Our number one enemy up north is poverty. Let's channel our energies into fighting it instead.
Our communities are littered with poor educational and health infrastructure that requires the kind of energy we use during conflicts to address.
School pupils are struggling for classroom space with goats, sheep, and other animals. It's very common to sit in class whilst uprooting Tick from your feet and testicles in our communities.
To date, pregnant women and children are still dying of preventable deaths. Our health facilities are ill-equipped with both human and material resources. Children are still delivered under trees with black polythene being used as gloves by our health workers. You go elsewhere, and catheters are being reused.
Very few families up north can afford three square meals a day but yet can afford to purchase guns and bullets for war. The struggle for a square meal and unnecessary conflicts on our arable land has displaced most of our people down south. Get to the biggest market in the south and the majority of the head potters (Kayayei) are our brothers and sisters. These hard-working men and women could have remained up north to contribute to our socioeconomic development. Some to date cannot trace their homes up north.
I rarely see the youth of today soliciting funds to undertake development activities in our communities and even if they do, no one is willing to contribute. But when it comes to conflict, there you will find millions of cedis pouring into mobile money accounts for the purchase of ammunition.
No tribe ever wins from war. No matter what, each faction will lose valuable human and material resources.
Let's remember that, through intermarriages and formal jobs we have all become a tribe. You might be pointing a gun at your uncle, aunty, or cousin if you care to know.
Let's see the North as a tribe rather than tribes and de-escalate for peace.
Let's give our revered chiefs and overlords the chance to joy to bring back the confidence we have had amongst us.
Let's point our guns at poverty and not at our fellow humans.
Abdul-Ganiu Nuhu Kantama
