 Good afternoon, everyone. I hope, I mean, we have really been enjoying the conference as you have on the program We now have the keynote speech Which will be given by his highness the emir of Kano Who will be introduced later by Professor Stephen Chan my duty now is just to introduce the chair President Chan will then come to introduce to us the emir before he delivers his speech Steven Chan is professor of world politics in the department of politics and international studies here at soas He was awarded the OBE in 2010 for services to Africa and higher education And in the same year Steven was named the international studies association eminent scholar in global development Steven has been at soas for quite some time Who was the foundation dean of law and social sciences here at soas and he has also held named chairs around the world most recently the current Dean was steep turn chair of academic excellence at a brisee to university and the George Soros chair in public policy at Central European University You know a lot of the time Steven intimidates me a lot he Yes He has published 32 books, you know 32 authored books And having begun his career as an international civil servant He continues to be seconded to diplomatic initiatives in Africa and the Middle East He helped pioneer modern electoral observation at the 1980 independence elections of a Zimbabwe Steven inspires most of us here at soas with his knowledge on on Africa So it's a great honor for me introducing him and I want to invite Steven as chair of This keynote address to introduce the Emmy of Canada. Thank you, Steve Ladies and gentlemen on behalf of soas and the Center for African Studies may I Very much welcome you and welcome his Highness the Amir of Kano There are some people in the world to inspire me and the Amir of Kano as one of those people It's very rare for us to be able to host somebody who Traverses different worlds and was able to do so in a way that looks to a future Which is meaningful and hopeful not only for Nigeria, but for the wider region of West Africa And I think for international cooperation Way beyond the continent of Africa I was delighted when he as the governor of the central bank of Nigeria was named by bankers magazine as The Africa and global central bank governor of the year I think this was an honor that was extremely more deserved the amount of fiscal rigor That he tried to bring to Nigerian finances and economics was really quite astounding and of course We're all very familiar with the headlines that followed his Exposure of irregular practice what we might loosely call corrupt practices in the body politic in Public life in Nigeria This very very courageous stand is something which I think has been remarked upon as a turning point in Public life in Nigeria and a way towards a future of far greater probity than has been present up till now So he's a man of great technocratic and economic Accomplishments following upon his early development as an economics student master's degree Very very much involved in academic life in his early career before turning to banking He rose through the banking sector until he became the governor of the central bank of Nigeria and upon being Let us say required to relinquish that position He took up. He was able to take up the emirship of Kano in this particular position He's brought to a certain frontline position a combination of sage Lee knowledge and Modern knowledge of what the country and northern Nigeria Require for the future an Islamic scholar who trained in Khartoum on top of his learnings in Economics, he's been able to discourse wisely and progressively on sharia and what it means in a modern context in modern cultural context and how an enlightened Islam can take a Path forward in an engagement with modernity. He has defended minority groups. He's defended Sufi Islamic groups for that Boko Haram has put a price on his head. He has defended the rights of women He has been in many many respects far too many to enumerate today that Wonderful crossover between someone who's traditionally learned learned in the modern ways of global finance Learned and conscious of the need for a new future based on new foundations. So it's my great pleasure To invite my inspiration to give a keynote on imagining Africa's future language culture Governance development, please join with me to welcome the emir of Kano Good afternoon everyone and thank you chair When I was first asked to speak on this conference and asked to speak about Africa and culture and governance and development I I Did protest obviously no one can talk about Africa in that way I imagine there will be many papers on different parts of Africa and different Periods of history, but it's extremely difficult to speak about Africa in that manner in in half an hour or now Then professor bad during very kindly reduced that to Nigeria Which they had to be even more problematic Nigerian culture, you know So I Have an old habit that I built in us in the central bank Which is whenever I'm invited for these functions. I try to write a paper that is politically correct That I can always hold up and say this was what I presented and then I go ahead and say what I want to say Which may or may not be Consistent with with everything with everything the paper but So there is a paper around this topic Talking about Nigeria pre-colonial colonial post-colonial Talking about the colonial economy as you would expect talking about some of the tensions in the country the military coups and so on But I don't think I was invited here As an academic I thought so I will to I'll play the role of the aim in dealing with Real issues of culture and development and some of the thoughts I have around that area and hopefully Some of the things I will say will go into the theme of this conference When you think of Nigeria as one country when you talk about these subjects you You end up with a great deal of difficulty and it takes simple developmental indices or poverty indices one of the Key indicators of Development is the measure of poverty and if you looked at headline numbers you'd find that 46% of Nigerians are living below the poverty line based on UNDP figures for 2015 However, when you break that down you find that Only 20% of Nigerians in the southwest are living below poverty While 80% of Nigerians in the northwest are living below poverty So clearly even in terms of poverty or development you can't speak of Nigeria the priorities And the problems faced by Lagos are very very different from those faced by Kano or Medugri or Sokota And that's why some of the issues that come up In some parts of the country don't seem to be relevant to the parts of the country Perhaps the best way to begin this is to Talk about the kind of transition I had from being a governor of central bank to an EMEA Where I moved from a situation where I dealt with numbers and Statistics to a station where I was dealing with the human beings behind those numbers and beginning to understand what those numbers meant and then trying to think through how apart from the whole theoretical ideological debates we have about socialism and capitalism and globalization how in real terms We need to understand the real Underline fundamental causes of the problems that we face I always give this example and I'll try this time to go through it without Any kind of emotions, but it tells it's it's for me a telling example of the difference between looking at a statistic and looking at a human being In the central bank we reeled of these numbers about the number of Nigerians living on less than one dollar a day And I tell people I never knew what it meant to live on less than one dollar a day until I became the EMEA You know and one instance I give is What I still consider perhaps the saddest day in my life Where? Because usually when I sit in courts people come some have problems with their husband some are friends of their wives Some have issues with their neighbors. Some have land issues some need help with drugs and while sitting there I had this loud scream and I sent someone to find out what it was and there was this woman Who had walked across from the hospital across from the palace and among group of women with their children And while waiting for her turn to see the EMEA her baby had died and the baby died Because she did not have 3,000 Naira for drugs That's less than ten dollars and there are a too many line on that and all of them needed like 20,000 Naira so I mean this is a country where people or part of the country Where a woman would lose her baby because she cannot buy drugs of five dollars or ten dollars That is what it means to live on less than One dollar a day now It radically Changes and transforms one fee one's view of life of development of poverty and you begin to look at how we have Defined our development in terms of trying to look very much like what you call the developed world. So you You