By Suyi Ayodele

When last week, Professor Ango Abdullahi threatened that “the North is watching”, what did he mean? You must love the professor of agronomy for his unambiguity. He is not the type that leaves his audience wondering. He concluded his lamentation with a call for action.

The North, he reasoned, must demand accountability and be united against the ‘injustice’ meted out to the region. Hear him: “We must be proactive. We will be asking questions. And this time, we expect answers. If we do not speak up and insist on fairness, the marginalisation will continue, and our children will inherit a more broken and divided nation.”

The government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is just 26 months old. But the North lays all the problems bedevilling the region at the helmsman’s feet. Leaders of that region said that Tinubu and his government should be blamed for the entire woes that have been the lot of the North. They said so with a sickening entitlement mentality and the finality of a Presiding Bishop. That is a big shame!

They were also magisterial in a manner that depicts a no-nonsense-cane-wielding class teacher. The North, their leaders submitted, would, through its mouthpiece, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), write to President Tinubu to demand explanations on “some developments” in his government.

The region’s elders were not joking. Tinubu, must, for instance, explain: “Why the sudden relocation of CBN departments (from Abuja to Lagos)? Why the mass retirements (where and when)? And why were 15 new directors recently employed -with only four from Northern Nigeria?”

Those were the words of Professor Ango Abdullahi, NEF Chairman. He spoke last Tuesday at the Government-Citizens Engagement Forum put together by the Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation (SABMF). And President Tinubu had better assemble convincing explanations for “these developments.” Why? The former Vice Chancellor, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, warned: “These are not coincidences. They are decisions with CONSEQUENCES, and the North is watching!”

I do hope Tinubu knows the implication of being watched by Big Brother. If I were Mr. President, I would simply pad my buttocks like we used to do in our primary school days, when we stuffed exercise books into our pants to cushion the effects of the strokes of cane from our teachers. Of course, like Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, those eagle-eyed teachers always found out our naughty games, removed the exercise books and flogged us like the last cow to the herder! Is the President ready for the flogging of his northern masters?

When will the North be asking President Tinubu those ‘pertinent’ questions? When will the region be demanding for “answers?” While we are hazarding a guess, let me summarise the North’s position as enunciated in Kaduna last Tuesday: it is obvious, and very obvious, too, that Nigeria is never one and can never be one! This is the Nigeria of our time. Those who midwifed the contraption called Nigeria must be turning in their graves reading what the northern elite are saying concerning the backwardness of the region.

I am not Steve Cavanagh, the author of The Devil’s Advocate. I equally don’t want to play the devil’s advocate here. Tinubu has enough men and women, his night soil men, to carry his can of smelly chamber pots for him. My mission here is to ask us to examine the North and its claim of ‘marginalisation’, ‘injustice’; ‘unfairness’; ‘insecurity’ and ‘education backwardness’ in relation to out-of-school children and determine who is to be blamed.

There is a Yoruba saying that has a deep meaning. One cannot put the coral beads on the waist of another child whereas one’s child has a rotund waist, the saying goes. It is a Yoruba call for solidarity. The surface implicature is that one should rally round one of his own.

In the deeper sense, it means no matter how bad one’s child is, his conduct must be accommodated in the true sense of solidarity. It is saying that such a badly-behaved child should be preferred to another child from outside the family. In essence, ethnic solidarity should take the front burner above common good. Do I subscribe to that philosophy?

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I answer by saying that our tendency to condone everything the political class offers us in the name of tiwa n’ti wa (our own is our own) is the bane of our development as a nation. Our inability to call out our relations eating bad insects is the reason why we have not been able to sleep peacefully because of the intermittent whooping cough from the relations.

What is bad is always bad. A President should not be ‘supported’ based on where he comes from. Our solidarity, our fidelity and devotion methinks, should be to sterling performances and not to the ethnicity of the driver of our collective destiny. We should be more concerned about abundant life for the people rather than the ethnic background of the President.

A North that kept quiet when Muhammadu Buhari drove the vehicle of this nation to the bottomless pit has no right to complain if Tinubu decides to put the vehicle back on the reverse gear with his Stone Age economic policies. Likewise, Tinubu’s brothers and sisters will be eternally wrong to clap and cheer when the man who promised hope is delivering hopelessness!

