Running Out Of Patience

The youths blamed the situation on the lack of focus and vision by northern leaders who succeeded the late Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Prime Minister of Nigeria, who both lost their lives in the 15 January 1966 coup. They expressed nostalgia over the era when Ahmadu Bello fought for the development of the Northern Region without compromising the interests of the people he represented. They, however, alleged that individual interest has beclouded the sensibility of the present crop of leaders, who they accused of playing politics with northern development. The failure of northern leaders to address the lingering economic and educational backwardness in the region, the forum said, had forced youths in the past to resign to fate. Now, however, Comrade Isiaq said, the youth have decided to take their destiny in their hands

The Governor of the Central Bank, Professor Charles Soludo, who delivered a lecture titled Economic Backwardness In The North: Way Forward, bluntly attributed the general backwardness of the reigion to leadership problem, reeling out statistics to support his submission.

Soludo drew the attention of the audience at Arewa House auditorium to the bank consolidation period, when Bank of the North and Intercity Bank failed to raise the N25billion benchmark. This, he averred, was due to the failure of the 19 northern states’ governors to come to the rescue of the two establishments owned and controlled by northerners. Though the youths applauded Soludo for telling their leaders the truth, no sooner had he left Kaduna than some northern leaders railed that he was not in the position to blame them for the region’s woes. One-time governor of Kano State and now a serving Senator, Architect Kabir Gaya, posited that the problems facing the North were not different from those affecting other regions, thus Soludo, who comes from the Eastern part of the county, does not have the right to query or blame any northern leader for the problems facing the region. In his opinion, Northern leaders have tried their best but it was unfortunate that this has not been good enough due to the poor economic situation in the country.

The former adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo on Food Security, Professor Ango Abdullahi, however, tore Gaya’s argument to shreds. Agreeing with Soludo that northern leaders should be blamed for the region’s woes, Prof. Abdullahi maintained that whereas the late Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa used their positions of authority to attract development to the North and its people, lack of vision by their successors has virtually wiped out their laudable legacies.

Regardless of the arguments or excuses the present crop of northern leaders give for the North’s backwardness, the economic indices reeled out by the shrewd CBN Governor might not be far from the truth. The statistics clearly show that 80 per cent of the industries located in the North have closed down and without prompt intervention, especially in the improvement of electricity supply, many of the 20 per cent managing to operate might fold up. Besides, Isiaq asserted, agriculture has been abandoned for “politics and oil, and while it is pathetic that poverty ravages the North, nothing is being done to revive it”.

On the way forward, some serving members of Governor Mohammed Namadi Sambo’s cabinet told this magazine that the problems facing the North could only be solved through agricultural development. Even when 70 per cent of northerners are said to be farmers, said one of the political leaders, who craved anonymity, agricultural activities have been abandoned to only a few rural dwellers, and it is at subsistence level.

The youths also complained that education, which should have been a catalyst to development, has not been given the attention it requires to encourage the teeming population of almajiri–itinerant Islamic pupils–to embrace western education.

Dr. Suleiman Mohammed, a psychologist and lecturer at one of the higher institutions in Kaduna, opined that the problem facing the North needs divine intervention because the region has more leaders at all levels of government than others, yet it is faced with all sorts of developmental problems. “The northern leaders at all levels are confused people living in a confused society,” he concluded.

It was the consensus of everyone at the forum that northern leaders at the local, state and federal government levels should immediately begin to think of ways to solve the developmental problems bedeviling the region before the patience of the youths runs out.