OPINION: It’s Time For The North To Join Us in the 21st Century

Nigeria’s north has been a cause for concern in terms of underdevelopment, radicalization, insecurity, and illiteracy.

In 2018, the World Bank named northern Nigeria as the region with the most out-of-school children. It’s not just that. The trending issues about the cut-off mark for unity schools across the country calls for serious concerns seeing how low the expectations from the north are.

We are in serious trouble as a country if a region is decades behind the rest of the country and nobody is trying to solve that problem.

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It’s, in fact, one of the reasons why Boko Haram, kidnappers and other vices continue to have a breeding point there. Children are thrown to the streets to live as almajiris where they become raw materials for radical religious recruitments.

Attempts have of course been made in the past in terms of establishing more schools in the North but it has solved no problem, really.

Attempts to at least situate industries like the one the Nigerian Film Corporation wanted to establish in Kano in 2017 didn’t work either as certain clerical and local leaders kicked against it and mobilized their people to do so too.

There’s need for fresh ideas to tackle these issues as the North can no longer and should no longer be ignored. The insecurity is getting even worse and an end has to come to it.

Northern leaders have an active role to play to end this. It is not enough to pay lip service to these things or wave angry fists from a distance, it’s time for northern leaders to get involved at the local level, at the Senate, in their positions as Governors to genuinely end these insanities else, the country will be consumed, starting from the North and its leaders.

James Ogunjimi