Zaihali is an acronym I find in her full name – Zainab Habib Ali – that Nigerian young woman from Kano, miscaught up in a drug traffic sad story, with a possible Saudi sword hanging on her head, until the Government of Nigeria came to her rescue last week. Thanks to the people’s Government’ goodwill abroad.
At the least, we can find a big favour in the goodwill PMB built over the past four years. I am happy, too, that her case came up at this point of national voyage.
I am glad also that she went through all that she felt, saw and heard. I am sure Zaihali feels a better person now that she experienced that.
Those who passed the test of God always come out stronger and better than they were. Our society is such that persons hate to hear about the good person and anything good, because the good reminds of how terrible we are, individually.
But we have to tell the stories of the few good persons we have and the little good we record so that we complement Baba’s efforts that Nigeria is not all a bad mockery.
No. But good persons are a blessing to the nation and to the renewed leadership that we are changing, whether or not some of us like it. Goodness also brings the favour of God along to wrap even the evil in our mid.
Good stories of good persons always are narration of how the victims of bad experience pass the tests of God at a time in their lives, including those tests evil humans do in the name of God. Many of us have chosen to be bad and cruel to humans, and we don’t want to be reminded because it is huge dissonance.
When we do, we actually mock the victims in a pretense of sympathy. When we choose to remind ourselves or others about our idiocy, it must be same mocking of humanity – something bad that happened to someone in other societies that we share in mockery and in defence that, afterall, people are the same bad everywhere.
Yes. There are good and bad persons everywhere, but you have no idea what led to those bad persons so behave in their places. I mean experience leads to habits. What is your own reason for the choice of bad, cruel habits to humanity?
No one has any reason to be bad. It is not one of the rights of human rights either. Persons must not suffer for just your personal choice of way of life. And then this, no reason ever justifies touching others, their rights or justice. No justification in any of the holiness we claim in the mid of plenty spoil.
I am happy for Zaihali now that she is free, happy at last. She is a good stroy, positive out of a negative experience. But the best for her and for all the system’s hopeless, is in what followed after her release and what comes after the example of her case. What some of said about the FGN’s actions through the AGF was damn sad.
When persons use their hearts to reason instead of their minds, they fall naked on the gallery of reason. It is a terrible country where you wake up to every issue and see emotions from hateful hearts running through the media, and on almost every of the issues you carry the burden of sharing someone’s shamelessness. They compared two incomparable stories. But instead of receiving hate back, they received love.
Yes, they said much nonsense but more than what they say, we are back positive, hopeful that the Zaihali’ story can only remind us that Leah Sharibu’s nad of our other daughters’ stories in more prayers.
Leah Sharibu is not in the hands of a government of another country for easy, diplomat appeal. This FGN would have gone to end to bring her home too. Those of us who know PMB do believe that he will be last person to discriminate against any Nigerian or against any human.
Bias is different. PMB and all the aspiring good persons are definitely biased to goodness against anything bad. That is the majority view now in Nigeria as the elections showed. But she is sadly with terrorists and the many other girls in their hands too.
If it is that easy it will be done for Leah what is done for Zaihali. The latter came home first only reminds us to intensify prayers for the daughters of the North to get back home.
It is a theory now, and that is a conclusion I made long back, that whatever FGN does good is always bad in some eyes; what it doesn’t do is what they want and what it does bad is the worst to ever happen in life. So there is no need to waste precious words on the framedminded.
Those are persons who can’t see even the glariest figure of truth ever standing on earth. There is no point to mind them. Let the good across the boards pray hard for Leah and the other girls.
I have long inoculated myself from those sadist since the declaration of the winner of the last election which they do everything foolstupid to smudge with their dirt. It was long an end of discussion since we crossed over to NL.
I now need a new set of reasonable minds to talk to, those who actually use their minds when thinking at the national level and human levels and not their hearts. Those who use their hearts are always sick of something. They can’t walk. They will waste your time on the road of humanity to humanity. Leave them.
For the lessons we learnt from events as they folded ever since the aftermaths of the elections, and since the poor girl’s release, Zaihali has become our new hero. No. Not because she is a northern element.
No. It is because she is the latest story of the mystery called humanity, and as in every story, there are lessons to learn. For those who can, want to learn, anyway.
Zaihali means it is like my own condition, in dialectical Arabic, and that is what many women, even those in the comfort of their homes or locked up in Saudi Arabia at the moment, for different offences, may likely to tell Zaihali that.
It is something most women in Nigeria and all over the world seem to be telling her travails and even as she goes home free of any charge.
Every woman, rich or poor, literate or illiterati, white or black, big or small, is a pity. If she is a woman, she is most like a victim of greed, abuse and denial.
All women have all same condition. Forget their appearances and overt appeal. Their hearts are always heavy. They only try to conceal the debt of their hearts. Some of them die in the process, with many stories untold, unheard.
Every one of them seem to tell Zaihali that your experience, is just like my own condition, because women all over the world of the not developing countries, especially, have been in a mess that shows the shame of the capitalist’s shadow that enmeshed the lives of women and children. And their continue to carry the burden of life imposed on them by God through wicked, evil man.
And the men capitalists at home and at all the levels come from behind to say that a good way to measure development, look at the women and children you find in any country. And then nothing changes because the spoils outweigh the efforts towards fixing them.
Thanks to the many women and men of goodwill working on many projects dedicated for women and children, though. They are a blessing. Most of them also carry heavy hearts for the stories they see in desperate areas of the world and Maiduguri. All the breathtaking efforts from different directions cannot be enough because the mess is too messy.
