By Muhammad Al-Ghazali

The scheduled time for our flight to Kano last Friday was 3.30 p.m., and I made sure I arrived at the Nnamdi Azikiwe airport more than an hour and before departure time for good reason. I had a wedding to attend in the old city the following morning. In these troubled times, it has become commonsense to depart early for the airport whenever we travelled because of the security checkpoints and the normal lengthy queues at the airport tollgate.

In spite of that, the airline, somehow, contrived to delay our departure until well after 5.pm offering the well-rehearsed  ‘operational reasons’ commonly used by all airlines on the local routes to mask their incompetence as an excuse.

By the time we landed in Kano, it was already after 6pm. The dusk to dawn curfew recently imposed on the city by the state government in the aftermath of the recent Boko Haram attacks was already in full effect. We somehow had to navigate the several patrols and security check-points on the route from the airport to our hotel. The state deputy governor who was on the same flight was heard telling the nearest passengers to him to hold on to their used air-tickets for inspection at the check-points – a call repeated by the cabin staff, but all that only served to add to our apprehensions.

The security men at the check-points had seen a lot in past several weeks and could be understandably nervy or even trigger happy. Fortunately in such situations, leaders normally ‘elected’ themselves. As we drove in a convoy of two vehicles, an elderly gentleman in the front cabin of the lead vehicle offered to be a chaperon. He dismounted at each check-point and waved his used air ticket in faces of the bemused military men and mumbled some words using his dignified mien to good effect.


It worked up till the moment we got to a particular checkpoint led by an army Captain who was unimpressed by our excuses. He promptly ordered us out of our vehicles and bawled “Do you know that you have all violated a curfew imposed by the federal government?” ppausing long enough to add that even if the deputy governor’s convoy were to pass his way he would not hesitate to detain it.

Fortunately, after making sure he had put the fear of God into us, the Captain allowed us to proceed to our hotel. Between the airport and the Tahir Guest Palace I stayed in; I counted no fewer than seven checkpoints manned by a combination of police and army personnel. Along the way, I saw many residents of the city cowering in several doorways or peeping out of windows. If I had not known Kano before, I would have mistaken it for another thing entirely.

The city now resembles a ghost town especially at nights, and Kano, for those who knew it, had a vibrant nightlife that was incomparable to any other city in the north. And sadly, even as I write this from the comfort of my home in Abuja, I just received news of several gunshots and explosions around the Sharada police station in the city!

Still, for those who don’t know it, the written history of Kano predates AD 999, and even by then, the city was thought to have existed for several hundred years. The goatskins produced by its enterprising people dubiously referred to as ‘Morocco leather’ were traded in North Africa and Europe as from the 15th century. Kano was a major hub on the trans-Saharan trade routes for centuries before the first groundnuts pyramids emerged the large Lebanese community whose eye for opportunism and love for the easy profit made the city their home.


And if at all the Bomphai industrial complex is now also a shadow of its old self, it owed less to the industry of its operators and the good people of Kano, but more to the abysmal leadership and incompetence of government at levels in their failure to provide an enabling environment for the enthronement and survival of entrepreneurship as a lead driver of the economy not just in Kano, but the entire country. And if truth must be told, the failure of the government in this regard actually borders on deliberate sabotage.

Naturally, my firsthand experience of Kano this past weekend gave me serious food for thought. I needed no one to tell me that the situation the city now finds itself is simply unsustainable. Commerce and industry runs through the blood veins of most residents of Kano, whether they are indigenes or settlers in the city. They are bound together by strong bond of entrepreneur spirit which the recent attacks on the city by Boko Haram and the massive security clampdown has now clearly put in jeopardy. Something would just have to give.

Throughout my stay, I could see the deep frustration etched on the faces of its residents young and old and also perceive a strong yearning for a return to normalcy when industry and commerce could be the defining engines that drove their socio-economic existence. Not surprisingly, I could also discern a strong reverence to faith as a healing factor and a source of hope.


Needless to add, that an end to the menace of Boko Haram is now the lead prayer in many mosques in the city. Kano, after all, was home to Sheikh Jafar Adam; the revered Islamic cleric  by men suspected to belong to the Boko Haram fraternity, who, in their unfortunate choice of the city for their latest attacks may well have created their own Stalingrad.

Stalingrad, or present day Volgograd in South-western Russia was where the sadistic of the glorified Bavarian Corporal Adolf Hitler, started to unravel, in a major turning point in the Second World war. By attacking Kano, Boko Haram has defied the conventional military wisdom for armies never to fight on two many fronts especially against formidable enemy’s intent on their own survival.

To have survived all these centuries surely the people of Kano must have an indomitable spirit which justified its many legends that date back to medieval times. And if the pulse of the city of Kano I felt this past weekend read correctly, then it will be safe to conclude that there can be no hiding place for Boko Haram in the city because their continued activities has become a direct threat to the survival of the soul of the city.


Far from the impression created by many shallow thinkers in the national and international media that Boko Haram is a northern creation to embarrass and discredit a southern president, the feeling among a wide spectrum of residents of the city I interacted with was that of sadness and utter revulsion at their activities. Boko Haram may have had the nerve to attack the city, but I doubt very much if the sect has the resilience to survive its backlash and on that we have a historical precedence. Maitatsine too was here, after all.

Kano did not survive so many challenges including the British invasion for nothing.