly converted her to his sex slave, repeatedly raping her for the past five years. Upon being rescued, doctors have confirmed that she has been afflicted with a strange sexually transmitted disease.
Those of them that were captured at very young age could no longer even speak Hausa, their native language. A girl called Aisha was renamed Chioma by her captors.
Very strangely, as many have observed, the media in Nigeria has been loudly silent on the matter, Very few news outlets even bothered to publish the story as news, not to talk of publishing an editorial or keeping the story on the front burner for weeks or months, as it happened when a few Christians were converted to Christianity and married off by some unscrupulous Muslims.
Not many observed this conspiracy of silence, until the respected journalist and award-winning editor and columnist, Simon Kolawale, summoned the courage to complain bitterly about it in his famous column in Thisday newspaper. It was only after he raised his voice that Daily Trust, northern Nigeria’s most prominent newspaper, did an editorial, calling on the authorities to act on the matter with dispatch.
Among senior journalists, even from the North, only Jaafar Jaafar, publisher of Daily Nigerian, a prominent online newspaper, has actively come out calling for justice for what has since been known as Kano 9, representing the number of those initially rescued by the police. It was owing to his tenacity that the matter is gradually gaining national attention, and it is now coming to light that the number of those kidnapped in like manner revolves around one hundred!
There have been complaints, bitterly so, all over northern Nigeria, about this sad treatment of the matter by the Nigerian media, the predominant of which are based in the South. Endless examples have been cited of the case of a young Hausa boy who eloped with a 14-year old girl, Ese Oruro, from Bayelsa to Kano, in early 2016. Though they were madly in love, and the girl is said to have followed the young man to Kano willingly, the Nigerian press kept hammering on the matter, subjecting the North and Islam to all sort of ridicule, until the girl was returned to her parents shortly after the uproar. Now almost four years since that incident, the young man is still awaiting trial in prison.
But why is the South, or to put it more directly, southern press, silent on this matter? Only those who are conversant with operations of the media globally, but more so in Africa, could give a dispassionate answer, which is that the media, in reality, and in most cases, operates on the basis of self-preservation.
One is by no means trying to justify this blackout by the media, but even in advanced democracies, such as the United States, you find their media silent on some issues that are against their self interest. Tune to CNN or BBC TV even now, and you will find that the predominant news is about America or UK, as the case may be, and only what concerns them. A local county chairman could get live coverage, but these news channels will hardly even give a mention to major activities of President Buhari or any other president anywhere in Africa, though in the case of Nigeria, it is Africa’s largest democracy.
At the time southern Nigerians were taking the huge risk of investment in the media, northern entrepreneurs would rather engage only in businesses that are tangible, forgetting that what makes profit legal in all religions of the world is the risk element inherent in unpredictability of business.
A former governor of a state in the northwest once told me, with belated regret, the story of a fellow governor from the southeast who thought of establishing a major national newspaper. The southeast governor approached his colleague from the northwest and showed him a feasibility study he commissioned for a strong newspaper needing one billion naira for effective take off. He advised his northern colleague to contribute half the money from his own personal funds (both of them were stinkingly rich before becoming governors) so that they could be equal partners. But the northern governor shied away after, according to him, calculating the profit he could make from that five hundred million naira, if he applied it to his transport business.
The southeast governor persevered. He knew what he wanted and did not blink an eye in going for it. He ended up investing the entire amount all alone. Today, his media establishment is a global brand that is earning him a solid fortune yearly. More than that also, he could, if he wants, use it to achieve any political goal he so desires. How then do you expect this person to now deploy his media platform in protecting your own interest, more so when it is against his own people, who, in any case, are his major patrons?
To be fair to the South, it deploys the media in fighting national causes. Southern media entrepreneurs have done that on countless occasions, such as in the fight for independence, and in our contemporary history, during the fight for entrenchment of democracy, a fight that still remains a work in progress.
All over the North today, you find newspapers and magazines publishing regularly. But most of those are owned not by the super rich dotting the region, but often by senior journalists desirous of entrenching a better Nigeria by bridging the yawning communication gap between the North and the South, but whose capital is far from being adequate.
A typical northern governor will rather ignore a northern editor and relate with a reporter from the South, owing largely to inferiority complex. And so, when it comes to placing adverts, they will hardly patronize the northern media outlets. They mostly only look for northern journalists when they run into trouble and are desperately desirous of a way out.
There is also the sad issue of almajiranci, with some northern parents willingly taking their very young children to far-flung towns and villages in the name of learning and memorizing the Holy Qur’an, a practice they embark upon in a way and manner that is far from the true teachings of Islam. Often times, these young lads get abused by the teachers, and maltreated or taken advantaged of by the society, especially unscrupulous politicians who hire some of them as thugs.
In Kano and other northern cities today, you could easily see a four year old roaming the streets in the name of street begging. He is at that tender age his own master because there is no limit to the places he could go to or the decisions he could take. The teacher he is entrusted to hardly cares about where he sleeps, or whether he has eaten or not. In most cases, the teachers assign these young lads to get the food they (the teachers) will eat with a large number of their families, and also get them money to spend.
On a recent visit to Kano, I encountered a young boy of definitely not more than four years of age, roaming a street in Sharada Industrial Area, helplessly crying of hunger. When I enquired from a shop owner nearby, he told me that what I was seeing was just a tip of the iceberg; that there are tens of such children, some even younger than the one I saw, in some schools in that area. I did not believe him until I took the trouble of going to one of such schools where I saw everything with my own eyes.
Little surprising, therefore, that UNICEF, in a report it released three days ago, said Kano State accounts for the highest number of malnourished children in Nigeria. That four year old boy I saw told me he did not eat any food for over thirty hours, since the early hours of the previous day. Now, tell me how difficult it will be for any criminal, whether Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa, to kidnap such children that are in millions all over the far-North, and convert them to anything he or she wants.
While it pains that the North does not have its own voice in Nigeria’s media configuration, or to put it in another way, media outlets of northern origin easily get dwarfed by their southern counterparts, the blame should definitely be rested on the doorsteps of the elite members of the northern society, many of who could, if they want, establish and fully finance ten or even more national newspaper projects at the same time. Would they ever do so? That, for me, is the one million dollar question.
As for the Kano 9, or Kano 100 (or now Gombe 2) as the case may be, we appeal that justice is done, and seen to be done. The fact that the media has chosen to ignore the matter should never dissuade the security services – and ultimately the courts – from dispensing justice with dispatch. Whether Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba or any other tribe, criminals of all shades do not deserve to walk freely in our streets.
