Insecurity Is Everyone’s Concern – Etsu Nupe

Your Royal Highness, in a few days’ time you will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of your coronation, what should Nigerians expect from the event?

My gratitude to Almighty Allah for life and time to actually mark this occasion, the 20th year on the throne of our forefathers, having ascended the throne and assumed the title, Etsu of Nupe land on the 11th September 2003. So, by 11 September 2023, I shall be 20 years on the throne and I thank the Almighty Allah for that and coincidentally, my birthday also falls on the 12th of September. I was born on 12 September 1952 so we usually merge the two occasions together to thank Almighty Allah. As for the activities lined up for this occasion, we are actually planning and preparing to observe this day 11 and 12 to visit remand homes, prison yards and also orphanage centres and the hospitals, just to encourage them to have faith in the Almighty Allah and visit some important places and domain from 11 to 13th. And on the 14th we will do some empowerment for the less privileged in terms of equipment and some cash donations for small scale traders, who may be lacking capital, so we want to use the opportunity to extend our own gesture and support for these people in terms of money and food also.

On Friday morning, we will have Special Prayers in which we will thank the Almighty Allah. And on Saturday, we will come out and identify some of our sons and daughters who were given some traditional titles and then we will launch a historical book of Nupe and all the Royal Fathers that piloted its affairs. We want to showcase and present that book for people to use as a reference to know who a Nupe man is and how we operate. So, that book is a very comprehensive reference material and finishes it up with cultural night which will showcase our culture.

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How does it feel reaching 20 years on the throne?

Well, I thank Allah, the Almighty. Coming into this throne was not like what you planned for. I just thank Allah for being a member of the royal family. You know every royal family member would like to be on the throne but when and how, we don’t know, it is only in the hands of God and out of many, God has picked me to lead at this point in time.

As community leaders, we are expected to do what is good and make sure that people love one another and live in harmony and we are so blessed in our area that we are more or less agriculturalists, farmers predominantly. We have a big river, Niger, that runs from south to the north or from north to the south, throughout our territory. So, we are blessed and our land is very fertile for any crop you put in the ground to grow. So, I want to encourage our people to embrace farming and we don’t do that with mouth, we use our practical experience and practical touch. We open up farms, we go to farms ourselves, to see how to encourage people because if you want people to do something good you need to show them how to do it yourself. So, we put into practice the farming attitude and culture for them to embrace our exemplary steps.

Look at the era of education also, you discover that yes, we cannot do anything without education in our communities, so progress will be very less in the community without education, so we encourage primary school, secondary school and we established some prototype of this level of education. We have our own primary schools; we established a secondary school and we are grateful to establish a private university to support what the government is doing in the education sector.

We have this Education Forum, whereby we encourage our citizens to contribute in one way or the other to that forum and we use this money to encourage our people to go to school and ensure that we provide necessary infrastructures and where we see the classrooms are bad, we repair them and put them back. We sponsor students who are very bright and they want scholarships to go for further education. We use that forum to provide educational support to our people. When you also talk of health, we don’t leave things unattended as far as health is concerned because a healthy society is a wealthy society. So, we use our small resources to establish health centres and also encourage some existing health centres by providing medicine. We also have a health centre established in our domain to help the less privileged because sometimes you go to hospitals or clinics, hardly will you find drugs being provided there. Even if you are sick, and doctors prescribe medicine, you have to go and buy them, so in our health centres we make sure the price of these drugs is affordable so that our people can afford to buy. We also encourage school of nursing in our domain to make sure that they’re up to date.

How would you describe the state of the nation?

Nigeria is now faced with so many challenges, most importantly, the insecurity is disturbing everybody. It is everybody’s concern. The government is doing its utmost efforts to ensure that this has been addressed. All hands have to be on deck and I also believe that at the local level we, the traditional institutions, should also contribute and support the government. We need to use our God given method of checkmating insecurity as we used to do in years past to have a good and peaceful environment. So, from time to time we advise and present papers to authorities, both at local, state and federal authorities to checkmate insecurity. Hopefully, once these mechanisms of doing these things are put in place, we will be rest assured that the insecurity will be under control. You cannot totally wipe it out because no nation in this world is totally secure. The degree of insecurity vary from one country to another. In our own case that degree is very high here, very risky, very frightening so we need to deal with it to ensure that people go about their normal businesses because what we are having now is issue of food scarcity because many farmers are not opportune to go to farms or their normal duties because they are being terrorised by kidnappers, so that has contributed to the scarcity of food and also, the subsidy that was removed. Very unfortunate, what has been going on is like a cankerworm in our system for the past 40 years or so. This has been going on and people who know about it are always crying that few are enjoying but many are suffering. So, we are yet to even realize or know who are those few that are enjoying the subsidy, we don’t know, they just said only few are enjoying it. Who are the few? We don’t know, what did they do to them? So, like a usual circle we don’t know who to hold responsible but when the government came out that it is cancelling subsidy, it is good, so, what are the plans to caution the suffering because you can see immediately that announcement was made things started changing, people can’t even afford to use their cars because they can’t buy fuel as they used to buy before. So, something needs to be done in order to bring life to normalcy. We need to ask ourselves, why can’t we refine the oil by ourselves? If we refine this oil, the cost of buying finished products will reduce and we will be able to process this oil by ourselves and sell surplus outside, we will be able to get something and then we open our factories and start to export rather than importing. So many things we are importing is affecting our foreign reserve.

Advice to Nigerians and the Nupe people

We thank Allah, the Almighty for giving us this time. We appreciate and I thank my people for the support. They listened to us and whatever we asked them to do that will benefit everyone they quickly carry it out. I must appreciate the support and cooperation that they are giving me and pray to Almighty Allah to give us peace in this country and let us understand our difficulties and shortcomings to be able to work in harmony. All the insecurity that we have, we also pray to Almighty Allah to change the minds of those who are taking part in it, killing innocent people and destroying properties.