An academic and Secretary General, Kaduna Restoration Group (KRG), Prof Yusuf Dankofa, has tackled northern leaders, including Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, who recently decried the region’s poor development indices.
In a speech delivered Saturday during the Northern Youth Summit organised by Northern Hibiscus Initiative, in Kaduna, el-Rufai lamented that Northern Nigeria had development indices similarly to war-torn Afghanistan.
He said that the region was characterised by widespread poverty, high rate of out-of-school children, drug abuse, gender violence, banditry, kidnapping, and terrorism.
“Nigeria consists of two countries; there is a backward, less educated and unhealthy northern Nigeria, and a developing, largely educated and healthy southern Nigeria,” the controversial governor said.
But reacting, Dankofa described the statement as the “height of deceit and inglorious humiliation of the people they enslaved”.
Dankofa, who did not mention el-Rufai’s name, said it was “outrightly dishonest and self-serving for a northern leader to come out and lampoon the north because he is a big part of the problem.”
He further accused the Northern political elite of looting the region’s resources and using the proceeds to acquire private properties instead of building industries that could benefit the masses and boost the region’s fortunes.
He said, “They own palatial houses and malls rather than industries that will cater for their people and even the funds came from the undue advantage conferred unto them by a rentier economy.
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“They reserve employment for their kids in national and multinational development corporations that are used in warehousing and laundering money for themselves and their families while the children of the northern masses roam the streets either as urchins or political thugs.
“Most of the children of the poor who have good education that allows them compete have their future pidgenholed by becoming security workers in private companies or taxi drivers, with N10,000 as maximum wages. How come none of their own children drives taxis or Dangote trucks?
“Scholarships and bursaries that are primarily meant for the poor have all been allocated to their children while the target beneficiaries are encouraged to hawk Indomie to be able to raise money for their education.
“The entire political and economic space in the north for the past five decades have been curtailed for the benefits of past and present northern leaders and their families and only bootlickers get crumbs and for the crumbs to continue to flow, the bootlickers must lick and lick the boots of their oppressors until they become physically and mentally fossilised and die without an iota of critical thinking.
“We all know that this is deliberate refusal to educate the northern masses is deliberate because they know that without education the north can never have a voice let alone resist its tormentors.
“Without education the masses will naturally be easy to indoctrinate, manipulate and be willing tools of mind destruction by their selfish and parasitic elites And we all have seen the consequences today ethno religious affiliation, banditry, terrorism is now the lot of the oppressed masses.”
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He added, “When you deny people education, they will end up as dregs of the society and crime together with substance abuse will define those people. With more than 13 million school age children out of school, can any reasonable person not understand why kidnappings have become so lucrative?
“It is outrightly dishonest and self-serving for a northern leader to come out and lampoon the north because he is a big part of the problem. They live in unwarranted opulence with state funds that should be channelled for the welfare of the poor.
“They spend billions on foreign trips that do not add value to statecraft, all the resources of the state are being used in promoting their political and personal career while the masses are faced with the most debilitating forms of poverty and deprivation and this same people will come out and declare that the north they deliberately made to be backward is backward, when in actual fact they like it like that and have been promoting and sustaining this status quo since time immemorial.
“To come out and start promoting a narrative that northern leaders are concerned about the decadence they promote is not only condemnable, but outrightly callous and inhuman. This they must be told in clear terms!”