go to a booge and you've got all these Beautiful bridges and even in kind of beautiful bridges overhead bridges, you know beautiful roads street lights Skyscrapers and we see that as development when in fact The vast majority of people walking on those streets are hungry and they're sick and They've got nothing to do and for a fraction of of those resources you could change the lives of people and I always give the story of Of a poor Nigerian man from Kogi state who was invited for a town hall meeting with a former president of the World Bank in Abuja and So after the when they all asked to speak this gentleman put up his hand and You know, he made this we all laughed when he made this even but it was so profound. He said look in my village There's a river that separates me from the main road And during the rainy season I can't come out The only reason I'm able to make it to a booger was this is great dry season so I can walk across the stream and get a Get a bus to come to Abuja But what surprises me I Came to a booger and I saw all these bridges and there's no water. There's no river in a booger You know and it's it's fundamental in a sense, you know, we think we are developed because of which it looks like Begins to look like London, you know, when in fact for 80 90 percent of the population you need small bridges that would just give them Access to cities, you know, get their farm produce to the market get them to hospital in case of emergency And they don't have it so Again, I would say professor by during the talk about Nigeria. It's a bit too much for me Okay, but I'd like to share some of my thoughts about some of the Interrelations between what you might call culture and Development in the part of the country that I happen to be engaged with on a daily basis now I've been involved in these debates at a theoretical level for decades. I've been involved in these decade debates around Islam and modernity around negotiating our interpretations of Islam but the place of a Muslim community in a multi religious Or secular secular state But these tensions, okay, and these issues and these interpretations have Profound impact from a developmental perspective in a manner in which I had not considered before so Having studied economics and having studied Islamic law I Now find myself in a role where I can actually and I Can actually begin to see how certain Archaic or wrong or Misunderstood Perceptions or interpretations of Islam have actually led to economic underdevelopment Now it sounds strange and very controversial controversial thesis, but So one of the first lessons we learn in economics, obviously Is Malthus and the whole issue of population and how You continue to increase the labor force on a limited Amount of land or resources and you end up with diminishing marginal productivity I call it just diminishing margins or the law of diminishing because everything goes down now take Nigeria in 1960 The amount of land And Available to a rural dweller on the average was two hectares Today it is 0.9 and In the next decade or two it will be done to 0.5 It's a combination of desertification Desalination erosion and other environmental issues, but it's also about demographic explosion and That has led to all sorts of conflicts We hear every day about Fulani herdsmen and Their conflicts with grazers and people Ethnicize or give religious Collarations to what by the way is a problem that has that's as old as the Old Testament itself And you do it give them grazing land you encroach on the land you're going to have these problems We have Boko Haram we have ethnic conflicts and We're not Joining the dots when we're not beginning to make a connection between a failure of social policy and The social unrest and the economic Problems that we face as a country So I come from part of the country where which is a part of the Sahel which I Suppose 500 years ago 600 years ago was the richest part of sub Saharan Africa eclipsed later with the Discovery of the steamship and colonialism and the coastal cities So cities like Kano and Katzina and Timbuktu and Gao got eclipsed by Lagos and Akra and Abidjan so on but with social structures and Family structures and social organizations that were formed for wealthy Societies which have not yet understood that the world has changed Okay, so It's very easy in Kano to see a man who has no Employment of any sort and who earns nothing Marry three women and have 18 19 children and he's very happy to have them roam the streets as what you call unmajorie And it's also very easy to see public offices Discussing how they're going to find the money how they're going to build the school So they're going to care of unmajorie without anybody ever asking If the father who gave birth to this child had certain responsibilities in the first place And if he should be held responsible for the child that he brought while the rest of the Muslim world has introduced a Reforms to family law looked at such things as the age at which goals marry the issues like child spacing Regulated polygamy sure that you're able to maintain a family before you have it child rights These are issues that are not Part of the conversation or they've just started being part of the composition a very difficult manner in the north partly because of a culture That has been built in which the interpretations of Islam and certain Certain historical social structures have become so conflated. That's very easy to get emotional rather than have a rational and and and proper intellectual conversation So How did we get here? How did we get to a situation where? today The very large percentage of gold Child of gold children in the north never complete school If you take the north east and north west of Nigeria, maybe about 10% or less of the adolescent girls read and write The north east has maternal mortality rates five times the global average in a state like Zanfarah and a state like Kiobe 90% of the population is living in poverty Where you have in cannot state alone three million children who are out of school And in the north maybe 15 16 million Statistically out of school so Nigeria after India has the highest number of out of school children in the world how did you We get to a situation where you one country has become effectively two countries where you you would as I said in a recent speech which didn't go down well with people if if the north itself Where a country on its own it probably would be one of the poorest countries in the world Because we're not looking at the we're not looking below the headline numbers Now there are a number of issues that we need to look at some of them I think have Not been Seriously considered in academic discourse, and I'm hoping that Institutes lecturers would look at the implications of some of the events of high history So if we go back to Colonial educational policy and and the works of course of people like to be in Dharana who've Seriously studied Education especially in northern Nigeria and the policy of the British as far as education was concerned the the arrival of a Britain and the Conquest of the north and turning of the north into a British territory It came with certain Naturally Was accompanied by certain events around policy that I've had a long lasting impact on where the north is The north was unfortunate to have its first three governors Come from Sudan coming straight from a very very bad experience with the Mahdi Therefore, you know, it's like getting Someone with a strong Islamophobic Tendency today to go and rule a Muslim country So so first of all the from Lord look out on the principle fear was how do we make sure that we do not? reproduce in northern Nigeria the kind of radical Muslim intellectuals that we produce in Egypt and India and the Sudan and Determined not to repeat the mistake of Egypt and the Sudan and India The British had a policy one of keeping as many northerners illiterate as possible to When you educate them make sure you educate them to be Employees competent employees of the native authority and obedient servants to the colonial administration So the policy was explicit Teach them respect for hierarchy Teach them the supremacy of the white man Teach them technical skills But make sure they do not develop a mind of their own and did not challenge the system Northern Nigeria of all the protectorates of Britain have the lowest number of schools We had few schools than Ghana as at 1959 When the first school offering higher school certificates Started offering those barrier college. They're already 20 schools offering that in southern Nigeria at the point of independence The North had maybe 2,000 elementary schools while the South had about 9,000 The North had 200,000 children in elementary school the South had about 1.2 And this was even before the southern regions started universal free primary education Nowhere in the British colony. Did we have the gaps? between Boys education