We can wake up the spirit of Northern Nigeria

I did not see it that way. Now, I do. The fog has lifted, thanks to Nasir E-Rufai, governor of Kaduna State. He told a Northern Youth Summit in the old regional capital last week that the spirit of Northern Nigeria is either asleep or dead. My ears, as they are wont to do, perked up.

I have often wondered about what is wrong with the house Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardaunan Sokoto, late premier of the Northern Region, worked so hard to build. The house, once an edifice, is now a pathetic, sorry sight with leaking roofs and crumbling walls with its occupants in disarray.

I now see that the problem with Northern Nigeria is that it is either dead or asleep. It is doing what Rip Van Winkle did many years ago. When he woke up years later, he found that the world had moved on while he slumbered. Let us be charitable and accept that the northern spirit is asleep, not dead. That way, we can, if we are so minded, still wake it up, force it to sit up and become a peaceful home region once more to a teeming population that was once proud to call themselves northerners because they felt a sense of unity, brotherhood and, of course, sisterhood.

I know that quite a bit of water has passed under the bridge linking Kaduna north with Kaduna south and consequently that common bond that once defined us is more or less in tatters now. We are torn by religious and ethnic differences. Still, we share the blame, individually and collectively, for watching over the sleeping giant while the rest of the country is matching towards the sunrise, not the sunset.

I would not know why Northern Nigeria chose to sleep at this critical time in our national history and development. I thought that only a drunken fool could afford to blissfully sleep through the daily din and the raucous noise we offer the world as our sane approach to our national problems. I now accept that the sober too sleep.

This is the summary of what has happened to Northern Nigeria while its spirit is asleep. I am quoting El-Rufai in full. According to the front page lead story of the Daily Trust of July 7, 2019, he said:

*We have the largest number of poor people in the world, most of them in Northern Nigeria;

*Nigeria also has the largest number of out-of-school children, virtually all of them in Northern Nigeria;

*Northern Nigeria has become the centre of drug abuse, gender violence, banditry, kidnapping and terrorism.

El-Rufai also quoted the guest lecturer at the summit as saying that “it would appear that Nigeria consists of two countries, made up of a backward, less educated and unhealthy northern Nigeria and a developing, largely educated and healthy southern Nigeria.”

Are your eyes still dry? You must be more stoical than I thought. Every bad thing is happening to and in Northern Nigeria. Indeed, burdened by the afore-mentioned afflictions summarised by a man who, like the emir of Kano, likes to tell it without pretences to diplomatic niceties (he calls it the naked truth) Northern Nigeria could not but be dragging the rest of the country down with a mill stone tied to its feet. Heard the clamour for restructuring?

It is easy to notice the absence of Northern Nigeria in the indices of our national development. Knock at the doors of the banks. The northerners you find behind the doors are employees. Follow the humming of machines turning out industrial products and you see where the labourers come from.

Kakuri, Kaduna South, is a major town in Kaduna metropolis. It grew up as a settlement around the thriving textile industry in the fifties up the seventies. Later other industrial establishments, most prominent among them being Kaduna Refinery and the Defence Industries Corporation, gave more prominence to Kakuri. Today the textile industry is dead; the refinery is limping and the NDIC is probably back in business as a defence industry, no longer as a furniture company.

We are losing our right to be the food basket of the nation. Insecurity is driving farmers off their land and leaving the farms fallow. When the statistics are in, none of us should be surprised that the hungriest people in the country are in Northern Nigeria.

Northern Nigeria is not a major player in our national economy. It is gratuitous to cite Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, as evidence that his being a northerner shows that the north has lost nothing by sleeping through this period of heightened economic, industrial, agricultural and social development activities across the country. Northern Nigeria has taken a back seat; its voice in national affairs is the shrill voice of the overwhelmed. Northern Nigerian leaders still hold the cows and the other geographical entities milk them.

The Northern Region no longer exists. It is dead. But Northern Nigeria remains a geographical entity and fact. The generals, who remade Nigeria into the current 36-state structure, never dared to tamper with that geographical fact. There must be matters beyond the capacity of the immediate effect military order we once thought was a radical approach to the bureaucratic tardiness of the civil service. Northern Nigeria still looms over the 19 northern states. When we look at these states, we assess them in the context of autonomous entities as northern states.

That is where our collective worry over the sleeping giant comes in. Because it sleeps, we are sleepy and are unable see that in spite of their autonomy, none of the 19 states can stand on its feet, let alone drive its own development. None of them can generate enough internal revenue to fund its responsibilities as a government. Take away the monthly hand outs from the federation account and all the 19 states would be sorely impoverished beyond your imagination.

Still, our leaders slumber, blissfully unaware that the increasing rate of illiteracy and poverty in Northern Nigeria are self-perpetuating. Governors come and go and leave on their departure more impoverished and disarticulated northern states than they found them. I thought it should be possible to pinch them and wake them up from a slumber induced by their inclination to embrace power without responsibilities –the province of harlots, as Churchill once put it.

It takes the states nowhere but down in the economic and social doldrums. A little adjustment in the thinking of the state governors could prove a bulwark against the steady decent into the hell of economic and social deprivation that have tended to make the northern states onlookers in the modern developmental race.

Let them borrow a leaf or two from the South-West geo-political zone. I have lived in Lagos for some 35 years now and witnessed the impressive socio-economic developmental strides made by the six successor states of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ekiti, Osun and Ondo. Their secret is in pulling their resources in the same direction dictated by the imperatives of modern socio-economic development. It is today the most cohesive geo-political zone. It is the least poor and the least illiterate. The results show in each of the states in the zone. Their leaders see the states in the context of development areas rather than autonomous entities hostile to one another.

It may be a difficult act to follow by the three geo-political zones in Northern Nigeria, North-Central, North-East and North-West, given the current religious and ethnic polarisation perpetrated and perpetuated by local champions. Still, I thought the fact that none of the states can be an island of development should force them to recognise the wisdom of pulling together in a given direction – for the sake of the present and the future. There is no harm in trying to do what the South-West has done. Development and progress are not made by re-inventing the wheel but by borrowing the best from wherever it could be found and transplanting them to your own soil with adjustments to suit your own purposes.

A Nigeria bifurcated into “a backward, less educated and unhealthy northern Nigeria and a developing, largely educated and healthy southern Nigeria,” is just not right for the future of our country. The responsibility for taking steps to make a radical paradigm shift rests with the leaders of the northern states. If they can manage to see themselves as collective agents of transformation, they can wake up the spirit of Northern Nigeria from sleep and arouse its people from slumber.