Why the North is poor

Regional disparities in living conditions between the North and South were the subject of dominant news for much of the past two weeks, from the disproportionate supply of electricity to the renewed debate on Value Added Tax (VAT), to the government’s totalitarian approach to minors who participated in the protests over hunger and hardship in August.

We have long known about these huge disparities in regional economic and political conditions in this country. The problem has always been how to account for these inequalities, and what to do about them by way of policy and in the interest of equity and justice.

On the first question, I can think of at least five reasons why the North remains the poorest region of Nigeria. First, there are historical and geographic factors such as the lack of ports connecting the North to important nodes of the global economy or lower levels of education, and the potential for economic mobility these provide in the Nigerian context.  Second, there are the structural disadvantages in the spread of national infrastructure and resources such as electricity. For example, the derivation principle is based on a narrow definition of “resource control” to mean only oil or mineral resources, neglecting the most important resource of all: land, which the North provides to help absorb a sizable portion of the Southern population.

Third, there is the progressively deteriorating quality of leadership in northern states, particularly since 2015, give or take a few exceptions. Perhaps the most important tasks before any northern governor today are how to transform the large informal sector into a formal, taxable part of the economy, as well as to provide economic opportunities to millions of northern women and youth—more than half the population—who are systematically excluded from even the informal sector of the regional economy. Yet, no governor of any northern state has imagined how to do this. Instead, many northern governors are hanging around Abuja attending events that serious people would not bother with.

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And then there is the North’s obsession with cultural, rather than economic issues. Up to the late 1980s, the North was Nigeria’s epicentre of radical politics and economics, spawning strong political parties that were distinctly socialist, social democratic, or economically conservative in both ideology and policy. Today, however, religion and culture dominate collective thinking in northern Nigeria as if people have forgotten that to do religion and culture properly, you need conducive politics and economics first. Moreover, northern politics today is empty of policy, whether at the state or national levels. The result of all these is a growing fatalism about economic life as divinely ordained, systematic exclusion of women from the economic space, a decrease in collective political action that holds the state accountable, and unfortunately, extremisms and insurgencies of all hues.

Each of these contributes, in varying degrees, to the stagnation of northern Nigeria within Nigeria’s political-economic space. But by far the most important factor for why the North remains poor is the limited opportunities available for educated northerners. Nigeria’s mainstream economy is based on educational qualifications—ND, HND, BA/BSc, MSc, etc—and some technical or professional skills that enable the holder to participate in the public, private, and non-profit subsectors of the formal economy.

My argument is that northern Nigerians who actually hold these qualifications and skills tend to find it exceedingly difficult to get jobs within these formal subsectors of the Nigerian economy. That is, qualified Northerners tend to be systematically excluded from the most productive jobs in the country, with serious implications for poverty and the prosperity of the region.

Let’s consider the public sector. In Nigeria, federal jobs are defined by the Federal Character Principle at all levels, after other requirements are met. Yet, how many Northerners are in federal employment in this country? I am not aware of reliable statistics on this, and we must produce these data if we are serious about equity, but I would guesstimate that the number of federal employees in six southern states would be equal to or higher than the number from all 19 northern states combined. Anyone who has ever visited even a single federal ministry, department, or agency will see this very clearly. For public sector jobs at the state and local government levels, where, in practice, employment is based on the Principle of Indigeneship, educated northerners tend to get jobs in their own or neighbouring states.

Northerners do not get similar opportunities in the public sector of southern states, even though thousands of Southern Nigerians are in the employment of various northern states, particularly in education, health, and other subsectors. More instructively, you would struggle to find even a single northerner in the employment of particularly federal educational and health institutions—the two largest federal employers—located in any Southern states, whereas thousands of Southern Nigerians work in federal institutions located in northern states.

Yet, while Southern Nigerians would shout to the heavens about real or perceived imbalances in ministerial or similar-level federal appointments, as happened throughout the Buhari government for example, but not now under the Tinubu government, they generally keep silent on the much larger and much more persistent imbalances in overall federal employment, and are often oblivious of how they are themselves beneficiaries of such deeply entrenched inequalities of the Nigerian federation.

The private sector presents an even more interesting case. If we believe the rhetoric, employment in the private sector in Nigeria is based mostly on merit and suitability in terms of education, skills, experience, etc. Yet, even the most qualified northerners tend to face debilitating exclusion from the private sector of the Nigerian economy overall, particularly at the executive and managerial levels.

In the more productive sectors by income like banking, insurance and finance, oil companies, telecom companies, and so on, I strongly doubt if northern representation is up to 15 per cent of all jobs in these sectors at the graduate entry to middle-levels, and probably less than two per cent at the managerial or executive levels. Meanwhile, universities in the North, now numbering more than 100, have been producing graduates and postgraduates since at least 1962.

And then, there is the non-profit sector, which, for ease of analysis, we can combine with jobs in international organisations, such as the UN System. Both domestic and international non-governmental organisations operate on the values of merit and equal opportunity for all. This is also true of international organisations in the UN system, and beyond. In addition, the bulk of activities by both NGOs and international organisations have been concentrated in the northern states in recent years, for obvious reasons.

Moreover, jobs in this sector also pay much better than federal and even many private sector jobs in Nigeria. Yet, northerners would scarcely account for up to 15 per cent representation in these sectors, and even that, only in recent years. Anyone who has seen where international NGOs and international organisations gather would see all of these clearly,

As the World Bank Nigeria Development Update (October 2024) document notes, productive jobs, not just jobs, are the surest way to reduce poverty and inequality in Nigeria. How then, can we ever reduce poverty, inequality, insecurity, etc, in the North if educated northerners cannot find productive jobs in the public, private, and non-profit sectors of the Nigerian economy?