The Horse Man With 4 Boxes, By Emmanuel Yawe
On April 16th 1911, Mr. Carl Zimmermann, a South African Dutchman mounted a horse at Wukari with four boxes. His destination was Takum – all in Taraba State. On the second day of his journey, 17th April 1911 and halfway to Takum, he came to a big village and decided to stop.
The founder of the village was Saaitu Deekpe, Chief of the Shitile clan of the Tiv tribe. He was not at hand to receive the horseman because he was busy attending to other urgent matters of his chiefdom. The horseman sent word through an interpreter for the chief to come and join those who were at hand so that he would tell them about ‘Aondo’ – the Tiv word for God which many Tiv people also answer as their name.
“What has Aondo done again?” asked the chief thinking the man wanted to complain about one of his recalcitrant subjects who answered the name Aondo. “I am too busy now to hear this complain about Aondo. Make the white man comfortable and maybe tomorrow I will hear what he has to tell me about Aondo.”
This was a pleasant surprise to the horseman.He had read the accounts of Dr Baikie who embarked on an adventure of the Benue river with Ajayi Crowther in 1854. Baikie had written that the Tiv are an unfortunate tribe that are against everybody and everybody is against them. He went further to conclude that “their rude minds are incapable of comprehending anything beyond war and raping.”
Other accounts he had read from colonial literature about the Tiv people were equally unpleasant and out of tone with the hospitality extended to him at Saaiutu. British colonial administration had up to that time declared the whole of Tivland as unsafe for Christian missionary work. Lord Lugard in his official dispatches described the Tiv people as “ignorant savages and very intractable people who enjoy lawless murders and looting.”
These negative opinions, expressed by people who were in a position to recommend bringing Christianity to the Tiv people were responsible for the delayed arrival of Christianity in Tivland.
There were however a few people who were inspired by the spirit Christ to bring Christianity to Tiv land. Notable among them were Dr Hermann Karl Wildhem Kumm, a German who studied Arabic in the University of Cairo in Egypt and Hausa in Tripoli Libya. He was instrumental to the formation of the Sudan United Mission in the United Kingdom in 1904. In 1907 he travelled to South Africa where they held meetings and in collaboration with Rev George Botha, a young theological graduate and another young man, Mr V H Hosking of the Wesley Church embarked on the arduous task which would bring Christianity to the Tiv people.
Still, given the negative publicity given about the Tiv people by early writers who came in contact with them, the man on the horseback was surprised with the hospitality granted him by Chief Saaitu Deekpe on 17th April 1911. Not only did the Chief allow him stay without molestation or an attack of the poisoned arrow for which the Tiv people were famous, he sent word round and invited his subjects to come and welcome his new guest.
If Mr Zimmermann was surprised, those who knew Chief Saaitu intimately were not. One of his most respected wives, Mrs Kwaghembe Sai (nee Burya) who witnessed the historic event on April 17th 1911 told this writer that the man Chief Saaitu was an enigma.
“He used to boast that he is a man with a coat of many colors: That from his house there will emerge poor men and rich men; good men and bad men; kind people and cruel people; honest men and thieves; small men and giants etc. His decision to welcome the queer man who looked like a sprite, the type that were being hunted and killed with poisoned arrows all over Tiv land and accommodate him in his compound did not come to us as surprise at all. It was in his character,” she told me before her death in 1975.
The surprised horseman took immediate advantage of the unexpected hospitality. He opened the first box and brought out a copy of the Holy Bible and read from John 3; 16. He preached and sang to the assembled crowd. The people were perplexed and started calling “Ortese” meaning the teacher. It was from this first box that Christianity and western educarion took root and has today become the dominant religion of the Tiv people. Chief Saaitu’s son Akighirga (Akiga) was the first Tiv man to be baptized and to profess that Christ was his savior. His other son, Ishoribo-Rev J E I Sai became the first Tivman to be ordained a Priest.This box also contained other books which brought literacy to the Tiv people. Chief Saaitu’s son Akiga was the first Tiv man to be literate and his grandson, Ezekiel Akiga became the first Tivman to get a University degree. Today the Tiv are one of the most educated ethnic groups in northern Nigeria.
Among the people who came to see the strange horseman were people suffering different kinds of ailments. Some had malaria, some had sores and ulcers all over their bodies, others were coughing endlessly. The second box was opened in which an assortment of medicines and the horseman was proceeded to administer these to all the sick people who came. Amazingly they were healed and healthcare became a powerful weapon to induce the sick who in the process of receiving treatment for their ailments also received the word of Christ.
On the second day, the horseman opened the third box. This one contained a hammer and other carpentry and building implements. With these, he erected a structure of his own and thus introduced the Tiv people for the first time to the art of modern architecture.
Soon, the horseman opened his other box, the fourth one. This one contained seeds of fruit trees and vegetables, namely mango, citrus (oranges), grape, avocado, guava, cashew etc. He planted the first mango trees in Tivland which are still standing in Saaitu’s village. The rapid spread of tree crop farming in Tivland came out of this box.