and girls education that we had in northern Nigeria and these gaps were exacerbated by the very nature of British colonial policy So girls schools were set up the first although the boys the first boys school set up in 1910 The first girls school was set up around 1930 Girls what we're called girls centers in Kano and Katsune those schools aimed to teach basic numeracy and literacy and then personal hygiene nursing Domestic chores that would make they'll produce young ladies that were good wives to the Educated boys that were being educated these children these ladies were all Children of the nobility of their aristocracy. So these were princesses and And daughters of title holders put in those schools that decision was a disaster because children of royalty Were the ones that tended to get married off early There was a very high demand for princesses for people who thought it was a way for upward social mobility So by the age of 10 11 every princess would have many suitors So usually they would be married off very early and even if they completed the school anyway The daughters of AMS and the daughters of Cardis and the daughters of imams never went out to work There was no financial incentive. They were the ones that practiced Perder or Kolei at the most extreme formats Many of you probably those who've read I share my doctorate thesis would be familiar with So girls schools were set up for those who did not need them or use them and The telecover the honorary people did not send their daughters to school because their experience of the boys schools had not been very positive out of the 3000 or so boys that had finished elementary schooling by 1945 or so only 700 got employed in the native authority system or 700 were children of noblemen So so the telecover who sent their boys to school found that their boys did not have access to native authority jobs Education was not for them a path for overthrowing the system precisely because the British system of indirect rule was Based on the on the principle of strengthening the traditional hierarchies so long as those hierarchies remain loyal to the British now I'm a beneficiary of that admit so but But this is this is really the logic of of colonialism and colonial education and and the second thing that the British did Largely under the influence obviously of Christian missionaries like Miller was to actively devalue and put a stop to Islamic education and Arabic education in many ways So for example the a gemmy script Which was Nothing, but house a language written in Arabic characters was basically stopped As part of education and Fisher Was quite clear in his documentation that if you allow the use of Arabic characters then you're promoting the Mohammedan religion. So Basically as part of a world in which imperialist officers communism in in the Soviets, you know where there was this whole Orchestrated attempt to put a stop to Arabic Islamic civilization northern Nigeria also suffered that and And as Nigerians know this is some that continued even after after independence I still have this funny example of a few decades ago where on our currency we've always had a gemmy which is House a retired extreme that says Ten narrow it says narrow Goma if you read a gemmy it's house a narrow Goma Naira, I shouldn't but just taken out because we had a central bank governor and a president who thought these were Islamic characters And they remove them, you know just how sir, you know, but It's so it's a continuation of of that policy Now What is the danger of that and this is really this goes beyond religion? You have a part of the country that for 500 years 700 years 800 years has been part of an Islamic civilization where the levels of Education in the Islamic sciences have been extremely advanced, you know comparable to any part of the world. I mean a young Child would learn the Quran after the grant you'd go to the Makharen to get me He would learn thick. He would learn grammar. He would learn hadith. He would learn jurisprudence Basically lettuce where it in Arabic Arabic was the language of the of the quotes at the Amos coming kids with a district It's in Arabic and so on and all of that was given a value of zero and It's still given a value of zero Today we say there are three million children out of school in Kano maybe Out of those three million at least two million Know how to read and write in Arabic But for all intents and purposes, they are illiterate There is no certification The system has no place for them. They have no future in the system the result is That they end up in the hands of some radical preacher Who understands them who gives value to their education? who radicalizes them and Takes advantage of the resentment they have against the system and they turn against society and And they come up and say Western education is haram and they want to kill you because you've had Western education I know to destroy the system, which has no place for them because it's no value for the education and As we try to deal with it with it. Yes, we have to deal with a military solution but no one is thinking beyond killing and Jailing and And basically Crushing this movement. No one is looking at some of the fundamental Issues and one issue being that you cannot just erase 600 years 700 years of history because of a 60 year interruption by the British Yes, 60 years of colonialism is important But 60 years is no reason to completely obliterate 500 years And it's difficult and it's impossible to do it and It will keep coming back You can't Northern Nigeria was not a clean slate. It was not a place about a history. It was a place about a culture tradition and there has to be a way of Mainstreaming that history and that civilization into this rich Country that we have and this is something that frankly I never Really thought about very deeply until I came to this role and began and realize all the frustrations that people feel when when you see someone who's Memorized the Quran whose studies Arabic who was very fluent in Arabic who knows jurisprudence who knows Islamic legal theory and For all intents and purposes. He's an illiterate. He doesn't have an opportunity Whereas in the previous system, he would be a cardee. He would be an Imam He would be an advisor to it in the court in the court of the Emir and whereas If you were an Arab in Egypt Without That level of proficiency in Arabic. He could get into a university and study medicine in Arabic So why is it that? You can't study medicine Arabic in Nigeria Why history or political science or economics it happens in the Arab world Why is it that an Arab? Who knows how to read and write Arabic is considered literate and Arab who has studied Islamic law is considered educated, but a Nigerian who does that outside the Formal English schooling system is not How is it possible for a Chinese to be a doctor without speaking English? But apparently in Nigeria is not possible and and and you know, so so we dealing with We're dealing with with with an entire system and a worldview That while we think is Nigerian is actually nothing but a colonial legacy We're still in a post-colonial new colonial mindset and we are unwilling to Challenge the legacies of colonialism and takes courage. I think to begin to ask those questions How do you turn? the six centuries of Islamic teaching and learning and Contact with the Arab world through chapter and sovereign trade and the caravans and through exchange of ideas How do you turn that into an asset? Rather than a liability because at the moment The Muslims of the Northwest and the Northeast are a liability to this country They're poor They're marginalized Their education has no value they're frustrated and They are susceptible at this point in time to being Co-opted into agendas that are not even theirs. It's not just northern Nigeria is the whole of the Sahel It's a problem that we need to deal with a few weeks ago the Sorry, this is prayer time in Nigeria Okay, so a few weeks ago the French president Was in I think Mali and an interesting meeting with about five West African heads of state on the Sahel and And at the end at the end of that meeting, what were they talking about? How many more French troops you're going to have? How many soldiers each country was going to have I was waiting to see how look How many million euro was France going to invest in education in the Sahel? What what agricultural policies where you're going to have how many megawatts? How do you turn all the solar energy in the Sahel into power for industries? for development no one is talking about I talk about how many bullets you're going to have how many Terrorists you're going to shoot. It does not address the problem so When we speak about culture and so it's precisely that insulation from modernity the level of the education first of all that deprived the bulk of the north of Western education while Stopping the progress of Islamic