This is no time for public tears for the north. Tears of frustration characterised the remembrance of one of the region’s major personages.
At the General Hassan Katsina Memorial Conference in Kaduna, a prominent intellectual, vocal voice of the region and former vice- chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University, Prof. Ango Abdullahi, was not happy at the state of his region of birth.
‘The North has lost its values,’ he warned. ‘You may not want to hear this, but that is the case today. If we have not lost the values we inherited from our parents and our pioneer leaders, the North will not be where it is today.’
He said further: ‘The North is in a pathetic situation. For me, that is the only reason why the North has stagnated. Don’t worry about the buildings you see. The basic issue concerning where the North finds itself today is the loss of our values.’
His was not the only voice. Politician and former vice- president Atiku Abubakar’s aide, Usman Bugaje, added his own gloomy tone.
‘The troubles of the North are many and varied. Food production is going down daily, hundreds of thousands are being displaced from their homes, the economy has been shrinking, poverty has nearly tripled, education and healthcare have collapsed, and our human capital has been depleted,’ he said.
He wondered how much of the North still remained. He even questioned the sanity of the elite.
Bugaje criticised sections of the northern elite for merely lamenting the region’s challenges without providing practical solutions.
Embarrassed by the NEF leader’s comments, the Arewa Consultative Forum’s (ACF) publicity secretary, Tukur Muhammad-Baba toned down the rhetoric. He said: ‘It is… difficult to fault his pronouncements on such matters,’ adding that ‘We can only wishfully add that all is not irretrievably lost. With determination and the necessary sacrifice and commitment to do the needful and the rightful by all, the North can regain its bearings.’
Reflecting another tendency in the region, the spokesman of the Middle Belt Forum, Luka Binniyat, asserted more rebelliously,
‘The North lost its value and ceased to exist when the regional government was abrogated. What is going on today is not new to us. The North is already gone, even now that Prof. Ango Abdullahi knows it has lost its value. As far as the Middle Belt Forum is concerned, the North has never had any value to its people in terms of politics, economic empowerment or virtually everything.’
While Professor Abdullahi, Bugaje and Muhammad-Baba were speaking of the core north, Binniyat was speaking of another. It reflects a lack of cohesion in the region.
But more importantly, this marks the first time the northern elite would stare down at one another with the home truth. In an odd sense, the admission of an erring elite may mark an unlikely conjuncture between the radical north and the conservative north. The radical north was marked, in the past decades, by student radicals and their Marxist mentors. They had often condemned what they saw as the parasitic feudalism of the elites. The elite often shunted them to the margins as a cohort of condemnable upstarts.
The north was not as bad as it is today, but then, as now, it had the great scourge of the society. The pervasive presence of the almajiri system. It had buoyed a divided north between the affluent and the destitute.
But this same scourge has turned into a vicious army tearing apart a region known for its calm and pious devotion.
Because of them, businesses have fled the region. Many cannot farm and cannot hunt and cannot even move without trepidation in some areas.
Such conferences offer the platform to vent and grandstand. What is needed is action. Without it, things will worsen, and rhetoric will be the only succour amidst decay.