Today Benue is the leading producer of mangos and citrus in Nigeria. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimates that there are 22 million mango trees in Benue equivalent of 220, 000 hectares – all from one of the four boxes with the horseman.
Thus, the horseman, Carl Zimmermann, who arrived Saaitu village on 17th April 1911 with his four boxes brought with him a revolution that has changed the course of Tiv history.
Chinese investment company, Tongyi Group has donated five million naira to the government of Benue State as part of its contribution towards the alleviation of the sufferings of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the state.
A member of the House of Representatives, Dapo Lam-Adesina, has made it clear that he was born into progressive family and will remain wherever progressive politicians are gathered even as he denied speculations that he is planning to defect from the All Progressives Congress (APC) to Alliance for Democracy (AD).
The minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun has said that the sum of $322,515,931.83 recovered Abacha funds from the Swiss Government is being transferred into a special account in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Buhari And The Lazy Political Youth Coyotes, By Peter Claver Oparah
In his speech in London last week, President Muhammadu Buhari, ever his frank and honest self, captured the challenges a state like Nigeria faces, with a huge population fixated on the entitlement syndrome which feels that the state must do everything for the citizens. Said the President at a Commonwealth Business Forum on Making Business Easier Between Commonwealth Countries in London; “We have a very young population. Our population is estimated conservatively to be 180million. More than 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 30. A lot of them have not been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil-producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free.”
There is nothing you can fault from Buhari’s perfect reading of the Nigerian reality, especially where a ravenous newly-minted opposition feels it is its right to hold power, raid the treasury and ride roughshod over all Nigerians, as it did in 16 woeful years. Where the displaced PDP and its cohorts think they have a thick poach of lazy, idle and uneducated ‘youths’ from its bizarre years in power who lie in wait for the proceeds of stolen resources, there is absolutely nothing new or wrong in the President’s unputdownable reading of the country’s predicaments. President Buhari merely brought to the fore the needs of a nation that had its best years eaten away by locusts, its youths badly short-changed and duped and its future made so uncertain by the prebendal profligacy of the past. So why do the Gentiles rage and the people utter folly?
But his honest and faultless statement was latched on by an opposition that wants to desperately hoodwink, cheat and con its ways back to power. Pronto, we had another version of Buhari’s sincere statement of the facts of the Nigerian problem. We heard from the distraught opposition that President Buhari said that Nigerian youths are lazy and there began a round of devious maelstrom that the same opposition hopes will drive it back to power to continue the bizarre sleaze it did in 16 years before the Buhari tsunami swept them off power. That was all the coyotes who have been bleeding badly since they lost power needed to raise a way cry. Oh, yea, he called us lazy and we will teach him a lesson in 2019! Can you believe such bacchanal deceit? Can you imagine such lascivious fraud? Can you believe such bestial intrigue? Can you believe such naked scam?
It can rightly be asked if the President’s comment above was the only match stick that kindled the mischievous anger of the dehydrated and frustrated Nigerian opposition. Is this simple statement of truth the only catalyst that set off the bottled rage of the opposition, hurting badly after being defeated and sent off power and bleeding more after the capping of the notorious free-loading enterprise with which they demolished Nigeria in 16 years? Is this statement enough to let off so huge a gall bag the distressed opposition and their cohorts have been exuding since then? Ordinarily, the President’s comment shouldn’t let off the huge fireball those that want to come back to power by fire, by force have raised. But we are at a point where the consuming desperation of the opposition to return to power is firing the pin of a dangerous social, political and economic mayhem the country has never seen before. We have in our hands today an amoral and corrupt opposition that desperately wants to lie, slander, perjure, forge, bite and claw its way back to power. We have a deadly gang up of bitter but hugely corrupt forces that won’t mind setting the country on fire to achieve their consuming desire to get back power for the purpose of self-aggrandizement and free loading. For such deadly, spitting force, forging, lying and seducing the unaware and the simple minded with such frauds as they now untruths to the President, are all game.
In its desperation to nail Buhari, even by false means the bizarre opposition the country has been saddled for the past three years ran into its ever busy laboratory of forgery and fabricated a false version of the president’s comment and came out with the mantra that President Buhari called all Nigerian youths lazy. They didn’t go further. They have gotten all they wanted and they set sail, furiously marketing this lie to their confederates in desperate bid for power. They were not interested in proof of Buhari’s culpability because, like every other dubious marauder, they don’t have proof. They now moved in to seduce the ill-informed youths, their supporters and their fellow collegiate in the queer battle to get back to power and continue their brigands to mount a war cry of how Buhari abused the youths as lazy. They fawned, foamed ceaselessly in the mouth and threatened with corrupt indignation that they will vote out Buhari n 2019 for calling Nigerian youths lazy. Believing Nigerians are unthinking and irrational mobsters they can twiddle in any manner they want so as to get back to power, they lurked at the back, smiled in a glee of mischief and uttered, like Mark Anthony in Shakespearean Julius Caesar; ‘mischief thou art afoot’. They hope to garner the rewards like any other yahoo yahoo fraudster but they will be disappointed because even as they have consistently taken Nigerians for fools, Nigerians will disappoint them at the fullness of time.
