Attahiru Jega weeps

Professor Attahiru Jega, former chairman of INEC, spoke with righteous indignation. He is right to be indignant. The changing face of the north is a source of sleepless worry for all those who value the simple fact that no community held hostage in the swamps of its failures can aspire to modern development and progress.

At the Maitama Sule Leadership Lecture series promoted by the Coalition of Northern Nigeria in Katsina a couple of weeks ago as of this writing, Jega gave a strong voice to his frustration. His speech raised some valid questions that northern leaders and elite need to honestly answer. He wondered, and it is no small wonder, why the north has failed to rise up to its challenges and has instead become a huge disappointment to itself, its people and the Nigerian state.

Like some of us, Jega does not understand how the region suddenly transformed itself into a poster child for almost everything that is wrong with our country. We no longer hear good news from the region. We hear bad news: “Whether it is poverty, unemployment, insecurity, infant mortality, out-of-school children, poor girl-child education, or even early marriage,” the north holds the candle to itself. Thus thundered the once radical leader of ASUU who took on the might of the military to secure a better deal for our university teachers and rescue our education and chart the right course for our educational institutions and save them from being degree mills.

The question is why? There are a million strings to the word, why question but there are no easy answers. Still, we can raise some of them if only to show the depth of our collective frustration and disappointment with ourselves and our political leaders. So: Why did the region lose it? Why has the region that once touted itself as the senior partner in the Nigerian project become a drag on our national unity and development? Why has it become the home to every crime and criminal – kidnapping, armed robbery, banditry, hired and mindless killing? Why does the north bleed? Why are its people so wretched and deprived? Why has the region that fed the nation become a basket case? 

I repeat, these are important questions but there are no easy answers. In seeking for answers it would be unhelpful to resort to the blame game and see the hands of past leaders in the unsavoury pie. The answers rest with the current crop of northern leaders, be they politicians, traditional rulers or religious leaders. Do they consider these shameful of their leadership and the abdication of the legacy leaders are obliged to leave for their people?

There is no pretending about the unacceptable face of Northern Nigeria today. The region continues to lag behind in education; it continues to harbour the largest collection of the poor and the hungry in the land. The north was the most peaceful region in the country, envied by the other regions in perpetual conflict with themselves. The north is now the most violent and the least peaceful or safe region in the land. Societies transform by emerging from the darkness of their past problems and failures; when a society transforms into its darker period, it gives rise to the gnashing of teeth. I can hear no gnashing of teeth.

All the 19 states in the north are poor. None of them can generate enough internal revenue to take care of its basic governmental responsibilities. All of them wait for the monthly handouts from the federation account. You can understand why the south says the north is a parasite living on crude oil revenue. 

Civil servants and pensioners in the northern states are dying in droves but the expensively baban riga-clad political leaders think less of the people and more about massaging their own egos, convinced that the wailing of the impoverished and the hungry among their people is a new juju music extolling their sterling performances in office. Ha!

Everything that did not need to go wrong has gone wrong with the region, its people and its political and traditional leaders. The leaders are absent when trouble comes knocking at the door of the people. They choose to live a false life and wallow in the false belief that everything is all right when nothing is remotely all right. They plot power retention but forget that years of holding the reins of political power have not translated into a more educated and more developed region. They forget that power exerts its moral imperatives on its holder. 

The north bleeds and bleeds badly. Letting it bleed is not an option. We have reached a point where the people and their leaders must pause in the quest for power and commit to doing first things first – and that is to make the north right. It means concerted efforts on the part of northern leaders to staunch the bleeding and rescue the people from the nightmare visited on them by the burgeoning trauma of insecurity, illiteracy, hunger and poverty.

The challenges before them are self-defined and dare them to blink. FAO has predicted famine in a number of countries in West Africa. One area that worries the experts is the North-West geo-political region. There, famine looms because our struggling peasant farmers there have abandoned their farms for fear of either being kidnapped for ransom or killed. Do northern leaders see this as a challenge that must be tackled under their watch or, as we say in the country, one of those things?

Let me spell out the steps they must take now. They must take urgent steps to restore peace and security to the region. Our peasant farmers must return to their farms and carry on their thankless task of feeding the nation in safety and security. President Buhari said recently that 12 million children have been driven out of school by kidnappers and bandits. These are mostly in Northern Nigeria. 

These children are the future of Northern Nigeria. Education prepares them for leadership tomorrow in all areas of human endeavour. Are our leaders to happy to see their present and future leaders wasted because of non-state actors who enjoy the impunity to do as they wish with the people? I hope not. Our leaders must ensure they return to school and they and their teachers must be secure and protected. 

An unspecified number of children from the Federal Government College, Birnin Yauri, and Bethel Baptist High School, Kujama, have been held in captivity for 165 days and 147 days  respectively as of this writing. They remain captives because their parents cannot pay the ransom for their freedom. We do not know the conditions under which they are being held. Surely, our leaders are parents too; they know the pain of the parents of these children forcefully separated from them. Is it right for our political leaders to ignore the pain and the trauma of these parents and let their children continue to languish in captivity? Would leaders anywhere but here tolerate this assault on the future of their children?

It may be helpful for the northern leaders to quit all pretences; get off their haunches and be their people’s keeper. Here are phrases that commend themselves to their attention: Incompetent leadership; selfish leadership; indifferent leadership. They may wish to look them up and see if a leader imbued with them these qualities can lead rather than rule his people.