The north of Nigeria after the protests

Usman Yusuf, professor in the medical sciences is working hard at being a voice of opposition. He cut a controversial image during the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari during which he headed the National Health Insurance Scheme, (NHIS). He was fingered for a bouquet of infractions under his watch and was serially upbraided by the minister who superintended over his brief, the Health minister, Professor Isaac Adewoye. Yusuf was subsequently eased out of office after which he became a notable critic. He thereafter severally chastised Buhari for his below par performance and the massive looting of state resources under his watch. This was even as the former president postured as being incorruptible. Yusuf refused to be restrained by such parochial considerations as his being from the same state, Katsina, as the former president. Incapacity and ineptitude for him know no creed or colour.

If he faced up to his kinsman Buhari obviously for the reason of his ouster from the NHIS despite the sociocultural consangiunity between both men, Yusuf has been unsparing of Buhari’s successor, Bola Tinubu. He has repeatedly drawn state attention to its palpable failures in delivering on his campaign promises. Yusuf has spoken about the incontrovertible fact of the rapid impoverishment of the citizenry; the acute food scarcity staring us all in the face, as well as the festering insecurity across the land. He holds that the people are being continously deceived and shortchanged by their supposed leaders. Waxing poetic, Yusuf noted that the “renewed hope” promised Nigerians by Tinubu has indeed metamorphosed into “renewed hopelessness.” That is how scathing Yusuf’s engagements can be.

The social media recently availed us the video clip of one of Usman Yusuf’s fire-spitting interviews. His thesis on this occasion is to the effect that northern leaders and their followers are complicit in the security quandary of their part of the country. Away from the Buhari misadventure, Yusuf believes that the north has neither deployed nor synergised its agglomeration of resources to impact on the security and economic situation up north. While the area may not have a sitting president, a position in which Buhari failed to impact his region, Yusuf maintains that the north is not short of capacity in the incumbent governance pyramid. Professor Usman Yusuf references the fact that the: Vice President, Kashim Shettima, (Borno); Speaker, House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas, (Kaduna) and the National Security Adviser, (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu from (Adamawa), are all from the north.

The two Ministers of Defence, Mohammed Badaru Abubakar, (Jigawa) and Bello Matawalle, (Zamfara), are both from neighbouring states in the north west. Instructively, this is the first time in contemporary Nigerian political history that two sitting Ministers of Defence, are from the same geopolitical zone. The two ministers manning the Ministry of Police Affairs, Ibrahim Geidam, (Yobe) and Imaan Suleiman-Ibrahim, (Nasarawa) are also from the north. Chief of Defence Staff, (CDS), Christopher Gwabin Musa, (Kaduna); the Director-General, State Security Services, (SSS), Yusuf Magaji Bichi, (Kano) and his counterpart at the National Intelligence Agency, (NIA), Ahmed Rufai Abubakar, (Katsina), are similarly from the north. Let’s hope that this mammoth concentration of the leaderships of virtually all critical intelligence and security formations and services in the country, does not stir murmurs and grumbling from sections of the land. Reading this reality, many parts of the country will feel genuinely underrepresented in these critical sectors.

The previously announced 10-day nationwide protest against hunger and bad governance kicked off on Thursday August 1, 2024. Compliance with the invitation to protest, however, was not going to be wholly and total. Governors and leaders in many states engaged with their constituents and talked them out of participation in the programme. Groups and associations in many states also opted out of the exercise preferring to hold government to account on its promises. In many cities and towns, processions snowballed into uncontrollable chaos, unmanaged violence, destruction and looting. This was witnessed in predominantly northern locations. Hoodlums, vagrants and *almajiris* infiltrated the ranks of otherwise altruistic protesters, visiting lawlessness and utter brigandage on multibillion *naira* public and privately owned facilities and infrastructure.

Shopping complexes, government establishments, warehouses were among investments intentionally and viciously vandalised by the rampaging mob. The propensity of lowlifers to the holistic ruination of everything in sight was evidenced in Kano. Protester-vandals mustered implements like diggers and hammers and chiselled concrete pallets laid across drainages for use by automobiles. The scenes as recorded real-time by television stations, reminds of the same mindlessness with which metal slippers on railway tracks are stolen and sold. It brings back to the teary mind the metal components of our bridges and roads, and even our traffic lights and street lights are harvested and sold by scrap metal merchants. You want to weep for Nigeria.

The Nigerian police and its sister agencies attempted the containment of the bedlam in places, even as the mob outstripped their numbers in instances. There have been casualties across the land with the media reporting the felling of at least a dozen mobsters tallied from frontlines of engagement. Borno and Niger states accounted for a sizeable percentage of the casualties, while several more sustained gashes and grazes in various degrees. Kayode Egbetokun, Nigeria’s Inspector-General of Police, (IGP), reported the loss of one of his men on the first day of the brawl. Christopher Musa the CDS commended the professionalism of the police in managing the uprising, while assuring of the readiness of the military to intervene in the event that the police was overwhelmed.

Governors in some states, notably Borno, Kano, Kaduna, Kebbi, Nasarawa, Jigawa, have had to declare curfews to minimise the wholesale disorder. Not one state in the nation’s south has declared a sit-at-home for its constituents not because there were no protests, but because the exercise was maturely and peacefully prosecuted. Governor Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra State was launching a “back to land” agricultural programme to boost agricultural production, while the protest was supposed to be in its third day, elsewhere. Yet, the morning after in many northern capitals and cities, carcasses of multibillion naira structures wilfully incinerated by numskulls; ashes from bonfires made of rubber tyres; wilted tree branches, dot the face of the earth. Smithereens of glass; stones and pebbles; cannisters of expended pepper spray; empty plastic bottles, drained sachets of water, carpet the lonesome streets. Not forgetting the cadavers of comrades felled in the preceding delirium, now grisly souvenirs on the forlorn roads and roundabouts.

Again a reversal of the clock of development as rebuilds and rehabilitation of damaged resources begin from scratch, particularly up north. Professor Usman Yusuf invites the northern leadership and political class to begin a process of genuine soul-searching if it aims to crawl out of the multifaceted morass in which it has practically plunged itself. Statistics from the National Bureau for Statistics, (NBS) and similar bodies local and international, have never been wavered in quoting lower developmental indices across board for the north, relative to the south of the country. In the specific sectors of education, healthcare, industrialisation, employment, the global north is way behind the south. The more forward-looking states in the north which give southern entities a run for their figures would be Kogi, Kwara and Benue.

Beyond the all-too-well-known convergences under various names and monikers, the northern region will require more than a one-day meeting in Kaduna the political headquarters of the north to surgically dilate and dissect the issues afflicting the region. It needs to have a global workshop spanning a few days to jaw-jaw. States in the various geopolitical zones must also meet to ensure the uniform implementation of set objectives. There should be quarterly reviews of programmes and initiatives. Errant governors famous for being on permanent excursions in Abuja the federal capital loafing about like school boys must sit down in their states to do the jobs for which they were voted into office. The north requires genuine regeneration and holistic makeover, made imperative by the recent mass protest brouhaha.

Olusunle, PhD, is a Fellow of the Association of Nigerian Authors, (FANA)