So far, no one has shown where such devilish quote of ‘All Nigerian youths are lazy’ came in President Buhari’s spotless reason for which he drew attention to a stark reality bedeviling Nigeria where its future generation latches onto a strange sense of entitlement to deny themselves the creative opportunities and urge to do well for themselves. No one has so far excerpted the forged quote from Buhari’s effort to offer a conceptual clarity to a problem which surely will hunt all of us one day. No one has offered any rebuttal to the truism of Buhari’s statement. No one has cared to offer any alternative fact to the one he offered. But to the multitude of lazy, jobbing coyotes that graduated from the PDP school of mischief, Buhari is guilty, even when he never made the quote they are running stark nude in the market square with. To them, Buhari is guilty of every sin in the world because he denied to pander to their sense of entitlement by sharing the national cake amongst a sybaritic cult of idle, lazy and pleasure-loving political hustlers. Most importantly. Buhari by defeating the PDP was directly responsible for their woes. He denied them the favourite feeding bottle through which they have lived their padded lives so he must bear the responsibility for even what he never said or inferred. Can you believe such tragedy?
What was contained In President Buhari’s speech that had not been said by various people, even in more acrid forms before? Let us revisit a few;
In July 1974, precisely at the Ondo Town Hall, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo delivered a speech at the presentation of legendary Chief Gani Fawehinmi’s book, ‘People’s Rights To Free Education At All Levels’ where he said, “The trouble with many Nigerian youths is that they sleep too much, play too much in idle chatter and gossip”. Buhari, in his London speech, didn’t come near this fatal indictment but there was no banner raised against Chief Awolowo because he was speaking the truth. Then, there was no desperate caste of looters and their politically-charged lazy youth wing trying every prank to return to power.
Reuben Abati, the Spokesman for the immediate past president Goodluck Jonathan, wrote about Nigerian youths in September 2012, ‘Nigerian youths are idle and idling twittering collective children of anger, the distracted crowd of Facebook addicts, the BBM-pinging soap gossips of Nigeria who seem to be in competition among themselves to pull down President Goodluck Jonathan”. This is the official spokesman of the erstwhile President Jonathan. So why did the political ‘youths’ mouthing asinine war rallies today on their forged quote not protest this huge assault which grandly dwarfs the presumed slight of President Buhari? Will it surprise you that the same ‘youths’ that are now devouring their tongues in anger were sing-praising and urging Abati to fire on because this was from the house? Is it because, as at the time Abati made this scathing remarks, the same ‘youths’ now beating war drums over what Buhari did not say were sitting lazily in the village square, singing, drumming and clapping for Jonathan and drawing handsomely from that but are now weeping out their eye sockets because the illicit source of vain livelihood they were surviving from had been plugged by Buhari? We must be clear on this before we are inadvertently recruited for an obnoxious political battle for the benefit of those that despoiled and laid the country bare just the other day.
Truth is that no sane, educated, informed Nigerian youth will feel perturbed with President Buhari’s frankness. No good Nigerian youth will feel indicted by the President’s assertion of the truth that many Nigerian youths are idle because they feel the state will wipe their behind for them because it is an oil-producing nation.. No sane Nigerian youth will submit to the devious project to falsify President Buhari’s true reflection of Nigeria with a view to stealing the roaches back to power. No sane Nigerian would gladly wish the President play the ostrich, pad and hide the truth from the outside world and risk a factual presentation of his country’s problem and open doors for meaningful intervention in a bid not to fluster the nest of lazy, political youths and their corrupt paymasters. The truth is that no sane Nigerian youth will consume the sick and awful forgery of the lazy, corrupt, uneducated political youths who deviously embark on deliberate smear campaigns to achieve the deadly goals of their corrupt paymasters and their consuming desire to come back to power. No informed youth will fall prey to such cheap traps as the one made from forging President Buhari’s frank and honest take on any national issue.
But then, what else did the latest hoax about President Buhari allegedly calling all Nigerian youths lazy show but that, more than even the President can capture, Nigeria is firmly trapped with lazy, uneducated and ill-informed youths who cannot read but wait on the state to feed them, often through stolen resources? It is incredible that some people will go such a long way mischievously manipulating President Buhari’s comment, get raucous applause from those that consume such forgeries and still protest being called lazy, illiterate and unproductive. It is instructive that the strategy these predictable political manipulators want to mischievously employ for selfish political gains have turned out to expose them so badly that, by their actions, they are proving President Buhari’s factual comment much more than the perversion they turn of it. Everything points still to the danger where an erstwhile corrupt political culture made a mess of our youths by destroying everything that will lead them to productive growth while feeding them with poor rations from stolen funds. From whichever angle you look at it, the problem is critical and demands such urgent attention far beyond what the country can muster, as Buhari pointed out in London.
Claver lives in Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com