I had thought the twin outings on October 4 and 11 adequately rested the matter, or at least, supplied a reasonable explanation that corruption is a by-product of injustice and there would not be need to continue flogging the same matter. But I had the misfortune last Thursday of listening to the lamentations of Babachir David Lawal, Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), at the close of the 21st Nigerian Economic Summit (NES) in Abuja on television.

The SGF had come to collect the report of the Summit on behalf of President Mohammadu Buhari. Instead of doing just that, he decided to talk too, so that he could be recorded as one of the many eggheads that created the perspectives in this year’s NES summit. In summary, he told the summit that in the Northeast, it is not only the poor that cry; the very rich and powerful also cry. He refocused an ongoing conversation on security and the economy to something far more evocative than academic.

He said: “Five local governments in the northern senatorial district (he was talking of Adamawa State) were completely taken over by insurgents. Two local governments in the central district – mine and the next on the way to Yola – were completely taken over by insurgents. My house was the headquarters of one of the Amir or whatever they call themselves. So for six months, I was an internally displaced person.”

That was quite serious. In a hurry to tell the Summit more gory tales of woe from the Northeast, Babachir forgot to add a very useful link. He did not say from which of the many IDPs camps in the country that he got picked up by President Muhammadu Buhari to be SGF. He just missed an excellent opportunity to tell the whole world how connected he is to the ordinary people of Adamawa State. Such unusual piece of bio-data is capable of enhancing his profile as a man of the people, besides being the first IDP to hold a high government office in Nigeria. The APC can actually go ahead to include Babachir’s appointment as part of the change agenda of President Buhari.

The lamentation continued: “Within that period (exact dates and time not given), four people, my younger ones and others were on admission in the hospital in Mubi the next big town to my own where there is some presence of general hospital. When Boko Haram entered Mubi, all the people had to evacuate the hospital and run into the mountains, no matter the degree of your (sic) sickness. My younger brother whose children were in that hospital was visiting; he had to evacuate. For two weeks, we didn’t know where they were because they ran into the mountains.”

Babachir told his story with accustomed dexterity. All the inflections of good speech and oratory were deployed to achieve the desired effects. He paused when he should and raised and mellowed his pitch in a tonal variation that created the solemn rhythm of a compelling tragic narrative. He looked at some point as if he would be overwhelmed by the self generated emotions and collapse in tears the same way General Buhari did in 2011 when it seemed he (Buhari) was not primed to pick the presidency on his third attempt.

Like a well-produced melodrama, the NES audience was sucked in by the arising emotions. They listened with an attentiveness that belied the setting. Since there was no postmortem session to analyze the speech of the SGF, he got away with so many fallacies without having to answer some tough questions on power and responsibility. He sounded as if the insurgents that wrecked untold havoc on Adamawa State and most of the Northeast were invaders from outer space, which then made the helplessness of the people in the face of alien invasion even more pathetic.
These space invaders (who were not from the Northeast) did more damage which Babachir also explained. “The telephones, the base stations had been blown by Boko Haram. In any case, the battery had run out of the phones. We didn’t know whether they were eaten or whether they were dead. We didn’t know where they were. The total number of cattle in my village where everybody was a livestock keeper was 385. When people had to run for their lives, the last thing they would think about is cows, goats and chickens.”

And so while those conferees in smart corporate wears were busy pushing hypotheses to establish a correlation between security and economic buoyancy, Babachir was struggling to bring them back to the basics of life. He said in the Northeast, the choice is not between security and economy but between life and death. According to him, every supporting infrastructure has been decimated by the insurgents and the only meaningful choice for now is saving the human life which is facing constant threat in the unceasing Boko Haram onslaught.

Altogether, Babachir did not tell a good story. Every good story has a beginning, a compelling middle also called climax and then a conclusion that ties together all the strands of the intriguing plot. The SGF did not talk about the things that happened or did not happen in the socio-cultural and political inter-relationships over the years that got the Northeast and by extension the entire North to where it is today. He just assumed the stage and badly abridged a long melodrama that is loaded with many vicious villains into an emotive narrative of a victim to score a cheap point.

It does not work that way. As a writer, I am very pained when a narrative is mangled to perpetuate a literary fraud. To play the victim and make the Northeast problem look like a problem caused by the entire Nigeria is white fraud. It is a degree of corruption that is higher than the type that Buhari is expending so much energy and resources fighting in Abuja. If Babachir truly desires help and healing as he has pleaded, the starting point is to state the truth; the whole truth and nothing but the truth no matter how bitter so that even God can come in to assist.

And the truth is that the calamity in the Northeast is purely home grown. Going forward, culpability must be properly situated in the feverish search for solutions for the troubled Northeast. What did Babachir himself and many others, including tall names such as Atiku Abubakar, Bamanga Tukur, Babagana Kingibe, Prof Jubril Aminu, Ali Ndume, Modu Sheriff, Nuhu Ribadu, Air Marshal Alex Bade, Maj. Gen.Tukur Yusuf Buratai and present and past governors from the zone who have had large access to power and wealth do or failed to do to stave off the conditions that festered into the Boko Haram uprising?

It is annoyingly abdicative to pin the Boko Haram down to Nigeria’s share of global terrorism. Terrorism is first defined by the sociology of the originating location before it is placed in a global context. It has a large local content and that is what I am talking about here. One Northern politician has suggested a national conference to discuss the Northeast and create some kind of Marshall Plan to turn around the region.

I dey laugh! It is this degree of insincerity of a profit driven leadership and elite class that has kept the North backward so much so that a large part of it would not still catch up with the South if the latter were to be held down from moving forward for 100 years. There is no effort at soul searching since there is a mythical institution called government that restores everything that has been willfully underdeveloped by the so-called leaders.

How do you hope to rebuild and sustain an edifice that had been obliterated by erosion without first recovering the lost ground? In sum, the foundation of a sociology that allows children to be produced and thrown into the streets as almajiris and be manipulated by self-serving elite class must be questioned and overthrown. Let’s pick the courage to challenge a feudal hegemony that perpetuates a segregation, almost like the Hindu caste system, for its own survival.

Nothing will change if the Northeast is rebuilt with other people’s money without obliteration of the underlying socio-cultural conditions.