The Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, has been speaking blunt truth to power, telling the Northern Nigerian elite to take full responsibility for the underdevelopment of the region. It is refreshing that a blue-blooded scion of the region’s ruling class understands that the fundamental cause of mass poverty, illiteracy, disease, indolence and insecurity afflicting the Northern states and dragging the entire country backward is poor and selfish leadership. All stakeholders should heed his clarion call and join forces to reverse the worsening poverty in the region.
Sanusi, a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, re-launched his campaign for radical change in the region when he railed against female illiteracy, polygamy and multiple children by the poor. His advocacy of laws to restrict men to marrying and procreating only within their material means was still generating discomfort among the conservatives when he made a more comprehensive call at an annual lecture on the missing Chibok girls held in Abuja recently.
Quite rightly, he reminded the elite that it was the kind of society they created through their misrule that provided fertile ground for extremist groups like Boko Haram, which infamously kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State, three years ago. Sanusi recalled the grim human development indices that advertise the 13 states of the North-West and North-East regions as the poorest and most miserable places in the world to live in.
As usual, reactions have been predictable. While some reasoned voices backed Sanusi’s call for a change of attitude, others like Governor Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara State, are demonstrating why the region will continue to wallow in deprivation. Rather than climb down from his retrogressive thesis that the cerebrospinal meningitis that has so far killed 745 people, 90 per cent of them in the North, was a result of “sin,” he has taken to verbal assault on the emir. It is a familiar, hypocritical script that has to change for Nigeria to fulfil its development potential: as long as the North is backward, Nigeria too remains stuck in a morass. Misrule and visionless leadership pervade both the North and South; the people of the South have, however, given priority to self-advancement through education. The results of poor governance have therefore been more devastating in the North.
Religion and illiteracy have kept the Northern populace trapped in poverty for decades. For instance, while the United Nations Poverty Index that measured the years 2004 to 2014 estimated average poverty rate at about 46.5 per cent, the regional breakdown revealed that it was 80.9 per cent in the North-West, 76.8 per cent in the North-East and 45.7 in the North-Central. Poverty was, however, only 19.3 per cent in the South-West, 25.2 per cent in the South-South and 35 per cent in the South-East. The drag is also stark in literacy levels where UNESCO in 2015 estimated 56.9 per cent adult literacy for the country, one of the worlds’ lowest, when, in fact, illiteracy in the South is low. Literacy level was 92 per cent in the Southern state of Lagos, Osun 80 per cent, Ekiti 74.7 per cent and 70.7 per cent in Akwa Ibom. In the North, Borno was 14.5 per cent, Katsina 21.7 per cent, Yobe 26.6 per cent and Taraba 23.3 per cent.
The North has made little progress in eradicating extreme poverty. It is time the 19 northern state governors rallied to the call by Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State for region-wide initiatives and collaboration to develop agriculture, education, industry and infrastructure. They need to drop their incendiary preoccupation with religion and align, as Sanusi reminded us, with new thinking in other countries like the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and Qatar that have rejected illusory 13th century notions of grandeur and latched on to innovation and modernisation.
The Northern intelligentsia and the traditional ruling class should join hands to revive the vision of the late Ahmadu Bello, the then premier of the defunct Northern Region, who, appalled by the fact that the North had less than 10 graduates in the mid-1950s compared to over 2,000 in the South-West, embarked on a development programme to close the gap. Governors should work furiously to close the gap that, 60 years later, has widened. Balarabe Musa, a former governor of the old Kaduna State, put the knowledge gap starkly: he said that whereas every local government area in the South can produce 1,000 engineers each, only Kwara and Kogi states can boast such number of engineers. Like Musa, we assert that given its large land mass, its extensive water and mineral resources and population, the Northern states should be the richest region in West Africa.
But trapped in feudal practices, gifted by the departing colonial overlords with advantages over the country’s resources and having access to power, Northern leaders have imbibed a culture of entitlement that kills motivation.
It is no longer a viable route. Agitation for fiscal federalism is bound to yield success in the years ahead and every part of Nigeria will have to fend for itself as was the case up till 1967 when the military destroyed the federal system. No society develops with an illiterate population. Nor do societies that elevate religion above development prosper or remain stable. Adult literacy for females in the UAE is 95.8 per cent; Algeria 73.1 per cent, and Iraq 73.7 per cent, all three being Muslim majority countries. Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, has 99.73 per cent adult female literacy, demonstrating that the excuse of faith or culture by which the elite keep the masses in ignorance is not tenable. The over 80 per cent female illiteracy in the North-East and North-West should be reversed by aggressive free and compulsory education. All states should domesticate the Child Rights Act, eradicate and criminalise child marriage.
The critical factor will be an attitudinal change by leaders nationwide to imbibe a culture of selfless service and drop hypocrisy and cynical manipulation. Where they don’t, civil society should mobilise the masses to follow through on the advice of the Sultan of Sokoto, to vote out non-performers.