No nation moves forward that way. No meaningful development can take place in a nation populated by the máa jó lo mo ńwo èyìn e (keep dancing, I am watching your back) orchestra even when the percussion churns out discordant tunes! Nigeria can only become a success the day we individually and collectively agree that once one’s child comes with a twisted waist, the coral beads should be tied round the waist of a child with a well-formed waist irrespective of who sired her!

This is why I love the balance in the Yoruba worldview. The elders of the land who say one cannot put the coral beads on the waist of another child whereas one’s child has a rotund waist, also caution that it is only when one’s masquerade dances very well at the arena that the one holding the cincture will be proud and happy (bí eégún eni bá jóo’re, orí á yá atókùn). Only a child that is doing very well deserves the support of the clan.

The average Nigerians are not necessarily tribal jingoists. No! The elite, for their selfish reasons, are the ones fanning the embers of disunity. It pays them to see the masses divided alongside ethnic interests. An average Nigerian, the common man on the street, craves for results, successes and any good policy that can put food on his table. Nothing more.

Give the presidency to Ibrahim Momoh, the vice presidency to Musa Adamu; the senate presidency to Jalingo Tundunwada and the speakership of the House of Representatives to Chiroma Abdumalik. Then make life more abundant. Guarantee security, build roads and supply uninterrupted power for 24 straight hours every day of the week, common Nigerians on the streets will go about their normal businesses and celebrate the good things of life they have in abundance. The problem of ethnicity, marginalisation’, ‘imbalance’ and what have you are creations of the rapacious elite!

It happened recently when our Super Falcons won the 10th WAFCON trophy for us. Check the team, check the composition. Nobody complained about any imbalance or marginalisation. Nobody talked about Federal Character, our euphemism for sacrificing merit for mediocrity. Nigerians were all united, cheering the girls to victory.

We hugged one another, we backslapped one another, and we celebrated when the girls won. When they were two goals down at half time, we all prayed for their victory. When eventually they won, we forgot that Imo state alone had six of its girls playing for us! That is what success is all about; that is what achievements bring. Our unity as a nation is more defined in the beautiful performances of our leaders.

If a loaf of bread goes back to N250 today; if a litre of petrol sells for N120; If Nigerians can travel from Lagos to Maiduguri on the highways without any fear of kidnappers or bandits; if farmers can plant and harvest their produce in peace, I take a bet, Adamu Abubakar in Maiduguri will celebrate Tinubu; Okechukwu Okafor in Ikeduru will forget about the nsogbu-nsogbu drumbeat of war in the South-East and Jumoke Abodunde in Emure Ekiti will tie her wrapper and dance to celebrate the president’s achievements. The masses of the North, and the peasants of the South are united by one denominator: abject poverty. And they also have one common enemy: the elite, the political power holders who have become the proverbial locusts eating the vegetation of the nation.

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So, whether the elite gather in Kaduna, congregate in Ibadan, assemble in the Coal City of Enugu, or foregather in the swamps of the Niger Delta to lament our present parlous state, they are not doing so for any altruistic reason. The masses should know that the communiques issued on regional marginalisation, infrastructural decays and the alarming numbers of out-of-school children in those gatherings are not because the elite love the masses.

The recent cries of marginalisation and what have you is because another set of locusts are in power today. It is all about self-serving interests and nothing more. Those who milked the nation dry during the administration of Olusegun Obasanjo never complained. They became the champions of the masses only when Musa Yar’Adua started changing the political landscape to their disfavour. And as soon as Goodluck Ebele Jonathan took over and started patronising them, they simply dissolved into the government choir group.

When Buhari came and made the North his only constituency and another part of the country a mere “dot” on the nation’s map, the today’s agitators, talking about marginalisation, were deaf and dumb. They only got their voices because Tinubu has decided to be the third generation of greed, who, our elders say, must be a burglar, by not just making his South-West his catchment area but positioning his Bourdillon boys in choice places. It is a vicious cycle that will take a long time to break!

