The Northern elites must know they and others in the nation are sitting on a keg of gunpowder.
The North is the part of the country that must be placated all the time. The North of Nigeria is part of the country that must be assuaged. The North is part of the nation that must remain untouchable. The North is the part of the country whose elites though now well-travelled see beautiful things of the world they visit but refuse to see. The North is the part of the country that must be spoon-fed. The North sits on huge mineral resources but will rather depend on the south of the country for its upkeep. The North prefers not to educate majority of its children. It prefers to retain a kind of Islam that is not according to the teaching of the Prophet of Islam. The North goes on procreating without the slightest thought for the welfare of the offsprings. When anybody, especially people of south of Nigeria attempt to sensitize the elites of the country to these issues, the best of the North who are well-educated attack with ferocity accusing people who do of “North bashing.” Is it not funny that this accusation of “North bashing” has been on since the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914 and it is on till the very present day. When will the North stop to deceive itself and think it can eat its cake and still have it. Now the North of Nigeria is home to all kinds of criminalities ranging from terrorism, banditry to kidnapping as well as poverty and the highest number of out-of-school children. The North wants everything for itself and it is not prepared to give anything in return. It must be the North’s way or nothing at all.
No nation runs like that, no society can make progress when one component decides everything must be according to its ways. Society makes progress by give and take. The population of Nigeria is no longer tolerable and useful. It has been estimated that by 2050 the population census in Nigeria cannot be less than 400 million, twice what it is now. If there is anything the current administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu has revealed, it is that Nigeria cannot continue the way it has always run. The problem is not squarely that of Bola Tinubu but he is the one who said he needed power and that nobody should pity him. But he is certainly confused. It doesn’t seem that he came prepared. The nation is now run on trial-and-error. No nation succeeds that way.
One of the revelations of the Tinubu administration is that Nigeria’s population is out of control. Tinubu will not own up to that because he will not want to confront the section of the nation that is responsible for it. The south because of its advancement in education has of necessity reduced its population. No educated woman wants to spend all her life bearing children and ditto for educated men. In the South, therefore there has been shift in demography, more education less number of children. But in the North it gets worse and worse everyday. It is worse now more than it was in 1960. Even the educated ones in the North feel nothing bad about marrying many wives and bearing scores of children. A retired central banker from the North told a friend of mine that his aspiration is to have a village of children. He had four wives when he said that and he’s retired which means he is in twilight of his years.
Why do the educated ones find it so easy to acquire many wives as they want? The reason I think is that women in the North are not encouraged to get education. So, easily the few educated ones oppress these women because they can’t stand up to them. Since they don’t go to school, these women start bearing children very early and spend all their years having childen. One former governor of a very poor state in the North, the state that takes the last position in all development indices in the country once said if doctors had not asked his wife to stop bearing children he would have continued to impregnate her. By the time he said that this ex-governor and former senator of the Federal Republic already had twenty-six children and four wives. Yet he is a graduate of economics and well-travelled. Another member of the House of Representatives took his four wives and 28 children to the house for a display telling members of the house that his large number of children and wives show that he was “very active at night.”
The Northern elites must know they and others in the nation are sitting on a keg of gunpowder. The recent wage demand by the Nigeria Labour Congress has revealed a very terrible situation the nation has found itself. It is unlikely that the issue will be resolved easily. The Tinubu government is proposing a minimum wage of 62,000 naira to labour while the state governors are saying they can’t pay more than 60,000 naira. Even states in the North are saying they can’t pay more than 30,000 naira. The state governors are saying if they have to pay the 62,000 naira they will have to use all their allocations from the federation account on salaries alone. What does this show? The North is still very poor, not because they must be poor but because the most important resource any nation can have which is human resource are just many but undeveloped. What is the use of a population that is not educated. We boast of our population, we say it confers advantage on us, we say it invites foreign investors to our land. But what is the advantage of a huge population that has no money to buy anything. It is a backward population that can’t offer anything.
