I have not met him anywhere before. But I have met him at heart, by the ear. A good, hardworking man is a thing of joy that should be celebrated by every decent human. The last time he led a team from the visiting German broadcast outfit, the Deutsche Welle Hausa to see how the Department was doing during our time and what they could do to help, I travelled and was represented.
At a time when Fulani the man and the tribe are a sudden stigma of evil blamed for all national calamities in history, I take pride and pleasure to write about one man of one tribe, without being a Fulani of origin talking in self-defence. Thanks to freedom of speech. Injustice must end in this country. It must.
They got the highest reception by the then Chief Executive of my institution himself, who, as a progressive, ad committed academic, who was happy they came, so enticed by their kind consideration. He brought them home, wait, don’t even know where he is from, and brought them to his alma mater. I received a good report and the good story of one of them – Usman Shehu Usman.
Who says a name does not follow its bearer? Who can deny the effect of the legacy of the great? Feel the weight of the name, the sound of its ring and remember the first person that we know bore it. It recalls everything about the great first Shehu Usman with the last name – Danfodio purposively missed off.
Who can deny the values of northern Nigeria derived from the east? Who denies the culture, system and beliefs of a people whose hearts are traced eastwards? Only the well-educated, the rightly guided son that can hold onto the past. They cannot cut their types of the origins of the founding philosophies that spur humanity to big heights.
But how can one write about somebody they haven’t met? Why? I will try this one. And it is because he is a huge example of a remark which is a recurring decimal during my lectures: “aspire high. You are a citizen of the globe.
Dream to work for Aljazeera but when the graph slopes, the worst can be anything in gratitude to God. Don’t dream to be a local drumbeat. Look up. Not straight ahead. Never look down. Looking down is the least option for anyone”, I say.
I tell my students I don’t train them for work at the local broadcast stations but for the world media, because they are not, they should not be local champions but competitors in the most challenging of the world – the new multitask, multimedia practise of the noblest profession but only if you know your ways that is journalism. I ask them to think big and aspire high.
Big thinking takes the competitor high but in the event of diminishing returns, they can lower their ambition. At the worst of things, they can come down to work at the local level, to serve their people.
But again who says if you gow high you won’t come down. Shehu has seen the world and now reminds us about the old maxim that there is no place like home.
Thank God I now have a good example in a student I have not met, have not taught to hold in defence against the many local champions I have met and taught, and wage the wrong knowledge to deny, dismiss and displace facts and theories of life, history and reality.
No matter the level of education, home-sitting kills the mind down below human level of reasoning. Lack of exposure makes the educated far worst than the illiterate. It tells that my idea wasn’t wrong as some students tend to deny, denounce or delete the damn lessons as I learn of recent.
And I now have more arms to say it again and bold: Don’t look down. Never. Go out to see the world, make your point at the world stage, get a universal name, never stop thinking about home and at some point, come back home with big ideas to solve home problems.
Setting personal standard to the local level ties you down to the circumference of this remote part of the world, dropping your right to be anywhere as a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars as mentor J B Jaw-Jaw of blessed memory – a Masi from Wuyo, Borno State who died last June 18 years back in Bauchi – used to say. It is better a working idea
Shehu Usman Shehu has a Diploma from the Department as a member of the starting set, some three years before I came. I heard his stories. I hear his stories. Some of his mates and lecturers around still recall how unserious he was. But in broadcasting, it is the unserious that get jiggy with it.
This is the second person I know who never took class notes but will always pass every course. I used to think it is a combination of both innate and learned traits, but theories change and they change my mind now that great broadcast talents and great broadcasters are born only instead.
They are the type of student that never takes notes or the one that put their notebooks into the back pockets of their Jeans or the type that is often late or absent or always in the Department’s or the class’ news.
They are notorious, the funniest in class. They demystify class boredom by sudden break-into class with some funny news about what has just happened outside or tell even a fake an anecdote about one lecturer, just for laughs.
May be Shehu is not one. May be he is. But I have known his type up there in the skies of the world, making fool of radio attendants and helping everyone laugh out their sorrows. Broadcasters are great teachers but like every teacher, their talents are abused by the practise of conspiracies against the change back home, making us charge them as almost saboteurs to national progress.
