India

By Alkasim Harisu Alkasim

Often, the people that idolise going to school are arguably the ones who, in the long run, turn out to be stinking poor. This is to paraphrase a friend that ardently considers schooling a total waste of time. This assertion is controversial. But, is my friend spot-on or not? It is, to some extent. Still, I have my buts. 

This argument has often generated a heated debate amongst us. Whenever it comes to my mind, it reminds me of Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The writer dissects factors that hinder the learned from earning big bucks. Kiyosaki argues that going to school is the biggest hurdle that denies one the chance to make a bank. He opines that a person spends twenty to thirty years worshipping books, yet, over that period, he scarcely becomes a big gun. Unfortunately, in Nigeria, one ends up jobless after this long journey. 

Debunking formal education, Kiyosaki argues that a person is not taught a single subject on how to make money from primary school to university education. The conventional subjects such as chemistry, physics, literature, etc., are what one seriously enrols in. In his opinion, students should be taught topics such as financial education. Education indeed discourages one from accepting jobs that are not money-spinning. For instance, somebody with a Master’s degree or PhD will feel ashamed to sew for a living, not to talk of driving the commercial tricycle (aka A Daidaita Sahu). 

Are the graduates the only ones to blame? This is a question we should all ponder. The government is blameworthy too. Like it or not, the government cannot give everybody a job. True. But it can establish a conducive environment to doing other jobs. I have never hunted for gainful employment, thanks to my passion for academia. I know this job in Nigeria does not make you a money bag. Yet, I have for long picked interest in it.

In the developed and even some developing economies, the private sector employs a great score of people. The government creates an environment that will aid it to carry out its businesses for the sector. Private sectors pay handsomely in such countries, especially in the western world. I wondered if you know that employment is scarce even in the UK. Even the rampant lack of jobs causes deviance and other criminal acts there. (See Haralambos and Holborn’s book on Sociology).

Of course, we walk tall. We don’t want to do what society looks down on. However, some of us make an exception here. I know of a person with a First Class honours degree in engineering who humbled himself and took up a job many of us can’t do. He ekes out his livelihood from selling coals, taking pride in it. He sees the world of the little he earns from what he sells. Life goes on. Nothing reduces his charm.

I was once in India for a higher degree. There, I saw a lot of wonders. We had a cook in our university who is a master in political science. It is said that people with first degrees in India outnumber the whole population of France. Remember, India is the second-most populous country in the world. Imagine somebody in Nigeria cooking for a living. I don’t say we can’t find one. But rarely can you find more than two in your quarters. Of course, people with degrees, or even diplomas in Nigeria, feel too big to do lowly jobs. I, nevertheless, think our arrogance is reducing because you can now see graduates doing menial jobs. Why not? There is a score of jobless First Class students roaming the streets.

I submit that people with higher educational qualifications always end up jobless or not raking it. People with lower qualifications or no qualifications are the ones that are the business moguls. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Aliko Dangote are textbook examples. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, and he is now stinking rich. 

Indeed, formal education discourages and slows down creativity. It also dampens one’s enthusiasm. Honestly, the way an avid reader confines himself in his study speeds his entrepreneurial death. This is nothing but creative imprisonment. Whenever in his study, the reader seems to imprison his creative faculty in books. He brims with wishful thinking,  ideals and all what-have-yous owing to his fervent reading of all sorts of books. 

Having read a lot, he begins to idealise the world. He pictures and pores over how the world should be. But this is just his wildest dream. In his attempt to make the ancient Greece an ideal state, Socrates lost his life. He was sentenced to death for being a corrupt influence. In his book The Republic, Plato also romanticised how Greece should be,  how rulers should lead, the type of people to obtain in a state, and those exiled. After all, he died not having his dreams fulfilled.

Not very long ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels conceptualised and advocated a classless society in their works. For instance, they co-authored a book titled Communist Manifesto. In the book, they discussed how the masses could emancipate themselves from the domination of the bourgeoisie. In his three-volume book Das Kapital, Marx critically studied the architecture of the economies of European societies. Unfortunately, most of the ideations and philosophies of these great thinkers flopped. For instance, Marx’s classless society idealised where all and sundry would live equally has yet to happen. Marx, who died an atheist, lacked the knowledge that such a classless state is a paradise. So said Dr. Saidu Ahmad Dukawa.

May Allah awaken and help us embrace the realities of today’s world. May we not feel too big to do the most menial jobs we can find around. The journey is long. You can start unimportant and end up important, and vice versa. Remember that Margaret Thatcher was from a lower-class family. She went through rigours to make it to the upper class. 