education has left the northwest and northeast of Nigeria locked in the past and That is the truth civilizationally and culturally they have been delinquent from the rest of the Muslim world So many of the issues you deal with in majority. We're still talking about regulating the age of marriage look Egypt regulated age of marriage in the 1950s most Muslim countries Egypt Malaysia Tunisia, Algeria Morocco you can't go and marry a girl of 12 it's illegal and Even those countries that have not made it illegal have put in such street guidelines that if you want to marry a girl below 15 or 16 or 17 or 18 men on the age you will need the approval of a judge Who would make sure that the girl is old enough to take on the role of a wife and a mother? But that conversation in Nigeria today Has just started and it is a very difficult one to have Most of these countries have understood that you've got to regulate polygamy nobody says How to law it nobody says prohibited, but clearly the Islamic law and Islamic jurisprudence has always had and Deline the permissibility of polygamy also responsibility that you've got to take The rights of children Okay, to education to care You can't just give birth to a child and leave him on the street for the set to care of You can't just produce children you cannot take care of and Now these are Basic conversations that have taken place for decades in the Muslim world Which have not taken place in Nigeria. So you on the one hand the north was not given Western education on the other hand its progress in terms of understanding its own religion and this process of HD had of of coming up with new rulings for changing times has been stopped and You therefore have a whole generation of experts and generations and generations of experts Who are experts on? 15th century Muslim jurisprudence and they think all the questions that we need have been answered Five five and are we doing the new answers now? Until we address this issue of What's our attitude the tuition of our goals? What's our attitude to the Age of which a girl should be a wife and a mother What's our attitude to spacing children was artists to polygamy? What's our attitude to responsibility as a parent and these are all issues of Islamic jurisprudence that Have to be have to be used to confront culture and again Some part of the mistake that people have made in the past is to come to To people and say well, you know, this is the United Nations resolution Well, you know, they know they don't care about the United Nations. It's not an argument You and it's not an argument but the truth is For I'm sure and then there's a few who are I mean Mosher is a scholar of of sharia. I mean Imam Malik talked about 18 as the age of marriage and so did Abu Hanifa and so did I'm a been humble Yes, Shafi said 15 sort of the four Sunni schools three of the imams actually at one time mentioned 18 when they talked about age of marriage But you say 18 today and it's seen as a United Nations Gender, so we being able to argue from within the tradition Using the Quran and the hadith and the jurists and also the work of other Muslim countries is important But you can't do that until we continue until we begin the process of opening up that civilization and relinking the The the jurisprudence and the scholarship to the international scholarship on Islam so Culture and cultural practices To my mind have led to this demographic implosion they've and that has Contributed to the levels of poverty and development and they will continue to do so until we go and address the roots if you're a governor in a state in northern Nigeria today and you told you've got 250,000 children Who are going to school? I assure you by the time you build the classrooms for them There will be another 500,000 waiting. I Mean we you know we have in The northeast and northwest and and this is where this conversation is important We have gone through a process of Commodification the people we have this mass production of human beings and and devalue them at the same time so If you talk about the present and the future, what would I say are the other key things we need to look at apart from of course the I can go on with a standard Economic arguments. I've made all the arguments against a rentier state about the And and rent seeking by the way continues in different guises with one one government of it It's either in the currency markets or in the petroleum sector until we deal with that as a nation We're not going to have the development we want so we can talk about the general economic culture of the country the the rent seeking state to the the corruption the the lack of focus on On industries in a sense the continuation of Even on the economic level just just as we've done at the cultural level of this of this Colonial project. I mean Nigeria is a country that I Always say It's special in that we export What we don't have and we import what we have You know and I mean look why should Nigeria import petroleum products? But but but they mean if you take the trade between Nigeria and the United Kingdom The largest single component of Nigerian imports from Britain and from France is petroleum products We keep in refineries in Europe open I export in our crude We burn our gas and we don't have electricity And by the way, even though we don't have electricity we do export electricity to Niger You know, we have all these heights and skin And we import shoes from China We have a large cotton belt our textiles are all dead We import fabric from the Far East We put plastic Made from petrochemicals and we're an all-producing country and by the way, China is not China is a net import of crude oil so they buy our crude oil and They're able to turn it into petrochemicals and sell us plastics. We have heights and skin What do we do with our heights and skin? pepper soup We consume it we consume It's a delicacy in some parts of the country That's GDP other countries, you know, I mean as far back as the 16th 15th century according to economic historians Kano was exporting leather and bags and shoes To Morocco to India today. We don't we export with blue You know We so good at this we even had a military government that conducted a free and fair election in Liberia, you know And it's and it's and it's it's sad Because you you had this and if you go back before this crisis, we had a country that was growing GDP growing at 7% Imagine at what rate Nigeria would grow If we stopped importing petroleum products and stopped all these subsidy schemes Swaps and all that which every day we we still hearing off which cost me my job by the way If we stopped all of that and just refined our petroleum products and became a net exporter of petroleum products If we stopped importing three million pairs of shoes from China as I did producing our own shoes and bags and I'm not talking about You said Laurent Pierre Cardin or Gucci, I'm talking about simple shoes that children wear to school That people wear to farms Handbags for the woman in the village. I'm not talking about Synthetic expensive leather by the way the goat skin in Kano is called Moroccan leather. It's the best leather But we don't do anything with it or the funerals are gone for a country of 170 million people We generate at a peak today a little over 4,000 megawatts of electricity You know that is not 4,000 megawatts 24 by 7 if in a month you get to 4,000 megawatts for one minute You say you've produced 4,000 megawatts in June. How do you re-industrialized? So we've had a proof of deindustrialization. So so so tell me if you had an Imperialist power in Nigeria If Britain were today in charge of Nigerian government, can they have it any better by my crude? sell you petroleum products Buy your cotton sell you textiles Buy your heights and skin and give you fancy shoes to wear Sell you private jets Was this not what colonialism was about was this not what they came and fought and sorted was this not what it was all about They had stopped slavery so they didn't come for the slaves. This is what they came for We're giving them for free 60 years after they left so I Don't know if what I say Because I'm also processing still in my mind as I go along these things But the long and short of it. I I think is I Have come to the sad conclusion that we are all still products of colonialism And we are yet to free ourselves economically socially and culturally We need to go back For the Muslim North There has to be a recognition that history has brought Nigeria together and you're part of this country and you've got to respect the diversity of the country But also have the confidence to insist that your history cannot be written off It cannot be wiped out by 60 years of colonialism We will sit side-by-side will speak English and speak Arabic and we will be a part of a country That recognizes that it has brought people with history that has flowed from different parts of the world Economics we've