If the educated ones in the North are not tamed, we can imagine the problem among the poor. It is a common discussion on social media of a southerner who went on NYSC to the North and offered his students a free after-school lesson to prepare them for the SSCE exam. The students asked him how much he would pay them for attending that lesson. He was surprised that he had to pay them to attend a lesson designed to give them extra-hours of learning and without cost. They told him he had to pay them because those hours were hours they use on their farm. This youth corper found out later that most of the boys were already married. In another social media conversation, a youth corper saw a student who was supposed to be in an examination hall strolling in hours after the exam had commenced. He was alarmed but he saw that others teachers were not. Then he asked and was told the student was coming from the hospital where he had taken his pregnant wife for delivery. He was surprised because the student who was still in secondary school already had a wife and bearing children. If education has the advantage of delaying marriage and procreation, that excludes the North, they go to school and bear children along. These are the children who become almajiris, the children who become bandits, children who are recruited into boko-haram and who shout to the world that education is sin. And their fathers are those that pay little attention to education. No wonder they record poor performance in public examinations.
My very deep Muslim friend, a southerner from Ibadan where ninety percent of the population is Muslim told me that Islam does not condemn learning, that it indeed encourage Muslims to pursue learning wherever they can find it. But the Muslims in the North, I don’t know the Qu’ran they read, whether it is different from that which every other Muslim read are different in their beliefs. The ordinary northerner has such an unexplainable disdain for education. Its amazing they are not encouraged when they see the few of their elites who are educated in good positions and using the good things of this life. I think they have been so hoodwinked to believe they must be poor for ever, that it is the will of Allah for them to be poor, that Allah makes some poor and others rich. Muslims in the south deny this but those of the North uphold it and so we don’t know who is right and who is wrong.
If the Tinubu government and the state governors cannot resolve the salary issue, then tough times await the nation. Even if labour is bribed to accept the 62,000 naira minimum wage and the state governments are cajoled to reduce their kleptocracy so as to accomodate the new minimum wage, it is still uncertain that the money will tame the galloping food inflation rate created by the subsidy removal, the floating of the naira and the rampaging cowherders who have driven farmers away form their farms. Nigeria cannot feed all the mouths she produces. Because of huge population in the North and the unavailability of jobs there, the excess number is migrating to the southwest. It is estimated that the southwest region will be home to 50 percent of the nation’s population in 2050, most of them not her own.
That’s a very big problem. The additional population because of migration can lead to ethnic tension as those who migrate have no homes to live in and jobs to do. The devil finds work for idle hands. They become thieves and armed robbers and their hosts can do worse things to protect themselves. How are we going to solve the salary problem and the population problem. The salary problem arose because the civil service has been seen for a long time as a place to give employment to people who are leaving school. The reason Sir Ahmadu Bello did not give permanent positions to southerners in the employ of the North in his time as the premier of the Northern Region was, as he said, “where do we put all the products of our schools that we set up.” Both the federal and state’s civil service are over filled. All our money go to pay civil servants who don’t do much. To solve this problem we must collapse the 36 states into six big regions according to the zones we have now. With that, the nation will spend less on civil servants and will swear to itself never again to see the civil service as a place just to provide employment. Merit and availability of places must henceforth be the yardstick for employment in the services. What do we do to the excess civil servants who will be offloaded? We must train them in commercial and mechanized agriculture and assist them with soft loans so that they produce food for the nation. We must also take the herders off the streets and farms and put them in ranches in places where they are accepted, that is, in the North. We must let the ranches be individually owned. The owners will also be assisted with soft loans. There must be political will to do this. It is doubtful that a government like Tinubu’s which just placated Muslims with 90 billion naira Hajj subsidy can do this. Tinubu I think does not like to offend the North.
Surprisingly, some Muslim preachers have been crying out loud that the kind of hypocritical Hajj people go in Nigeria is not the type that the Prophet preached, they say only after a person is wellfed and had taken good care of his family should he go on pilgrimage. They say the money used for pilgrimage should be spent on improving the economy so that people will have jobs and businesses. But would Bola Tinubu do this? It doesn’t appear he would, but the consequences may be unbearable.
First Published in METRO
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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master’s degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.
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