Wonderfully, Thatcher became the first female UK Prime Minister. She was even taught how to speak, walk, and act in an upper-class-like way when voted into office. Like the UK and other democratically capitalistic countries, Nigeria also allows social mobility. Thus, try to move up the economic ladder. Just give it your best shot. You can. I, rest assured, know you can.

Alkasim Harisu Alkasim wrote from Kano via alkasabba10@gmail.com.

By Aliyu Sa’adatu

Disturbing images and news keep coming out of India where Muslim men and women continue to be harassed and prosecuted by Hindu zealots, but little has been done or said about it. There has not been the intervention of International Human Rights Watch or the United Nations, much less an outcry from the United States. The US has, over the years, designated and paraded itself as the human rights violation police, overseeing and monitoring cases of abuse across the world.

Could the lens of the US be partial?

Lately, there has been a surge in Islamophobia across the US, Europe and other countries like India. Hindu elements beat Muslims, rip apart their homes and businesses and rape their women day in day out. These thugs are emboldened by the nationalist campaign to create an exclusive Hindustan by some of its prominent leaders of the BJP party and even the so-called prime minister Narendra Modi. Yet, the United Nations and the US have been silent over the years as more crimes against humanity are being perpetrated against Indian Muslims.

What set the Taliban apart from the BJP?

The Taliban in Afghanistan wishes to formulate a Muslim State where Sharia, in its strictest form, is used as the basis of governance. It has, over the years, fought foreign government out of the country, establishing the kind of state it wanted even though the system of governance put in place and proposed by the Taliban is considered to be inclined towards extremism as women’s rights to things like education and work continue to be denied.

Over the start of its rule in the late 1990s, records of violations and abuses have been filed of men and women subjected to public beating, amputation in case of theft. In addition, girls are forcefully taken out of schools as young as the age of ten and condemned to a life of early marriage, to mention a few.

The US and its allies have seen these as offensive and unacceptable, but it has repeatedly perceived these acts practised by the Taliban as highly condemnable and unprogressive. Whereas in 2002, Narendra Modi is said to have fuelled the brutal crackdown on Muslims in Gujarati when he was governor of the state and is doing the same as we speak, as he seeks to rid off the nation of Muslims to establish an exclusive Hindu state. Yet I do not see the prying lens of the United States shifting to cover the crimes committed against Muslims. I do not see it calling out the prime minister of India asking him to end every violence perpetrated against its minority religious population as Modi seeks to obliterate Muslims off the face of India.

To this day, his actions continue to fuel and encourage the Hindu majority population as they continue to terrorize the lives of their minorities like Muslims and Christians alike. Now I ask: what set aside the Taliban’s mandate from that of Narendra Modi? What even sets Modi’s nationalist agenda apart from that of ISIL, who brutally prosecuted minorities, like the Hazaris’ and Kurds’ in Syria and Iraq subjected to beheadings and widespread rape of women and girls in a bid to establish an Islamic State? We all have criticized their approach and activities. Why then is the West and its allies turning blind eyes to this crisis as Muslims continue to suffer in the hands of extremist Hindus’ and Narendra Modi as he rakes the path to establishing the so-called Hindustan?!.

The hypocrisy of the West and the Muslim witchhunt

The West is quick to find a faulting de facto Muslim leader of a country and have him investigated, slammed his government with sanctions and in some cases invade his country and eventually have him removed if ever found wanting on crimes committed against humanity. Still, when the leader in question is a non-muslim, they turn blind.

Some months ago, some Hindustani populace went online publicly calling for genocide against Muslims of India. The case went viral. We saw and read across media platforms in the world. The United States probably caught wind of the news, but strange is the way they never respond. When the Burmese military crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar six years ago, nobody did anything. Again, I ask why the United States and the rest of the international community are selective in their punishment in response to human rights violations against Muslims worldwide.

A boycott of Bollywood

We Muslims will not sit back and continue to watch the people’s faces who continue to kill our Muslim brothers and sisters in India. So, therefore, my suggestion is we call on the Muslims across the world for a boycott of Bollywood. We will patronize them again only and solely when the ban on Muslims right to worship peacefully without intimidation in India is restored. Their right to live in peace and use public spaces like other Hindu citizens should also be re-issued and guaranteed.

Sa’adatu Aliyu comes from Kogi state. She is a graduate of English Language from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and a Masters student in Literature at the same institution. Her email is saadatualiyu36@gmail.com.

