How Northern leaders 'swindle' the region
By Abdullahi Mohammed
Governor Aliyu Babangida of Niger State has been doing everything within his power to get fellow 18 state governors in the North and other leaders from the area to change the scandalous poverty levels in our part of the country. It is the right thing to do. Otherwise, the Millennium Development Goals will be a mirage, and the seven-point agenda of President Umaru Yar'Adua. True, poverty is pervasive in the entire country. According to international development agencies, 90million out of of Nigeria's 140 million people live in abject poverty. But desperate poverty is far more pronounced in the North.
Apparently in response to unflattering statistics, from international agencies and the Central bank of Nigeria, Gov Aliyu took the gauntlet to address the acute poverty in the area. He has, among others, conducted a major conference on this issue and sought far-reaching solutions to it within the shortest possible time. However, not all northern leaders are prepared to take the bulls by the horns. This is a colossal tragedy. Most of the culprits are men of the "ancien regime". Let us take two recent examples. In a recent interview with Thisday on Sunday, the deposed Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki, after spiritedly denying abject poverty in the north, contradicted himself by admitting widespread wretchedness in the region, but curiously ascribed it to the CBN Governor. The evidence of the CBN Governor's contribution to the pervasive wretchedness? The 2004 directive that the minimum capital base of every bank be increased from 2billion naira to at least 25billion naira. The erstwhile Sultan, who lives in Kaduna following his dethronement and banishment in 1994, argued that as a result of the policy there is no bank in the country, which can still be called "northern".
The second example is the recent interview in Daily Trust by an erstwhile lecturer in sociology at Ahmadu Bello University, Dr Ibrahim Tahir, who toed the Dasuki line, but was more elegant in use of language. Still, the interview was sheer sophistry, if hocus-pocus. The two prominent northerners set out to play the Don Quixote of the north. They thus ended up doing our people more harm than good. By arguing that a lower bar should be set for our region in development terms, they confirmed the impression in some quarters in the south that the north is a dependency, which must always be assisted to even get by. As someone who lives and works in the south, I am always distressed anytime someone thinks I am a "quota professional". The late General Joseph Garba, Nigeria's Minister of Foreign Affairs who later became the permanent representative to the United Nations, used to say that he felt insulted anytime someone remarked that if not for "quota"
or "federal character" he would not have achieved much in life. The sole reason some people had this impression of him was that he came from the north.
Truth be told, our people do not need either the CBN or international development agencies to acknowledge that we are where we are not supposed to be as far as development is concerned. On Wednesday, January 14, 2009, I was moved to tears while watching the Nigerian Television Authority prime news bulletin at 9pm when it aired a news feature on the growing menace of destitution in Kaduna State. Yet, no state government in the north has any programme to tackle this social blight, or the problems of begging, primitive diseases and mass adult illiteracy which are unfortunately becoming cultural in national perception and reality. The fault is not in our stars, but in our selves, to paraphrase William Shakespeare. For some years this decade, millions of children in the north could not be vaccinated because propaganda was mounted to the effect that the vaccination of children was a ploy by the western world to populate Muslims! The person who
championed this lie is amazingly a medical doctor in the person of Ahmed Datti, president of the Supreme Council for Sharia Affairs in Nigeria. Dr Datti, of course, knew better. The result of the propaganda was many more millions of northern children afflicted by polio, in addition to those who died otherwise preventable deaths. Ironically, while this propaganda was going on, all the educated and privileged northerners I know ensured that their children, wards and relatives were properly vaccinated.
Our people should learn to accept responsibility, instead of blaming outsiders for our unimpressive development. At a conference last year in Kaduna on the collapse of virtually every industry in the north, a development, which CNN featured recently, some participants attributed the tragic failure to the regime of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the very person our political leaders adopted in 1999 and 2003 over and above better materials. The number one reason for the industrial collapse was rightly identified as poor public electricity supply. Much as Obasanjo's government was a nasty piece of work, it is grossly unfair to blame it for all the mess, which the Power Holding Company of Nigeria has become. PHCN, formerly called NEPA, had collapsed long before Obasanjo became a civilian president. No new power generating stations have been built in over 25 years. Nor have basic PHCN facilities been well maintained.
