by Haroun Harry Audu
In the aftermath of the calamitous and disastrously mangled #endbadgovernance protests which in early August 2024 consumed some towns and cities in Northern Nigeria, I was exposed to discussions online about the fate that may have befallen the region as a consequence. One of them in particular (Hunger Protest, Violence and the Russian Flag: Unfolding Events in Northern Nigeria, issued by my brother and friend, Hussaini Abdu, PhD.) offered a distillation of some of the core drivers of this unfortunate turn of events in especially Northern Nigeria.
Now that the dust has settled(?), I am inclined to hasten to restate the same points, albeit from another, more personal angle: Without minimizing the plethora of factors offered to explain and perhaps as a cure to aspects of the problems, it is my contention that as political, economic and civil society elites of northern extraction, we (yes, many of us) have for too long pretended, ignored, overlooked or simply downplayed and/or failed to collaboratively confront and proactively stem in creative ways, the slowly germinating seeds of youth restlessness and their attendant restiveness, across huge swaths of the region. And this has been the story of the region, going back over 4 decades.
In the late 80s and into the 90s, I was privileged to have spent quite a lot of time in the company of the former (and late) military governor of Northern Nigeria, Ciroman Katsina, Major General Hassan Usman Katsina, of blessed memory. At just about every private and public function that he had opportunity to speak, he would openly and loudly lament the sorry, degenerating state of parental and community leadership, and the gradual failure and erosion of family and societal values in the North. Citizens everywhere would often praise and thank him for his (then rare, near-solitary public) forthrightness about the issues as it were. Thereafter, and again and again, we all returned to our businessesas usual.
The situation continued to be made worse within the north, by an insipid, vapid and outlandish culture of “maula”, gleefully and mindlessly practiced and encouraged by a thieving rentier class of dealers masquerading as leaders in the public, private and faith sectors of the socio-economy. Add to this as well, the inexplicable veneration and promotion by some, of a culture of begging involving hundreds of thousands of minors in just about every capital city and major towns in Northern Nigeria and even outside of it. These are children birthed by parents who clear-eyed, have mindlessly abdicated their responsibility. It should be a badge of shame and dishonour that parents would instead wilfully “export” innocent kids away from home with hardly a compass to sensibly navigate their way through a rough, brutish and harsh terrain, thereby rendering them as canon fodder for only-God-knows-what. Add to these festering maladies within the culture, the general onset of apathy to (and the deliberate, criminal divestments and wanton corruption which have weakened public) vocational and formal education. Amongst several other factors, these have combined to disadvantage a rapidly expanding youth bulge, girls and boys, all over the north. The general collapse of education opportunities and standards all over Nigeria, with the north bearing the most brunt, became the bitter icing on the cake. And this was a region that had by all indicators of progression in modernity, lagged far behind its counterparts in Nigeria, long before independence in 1960.
Today, this generation of youth, those born between 25 to 35 years ago have all grown, and matured in a northseemingly flailing without direction. The lived reality and experiences of these youth have been but a witness toviolent conflict and the rapacious pilfering by their so-called political, social and religious elites of public resources. They have watched with envy – thanks to the ubiquity of social media – the abhorrent lifestyle of such office holders in the region and elsewhere, as exemplified by the opulent economic and social aggrandisement by political and faith leaders, serially on display in their villages, towns and cities. They haveseen and felt the apparent incapacity fuelled by corruption, how a section of men and officers in state law enforcement and security have woefully come up short and/or have abused, misused and compromised their role and gotten stupendously rich in the process. In stark, unmistakable terms, youth in the North of Nigeria are today living in the truest nightmare of a stateapparatus manifestly unable to crucially combat and end banditry and curtail and punish kidnapping as a criminal enterprise. Our matasa have encountered first-hand through nearly 2 and half decades now, a rampaginginsurgency that has wrecked untold havoc upon the foundations and very fabric of the north. Clearly then, we should be unsurprised that young people in Northern Nigeria cannot visualize and locate for themselves a visible trajectory of a thriving future of socioeconomic opportunities, and this goes back from especially 1999 to date.
But – away from the lamentation – I wish to hazard to say that some of the many answers and solutions to this dangerous state of affairs are right before us. I will mention a few presently.
Agriculture in the north is and remains our lowest hanging fruit. Public, private and civil society actors must quickly work together to redirect and deploy the vibrant energy of our youth population to full, sustained participation in this sector. The sad reality to acknowledge is that, within a space of just 8 years, a sitting president of northern extraction wistfully (some would say, absent-mindedly) and inexplicably superintended over the unfortunate “democratization” of insecurity, shamefully and shamelessly all over the region. Under his watch, rampaging insurgents and kidnapping gangs gleefully laid to waste commercial and subsistence farming leading to acute shortages in food provisioning. Farms and farming communities had to contend with endless acts of daily, vicious terror, rendering thousands of arable farmlands to lay waste year upon year. The options before us are as clear as day: we must quickly put heads together, figure out a way to attack this challenge, sensitize and partner with state agencies, and commence the difficult but necessary act of mobilising our young population to return in their numbers, to our first love historically, as a region.
Our villages, towns and cities are increasingly, an environmental sanitation eyesore with dirt and filth and unhygienic practices in overdrive as core living habits. The serial outbreaks in many of our communities of preventable and other serious diseases and ailments, reflect the degenerate health and living conditions of majority of our compatriots in Arewa. Yet again, our teeming youth population can, and should be mobilized, trained and offered incentives in their various locations, to take up massive clean-ups of our neighbourhoods on a weekly basis. We must move to reimagine and put forth concrete and viable action steps in this regard, consciously engage with state, non-state and educational/research institutions, so as to design pathways that will ultimately convert the state of our despondent residential and commercial environments into the sustainable gold mine that they most certainly are. We have the numbers in young boys and girls, who will be constituted as the vanguard for this badly needed turnaround.
Finally (I have several other ideas but let me end it here for now with this point): our northern governors must unashamedly and immediately ask to borrow in part or wholesale, the developmental blueprint of Prof. Babagana Umara Zulum, Governor of Borno State. In a short 4 years of his first term in office, and building on the foundations of his predecessor, he instigated a huge experiment in skills and vocational training for thousands of youths annually. Majority of these youth had on account of the Boko Haram insurgency, lost their chances at formal education, but given another few years now, Borno youth will be blazing the trail in Northern Nigeria with their globally acclaimed entrepreneurial skills sets. We were in Maiduguri, Borno State for a couple of days in late 2022, and based on my first-hand insights of these and other accomplishmentsby the government of Borno in health, education, agriculture, trade and commerce, the time is now for every governor in the north to emulate this example andcommit to skilling not less than 10,000 young people annually in various trades, crafts and entrepreneurship starter packs. The resources are there. It is doable.
We are, without a doubt or any form of pretence, far behind as a region. Let us step up to do something about it. I wish to charge socio-political and cultural platforms in the north, to come together and convene a platform of like-minded Arewa persons. The time is now to, step forward together and thoughtfully hash out andmake concrete contributions to charting a fresh course. History beckons, yan’uwa.
Audu writes from Abuja