got to realize that so long as we continue producing raw materials and exporting We are still in a post-colonial mindset. We still do what the grace want We've got to do what the Southeast Asian countries did for themselves And it's not just by Europe I Wrote an article in 2012 on China and it was a very unpopular article people thought I was Being ungrateful to Chinese for all the help they've done to us And I try to explain that you know at the end of the day At the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether it's British or American or Chinese if I'm exporting raw materials and importing finished products I am in a trading relationship that will end up changing terms of trade against me And I'm in a colonial or quest quasi-colonial relationship What we have to do to China is what China did to Europe? Take away the manufacturing from China And I'm not talking about competing with the Chinese or selling to Europeans We don't need to you've got a country of 170 million people that's enough market He's not exporting is the richest man in Africa selling to Nigerians cement flour sugar So just add to the list shoes bags Fabric textiles garments Slippers don't go into producing with nobody's things go and compete with aerospace. We're not interested in that but basic industrialization basic a group processing Look, just stop importing rice from Thailand to start with you know and produce the rice next door Or stop eating rice If you can't produce it eat corn eat maize eat wheat Eat what you produce and this is precisely how those countries that broke away from poverty did So Would you find this in this paper, maybe one or two sentences out of this somewhere in there but I'm hoping that I've just Try to share some thoughts and maybe through the Q&A I'll get an idea of what you'd like to talk about if I can Talk about it, and I think it would be best at this point to stop you and thank you for your attention Presentation Okay, bark. How does it work? you talked about polygamy and The fact that a lot of people have kids and don't know how to take care of them I want to talk a little bit about the about patriarchy and poverty and the cycle there So in northern, I do this is saying if you're poor that you should have had another wife and That's kind of a common belief amongst people. So an issue is you have The patriarchy kind of perpetuating this narrative that that's the way forward So a lot of people don't really understand what marriage is and they just see it as long as I marry a wife And I'm keeping her at home. I've done my duty even when it comes to kids And you've mentioned about young girls getting married off quite young and The fact the matter is often the people that do that are those who have the money to kind of bribe the parents and say I want your daughter Handed marriage and often it's because they're poor and they don't really have much of a choice They can't afford her schooling that they think that's the best way forward to marry her off you've also mentioned That there are there's a gap in terms of social policy so What would you advise in terms of the absence of government in terms of providing policies where people have access to education and health care That's kind of pushing people to join extremist groups or marry off their own daughters. What can Nigerians do in terms of bridging that gap in the absence of government because even if you do provide if you do Encourage people to have less children They still might have that barrier to access to jobs where if they don't know the right people They're still left in poverty. So they don't they're still left without much of a choice. So what would you advise in that circumstance? Well, first of all, I think that there are many things That really point to the failure of the state I mean it's this is very simple if you give birth to a child and the child is found on the street You're responsible someone has to say this is your son and If you go to Islamic law, the father is responsible for the maintenance of his child and if he's poor If he has a son who can do it, he does that if he has a brother going to there's a whole Sequence of Wilaya and it is only when No member of your family or one of those On home response that has been placed by the Sharia is capable of taking care of your child that that burden falls on society So we simply saying implement what is already in the law If you have a child you have a responsibility for that child right now the children are treated as criminals They did not produce themselves Okay, so that's one. So you've got the show feel of the state and and this cuts across many things and and I can I can understand politicians have a problem because they Sometimes they have a conflict between what is right and what is popular The truth is they need to do some of things that are right that are not popular and other parts of the world did it so if It is determined That it is harmful to a girl that she be married below a certain age It is the responsibility of the state to say you cannot marry off your daughter below that age period Okay, now if if I if I could do the law in Canada I would have made the law to say you cannot marry off your daughter below a certain age now If you feel your religion or your interpretation of religions says that you can marry her off below that age Well go somewhere else and marry her off but not in my state and this is really where I think The political authority to take responsibility now part of what we try to do is to help them By having a conversation By having people begin to accept and the truth is that the vast majority people understand that I was having a conversation with someone yesterday who said all this morning who said you You've had a lot of resistance. I said well, you can sometimes be carried away by noise from the establishment Because the truth is that there are a number of scholars who know that everything Said here is true and that this is not islamic culture If you go down to the village if there's a woman whose daughter has Been married off at a young age and who suffered from vvf and sitting right in front of her she understands that this is wrong If there's a woman who's not being taken care of by her husband who's been divorced um for doing nothing or Because there are no regulations around divorce, you know, people just wake up and say I divorced you've got four five children You go and they leave you with with that burden Many women in Nigeria have either been in that situation or no people were in that situation and they understand that these things need to change and there's a very large number of muslims that um frankly they Do feel uncomfortable with this but they don't have enough understanding of the law So they think it's actually islam and so they're very happy to hear that this is actually not religion But culture so I would say that This change is not going to be as difficult as you think but we've got to deal with it but but the other side to your argument, which is true is that it's not just um A culture of an understanding of religion. There's also poverty So if you tell a poor man in a village wait until your daughter is 16 and you don't have a school in the village What then happens? Which is why again, we've got to think out of the box a number of things one of the things I've talked about is The use of mosques for schools And please if there's any Nigerian journalist here tell me so that I know how to say this Five times so that I don't get the kind of misrepresentations I had the last time Now if you look at a geospatial map of kano It probably see 20 mosques before you see a school But if you go to muslim history mosques were were never just Buildings for prayers. I mean these were the mosques were schools mosques were places where you had political meetings mosques were places where Rulers were crowned or Um Or appointed and so on If you go to fast in morocco, the university is in the mosque The great inverse of al-Azhar. They're all in the mosque You know and not in every part of northern aja, but in the traditional mosques Yes, but now you've got a number of mosques being built with with sections for women I think most of the modern structures do have Uh places for for women, but that's still just for prayer But the point I'm making is if you have a mosque Then you have a school There's no reason why you can't bring teachers and students to learn in the mosque. It's just what happens all over the muslim world Why is not happening in our part of the muslim world? Why do you need to have money to build a primary school or tell Or exclude a child from primary education because his parents cannot afford transportation to primary school when there's a mosque next door Now when I said that uh, I think the headlines were that I said All mosques should be converted to schools. Okay, and I Somehow I don't know how they got to that interpretation, but but Everything