By Alkasim Harisu Alkasim

The challenges of marriage are common knowledge within and outside Nigeria. To sensible people, marriage is a keystone of luxury life. Yet, although marriage sometimes falls short of happiness and peace, personal uprightness and esteem still accompany and embellish those in the industry.

The marriage industry is chaotic. It is now commonplace to see overaged women competing for the love of a single male person alongside younger ladies. This explains how choked the industry is. Marriage, as an institution, demands a lot from us. To excel in this business, one has to school himself in patience, courage and determination. Otherwise, one will do a lousy job, and things will go south. 

In today’s materialistic world, what we call true love is lacking. Money buys love. A person can date a highborn woman even if he is lowborn. What allows him to do so is bucks. In cultures such as Indian, there is what they call a “caste system” that stratifies the society whereby one marries from within one’s caste. Interclass marriage is an abomination and, thus, a bad omen. Excessive expenses usher marriage.

In northern Nigeria today, to marry means a lot. One has to break the bank to afford marriage and multitask to afford to run a family. The trousseau he will gather robs him of too much money. If not loaded, one will feel like breathing his last while readying himself for this Sisyphean task.

Many a great family pressure prospective male spouses a lot to the extent they feel compelled to compensate their colossal expenditure by undertreating the girls they wed. The sight of the girls bores them; as a result, they start to mistreat them. This also purges them of the hate they hold for these exploitative families.

Poverty is raging, and the employment industry is becoming more competitive. Degree holders swarm places looking for well-paying jobs. As a result, some graduates are now resorting to low jobs that discredit scholarship and the status they are beginning to build. Some, willy nilly, accept works that break the back and pay low, thanks to the devastating nature of Nigeria’s economy.

Telling a greedy girlfriend that your wages or salary is not handsome implies losing her.  It once happened to my friend whose name I won’t mention here, for I feel that should be private. This happened when his family went to the girlfriend’s place. His father honestly told them about the level of income of his son. This bitter truth opened for my friend Pandora’s box. The relationship had since then staggered. In short, the two lovebirds have parted ways.

What hardens the issue of marriage in the North is our belittling the effort of even the hardworking people. We neither accept what our sons-in-law present nor study the situation on the ground. We need to wise up on this. But, unfortunately, some circumstances press people to do only those things that top their priorities.

It is worrisome that many families capitalise on their children’s beauty to milk boys of all their money. Such homes allow their daughters to tryst (zance) with more than a person at a time. In some houses, queues are made every day for a single girl. Boys take turns. Sometimes, some inpatient boyfriends cut in on the conversations of their co-suitors. What a world! The girl is seen as a moneymaking machine. Likely, after cashing in on her suitors, the girl will go out of fashion. Her beauty and charisma will decrease. As she puts on age, her boyfriends vanish, and the likelihood to marry a dream husband reduces. Now it is her younger sisters’ time. When it salaams at their home, the sendee will mention the name of her younger sisters instead. It will take time before she gets dated by somebody. Indeed life is a roller coaster. 

The social commerce between a girl and a boy worsens when the girl’s family pressure the boy for money. As he feels absolutely tired of lifting the girl’s responsibilities, he looks for a way to benefit from the dealing. The social intercourse between a girl and a boy does not stop at the former’s house as the duo rendezvous at their chosen spots. Now, the love glue between them starts to grow stronger. He will undeniably feel the urge to do the unlawful with her to the level he begins bedding her.

The groom has to pay dowry that a time costs him much. There is an amount which, if he pays below, he will have his money returned or hotly debated right at the place where the thing of the knot is occurring. In some instances, such disagreement plants in the groom’s family some disregard for the bride’s home. A bride needs to be lodged and fed. And if the groom doesn’t have his own house, he will have to find a place to sleep with his wife. Today’s brides come with vast furniture; the groom has to look for a house that sleeps like five people to contain his wife’s belongings. 

Believe it or not, the complexion of our societies has changed; we are not aiming at uprightness. We are after money and money-related things. If you are monied, you are everything. You can marry who you want. One can be immoral and still have a choice wife. That is why the deep-pocketed hire people to fake it as their parents/relatives. A bastard, in the world of today, betters a son borne in wedlock. Therefore, to be virtuous is to be well-endowed.

Allah Ka gyara ma na. Amin.

Alkasim Harisu Alkasim wrote from Kano. He can be reached via alkasabba10@gmail.com.