Yet, every NEPA or PHCN Chief Executive in the last 25 years has been a northerner. So has every power minister except the brief period the late Chief Bola Ige, Dr Olusegun Agagu and Liyel Imoke held forte. So wealthy was a former Power and Steel Minister from the north during the Ibrahim Babangida regime that he had 18 state-of-the-art cars in his compound! When the late Dr Bala Usman, a radical historian at ABU, attempted to lead some students of Ahmadu Bello University, including my humble self, to protest against this obscene primitive accumulation, some emirs and other prominent leaders intervened and reminded us that the person "is our illustrious son". And today some northerners are looking for Obasanjo or any other southerner to serve as an escape goat for electricity collapse and the consequent de-industrialisation of the north.
The same royal fathers intervened against our planned protest over the massive sports stadium which the military government of Brigadier General Sani Sami, now an emir Kebbi State, was building in Bauchi State. At a series of lectures in 1984/85, the late Dr Usman pointed out that while Brigadier Sami (he was to retire as a Major General) was building this monstrous stadium in the educationally backward state of Bauchi, his counterpart in Imo State, Brigadier General Ike Nwachukwu, was building a state university. The university was to become at a point the best state university in Nigeria, thus deepening the stature of old Imo State as educationally advanced. Now, come to think of it: what is the regenerative or economic value of the gigantic Bauchi State Stadium?
Northern political rulers spend fortunes on non-regenerative ventures. For instance, as the 2003 general elections approached, the then governor of Kebbi State, Alhaji Adamu Aliero who is now the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, imported from the United States and distributed a number of long-stretch limousines to emirs in the state. To state the obvious, spare parts of these very costly vehicles are not available in Nigeria, just like the expertise and the machines required to diagnose their occasional problems are very difficult to come by. In other words, the money was anything but wisely spent. Think of the number of people who would have benefited if the money had been spent on education, for example. It reminds one of the interview, which ex Vice Atiku Abubakar granted the BBC on the eve of the 2003 presidential primary of the Peoples Democratic Party where he disclosed that two northern governors had given him a colossal N90m just to contest. Think of the number of cottage hospitals or boreholes this amount could have built six years ago. What do we say about the week-long opulent parties Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State held in different parts of the country to mark his wedding to President Yar'Adua's daughter as his fourth wife?
The present northern political class is just swindling the people. The region must chart a new direction. Our people should listen to the likes of Gov Aliyu who can engage in honest self-examination.
Mohammed, an economist, works in a management consulting firm in Lagos.
Correspondence to 18, Abiola Subair Street, Off Medical road, Ikeja, Lagos.
Governor Aliyu Babangida of Niger State has been doing everything within his power to get fellow 18 state governors in the North and other leaders from the area to change the scandalous poverty levels in our part of the country. It is the right thing to do. Otherwise, the Millennium Development Goals will be a mirage, and the seven-point agenda of President Umaru Yar'Adua. True, poverty is pervasive in the entire country. According to international development agencies, 90million out of of Nigeria's 140 million people live in abject poverty. But desperate poverty is far more pronounced in the North.
Apparently in response to unflattering statistics, from international agencies and the Central bank of Nigeria, Gov Aliyu took the gauntlet to address the acute poverty in the area. He has, among others, conducted a major conference on this issue and sought far-reaching solutions to it within the shortest possible time. However, not all northern leaders are prepared to take the bulls by the horns. This is a colossal tragedy. Most of the culprits are men of the "ancien regime". Let us take two recent examples. In a recent interview with Thisday on Sunday, the deposed Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki, after spiritedly denying abject poverty in the north, contradicted himself by admitting widespread wretchedness in the region, but curiously ascribed it to the CBN Governor. The evidence of the CBN Governor's contribution to the pervasive wretchedness? The 2004 directive that the minimum capital base of every bank be increased from 2billion naira to at least 25billion naira. The erstwhile Sultan, who lives in Kaduna following his dethronement and banishment in 1994, argued that as a result of the policy there is no bank in the country, which can still be called "northern".
The second example is the recent interview in Daily Trust by an erstwhile lecturer in sociology at Ahmadu Bello University, Dr Ibrahim Tahir, who toed the Dasuki line, but was more elegant in use of language. Still, the interview was sheer sophistry, if hocus-pocus. The two prominent northerners set out to play the Don Quixote of the north. They thus ended up doing our people more harm than good. By arguing that a lower bar should be set for our region in development terms, they confirmed the impression in some quarters in the south that the north is a dependency, which must always be assisted to even get by. As someone who lives and works in the south, I am always distressed anytime someone thinks I am a "quota professional". The late General Joseph Garba, Nigeria's Minister of Foreign Affairs who later became the permanent representative to the United Nations, used to say that he felt insulted anytime someone remarked that if not for "quota"
or "federal character" he would not have achieved much in life. The sole reason some people had this impression of him was that he came from the north.