got buried in um in that but but that's the point. So You've got to think out of the box in terms of converting Um, basically like I said, so you've got this civilization that's produced all these mosques These mosques Can be an asset You can use the mosque as a primary school. You can use the mosque as a secondary school You can you can use the mosque as a hospital if you want and then clean it up for prayer So you don't need to start construction bring the teachers Bring intent internet connectivity bring some solar power bring some um Some tablets and you you'll be amazed what kind of education you can take to a rural area Okay for the for the cost of brick and mortar for a school So that's it. So you've got to deal with education deal with deal with poverty Build the schools And then you need all these foundations and the private sector support people need to give scholarships people need to support Children, this is how the Turks did they had foundations. I mean at Suleyman Suleyman the magnificent had these great Foundations attached to mosques That's sponsored poor children and give them education and we need to do more of that gentlemen on the front here Well, uh, I can understand where the Is coming from is more Less of the less of fire brand used to be in those days, but I can understand Now it's complain about marginalization of the north The euro bars complain of marginalization The Nigerian complain of the same. There's this asset of Biafra. And I ask who is marginalizing who So maybe Nigeria is actually marginalizing itself And so that's one point. Secondly, uh The basic solution I think well, we've talked about engaging the imams because they still control a lot of audience and attention in Nigeria And people now ask that. Okay. All this issue we have analyzed. What is the way forward? The political class has filled the nation And the the elites of course it serves their interests So what would be the basic things we can be complaining about? Colonialism after 60 years or so of independence any longer And so the nothing I say, how do we move forward to solve all those big issues as a part one part two is that Which has to do with the emma himself The house a program in sewers is Dying or dead. I wouldn't know And of of course also the euro, but that's the issue I read this morning What we would need is intervention in this regard to ensure that those positions for african languages, of course I equally restored. Thank you very much May I clarify that I did not complain about the north being marginalized I I talked about the actual conditions of poverty I see in the north and try to understand what brought them about and how we can deal with them I know because you've got these You know in Nigeria marginalization is a term that's a very useful political one And and when people say they're marginalized usually they just mean they haven't seen enough ministers Uh from their local government in abuja, which is again it goes back to this Distorted sense of what development is I mean, why do I care if I have 10 ministers in abuja from kano? How does that affect the number of women who die in childbirth? Or the number of children who are not in school Why do I care that the means of agriculture should be from a particular part of the country? How does that affect the productivity of our culture where I live? I think we need to I mean a lot of the debate and that that's why I think When I when I say these things I say some of the discussion is Is to me so vacuous We talk about restructuring Nigeria. I have not heard a single northern politician talk about the 500 years of northern history that has been erased This is far far more important Than how much you how you share resources oil money from month to month, which is what people are talking about And we've all been sucked into this debate of marginalization which Happens every four years a different part of the country is marginalized Okay, so when you have a southern government, the northerners say we are marginalized You have a northern government, southerners say we're marginalized and you say in what way Jonathan was from the Niger Delta. How much investment did he put in the Niger Delta? By how much did it improve? So we need to get out of that conversation I'm not I am not in that marginalization conversation. And by the way, I I don't even think of myself as an orphan I'm an amier but but I I think we've got to go beyond that and think of the country But if you've got this large population Um, and this population is poor. It's uneducated It's frustrated You're not going to have stability and development and to address that Um, and and I think these are some of the issues that we need to look at So on on what we need to do Again, I don't blame the british. I don't I've never blamed them. I think they they did what they needed to do Um as a colonial administration We we we did this all to ourselves after they left And that's the problem We might they might have they might have as well stayed You know Because for for all intents and purposes They couldn't have done us much more damage Than they've done Than we've done to ourselves and I think we need to Um get to that level of maturity where we see 60 years of British intervention or I mean maybe less. Nigeria was amalgamated 1914 Independent in 1960 46 years We've been independent now for Over 50 we've been independent for longer than the british were there. We can't blame the british Not that they don't deserve blame. They do But but we can't but we can't hold them, you know and responsible for what we do to ourselves You know So for me, I think it's if if we choose to forget all our history if we choose to To produce raw materials for them after they've gone and and keep their refineries open and import their goods That's our decision I've got to fix that You're excellent On the on the house of thin I thought professor bordering you'd sent me a quiet email that we're going to discuss this evening. Is that uh So I and to the extent that I have not even entered that Conversation I'm not able to say What I can but but I but I hear a point and I think we need to do everything we can to keep um House studies and university so alive Your excellency I humbly Would like to give thanks and praise For your presence and your wisdom my question is Is there a critical mass Of leaders in Nigeria Who broadly think like you who can come together to strategize and activate the decolonization program? You have you have so brilliantly articulated You know when when in 19 99 2000 One of the states in nigeria announced was going to implement sharia I got involved in that debate and when I started Initially, I thought I was alone When the debate Continued I realized that there were very many people who believed exactly what I believed just didn't want to Be the ones to come out and say it Okay My sense is that if you Well one you should never be afraid of being a minority Even a minority of one You should try to um have the courage of your convictions and then if you're in a leadership position as Marcus already said and you're given the choice between what is right and what is popular you must do what is right And you can never go wrong with that. I don't think there's anyone that As long as you continue to have a conversation Will not accept that there's something wrong with taking a go. I mean look we talk about Boko Haram One of the speeches I gave and bring back our girls is we talk about what Boko Haram did to the Chibok girls Okay, they took girls out of school kidnapped them forced them into marriage You know Made them mothers and we all horrified Now that is the horror we should feel at what happens every single day A girl's parents or uncles take her out of school Forcing into married daughter will enter into a mother. It's exactly the same thing. They just didn't hold a gun to her head and So long as we do have that human sense of This must be wrong ultimately, there will be A large army of people who will get up and the women themselves will get up and say we've had enough of it And this is how society changes what I'm happy about I mean I've I've not made as much progress as I had hoped I would on this cultural change And I have met perhaps faster for reasons from certain quarters than I thought I would get But there is a conversation Today in northern Nigeria about child marriage in of a type we never had before There's a conversation around polygamy. There's a conversation around The al-majris and and the role of parents and and the rights of children There's a question around contraception and child spacing. I mean there was a time when to open this conversation You would just be accused of Pursuing some Judeo-Christian colonial agenda against Islam and and and that's it today You've got people who said to say no, you know, this is something that has to stop. So I think We will get there As a country we we've had many false