This North, ‘Sef’

By Tunji Adegboyega

But for the fact that I don’t give awards to people, I would have decorated Governor Abdullahi Sule of Nasarawa State and his Niger State counterpart, Umar Bago, with garlands, over their words and deeds at the tail end of last month.

Most northern leaders have been behaving as if they expect other Nigerians to carry their (North’s) load on their heads while holding theirs (other Nigerians) in the hand. That has been the dominant mentality in the north, but it is unsustainable. It is like the ‘ranka dede’ system upon which the north has been based. It is because it could not have lasted forever that we have banditry and terrorism almost all over the north today.

I remember several years ago when I was at ‘The Punch’, we were always saying that this feudal system would blow over our faces someday. How can some people think that a system whereby some people would be eating sumptuous meals in mansions with all modern gadgets while others stay locked outside the gate doing ‘ranka dede’ and waiting for the crumbs from the tables of the super rich, would last forever? How? When they are not blind. They see all the affluence in the midst of poverty. Certainly, a time would come when those people would start asking questions as to whether some people have two heads for things to be so skewed against the poor and vulnerable.

That future is here.

There is no part of the country without its peculiar kinds of bad boys and girls. We have ‘area boys’ in Lagos and other parts of the south west; their variants exist in the South East and South south in varying degrees, with some masquerading as freedom fighters. We have castle rustlers, bandits, terrorists in the north. Of course we have other kinds of criminals including cultists, kidnappers, ritual killers, Yahoo Yahoo boys and girls, Yahoo Plus, armed robbers, pick pockets, etc. all over. But nothing near the kind of evil going on in the north.

Nigeria has 18.3 million out-of-school (OOS) children. At 15 per cent, it is the highest in the world. Of the current 18.3 million, the north takes a chunk of over 15 million.

The religious/cultural factor is the worst of the factors that have sustained the problematic ‘ancien regime’ that has been used to exploit the average northerner. People who are not profitably engaged would always find alternative jobs from the devil.

And, as if what is already on ground is not bad enough, we now have terrorism becoming a booming enterprise. Just at a time we were feeling that Boko Haram was dying, another terror group that calls itself Lakurawa or Lukarawa sprang up. So, we have terrorism mutating. At Nigerians’ expense. Yet, they did not cause the problem that led to this huge numbers of OOS children that have now become thorns in the flesh of everybody. The northern elite has been encouraging the ‘talakawa’ to go into the fattening rooms to produce babies without a thought for how their needs, including their education, would be met.

Meanwhile, the north collects huge sums from the national purse ostensibly to take care of its huge population but the political elite and, to some extent, their religious counterparts, pocketed substantial parts of this money which they spend on the education of their own children in choice schools abroad. Meanwhile, they encourage the children of the ‘talakawa’ to go to ill-equipped Quranic schools where equally ill-motivated instructors teach them God knows what, after which they go to the streets to beg for alms. For want of any meaningful job or vocation, they end up as terrorists.

Imagine the trillions that we have had to cough up to fight terrorism in the north alone! This is good money that would have gone a long way to better our educational system, improve healthcare, construct and maintain roads, increase power supply as well as provide other social amenities.

But what, specifically have governors Bago and Sule said or done differently to catch my attention? Good question.

I have always said that there is no part of the country that is not blessed. When we say the north is educationally disadvantaged, I do ‘t know when that and the unjust privileges that go with it would end. The north has been perpetually disadvantaged since I was a child. It is still so now that I am getting old. What’s ‘gwan’? We always give this impression of a dry and barren North. It is not true. The northern leaders either want to continue to exploit the rest of the country or they simply refused to put on their thinking caps when they make such statements because free money is available for all to spend.

Not long ago, Governor Bago said when he took over last year: “The State IGR was hovering between N500 million and N700 million but, right now, we are hitting almost N10 billion.”