Truth be told, our people do not need either the CBN or international development agencies to acknowledge that we are where we are not supposed to be as far as development is concerned. On Wednesday, January 14, 2009, I was moved to tears while watching the Nigerian Television Authority prime news bulletin at 9pm when it aired a news feature on the growing menace of destitution in Kaduna State. Yet, no state government in the north has any programme to tackle this social blight, or the problems of begging, primitive diseases and mass adult illiteracy which are unfortunately becoming cultural in national perception and reality. The fault is not in our stars, but in our selves, to paraphrase William Shakespeare. For some years this decade, millions of children in the north could not be vaccinated because propaganda was mounted to the effect that the vaccination of children was a ploy by the western world to populate Muslims! The person who
championed this lie is amazingly a medical doctor in the person of Ahmed Datti, president of the Supreme Council for Sharia Affairs in Nigeria. Dr Datti, of course, knew better. The result of the propaganda was many more millions of northern children afflicted by polio, in addition to those who died otherwise preventable deaths. Ironically, while this propaganda was going on, all the educated and privileged northerners I know ensured that their children, wards and relatives were properly vaccinated.
Our people should learn to accept responsibility, instead of blaming outsiders for our unimpressive development. At a conference last year in Kaduna on the collapse of virtually every industry in the north, a development, which CNN featured recently, some participants attributed the tragic failure to the regime of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the very person our political leaders adopted in 1999 and 2003 over and above better materials. The number one reason for the industrial collapse was rightly identified as poor public electricity supply. Much as Obasanjo's government was a nasty piece of work, it is grossly unfair to blame it for all the mess, which the Power Holding Company of Nigeria has become. PHCN, formerly called NEPA, had collapsed long before Obasanjo became a civilian president. No new power generating stations have been built in over 25 years. Nor have basic PHCN facilities been well maintained.
Yet, every NEPA or PHCN Chief Executive in the last 25 years has been a northerner. So has every power minister except the brief period the late Chief Bola Ige, Dr Olusegun Agagu and Liyel Imoke held forte. So wealthy was a former Power and Steel Minister from the north during the Ibrahim Babangida regime that he had 18 state-of-the-art cars in his compound! When the late Dr Bala Usman, a radical historian at ABU, attempted to lead some students of Ahmadu Bello University, including my humble self, to protest against this obscene primitive accumulation, some emirs and other prominent leaders intervened and reminded us that the person "is our illustrious son". And today some northerners are looking for Obasanjo or any other southerner to serve as an escape goat for electricity collapse and the consequent de-industrialisation of the north.
The same royal fathers intervened against our planned protest over the massive sports stadium which the military government of Brigadier General Sani Sami, now an emir Kebbi State, was building in Bauchi State. At a series of lectures in 1984/85, the late Dr Usman pointed out that while Brigadier Sami (he was to retire as a Major General) was building this monstrous stadium in the educationally backward state of Bauchi, his counterpart in Imo State, Brigadier General Ike Nwachukwu, was building a state university. The university was to become at a point the best state university in Nigeria, thus deepening the stature of old Imo State as educationally advanced. Now, come to think of it: what is the regenerative or economic value of the gigantic Bauchi State Stadium?
Northern political rulers spend fortunes on non-regenerative ventures. For instance, as the 2003 general elections approached, the then governor of Kebbi State, Alhaji Adamu Aliero who is now the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, imported from the United States and distributed a number of long-stretch limousines to emirs in the state. To state the obvious, spare parts of these very costly vehicles are not available in Nigeria, just like the expertise and the machines required to diagnose their occasional problems are very difficult to come by. In other words, the money was anything but wisely spent. Think of the number of people who would have benefited if the money had been spent on education, for example. It reminds one of the interview, which ex Vice Atiku Abubakar granted the BBC on the eve of the 2003 presidential primary of the Peoples Democratic Party where he disclosed that two northern governors had given him a colossal N90m just to contest. Think of the number of cottage hospitals or boreholes this amount could have built six years ago. What do we say about the week-long opulent parties Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State held in different parts of the country to mark his wedding to President Yar'Adua's daughter as his fourth wife?
The present northern political class is just swindling the people. The region must chart a new direction. Our people should listen to the likes of Gov Aliyu who can engage in honest self-examination.
Mohammed, an economist, works in a management consulting firm in Lagos.
Correspondence to 18, Abiola Subair Street, Off Medical road, Ikeja, Lagos.
Comments
when you have a small group of elite class in the midst of largely uneducated people, that's what is bound to happen. the literacy rate in the north is just heartbreaking too!