tarts. We've had high hopes that have been Dashed But I'm a strong believer In in this country on what we can do and I think we can Thank you very much Thank you very much I'm I'm not Nigerian not even West African But what I heard today is probably the best speech given by an African leader for a very very long time regarding exporting what We don't have an important what we have. This is an African disease. We do it everywhere And I think that's going to take us a long time to overcome But my question to you is what I find really heartbreaking is this idea of having so many educated kids Which I've seen completely worthless because they have the wrong kind of knowledge the wrong kind of language And that's really devastating because any any child that's a learner of the Quran by heart Is an incredibly Intelligent child that can advance the whole society Is there something you can do and your colleagues could do as leaders of the north to introduce maybe secular Arabic based education universities to be open in the north Thank you. It's always a great pleasure to be referred to as a young lady Thank you very much for for the lecture. I just have two quick questions And one is really to return To a central argument you've made throughout your entire presentation around Dismantling patriarchy. You've not talked about it in that way, but my understanding of it is that's what you're speaking about I just want you to clarify for me a bit of a slippage that I hear because you speak about The importance of centering girls education the importance of dealing with sexual and reproductive health rights questions for women and girls But anchoring that within a sort of Islamic understanding of responsibilities and rights Which as you spoke earlier still places women and girls under a sort of Control yes guardianship. Could you just clarify? How does that approach and I totally hear the thing about situating conversations in a language and a framework that people will hear But how does that move us away from this cycle of patriarchal control Which you know saying if it's not the man who can take care of it. It's the uncle. It's the son. It's the brother You know continuing this patrilineal approach The second question is around this thing we hear a lot around the asian tigers Africa needing to model itself around that which is fundamentally around the developmental state model, right? And we see and we know you know that that is deeply reliant on a very strong Central command if you will quasi authoritarian model if you will How how much of of looking to the asian tigers do we need to do in 2017? You know what what models of the developmental state do we need to fashion for ourselves? Because we've seen for instance, what has happened in Ethiopia post malice Right, you know the aroma struggles and all of that So can we have a conversation in 2017 that moves us beyond the asian tigers And africa needing to look to that model as a way to move forward Thank you for your presentation I'm using something that you said as a jumping off point for an issue that you didn't necessarily touch on directly Which is the issue of the thousands and thousands of young african Children who are dying in the Mediterranean every month In the last two years it's becoming Increasingly horrible and a lot of those young people are from northern Nigeria and I like that you mentioned Your dislike for the militarization of the response to over militarization of the response to Boko Haram And to terrorism in the Sahel But part of that is now we're seeing this increasing militarization or securitization Of the response to african migration and mobility And one of the things that stands out to me is How do we get african leaders To take more responsibility For the number of young african children who are dying in the mediterranean today from your perspective as an as a leader In a split in a country, you know in a space in a in a territory that is sort of implicated in this process in light of the recent comment by the president of france About africa having some civilizational problems and blaming that for The state of afia is in the on the continent You mentioned the fact that nigeria is a very diverse country, it's not a nation For sure There's a lot of diversity of you know linguistic religious ethnic diversity How do you see i mean, but what makes nigeria a political unit? Or what makes nigeria a nation if it is if it is one and Do you do you see any alternative other than western liberal values of democracy or human rights civic ideals Of nationalism and citizenship Beyond this ideals of citizenship. Do you see any ideals from existing? Nigerian organic civilizations that can't unite Nigeria as a nation or that can serve as an overarching identity of being a nigerian. Thanks Okay, yes, some of these questions are very tough, aren't they? Yes on the first I I think it's I basically that was my point. Okay, so if you go back to to the 1940s My great grandfather in kind of a Bayer set up what was called the judicial school Just an attempt to have western and islamic education in one compound and To this day people talk about integration. That's what they're talking about. Okay, you have a school where you can study english math history french and or whatever, you know, study this in english and then you've got Quran hadith fake and so on in arabic Now my proposal is Let's do what the arab nations do if you go to the University of Cairo today And you want to study medicine you have the option of studying medicine in english or study medicine in arabic You know, so why what is wrong with mainstream and in fact beyond arabic Why shouldn't we aim for a situation where you study medicine in hausa? You know why what if you learned medicine in hausa Are you Is it that you cannot do the operation because you were taught in hausa? Do you need you know? I mean, so it's it's about Basically asking simple questions. Why does it have to be english? Why why am I seeing as more educated than someone because I speak better english? And the further my accent away is away from the Nigerian accent the more educated apparently I am You know, so I mean we need to get out out of that and I think it's by having I do I do the answers I would say look Education is on the concurrent list That means states have certain flexibility in how they formulate education policy, even though there's a national curricula Delegate some of that to the states if cano feels therefore schools built by the cano state government And for the secondary schools in cano are for the universities owned by cano state They want to offer economics and political science and history and medicine and engineering to students who have shown a certain level of proficiency in arabic okay, maybe after going through some A conversion courses, you know on basic, you know, let them do it then set the standards And that way at least you begin to mainstream them And take them out of the margins Okay, right now. What happens is they invest so much in education because look You have you just about the value if If a child a child who memorizes the Quran For him this is a great achievement And yet in that society it's nothing Because it can get him nowhere. It can't even get him into year seven It's not the equivalent of a primary school certificate Now that child is frustrated That child feels this society has treated unfairly And that child ends up in the hands of someone Who says, you know what? This society is an infidel society It has no respect for the Quran and for God you what you need to do is go and fight against it And that's how you get all these children to send bombers And and I really think we've got to to deal with that which gets me to the question on militarization I Look a military and security solution Are essential. There's no way you can have a group of people with guns and bombs coming at you without a military solution The point I'm making is that the military solution is not the be all and end all and beyond Dealing with it. I look at look at Iraq. Look at Afghanistan. Look at Palestine. You can Win a war But at the end of the day, you've got to win the peace You've got to make sure that what we had with Boko Haram does not happen again But if you continue Having all these children who are not going to school if you continue showing up the Per capita income numbers you have the unemployment numbers you have the youth the ideal youth numbers that you have Um The very bad social policies that you have you're going to have something else. It may not be Boko Haram It'll be something look at the Niger Delta Look at these um ipop People who want who want to be afra? It's these are just signs of Frustrations, you know by by young people. It's really by young people Let me give you another number You have a country of 170 million people Take a guess. What's the median age in Nigeria? Median age today It's 19 It's 19 in in the