It is often said that institutions reflect the values and visions of those who design and manage them. If that’s true, and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests it is, then the Northwest Development Commission (NWDC) is already a tragic case study in failure by design. Its inaugural flagship program, the awarding of foreign scholarships to undergraduate and postgraduate students, is not just misaligned with the region’s most pressing needs, it is a symptom of deeper dysfunctions rooted in elite disinterest, political patronage, and a failure to build credible developmental coalitions.
Karounwi Adinni, in a searing Facebook post, offered a pointed comparison between the trajectories of the NWDC and the South West Development Commission (SWDC), and the contrast is as damning as it is instructive. While the NWDC flirts with education-based optics devoid of context or leverage, the SWDC, even if still aspirational in parts, is articulating a coherent regional growth strategy based on interlinked infrastructure, industrial productivity, and economic competitiveness.
The NWDC appears trapped in a performative mode of development, where intervention means doing “something” visible rather than solving problems. The decision to focus on scholarships, a high-visibility, low-impact intervention, mirrors the incentive structures of political patronage systems, not development institutions. It reeks of transactionalism: funds exist, and they must be dispensed quickly and with just enough flash to quiet critics, at least temporarily.
What makes this even more frustrating is that the Northwest is not lacking in developmental needs, nor is it short of institutional entry points. From out-of-school children, to agrarian stagnation, to collapsing microenterprises, to grid-deficient industrial clusters, the region presents clear sites for focused, impactful interventions. These are not hidden problems. They are staring us in the face. But rather than build responsive programs grounded in the socioeconomic realities of the region, the Commission has chosen an elite-centric pathway that will do very little to expand opportunity or resilience for the average citizen.
This is precisely the kind of developmental dysfunction Dr Zainab Usman has warned about: an absence of economic diversification strategy anchored in inclusive governance. For regions like the Northwest, where political institutions are weak and state capacity is thin, development agencies like the NWDC should function as hybrid actors, brokers that align interests, crowd in private and public capital, and deliver public goods with strategic clarity. But that requires more than budgets and titles. It requires a credible elite consensus around development as a long-term national interest.
Sadly, that consensus appears completely absent in the Northwest today.
The South West, by contrast, is working, slowly but deliberately, toward such a consensus. The SWDC’s policy signals, even if still largely declarative, show a level of spatial and economic thinking sorely lacking in its northern counterpart. Rail infrastructure to link the Lagos-Ogun-Oyo corridor is not just a transport project, it’s a structural labourmarket intervention. It’s a regional mobility strategy. It’s a mechanism to integrate industrial, residential, and logistical nodes in a way that expands productivity.
When Ogun surpasses Lagos as the manufacturing hub, and when Ondo and Osun revive plans for ports and agro-processing zones, they are not performing development. They are engineering structural transformation. And this is not because they have more money. It’s because they have clearer priorities, more coherent institutions, and elites who understand that developmental rents can be captured through long-term investment in systems, not just through political contracts or symbolic programs.
The political economy of regional inequality in Nigeria will continue to widen unless regions take responsibility for their trajectories. That is not to absolve the federal government or to deny the structural constraints imposed by the center. But as political settlement theory teaches us, development outcomes are shaped not just by resources or blueprints, but by the distribution of power and the willingness of elites to bargain toward long-term, institutionalized outcomes.
What is happening in the Northwest is a dereliction of that duty.
The elite consensus, if it can even be called that, is shallow, fragmented, and oriented around short-term spoils rather than long-term transformation. The appointment of political stooges to manage the NWDC is perhaps the clearest indicator of this malaise. When development agencies are staffed like campaign offices, failure is not just likely, it is guaranteed.
The region’s development thinkers, technocrats, and reformers, many of whom have offered their expertise pro bono over the years, have been systematically sidelined in favour of those whose only qualification is political loyalty. As a result, the Commission has neither the vision nor the capacity to undertake the kind of structural interventions required to reverse the region’s decline.
Compare this with what is being conceptualized in the Southwest: legal amendments to the NRC Act to allow for private-sector-led rail development; port projects that will integrate the region into regional and global value chains; energy diversification via off-grid solutions to power industrial clusters. These are the hallmarks of developmental thinking rooted in institutional experimentation and coalition-building.
They understand that structural transformation requires infrastructure, connectivity, markets, and people. And while these projects are not without challenges, corruption, coordination failures, and financing gaps, they are directionally correct. They reflect a mindset that takes development seriously.
Back in the Northwest, we have development being treated as a budget line to be allocated, not as a system to be built. The NWDC, if not careful, may miss the rare opportunity to define a new path, to reset regional priorities, and to catalyseinnovation in governance and service delivery. It should be thinking of how to partner with state governor to tackle insecurity through integrated rural development programs. It should be thinking of collaborating with UBEC and states to design a Marshall Plan for Almajiri education. It should also be thinking of partnering with Kaduna and Kano states to solve power supply issues in their respective industrial zones. Furthermore, the NWDC should be thinking of how to catalyze a regional value chain for dairy, grains, and textiles.
Instead, we got scholarships. To study abroad. In a region where millions of children cannot read or write.
This is not just strategic myopia. It is institutional negligence.
And as Karounwi Adinni aptly observed, when the Southwest begins to pull further ahead, as it inevitably will, it won’t be because there is a conspiracy against the North. It will be because its leaders made choices, difficult, strategic, and sometimes unpopular, rooted in a long-term vision of shared growth. If the Northwest continues to romanticize victimhood while trivializing governance, the developmental gap will widen further. And no number of rhetorical gymnastics or scapegoating will reverse it.
Development is not a technical problem. It is a political one. And unless the Northwest builds an elite consensus that prioritizes real, inclusive development, its future will continue to be outsourced to Abuja and to goodwill that never arrives.
There is still time. But not much.
The NWDC must be reimagined, its leadership professionalized, its programs reoriented, and its legitimacy rebuilt. If that doesn’t happen, we can expect more scholarships, more headlines, and more despair.
Because in the end, development only works when people in power want it to.
