25-10-2024.

The immutable, indefatigable and irrepressible producer and (often) presenter of the ‘Brekete Family’ programme, Alhaji Ahmad Isa is a Nigerian thorough and thorough, and also a proud Northerner to the core.

When I heard of the ‘Ordinary President’ for the first time, ‘authoritatively’ asserting that ‘no large theft in the country is possible without the participation of Northerners, yours faithfully took offence. Before then, I only heard about the programme, but never ever saw even one episode. So ignorant was I about it at the time that I even thought it was only aired on radio, not knowing that it was on the television and the print media as well.

With the benefit of hindsight, I came to TOTALLY agree with him on the assertion he had made, when I saw a warehouse somewhere in the North Western part of the country stacked with rows and rows of newly printed N1,000 and N500 notes, away from the eyes of everybody else but those who hid the humongous amount of money.

Such an ungodly thing could only be thought out from the mind of sick people, who have no fear of God, or the belief that everyone of us, no matter what race we belonged and what religion we practiced, has to account for everything he did or amassed before Him on the day of judgement in the hear after.

I have written many articles about him and or the Brekete Family programme in the past, that one more time would only add more heft to the usefulness of the programme in our beleaguered society.

In his latest outing in the Brekete Family programme, the Ordinary President took on the thieving northern government officials, and lambasted them for making the region a place full of beggars, where women and children took to begging to enable them find some food, regardless of whose leftover it was. 

In the programme, Alhaji  Ahmad firstly appeared as a child male beggar, with all the contortions of a sick child asking for alms from passersby. Before he started the caricature, he had asked the audience to repeat whatever he says while ‘begging’. After he finished with the male child beggar, he then switched to being a woman beggar, moving from one house to another begging for food or other forms of assistance.

When he finally finished ‘begging’, the  Brekete Family producer then told thousands of viewers, audience and his fans that the northern elites who were retired or presently in active service either in the federal service or the state civil service, were solely responsible for the large number of destitute in the area. He fired salvoes after salvoes, calling them ‘thieves’, without mincing his words, and urged them to fear God and His eventual retribution in the hear after.

He admitted that every region belonged to the thieving club in the country, but the ‘thieves’ from the southern region use ‘what they stole’ to develop their states, while the northerner ‘keeps whatever amount he stole from the public funds for himself and his immediate family, and whoever the Madam wants to assist’. He alleged that the manufacturing industries that were built by the Ogun State elite in the state were more than the entire industries in the whole of the north.

He also alleged that all the menial workers in the south, such as shoeshiners, security guards, street suya (roasted meat) sellers and their like, are performed by the northerners. Except for the super rich business people, nobody from the north is given any meaningful job in the south, he also added.

The Ordinary President is very much on the spot, when he claimed that the northern part of the country is only known for and identified with begging and nothing else edifying. It is all due to the corrupt and the I-don’t-care-attitude of the northern leaders, who prefer to become selfishly and senselessly rich at the expense of their fellow country people. Hence the blind competition among northerners to become someone who calls the shots at the federal level or state level.

The northern part of the country is the only place where one person can amass trillions of naira from the Commonwealth, in a nation where many of its citizens can barely survive because of extreme poverty, whereas the leaders in the other regions are busy developing their part of the country from the money they ‘made’ from the same source.

But most of the northern leaders love to give with a flourish, to the praise singers, the ‘clerics’, no matter the dubiousness of their claims) and ‘donate’ to some groups of debatable utility to the society, millions of naira, so that the world may know and pronounce that this person ‘is very helpful and useful’ to the people.

And to think that most parts of the north is without power (electricity) for eight days straight, and nothing is heard, or learnt about the efforts being done by the northern leaders to ensure the quick restoration of the supply in the area, says a lot about their concerns and care for the plight of their people.

May God help the northern leaders positively change their attitude, or help His servants get it RIGHT the next time.

Malam Malumfashi wrote from Katsina.