Shehu Usman worked at difference times at the national Voice of Nigeria (VON) and the local Bauchi Radio Corporation (BRC). He is the same student who is a renowned international broadcaster living and working in Germany, like the many we sent away out of sheer frustrations, hatred and envy.
He has thump-printed his name and his good family name on the annals of broadcasting at all levels and is coming home to help and touch life of a people in trouble with their own name and tribe as becoming a national stigma, courtesy of practise of politics in Nigeria.
Shehu now holds the tag of the proud founder of the new Koode Radio International (KRI) conceived and implemented in the language of the great Shehu Danfodio, and on the principles of mass education of the people of this Shehu’s clan.
KRI aims to educate the massive Fulani people across the whole of Africa and the world on the popular essentials of life and to remake the battered image of the Fulbe.
This is huge incentive to the cause that informs the Federal Government of Nigeria’s Ruga and the Fulani radio project objectives to edutain the Fulani on the vices of the many issues linked to them and the need for a better, meaningful and productive life hinged on education and service to their people and to humanity.
It is also a huge initiative that supports my standing criticism of our elite, political leaders, bus-tycoons and the privileged many, about their careless, negligent, wicked and retrogressive ideas about, and for, the north as a unique part of Nigeria that needs urgent socioeconomic healing.
More than the Ibos and their intolerance, they are doing more disservice to the cause Professor Jubril Aminu caste under the former Babangida regime. See how they are silent in the face of the brutality of northerners against themselves while the rest of the country claps that we are killing ourselves.
God have mercy on the sweat of the father of nomadic education. Their attitude is good reason we need to support the PMB FGN to continue to strengthen national institutions and institute more of them for specific purposes in order to avoid the wicked negligence of national imperatives by subsequent leaders.
As my brother Ibrahim Bello Shira rightly observed last week, the Fulani settlement issue of the FGN’s Ruga policy is rightly suspended because the elite and the traditional rulers whose duties directly relate to the issue are conspiratorially silent because all the blames, abuses and the political dust it raises are all on one man.
PMB is doing his best to want to do the best for Nigeria within the available time, because he knows the long standing problem of farmer/herder clashes due to shrinking grazing lands due to over-farming and because the economy needs both farmers and herders. Who is thinking along? Who is his help at every point in place and time? How many?
Without both the farmer and the herder, some of us will die of corn and beef starvation. Nigerians are only grateful to God by their lips. We never know the blessings we have in our count of benefits of cohabitation and mutual pursuits of occupations until we visit one of the most intolerant African counties, say, Uganda.
But because he is Fulani, the elite silence is helping bad politics and bad politicians, other political-conscious Nigerians to push on with the pressure and to cry foul that the President is trying siphon federal resources to do projects for his own people. They know this is Nigeria where stupid things are done by the stupid, for stupid ends just to meet a selfish objective.
The political-aggrieved across the country can take any foolish, stupid lie to use as a means for political self-actualisation of personal wants. In a Nigeria where the selfish cannot steal public money again, this Ruga issue is big chance to avenge PMB’s close of the stealing pipes big time. They are silent but when they read this, their response will be that they are working behind doors to help resolve the issue.
The people of the north are awake now, Fulani are not alone in this as they are core part of the region and we don’t forget again whither we have come and what we need to do to stand strong in support of reform and national corrections of individual and group myopia just against anyone and any part of the country.
We can see the difference PMB has brought into our lives and how we have been short-changed in the past, by persons who called themselves leaders of the north, yes, but who have opposed the President all his first years.
We have seen how individual efforts of the good human can make the difference, and how the young elite are ready to give while many of them are hidden to take from us.
But by the silence of the wicked taker on issues concerning the Fulani and the north, we can only say more eyes are opening and the eye will open wide.
Welldone, Shehu na Shehu. You are a worthy son.
Hassan Alhaji Hassan can be contacted on 08032829772/08050551220 (text only with full names and address)a[email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect WikkiTimes’ editorial stance.
