Worried about the underdevelopment of the northern region, Senator Shehu Sani has said the Northerners are the architects of their problems and should blame more of themselves than others.
Senator Sani, a human rights activist and Senator who represented Kaduna Central in the 9th Assembly stated this on his verified Facebook handle in a write-up titled, “The North; after blaming others, let’s probe ourselves”.
According to the former lawmaker, most public schools are free. However, the young northern ones still don’t want to go to school, just as he averred that most northerners don’t want their spouses to work or use their skills or talents to earn a living or contribute to the family particularly, stressing that resulted in a situation when such men die, they leave their spouse’s helpless widows and at the mercy of a hostile society.
He further posited that most young people don’t want to serve as apprentices in workshops or retail outlets because they lack the heart and patience to serve. In contrast, most parents in rural areas hand over their children to a religious teacher in the city, and the spiritual teacher depends on the children to beg or steal to feed him and his family.
“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. The bandits and terrorists that kill and kidnap our people deny our farmers from going to their farms and deny 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”.
The human rights activist lamented with nostalgia how we used to live together as one region in peace, brotherhood and love. Then we divide and hate ourselves along religious lines, and how we don’t vote for people who will serve us but vote for those who will give us spaghetti and grains.
“We concoct and spread all sorts of religiously inclined conspiracies to deny our children free health immunisation against diseases, and we end up with hundreds of thousands of blinds, 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.”
He further said most of our women and Girls don’t have a business capital 100,000, but they have an iPhone worth N1.5 m. Still, they can ‘struggle’ to meet up on a wedding ashobi of 500,000, adding that most of our girls’ children are denied their right to go beyond secondary school because of negative thoughts about the university.
“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. When our children are graduating from universities, especially public universities, most parents who attend to celebrate and appreciate their children in such events are parents of the southern students from the south.
Most of our industries and factories in Kano, Kaduna and Jos have since closed down when our kinsmen were in power.
“Our Farmers in rural areas have been farming with hoes for the whole period our kinsmen have been in power. The groundnut and cotton pyramids and fields disappeared long before our kinsmen were at the helm. All the spare parts, building materials, and pharmaceutical stores in the north are private businesses owned by people from other regions who were not backed, funded, or supported by any Government.
“When our Kinsmen were in power, we attributed our poverty and insecurity to God and to our Sins; when our Kinsmen were out of power, we attributed our sufferings to the King. 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?”
Senator Sani said, God gave us the most enormous land mass, the most significant number of people, the most of the Rivers and the resources and livestock and gave us power for most of our history, and queried, “Which of the favours of our Lord can we deny? The North: Eighty per cent of our problem is ourselves and not anyone ‘outside of ourselves,’ he concluded.
