Who is keeping the people of northern Nigeria down? How can the people of the region be rescued from the vice grip of poverty suffocating their social, political and economic life?
These are the questions that come to mind when one considers the recent alarm raised by the leader of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), Rabiu Musa Kwakwanso, supported by several socio-political groups in the North, that the federal government was marginalising the northern region of the country.
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Kwankwaso alleged that the Tinubu administration was sidelining the northern region and that national resources were being disproportionately channelled towards developing southern Nigeria. He attributed the endemic poverty and insecurity in the region, as well as infrastructural decay to the neglect of the region by the Tinubu administration.
Garment Factory
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Kwankwaso alleged that a garment factory slated to be built in Ogun State with a $2 billion loan by Arise IIP, ought to have been sited in the North because the North was the natural environment for growing cotton. But the truth is that the project is a collaboration between the Ogun State government and Arise IP, a pan-African industrial park developer. The mega factory, whose construction starts in September, will be located in the Special Agro Industrial Processing Zone of Ogun State’s new airport city with a capacity to produce 4.4 million garments daily. About 150,000 jobs will be created when the project goes on stream.
Every state has a right to find a way to take its people out of poverty. Generally speaking, in my interactions with street children in the North, I find them as sharp-witted and as imaginative as their southern counterparts. But who is going to liberate them from the millstone of illiteracy and poverty holding them down?
When faced with a more daunting version of the same problem, the Chinese did not bother to chant the ‘book of lamentations’. They introduced market-oriented policies which allowed the private sector to flourish, leading to the growth of township and village enterprises (TVEs) and a booming manufacturing sector which created millions of low- and moderate-skilled jobs. Eventually, they lifted nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty!
Although not a politician, I am a keen observer of how political players continue to showcase the ancient sport of using one loaf of bread to scoop all the stew in the plate in the name of political wizardry. This ancient sleight-of-hand doesn’t impress Gen-Zs one bit. Rather, they’re asking governors to show evidence of what they have done with the huge loans many of them have taken.
Ubuntu
I fervently believe that I am because we are (Ubuntu). I don’t have to be Hausa or Fulani, Bachama or Kanuri to comment on goings-on in the North, although politicians from that part of the country would want to play their ethnic games by labelling any analyst from outside the zone as an “outsider.” Some Southern politicians play that game too.
In the last 26 years of our Fourth Republic, I have argued that an implosion was imminent in the northern states with the way politicians from the various parties took the people for granted by deploying available resources in the service of self and narrow interests, while the people wallowed in poverty and ignorance. There is poverty all over the country but that of the northern states is especially biting.
It appears that the northern masses have been socialised to believe that the Federal Government owes them a living and therefore it is in their interest for one of their own to emerge as the tenant of the presidential palace. Even though this has been proved to be a lie over and over again — as exemplified by the successive Northern-led military heads of state of the bygone martial era and the recent eight years tenure of President Buhari — the Northern masses are still being told that the cause of their poverty is the Southerner occupying the state house.
Let’s be clear, there is no difference between the level of rapaciousness of Northern politicians and their Southern counterparts. However, the Northern politicians seem to have perfected the weaponisation of ethnicity and religion in selling their agenda. And this weaponisation is done in such a way as to give the impression that the North is a mono-cultural and mono-religious entity.
Some analysts have pooh-poohed the refusal of the Northern elite to take responsibility for the state of affairs in their region. It is common knowledge that other parts of the country have spent quite a bit of money on Western education in the last 70 years, while Northern politicians promoted their own idea of Arabic education to justify the Almajiri system in which Koranic students are made to beg for a living as part of their training.
Columnists and civil society activists over the years have begged the northern political elite across political divides to make the eradication of the almajiri system their priority in order to restore some dignity to the underprivileged. There are over 15 million almajiri children all over the northern states. They have no education and their prospects in the modern world are bleak. They constitute a ready army from which any terrorist group could draw recruits. Having lived on the streets for many years, an adolescent almajiri is primed for life as a bandit or terrorist or some other kind of outlaw.
Almajiranci
Those who glamorise almajiranci would never recommend it for their own offspring, as we see the elite trooping to Europe and America every summer for the graduation of their own children, while the children of the poor wander about the streets searching for food in the name of religion. Every state in the North has enough money to start an emergency programme to remove these children from the streets but they are not interested. Several years ago, when President Jonathan constructed federally funded schools for the almajiri all over the North, the elite rose against him saying the president was implementing a hidden agenda.
It was a case of, damned if you intervene (Ah, you’re killing Muslims!) and damned if you don’t (you’re allowing terrorists to decimate our population!)
Truth be told, it is unfair on almajiri children to be denied the avenues for self-realisation available to their counterparts down south. The girl-children among them are doubly disadvantaged. They are railroaded into child marriages when their minds and bodies are not yet ready for such responsibilities.
If the governors of the 19 northern states, their political elite and their religious and traditional establishments call a meeting and fix a timeline for ending the almajiri problem in their states, the issue would be resolved. But each time they all gather, it is to strategise on how power will return to the North, so that they can continue to ride in the gravy train. This is ‘systemic violence’ against the people — as dreadful as the dog-eat-dog violence unleashed by Boko Haram and bandits who routinely depopulate the region.
Internal Colonialism
If you have your ears to the ground, you’ll also hear that some of the dog-eat-dog barbarity is caused by bitterness over internal colonialism, where an ethnic group not indigenous to a place perpetually provides the traditional and political leadership, consigning the aborigine majority to serfdom.
Perhaps, before any politician is tempted to play the ethnic card in attempting to ingratiate himself with his people, he should first take a good look in the mirror.
Wole Olaoye is a Public Relations consultant and veteran journalist. He can be reached on [email protected], Twitter: @wole_olaoye; Instagram: woleola2021
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