Rebellion of the Almajiri -By Festus Adedayo

One good thing about the raging pestilence called COVID-19 is the way it has been breaking down the boundaries of orthodoxy. Long-held beliefs, assumptions, and seemingly impregnable opinions are falling like badly-stacked cards. While religious orthodoxies, which some charlatans masquerading as pastors and Imams fed fat on for centuries are giving way, the world will never be the same again after the coronavirus’ wings are eventually clipped.

One of the fatalities of COVID-19 is undoubtedly the almajiri institution, a system that is as old as Northern Nigeria. For decades, southerners who couldn’t fathom why a person would give birth to a child and throw him into the dangerous world, wandering aimlessly and without parental care, criticized this system as evil and satanic. This got the ire of the North which took the criticism as an extension of the so-called southern disaffection for anything that has North prefixed to it.

The almajiri system festered in its evil, gradually morphing into a ready tool for insurgents. From the rank of mature graduates of the almajiri system, who were weaned on the philosophy of the hostility of the world against them, insurgents got willing converts. Even at that, the deplorable class system of the North which encourages stratification, with the upper class feeding on the ignorance of the lower stratum and their ceaseless salute of rankadede for them, was not discouraged by the Northern elite. They needed the talakawa, prominent cadre of which is the almajiri, to continue to flourish.

Now, the lives of the Northern elite are threatened. They have seen that the almajiri are easy conduits of the transmission of the coronavirus to the comforts of their own homes and palaces. In the herd movements of the almajiri lie an easy multiplication of the virus. Faced with this threat, the elite, in their survival instinct, now descended on the system, seeking to wipe it off. As Chinua Achebe wrote in his Things fall apart, agadi nwanyin, the  old woman gets uneasy when dried bones are mentioned in a proverb. The presence of the almajiri signifies death for the elite and their bid to continue to live forever. Pronto, they got leading elements of their class – the governors – to decree death on the system. States which had hitherto used the almajiri – mostly under-aged – to populate the ballot box and to inflate census figure, in order to survive, outlawed the system and there is today a frantic scamper to rout it.

What they don’t know is that soon, there will be a renewed rebellion of the almajiri. Having seen how disposable they are to politicians and the Northern establishment that had pampered them with left-over foods while the children of the patrons of the systems schooled in Harvard, almajiri are likely to rebel against the system. Unfortunately, when the almajiri does his, as Yoruba musician, Ayinla Omowura, once sang, even those who did not negotiate to buy this lethal commodity would forcefully pay the price. That will be the lot of those who warned the Northern elite of the infernal nature of this system and Nigeria as a whole which will ultimately be the recipient of the revolt of the almajiri.