Zaihali was lucky because she was innocent. In every case, the innocent are always defended by God Himself. It is only that sometimes the desperation of the innocent, informed by a shaky faith in God, or informed by the person’s strength of faith who believes that, sometimes, God chooses those he loves to put them to test to qualify the strength of their faith or just to renew it.
But Zaihali was also lucky. She has a good educated girl that ensured the schools she attended went through her instead. And she carries the life’s value of good and goodness of life which makes her judgment, statement and comments during the four month condition easy.
Not every education can do that, I hear many good persons say. She could have spoil her case by just the utter of a wrong or bad word or doing something little stupid. Her calm in prayers was a connect with God that worked and will work for her any other time.
Her father’s lines actually moved me to this subject this week: itace yar karamammu. Amma itace malamarmu, Habib said.. She is the smallest in the family. But she is everyone’s teacher. That must have a lot of compliments to say about Zaihali.
May be more than what I first thought. But what easily beckons are that she has good education, working faith in God, good moral value base and full of respect.
These are rare traits in many northern young girls, who are ambitious, full of life but don’t know, don’t want to know how to hold the rope to climb up to responsible life. Zaihali is an open model for them to take a serious lesson
She is also lucky because she has a living father that is well educated too, or well informed, cosmopolitan and a faithful that believes in the very system that led to the set up of his daughter.
In the north, that is quite a high grade habit, a privilege. Not many young women can be so lucky. For most of them, it is either they are orphaned or the parents are limited in anything it takes to exonerate their daughters, push them on or help them where it is necessary. Sure that Habib didn’t have to push his to any level. She walked up.
And they may not get a lawyer, a volunteer, a kindhearted, easily, to take cases up for determined justice, like it was theirs. It is hard to find, to think even because this is the north of Nigeria, where we encourage goodness by not doing anything – a sort of passing on the responsibility onto the other/next person, usually the poor and week, as if the powerful is meant to do nothing to help the helpless.
The privileged think doing good is for the needy, and the desperate only because they are on the edge of life, nearing their death, and the dying needs some immediate rewards to take home, as if the rest are promised inoculation against needs, sickness and death.
But not Zaihali’s family. They are different. In the stead of calling a godfather or travelling to Abuja to ask to see the tops, Habib Aliyu, first turned to God in serious prayers and second went down to where it started – the MAKIA – and filed up the case with the airport authorities. This is exemplary for us because for most of the privileged in our mid, putting God first is only a statement of the mouth or that of the heart.
They always beat their hearts in the name of not God but in some powerful godfather. They can say or do anything to get not just justice. Their type of request with the godfather is rescue the suspect but also arrest, disgrace and even life humiliate the culprit, for ‘daring my family’.
But Zaihali was also lucky by nature. She was lucky as a person, for her type of character, may be a good heart, too. She was also loved by the many who followed her case and prayed for her elease because she was loveable. The father thanked many Nigerians who prayed for Zaihali. It is also a mark of faith to think that God Can also decide on a matter because of the prayer of any of his servants, for any reason.
For her heart, for her age in such a case, for her type of person, for her kind of family, (for those who know them) or for the misfortune of her poor case, humanity fell in love with Zaihali and wanted her to live more to full term. The innocent will also die any time, but it shouldn’t be that way, not by the sword.
Payers can move mountains. But our best prayers always go to those we love most. Nigeria loved her, her case sprang popular, the case went to court and the President acted on her issues. What a good person to get all that for no cost.
If you ask her now, her heart is full of forgiveness: forgive those chaps. It may not be their faults either. They didn’t know what was in that bag. They just used her remaining kilos to help someone who happened to be the wrong person to help.
We must appreciate and respect the modesty and humility of a rich family for the simple reason that they are exceptional. A daughter of such a family will never get to end of the sword, just for her, their character.
No. In most case, the hunt of our misdeeds always follows our cases. They determine whether not we win them. It is a divine order of life: you reap what you sow: those who read God’s signs in their life know how much this is true and how often it works with a minded character of the life of the faithful.
What a privileged daughter of the north. I know in her renewed life and her current prayful rejoice, she is envied by many girls, women. How many of Zaihali’s agelike in such or any case, are so privileged and lucky? Few. Negligible. Even in her type of case or related offences many women cant be anywhere near the package of life she got.
Many of our women are undergoing much misery even in their homes as daughters, wives, daughters, nieces, or inlaws. The prisoner that Zaihali was in Saudi was a better life for many of the women under our custody, if you go by the quality of tummy service and personal care, hygiene and health.
The Saudi prisoner was a better person than many women in their own families, homes. Why? Because of our tradition, culture and society, mostly, we have thrown out of our life what was to refine and seal the face of the beauty in us.
W e have selected some aspects of those that directly relate to our likes as men and applied the forbid of religion against them but any other thing that affects what those under us need from us, we carpeted them and muted them away from religojustice and from public discourse.
The conditions of women, we must admit and face it, are created by our type of society. In the discharge of basic human needs to the different women under us in some names and for some reasons, many members of the patriarchy are chargeable for many wants and culpable human waste of life.
Many other things cannot be said here, and in our silence, the poor, neglected woman will remain languishing in the confines of misery because of someone’s greed and careless, disrespectful attitude to the will of the God of humanity.
God, be the guardian yourself, of the many women you entrusted to us in custody of life, anywhere in the world, for we have failed them.
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.
