The North: After Blaming Others Let’s Probe Ourselves

By Shehu Sani

1. Most public schools are free, but our young ones still don’t want to go to school.

2. Most of us don’t want our spouses to work or use their skills or talents to earn a living or contribute to the family. When we die, we leave them as helpless widows at the mercy of a hostile society.

3. Most young ones don’t want to serve as apprentices in workshops or retail outlets because they don’t have the heart and the patience to serve.

4. Most parents in rural areas hand over their children to a religious teacher in the city, and the religious teacher depends on the children to beg or steal in order to feed him and his family.

5. For ethnic, religious and sectional reasons, we protected, defended, praised and refused to hold to account all our kinsmen who led the country at every wasted opportunity for over five decades.

6. The bandits and terrorists that kill and kidnap our people deny our farmers from going to their farms and denying our children from going to school. They are not from any country or the south of the country; they came from our homes and our families up north. We worshipped with them in the same mosque.

7. We used to live together as one region in peace, brotherhood and love, and then we divided and heated ourselves along religious lines.

8. We don’t vote for people who will serve us, we vote for those who will give us spaghetti and grains.

9. We concoct and spread all sorts of religiously inclined conspiracies to deny our children free health immunisation against diseases and we end with up hundreds of thousands of blind, lame, crippled and deaf children, who grow up as impaired victims of polio, glaucoma or leprosy, begging in the streets of northern and southern cities. Even the kind of Bill Gates who regularly shows interest in us, we have no kind words for him.

10. Most of our women and girls don’t have a business capital of 100k but they have an iPhone of N1.5m. They don’t have a capital of 100k but can ‘struggle’ to meet a wedding ashobi of 500k.

11. We deny most girls’ children their right to go beyond secondary school because of the negative thoughts about the university.

12. We don’t want our female children to wear uniforms. Whenever the recruitment portals for the Army, police, customs, immigration, and civil defence are on, we don’t want our female wards to apply.

13. When our children are graduating from universities, especially public universities, most of the parents attend to celebrate and appreciate their children. Such events are for Southern students from the south.

14. Most of our industries and factories in Kano, Kaduna and Jos have since closed down when our kinsmen were in power.

15. Our Farmers in rural areas are still farming with hoes for the whole period our kinsmen have been in power. The groundnut and cotton pyramids and fields disappeared long when our kinsmen were at the helm.

16. All the spare parts, building materials and pharmaceutical stores in the north are private businesses owned by people from other regions who were in no way backed, funded or supported by any Government.

17. When our Kinsmen were in power, we attributed our poverty and insecurity to God for our Sins; when our Kinswere were out of power, we attributed our sufferings to the King.

18. The FCT is in the north, can anyone explain why the people from the region couldn’t dominate the private businesses in the FCT and Suleja and Mararaba? Who should be blamed for this? One.

19. God gave us the largest land mass, the largest number of people, the Rivers and the resources and livestock and gave us power most oft of our history; which of the favours of our Lord can we deny?

20. The North; Eighty percent of our problem is ourselves and not anyone ‘outside of ourselves’.

About The Author

Shehu Sani is the former Senator representing Kaduna Southern Senatorial District in the National Assembly.