Ibrahim Balarabe Musa is a scion of his illustrious father, Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa, a Nigerian left-wing politician who fought the northern establishment and remained committed to his ideals despite having his nose bruised. Balarabe Musa, the father, was elected governor of Kaduna State in 1979. His tenure however was truncated when he was impeached on June 23, 1981. He was to later attribute his impeachment to his efforts at creating a more equitable, just and egalitarian society for the people of the north.
Ibrahim Balarabe seems to have followed in the footstep of his father. Where most northern elite who hope to get integrated into the ruling hegemonic class in the north through politics, marriage or businesses kept their peace and live in denial, Ibrahim, like his illustrious father, was ready to speak truth to power by calling a spade by its name. In an interview with Punch newspapers not too long ago, he insisted “the worst enemies of the north are the northern governors.” For him, successive northern governors should be held responsible for the ravaging poverty in the north. And as for the current insecurity in the north, while he believes that the ordinary people in the north are good and peace-loving, he did not spare the politicians, retired military officers and civil servants
Apart from Nuhu Ribadu, current National Security Adviser who accused the northern governors of having little to show for the over N8tn collected as allocation between 1999 and 2015 as against Ahmadu Bello who maintained security, built the biggest business conglomerate in Africa, south of the Sahara, established Ahmadu Bello University among others with revenue less than what one local government today collects as allocation, other northern leaders have continued to play the ostrich.
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A journey through history easily confirms the fact that the northern leaders are the scourge of northern masses. The north at independence constituted five–eighths of the entire territory of Nigeria with 56 per cent of the entire population. Their system according to Awolowo “was feudal and autocratic at best, oligarchic and authoritarian and completely antithetical to liberal tradition of the Western Region and egalitarian beliefs of the Eastern Region”. He therefore believed “the problem of Nigeria “cannot be solved until the problem of the north has been solved”. To therefore avoid social dislocation we are today witnessing in the north, Awolowo canvassed for the introduction of universal adult suffrage, free education, Abolition of electoral colleges and territorial commission to revise boundaries.
But the northern political elite who only see the northern masses as instruments for political bargaining would have none of Awolowo’s apocalyptic prediction. And while they sent their own children to the best schools in the world, back home, they groomed an army of ‘almajiris’ and ‘labourers born labourers’, who they periodically lionized to terrorize southern leaders including Awolowo and Azikiwe who tried to spread message of freedom and liberty to the north.
In the early fifties, NPC had an extremist terrorist group which called itself the MAHAUKATA (madmen) and NEPU, “Positive Action Wing’. When AG decided to carry its crusade to Kano, the mad men and the cruder inhabitants of both and old Kano cities were making cutlasses and stick ready to receive the people “who had insulted their leaders”. The northern leaders of the period were determined to stop both Zik and Akintola from lecturing their young men. An attempt to prevent AG’s S. L. Akintola from lecturing northern youths on democracy in 1953 left 40 dead in Kano.
Seventy years later, not much has changed. At the beginning of the 4th republic, 13 northern governors allegedly sent northern youths for indoctrination under Osama Bin Laden while hibernating in Sudan. Many of them came back as the governors were institutionalising what Obasanjo called “political Sharia”, to form the nucleus of today’s insurgents groups including Boko Haram, herdsmen killer group and bandits that have today made the north ungovernable.
Unfortunately northern leaders have continued to play the ostrich. And instead of retracing their steps back by rejecting feudalism and embracing modernity, they have been trying to export northern self-inflicted tragedy to the south. This became apparent under the Buhari presidency when his “loyal gatekeepers”, serving other tendencies in his government tried to justify infiltration of southern reserved forest by armed killer herdsmen.
When the southern leaders called for restructuring as a reaction to attempt by northern elected politicians including President Buhari and those in the National Assembly to export self-inflicted tragedies of the north to the south, northern political elite pretended not to know the meaning of restructuring. But except for the fact that they are playing the ostrich, they have Tafawa Balewa’s speech at the 1954 London Conference as a guide. Balewa in the speech had said “The future of Nigeria will be imperilled by anything but a loose federation; there should be complete regional autonomy and the regions should be allowed to develop at their own pace without interference in their affairs from other regions.”
As against confederacy, our founding fathers settled for federalism, a social system that equally has the capacity of liberating individuals and groups from the tyranny of the state.
And when tragedy struck with substitutions of federalism with ‘unitarism’ by ill-informed soldiers, the military social engineering strategies including quota system of admission into the tertiary institutions, military and the bureaucracy and revenue allocation formula that did not allocate value to productivity, the parasitic northern governors and their southern counterparts who go to Abuja cap in hand every month to collect handout from a dysfunctional centre, have little incentive to address the challenges of governance.
The above provides the answer to Ribadu’s question. After all, economists have long warned that failure to abide with law of input-output which requires a corresponding input into output will lead to disequilibrium. It is therefore not an accident that northern governors and their southern counterparts often squander free monies they did not work for, on marrying new wives or buying new houses in and outside the country as we have seen through various EFCC probes.
This was the reason ‘Statisense’ (UNIICEF, 2023) recorded about 15.28million out of school children in the north as against 2.58m of the south, despite the existence of counterpart funding and Universal Basic Education schemes which many governors have refused to access.
It was also the reason the 2022 Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report said the north with an average poverty index of between 0.351 and 0.425 is leading other regions of the country. (The Guardian July 7, 2023).
And as for the current challenges of Boko-Haram insurgency, banditry and kidnapping for ransom, that have turned the north into hell on earth, Muazu Babangida Aliyu, speaking as a guest lecturer at Annual Lecture and General Meeting of the Kaduna chapter of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) on December 2, 2023 attributed them to political elite corruption which he said “is the mainframe that eroded northern Nigeria’s values and continue to fuel insecurity in the north”
That the northern population which is supposed to be a blessing has become a disaster is not because the northerners are unproductive but because they have been betrayed by leaders who only see them as instrument for political bargaining. That the majority of the northern governors since the birth of the 4th republic failed to take advantage of counterpart funding to take some of the over 15m ‘out of School children’ off the street just as they did not see the imperative of setting up marketing boards to safeguard the interest of northern farmers who are periodically swindled by middlemen, only but confirm the Balarabe’s claim that northern governors are the scourge of the northern masses.
