The Learner

  Hausa Zallah Zealots Fight the Wrong Battle By Muhsin Ibrahim The interview with Professor Tijjani Naniya on Arise News that I shared on Facebook yesterday continues to generate more (wild) reactions. At the time of posting this, about 1000 comments had been made. This is far more than my previous posts or, generally, above-average social media posts. Of those comments, many are expletives. I deleted a few, but I chose to leave almost all the subsequent ones, including those containing abuse and insults. Why? I want people, especially the thoughtful among us, to see who the faces behind the Hausa Zallah agitation are and what many of them represent. Those comments contradict several core Hausa socio-cultural ideologies codified by scholars such as Kirk-Green (1974), Alhassan et al. (1982), and Adamu (2001). I wonder where those so-called Hausa Zallah folks got them. If they were genuinely "Hausa Zalla", they should demonstrate the cherished Hausa values. Equally, go see ho...

  By Muhsin Ibrahim The uproar over Sultan Abdurrazak’s Film House in Dorayi is astonishing, though, on reflection, perhaps not entirely surprising. There are several film houses in Kano, Kaduna, Jigawa, Gombe, and elsewhere. The films we watch and discuss, and sometimes quietly enjoy, are shot in those very houses. Why is this one different? Why is this one being rejected? This is not, after all, the first time such a proposal has met with hostility. When the federal government under President Muhammadu Buhari proposed building a dedicated Film Village to serve as a production hub for the Nigerian film industry, the reaction in many Northern circles was swift and dismissive. Critics saw it as a government-sponsored gateway to moral corruption, a physical infrastructure for an industry they would rather see disappear. The Film Village never materialised, at least not in the form envisioned, and the opposition it generated revealed something important: many people’s problem is not w...