Who thought the news of the abducted Kano 9 would not be given that pride of place on the cover pages of the southern media outlets? The southern media have their own way of doing things, but that should not have anything to do with ‘humanistic journalism’.
‘Journalism’ is a preciously sacred and respectful profession. Ordinarily, the media are expected to present a balanced picture of the world to their readers/audiences thereby rendering a genuine service to humanity. This unfortunately cannot be said of the southern media. Their penchant dissimulation and hypocrisy reached its peak last week Friday. But at least we are in the age of self-congratulatory media, when journalists, reporters, editors as well as analysts, call themselves freedom fighters or good Samaritans of some kind.
One ominous thing about the southern media is that they are very notorious for prejudiced reporting. The media are well-known for their insensitive reportage mostly laced with prejudiced information capable of inciting violence especially on issues bordering on religion cum-geopolitics.
About five years ago, the southern media succeeded in giving a simple case of elopement between Yunusa Yellow and one Ese Orure of Bayelsa State abduction-kidnapping-forceful-conversion-paedophilia toga. The prejudiced semicircular cloth sadly fitted the case. Readers, especially outside the country, could not but reason with the toga not the young man and the lady behind the veil.
For quite some time the media was awash with hateful and inciting headlines. This was followed by scathing reports and editorials by many southern media outlets skillfully deployed to finish off the comatose north. Finally, Yunusa was termed a terrorist.
The raging bull of the southern media could not leave any stone unturned in its ill-informed campaign of giving the naïve north a bad name in order to hang it. This was what happened. The north had to kowtow to the south’s wishes. Ese was taken back home, Yunusa was disowned and handed over to the appropriate authorities for prosecution. What would the north do? It could not stand a media war with the war-chested south-based media outfits mostly privately owned.
Nobody cared to write or tell that Yunusa Yellow and his novice lover, Ese Orure, were hypnotized by Eros and acted under the soothing influence of its spell; neither had the case been treated as an isolated case of two lovers, who had decided to run as far as they could to remain in each other’s bosom, of course after religiously sectioned marriage rites including the payment of dowry to the bride in the presence of sane and just adult witnesses.
Besides, the case could have been treated without giving it ethno-religious coloration. Nay, this was not the intention of southern media. The media, backed by war-mongering CAN, dubious human rights activists and some southern leaders, have a hidden agenda of smearing the religion of Islam and the Muslim north. The region was caught in an inescapable garment of blame.
Despite the unrelenting efforts Kano leaders made to take Ese back to her parents and see Yunusa punished for his ostensible excesses, the ancient city of Kano was forced to be on the defensive. Kano leaders could not sleep for months. The media, the so-called human rights activists, religious bodies and the southern leaders were unstoppably throwing invectives at the region.
The settings of Kano palace and the government house were funereal – silence dwelled, heads bent down, beads of sweats, and eyes bloodshot. The state tasted the magnitude of despair then. This was the price the state had to pay for a ‘crime’ committed by an individual.
Yunusa was charged with five counts of abduction, kidnapping, paedophilia, rape and sexual exploitation. In a month or two, due to the special attention the case received, Yunusa’s picture had to make it to the 89 best crime images in the country under the auspices of the southern media.
No, that will not be enough. Sad narratives of northern traditional institutions, religious and political leaders’ complicities in the case have kept on popping up to date.
The Guardian newspaper was out-front in its attack on the north. In one of its March 16, 2019 reports titled ‘Taming the monster of girl child abduction’ the newspaper went on rampage.
The report did not only blame Yunusa Yellow of abducting a Christian girl, as the report loved to qualify the helpless girl, Ese Orure, but heaped the blame on the alleged complicities of the police, traditional institutions, religious leaders and even judicial officers.
All that could not quench the paper’s thirst for denting the north’s image. According to the report the trend was now assuming a more frightening stance not only as heightened by the alleged abduction of Ese, but also as an ‘unnamed’ Christian community in northern Nigeria raised alarm on the new phenomenon of how Christian girls under 18 were abducted and forced to convert to Islam. And the north, the report added, had a whole institution that facilitated the abduction; and the abducted girls are kept in palaces or ‘radical’ religious leaders’ houses for the emir or clerics’ pleasure.
On Friday October 11, 2019, came the terrible news. The bench has turned against the south. The Kano State police command, in collaboration with sister security agencies, had busted an Igbo syndicate specialized in abducting, kidnapping and trafficking of children of Muslim north to a destination in Anambra State and possibly some other southern states, where the abductees are forcefully converted to Christianity and later subjected to hard labour.
Addressing a press conference on Friday, the Kano State Commissioner of Police, Ahmad Iliyasu, as reported by Daily Nigerian, said the command’s Tactical Team of Operation Puff Adder investigated, uncovered, rescued the minors and arrested the culprits following a tip off by some concerned citizens of the state.
The six nabbed suspects confessed to their crimes. According to one of the suspects, Paul Owne, the syndicate had been in operation for more than five years kidnapping and trafficking innocent Muslim children from Kano to southeast where they are Christianized and subjected to hard labour. In five years only God knows the exact number of children abducted.
One frightening thing about the case is that most of the abductees are barely out of diapers – between the age of 2 and 5; and they were mostly abducted on either their way to school or back home.
Two days later, the story of the abduction, kidnapping, trafficking and forceful conversion of the 9 Kano children turned out to be a tip of the iceberg as the association of the parents of the abductees released photographs and list of about 50 missing children believed to have been abducted by the syndicate. And the counting is still on.
It will not cost a life to understand the hypocrisy of the southern media, the so-called, human rights activists, and public affairs analysts. Since the news was broken many of them have been on sabbatical leave or pretend to be and those who maintain their presence feigned blindness to the news. The southern media as usual, despite the enormity of the crime, gave it mere passing references as if mere domestic animals were involved.
The north must learn to speak for itself as no one will do that for the region and one thing is imminent: the north is under siege. The syndicate is hell-bent on a mission to uproot the Muslim north from its very source or core of its existence. The heinous crime is not only Boko Haramic in nature, but also an organized crime that poses the greatest threat to the Muslim north and that must be resisted by all and sundry.
All parents or guardians whose children were suspected to have been abducted all this while must organize themselves into associations, collect the dates of their missing love ones and speak out.
Government must ensure the security of lives and property of its people are guaranteed, justice is done to the victims and their parents, the perpetrators brought book and reunited with their relatives.
If the suspects were northern Muslims, even the so-called advanced western democracies that boast of human rights, the Vatican and other non-Catholic Churches would have raised voices against this dastardly evil. But since Christians are the perpetrators none of them has seen the moral justification to condemn this atrocity. What is good for the goose is not good for the gander or so it seems. What a shame!
Abdulhamid wrote via abdullahiyassar2013@gmail.com
08145901322
Twitter: yassara2013
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Sky Daily