Of course, the next question is “where did you get that from”? His answer: “Just by blocking the loopholes. We have migrated a lot of collection system, reporting system. And, there is transparency in our application. We have seen loopholes; even people who generate and consume, now; don’t generate and consume. They report through the system. It is just responsible governance that we have brought into practice. Secondly, with the agriculture initiatives, we are making money.”

I read Bago’s interview in a national daily and I must confess he mesmerised me. I don’t know him from Adam but I can tell you the sky is the limit for his political career if he can walk his talk in that interview, at least, substantially. He is a man of ideas. He has clarity of expression and he seems sufficiently informed about where he wants his state to be in a few years of his tenure.

Then Sule who is also the chair of North Central Governors Forum. Hear him: “Just like it is a sin to continue to marry wives you cannot take care of; it is also a sin to continue producing children that you cannot take care of.”

Sule continues: “Why is it that it is only here? I just got back from Saudi Arabia. I didn’t see many almajiri in Makkah, Madina, Jedda, or anywhere else. They are an Islamic nation. Yes. You mentioned that in Pakistan, they have out-of-school children, but their situation is entirely different. Why should Northern Nigeria continue to hold the entire nation at ransom when we know that it is our problem and we have to go out there and find a way to solve it?

Many of the northern elites and remnants of the oligarchy there would not be happy about these frank statements from the two governors. But their positions are the future that we are going. If the oligarchy is sad; I can understand. Nobody is happy to lose freebies. But the kind of honeymoon they have been having with public funds must come to an end someday. The owners of the money must be allowed to partake reasonably from the common wealth.

Yoruba people have a proverb that a child that is not trained (educated) will end up selling the house that those who were trained built (omo ta o ko lo ma gbe ile ti a ko ta).

Many northern leaders have abandoned their towns because of the problems now being caused by those children they played yo-yo with the money they should have spent to educate them. Those children have permanently ensured that those who refused to train them too cannot rest or sleep with their two eyes closed. So, it is now a situation of the bird that perches on a tree; neither the bird nor the tree can rest.

On a rather sarcastic note, these politicians who can no longer go to their towns come down south, particularly Lagos to add to the infrastructural pull and catch fun. Yet, when it is time to talk about raising what comes to Lagos from the Federation Account, they shoot it down.

But that is by the way.

I agree with northern leaders who always brag that the north can stand on its own. They are very correct. As a matter of fact, that is what Gov. Bago has proved with the miracle of his IGR. The only difference between Bago and those braggarts is that while they believe the north can stand alone, they are very quick to see every move to make them demonstrate that as an attempt to take crutches away from them.

That is why I am disagreeing with Gov. Zulum when he said that he won’t be able to pay salaries if President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s tax reform bills scale through in the National Assembly. For me, this is not good enough. The whole essence of the reform is, first, to obey the first cardinal rule of taxation which is to return a chunk of the tax revenue to where it is generated. To bring in more people into the tax net as well as check multiple taxation, among others.

Zulum, I must confess, is one of the governors I admire. I love the passionate ways he has been handling the various challenges besetting his state. His passion for education as exemplified in his construction works, especially school buildings that he is modernising, etc. A long time ago, I dedicated this column to him, in acknowledgement of his good works.

I could not but marvel when he waded through knee-deep floods that swept through the state capital in September. Many of his colleagues would simply stay at what they consider a safe distance and point at any object of interest.

I know the Zamfara State governor has a peculiar challenge given the havoc wreaked in the state by Boko Haram and other bandits and terrorists. But if the governor looks well to the ground, he would always find a redeeming feature that could translate to money for the state.

It is high time northern state governments began to do more of looking inward rather than relying on money from the Niger Delta. This is not about Zulum alone. It was the same mentality that made some south west governors to refer to their states as ‘civil servants,’ states, whatever that means.

Just as babies are bundles of joy, human resource is about the most-priced of all resources. It is the one that gives them meaning, galvanise them and put them to productive use. The North has a surfeit of it. It should flaunt it. If it cannot do that in its raw form as it were now, it should work towards making it productive rather than keep asking other parts of the country to wait for it.

Culled from The Nation