Emerging two nations in one nation

Here is the latest unsettling news about northern Nigeria. In its 2016 report titled “Advancing Social Protection in dynamic Nigeria,” released last month, the World Bank again gave us nothing to cheer about the northern Nigeria. The bank said that northern Nigeria is the capital of the poor and the extremely poor in our dear country. According to the bank, a full 87 per cent of the extremely poor in the country are in the north.

Would a nation inured to bad and disturbing news find the report shocking or amusing? After all, we knew all along that the 100 million extremely poor in the country are not evenly distributed among the regions, a la the quota system. It is not that strange, I suppose, that the north with its towering physical size with the highest population, should naturally be home to more of the poor in the poverty capital of the world.

I am willing to bet that our leaders and their vocal minions would, as usual, treat and dismiss the report as fiction from the fertile imagination of those who are too blind to see and too biased to appreciate the giant developmental strides by the giant of Africa in recent times. Perhaps, it is not anybody’s fault that our country is plagued by contradictions that befuddle the mind. For instance, ours is the largest economy in Africa. How then did we manage to grow the largest economy on the continent and yet attain the status of the capital of the poor and the extremely poor in the world? As novelist Mabel Segun would say, there are many things we no understand.

The report matters because there are least two important points to take away from it. The first is that the bank has once again shown that we are largely living a lie about the state of our economy and the state of our national development. The bank, according to The Punch newspaper of February 11, identified “weak governance, lack of basic infrastructure, poor quality of education and poor social service delivery, as some of the reasons for the high level of poverty in Nigeria.”

Nearly 60 years after independence, it looks like we have not even started. Every area of our human and social development is held captive by the growing poverty in the land amidst the extravagant celebrations by the important people. The bank once more underlined the fact that “Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children of primary school age in the world with nine million children out of school.” This has remained a problem hidden in plain sight. It is depressing for me to continue with the catalogue of the prices we are paying for missed opportunities and the lack of will to do what it takes for the country to live up to its billing as an oil-rich nation with the largest economy in Africa, even if the latter is now really fiction.

The second point is the truly pathetic case of northern Nigeria. Northern Nigeria is just not a player any more in the soccer field of economic and social competitions. The bank made that point strongly, pointing out that “regionally, the north lags far behind the south in every human capital outcome.” The north is hobbled by poverty, a growing rate of illiteracy and racked by insecurity. Two of its geo-political zones, the North-East and the North-West, are not even players in the northern region. They are the least educationally developed and the poorest in the region. Millions of people in the two zones lack the very basic necessities of life such as potable water; and this in the 21st century.

I do not think its worst enemies could have wish these crass failings on the region that was once the food basket of the nation. The worry, really, is that we are building two countries separated by poverty. The south is the rich nation and the north is the poor nation. The emergence of two countries in one is deleterious to our national health, unity and development. It is a growing problem to which not many of our political leaders bother to give some serious thoughts, let alone commit to bridging the growing gap. A poor, unstable and vulnerable northern Nigeria is a millstone tied to the feet of the Nigerian nation. It can either not move or move painfully and very slowly with obvious difficulties.

I find it interesting that some northern leaders are acutely aware of the northern problems. The Punch sampled their opinions on the World Bank report as it concerns the northern region. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, former vice-president, said, “Education is a game changer. The North-East and the North-West are not doing well in that particular sector. This has impacted on the poverty aspect.” Alhaji Balarabe Musa, former governor of old Kaduna State, thinks so too.

Where does the north go from here? It is a tough question because the problems have become progressively nastier and the consequences for the region now and in the future are so predictable that the political leaders ought to have sleepless nights, racked by worry and a throbbing conscience over their style of leadership that has short changed the north and its people.

On the whole, the World Bank report is a pathetic reflection of what our nation has become. It points to one inescapable fact about the management of our national resources, human and material, to wit, we squandered our riches in the past and we continue to squander them in the present. Perhaps it is time to quit living a lie and face the ugly realities that confront our nation. The ball, as all such balls are won’t to do, is in the court of our leaders. How they choose to play it would determine the tenor of the next World Bank report on the country.