When Professor Ango Abdullahi said that 80 percent of Nigeria’s out-of-school children are from the North, did he not know when the rain started to beat the North education-wise? The elder statesman schooled in Ibadan from 1961 to 1964. Did he not see the wonders that Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s free and compulsory primary education of 1955 did then? When in 1979, the same Awolowo upped the ante and extended the free education policy to secondary school level and adopted that as one of the four-cardinal policies of his Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), what was Ango’s counsel to the North-dominated National Party of Nigeria (NPN)?

How do you strike a balance between a region which started free education in 1955 and the one which in 2025, would have its daughters married off in their cradles while the leaders who are expected to champion the development of the region hide under the cloak of religion to approve such perfidy? Why would the North not have the largest number of out-of-school, and in most cases, never-in-school children when its elite see children roaming the streets begging for alms, as “normal and our way of life?”

What were Professor Abdullahi and his twin brother, Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu, the Chairman, Board of Trustees of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), saying when they complained of the North being marginalised? How do you marginalise a region that has occupied the nation’s number one seat for a period of 47 years out of our 65 years of independence, leaving Tinubu’s South with a miserable 18 years? Or they think we all should buy their waggish, ill-conceived and duplicitous calculation of the Nigerian nationhood from 1999?

Did Nigeria start today? How could the professor and his main ACF man have forgotten that Nigerians started voting for their leaders since 1957 at the centre when the late Tafawa Balewa became the Prime Minister? Who will teach Professor Ango Abdullahi and Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu basic political history of Nigeria outside their non-adding-up narratives?

We can blame President Tinubu for the poor performance of his government in the last two years. But it would amount to a sin against heaven and earth to blame him for the backwardness of the North. No! It is callous, pure bitterness and completely insane, to lay the blame of the insecurity, the growing number of out-of-school or never-in-school children of the North and the poor infrastructure of the region on the man who came to power just 26 months ago.

The rain beating the North now did not start in the last two decades. And as long as the Ango and Dalhatu of the North think that emotional blackmail is their weapon to whip up sentiments in the North, it will not just continue to rain over there, it will pour, torrentially! Enough of this entitlement mentality, enough of this boast of “the North is watching”. The South is not blind too. If we can’t watch down South, we can use binoculars!

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If 2027 is the reason why the NEF thinks that it can issue streetwise JAMB questions to Tinubu, I can only pity the President who has failed to live up to the expectations of the people who voted him to power. Let Ango Abdullahi and Bashir Dalhatu take a bus ride from Kaduna to Ekiti, let them travel from Lagos to Ibadan, from Port Harcourt to Yenagoa and from Akwa to Enugu, they will discover that no road exists anywhere.

If they are bothered that Tinubu is not doing anything about the banditry and the insurgency of the region, sad occurrences created by the same North, they should know that down South here, our wives are raped in the presence of their husbands and that our daughters are defiled while their parents remain helpless!

The North should know that we are being kidnapped at the rate of three for two and half kobo (méta tóró)! And guess what? The ones tormenting us, I mean more than 80 percent of the perpetrators of these heinous crimes down South, are the same untrained children of the North unleashed on us by the failed leadership of the region!

Agreed that in 26 months, the Tinubu administration has not demonstrated enough aptitude for the job he spent his entire adult life pursuing. It is also a fact that President Tinubu has not been able to show that he understands the basic nuances of governance at the federal level. That, however, is not an avenue to blame the President and his administration, directionless as it is, for problems that have been with the North right from the very foundation of the region. That is pure injustice to the lethargic outings of the administration!

When a memorial event is organised, it is to dwell on the achievements of the person being honoured. Sir Ahmadu Bello, no doubt, did his best for the North. One cannot query him for projecting the wellbeing of his people the way he did. It is therefore a huge disservice to his memory if those he bequeathed such lofty ideas and ideals, turned out to be prodigals in power and wasters of enviable legacies, who today turn around to look for excuses and sacrificial lamb! That is exactly what the last Tuesday Kaduna gathering did to the colourful memories of Ahmadu Bello!

Rather than look for scapegoats for its self-inflicted problems, the North, I think, particularly, its elite class, should do a retrospection, and take the wisdom of the saying of our elders who posit that what is destroying Ado lies in the hands of the princes of Ewi (Omo Ewi), the king of Ado Ekiti (Ohun tó ba Adó jé wà l’ówó Omo Èwí). If the North must develop, its leaders must first release the region from the shackles of poverty with which they have held their people bound to violence!