As a northerner, I sometimes feel piqued when I read articles and statements from writers and personalities from the southern part of the country on the many faceted challenges facing the northern part of the country. I cringe from the generalisations, the factual inaccuracies, the ignorance and the subjective inferences contained in those unfair characterisations and prejudices which are conveyed with an undisguised tinge of contemptuous sadomasochistic serves-you-right disposition. I have longed understood and viewed such opinions from southern writers and personalities as a kind of comfort zone for their abiding claim to superiority over northerners.
I have observed that these feelings have become so deeply ingrained that attempts to correct some of these subjective assumptions with empirical facts and figures yield little or no positive results in understanding. Indeed in some cases one is met with hostility that it becomes necessary to allow things to go on due to the futility of trying to change what is for all practical purposes a DNA thing among southerners not to expect fairness, objectivity and illuminating conversations on issues pertaining to the north.
No matter how hard one tries to present facts and figures, one cannot hope to correct the perception of southerners that the north collectively is a parasite, backward and unprogressive to the quest for development in Nigeria.
Recently there have been debates across the country on this subject matter sparked by articles written by columnists and writers on the unending insecurity in the north and related matters.
I expected the writers to bring to the narrative on such a sensitive topic, the sort of objectivity and rigour that will positively contribute towards the discourse on the challenges facing Nigeria. But writers could not resist the urge to go down the much travelled path of northern profiling on a matter that affects us all and to which we should all help to find constructive solutions to.
Yet removing the unhelpful subjective narratives of insecurity in the north and matters associated with it, I must admit that in context, the north bears the responsibility for the opprobrium being directed at it.
The figures and optics of current socio-economic developments in the north bears clear testimony to this.
Of the 140 million Nigerians identified as living below poverty level, it is incontestable that over half of this damning statistic resides in the Northern part of the country. Similarly the United Nation’s alarming report on the growing incidence of hunger in the Nigeria points inevitably to the North as the part of the country where this is most prevalent.
If figures and reports appear unpalatable and can be contested, the living and lived-in conditions of millions of people in the northern part of the country clearly attests to this. A visit to any part of the North, urban and rural, will vividly illustrate this. There in the streets one is confronted with a litany of deprivation, desperation and destitution chorused in a cacophony of beggary want. In Northern cities one will likely find whole generations of families who have resigned to begging as a means of livelihood in the streets. In the northern rural areas too many communities live in a Hobbessian state of nature, very often nasty, brutish and short.
If the elites of the north are aware of this abysmal state of affairs in the region they have not shown sufficient commitment towards ameliorating it comprehensively.
And this is not for lack of resources. It is more of a lack of will.
For the past decades every month trillions of naira flows to the 19 states of northern Nigeria from the federation account alone. This is excluding various sources of incomes running into yet other trillions of money in form of internally generated revenue and development aid and grants for various intervention programmes from international development and donor agencies.
With all these pool of resources and assistance the North ought to have long ago embarked on a massive Marshall Plan like development or poverty reduction programme like the Chinese have done lifting millions out of poverty in two generations.
Why then has this not happened?
It is a lack of political will pure and simple. The North exists in a cultural construct of fatalism and exclusion in which the elite and religious clerics conspire to define life as a consequence of the divine order of things. This ecosystem justifies the social construct of the unquestioned dominance of rulers and elite over spiritual and temporal matters of life. And for over a century even with the coming of colonialism and its life changing social evolution, the north has remained largely atomised and excluded from the massive social changes that had transformed and thus conferred immense socio-economic and political advantages to other parts of the country in the scheme of things.
The insecurity that has unfortunately become the signature definition of the northern part of the country now was incubated in this construct. It is the consequential development from the deliberate failure to pro-actively come to think out of this box and to allow even a gradual calibration of this self-defeating construct that has landed the North where it finds itself today.
The situation does not call for lamentation and grandstanding as northern elites have been doing. It also does not call for taking offense even when southern writers address the issue of northern Nigeria in dirisive terms as they often do which causes pains to northerners. It certainly does not require northerners to be unnecessarily defensive, self-pitying and seeking to throw blames all over the place at everybody but themselves.
No. Northerners need to look into the mirror critically, do a deep introspection and resolve to begin to walk on the path we deliberately ignored and neglected, in order to construct the North that we all and Nigerians will be proud of.
NOTE: Views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Theliberationnews