next 20 years You're going to have 85 million Nigerians between the ages of 20 and 40 That is more than the population of Germany the third largest economy in the world. Think about it On what economy are you going to sustain them? And if you think The Biafra war and Boko Haram and Fulani Hertzman Arrow crisis Think of the crisis we would have and we have 80 million youth unemployed You know, so Don't anyone who thinks that because you've defeated Boko Haram you've solved the problem You know All those young ones, you know The toddlers that are around all those young ones are going to grow up into a far more vicious A Boko Haram so you've got to deal with you've got to think okay Where did we go wrong and how do you make sure we don't go wrong with the next generation? This is I think for me for me the point The young lady I I wish I could claim that I was advocating for dismantling patriarchy. Unfortunately. I'm not that progressive Not that I I think it's wrong. I mean if you I'm always happy my daughter my daughter I have a daughter who says I'm a fraud that that people think I'm progressive Um, I'm liberal, you know, and that they should ask her She says three years after I've been an amia. I don't have a single woman in my emirate council I have done nothing to show that I'm ready to have a woman become amious You know and as far as she's concerned. I'm just a slightly refined Um Model at all. So so the next generation is worse. No, I I think that I think that it's it's very difficult to Totally and and look I don't I don't have any moral issue with having a patrilineal or patriarchal or matrilineal system I think at the end of the day Things have to work. I think stuff to work within a certain logic So take even take the simple issue of child marriage Okay, when we're growing up It was very normal to have a girl of 12 or 13 get married to an older man who had other wives And she would be married. She would be taken to his house And she would be treated more or less like a daughter Okay, clothed and fed and Taking care of and then when she's of age 17 18 She becomes a wife in that sense. Okay, even Islamic jurisprudence makes a distinction between The age of marriage and the age of consummation and there's actually There's actually criminal punishment For consummating marriage with a girl who is not ready for consummation. It's it's in the law I mean people just don't don't use it now you fast forward to the to this century or and and this decade and People marry 12 13 year old girls without any kind of knowledge of that logic of that patriarchal structure Okay, and people have talked about the bargain of patriarchy. Anyway, uh, you know that more than I where women sometimes give up Some of their rights to equality in response in return for the protection they get From the husband or the father or the brother now that is part of the logic of a patriarchal system Well, you where things go wrong is when all the men Take all the privileges of patriarchy without any of the responsibilities In a patriarchal system, you would be ashamed to see that your son is a beggar You want your son to be something In a patriarchal system, you'd be ashamed to see that your wife has to go out to beg someone for food That is not patriarchy. This is just injustice You know, so let us at least start I start with that and Maybe after we've resolved the issues of child marriage domestic violence We can start talking about dismantling patriarchy and I can assure you that when it begins the revolution will begin from my own house You know, there are quite a number of people who are ready to overthrow me So Okay, so Now on on on this question of The developmental state, you know There are things that have worked and there are things that haven't worked And if you look at yes, you've had a few cases of countries that have gone through or Leapfrogged certain stages of development But one thing we know as economists and we have known since the 1950s with structural economics Is that There is no way you are ever going to develop if you continue to rely on primary exports. This is Some that's worked that we know Okay, so we had the industrial revolution in europe. We had it in the united states We've had asian countries who have gone through that process And they've moved themselves out of poverty I there's an interesting book about nigeria and indonesia growing apart You can see clearly what they did that we didn't do And you can see All the potential that nigeria has With all the resources that we have just like and I keep saying just just imagine it Just imagine if instead of burning all these guys you produce electricity Nitro is 60 60 65 percent of the population in west africa Is 50 percent of west african gdp It has a captive market next door Without going outside its borders it has 170 million people How many pairs of shoes is that how many bags How many shirts You know, how many kilowatts of electricity How many gallons of water purified water How many bottles of coca-cola? I mean just think of it It's it's simple. I mean for me. It's And that's why I'm so confident that the day nigeria gets it. This is this is history. It's just that One thing, you know that that that hasn't clicked, you know So I would I would say do not reinvent the wheel just do what they did And we can do it and Ethiopia by the way is something Melis Is one person that showed what could be done I mean take what you do with coffee You know, he said look, I'm tired of my farmers getting only 10 percent of the value of their coffee Okay, got the IFC got starbucks trained coffee farmers by the time he was through Ethiopian farmers were getting 65 percent of the value And you would go to starbucks shop And drink coffee that came straight out of out of Ethiopia without going through another country I didn't have to go to brazil for airing and drying and whatever You know, and when you think that the term coffee came from a region of Ethiopia kafa. It is so sad You know, it's almost A no-brainer that Ethiopia should do that with coffee. That's not just coffee. Look look at cement He called donkote Come and produce cement here. I'll give you free electricity brought down the cost of cement by 40 50 percent construction boom It told the chinese I'm tired of selling wet blue to you and important shoes come and produce the shoes and gloves right now outside Addis, there's a big shop producing shoes and gloves exporting to the united states under agoa And if your peer grew at double digit 11 12 percent year after year I was governor of central bank I was green with envy I was you know, I was I was telling my government look look at Ethiopia Just do a little bit of that. Look legos is 30 percent of nigeria's non-all gdp If legos grows by 10 percent That is nigeria's non-all gdp growing by 3 percent What does it take to grow legos by 10 percent a deep sea port An expanded airport Some rail line to remove the traffic You know, so We'll get there. Don't worry. I have no I have no doubt The final point is about the french the french president said what something about africa having Well, that's that's rich coming from the french I mean I mean look Look who doesn't have a civilizational problem. Is it is it leadership? I mean so where is the Where is the role modeling coming from? Is it america with donald trump or Russia with put in You know, where is the role modeling coming from? You know, people need to stop Pronouncing these judgments on other cultures and civilizations and look inwards. I can see a lot about french about the french I am I'm going to Paris tomorrow. I don't want to be rude But but no, I wouldn't I wouldn't listen to him, but I but I think that One of the greatest problems of the world or With some people is that they're so quick to pronounce judgments On things they don't understand. I've heard people talk about muslims And and they they they don't even about islam at all Or or about blacks or about americans The truth is you've got to Be able to Identify the particular individual or the particular issue they have an issue with and discuss And we need to understand that the 21st century world like every other world is a world that has many cultures and civilizations all of which deserve to be respected and We should first of all respect ourselves and then demand respect from everyone else Ladies and gentlemen, his highness drove three hours from brighton to get here because of traffic jams So we're going to bring this formal part of the discussions to a close So he can relax a little bit with you at a reception and i'm sure he'll be very happy to talk On a one-to-one basis with you before we go off to solve the problems of hauser So as but I think we're all agreed that we've listened to some words of wisdom Tonight and I think that we should all Thank the amir From the depths of our being for his coming for his talking so well And imparting his wisdom to us ladies and gentlemen