A Message To The North: The South Is Getting Fed Up!

By Dr Ugoji Egbujo

I have a story to tell the North. I hope it receives it in good faith. I love the North. So I have decided to tell the North how his brother the South truly feels. The South loves the north but the South is getting fed up. The truth may taste bitter but it sets free. I will throw away political correctness and let the North know how the South feels because the North has to sit up and shape up.

The South is getting fed up. Today, it’s Boko Haram. Tomorrow it’s banditry. Yesterday, it was confounding mass illiteracy. And no mention has been made yet about the abiding mass obesity of the North. Family resources are being wasted fighting useless fires! The truth is: the South increasingly sees the North like a slothful, temperamental brother that has stubbornly refused to go to school and has begun to keep the company of bad gangs.

So the North isn’t just a laid back family black sheep, it’s now the sort of black sheep that is bringing in wolves and troubles to impoverish and imperil the family. And nothing rankles the South more than the fact that the North seems utterly oblivious of its predicaments and their toll on fortunes and future of the family. If the North understood the magnitude of its problems, its leaders will weep every day.

The South wants his brother the North to take out time and do some sober reflection in a pan  Arewa village meeting.  Their emirs, their generals, their billionaires, their Islamic clerics. So that the North can ask himself soul-searching questions about how he came to such a sorry pass. Because nothing irritates the South more than the fact that the South sees the North, every day, chasing political shadows instead of chasing its children to school, instead of taking care of its ever-increasing number of young pregnant women.

The South is amused when he watches the North occupy himself,  chasing population numbers, disfiguring meritocracy with the quota system and resisting power devolution instead of taking practical steps to save his children from poverty and illiteracy. Yes, this is how the South feels. I know the North has things to tell the South too. It’s normal. But this is how the South feels. The South is not an angel and the South is not without its own conspicuous sins. 

But the South can’t understand why a brother beset with so many crippling self-inflicted wounds could yet be so aloof, so arrogant, so enamoured of frivolity. This is the North in the eyes of the South today: The picture of a backward brother in a poor family. The picture of a fat family liability. I promised to tell the whole truth. There is a feeling of disgust that seizes a brother when his own brother’s prodigal shortcomings and recklessness threatens to plunge the entire family into turmoil and shame. 

It solidifies into repugnance when rather than face his problems, perhaps, that brother takes more interest in claiming ‘firstsonship’ and talking about how his brother has lost respect for him. And rebuking sympathizers harshly, with reminders about groundnut pyramids and how he was once the prosperous one. The truth is, the South has logged in its own eyes.

The South might even suffer from bigotry.  But it is indisputable that his brother’s slothfulness poses a more immediate calamity to the family. The South wants the North to sit up and zip up.  Yes, zip-up and stop breeding the way our great grandfathers ignorantly did when there was little else to do than marry and have children.  The extended family lacks the resources to feed one hundred million children.

And neighbours mock when our scrawny children go plate in hand begging for food. The South wants the North to note how Fareed Zakaria painted Nigeria in glorious lights a couple of days ago. Nigeria has more percentage of PhD holders in America than China and the UK. Nigeria has a higher percentage of Bachelor’s degree holders in America than every other country.  The CNN presenter told the world that Nigeria was rich in quality human resources. That data is Nigeria’s, but it is plainly the South’s.

Because last year Zamfara with all its puritanism couldn’t get more than 20 students to write the National Common entrance Exams. It is indeed, an abomination. But have you seen any northern leader weep over this? Or call for a Jihad to fight educational backwardness and social injustice in the north? So the South wants the North to produce only the children the North can feed and send them to good schools.

The South doesn’t and can’t feel safe when his brother’s children rather than become doctors and lawyers are ending up in droves as angry street urchins. The South doesn’t know how to say it, but he is fed up with the North dragging the family numbers down. The South wants the North to see Boko Haram and banditry as wolves that can devour the entire family. The South wants the North to hold a village meeting and find a spiritual solution to the wolves.

The South knows that his brother has a temper. But he is yet to see that temper unleashed on Boko Haram and banditry. He would like to see one Yerima or one Shinkafi stand up and issue a fatwa against Shekau and the insurgents.  And follow it up by mobilizing 2 million volunteers into Borno. Because in actual sense the insurgents have blasphemed God and done incalculable damage to Islam. The South knows the North loves Sharia. It doesn’t mind. But it wants the north to open the windows of its mind and excommunicate religious intolerance.

I’ve come to tell the North how the South feels. I didn’t come to mince words. The North must discard his pride and face his perilous reality. His farmlands are lying waste because of banditry while his children roam the streets with chronic malnutrition and preventable diseases. Northern leaders can’t be frolicking in Abuja and Kaduna plotting 2023!

The South knows that it also has some rogues as leaders but it wants the North to stop scratching and smiling, and start treating, in earnest, the craw-craw of having about the worst set of leaders in a badly governed Africa. God bless the North.

*Dr. Egbujo is a commentator on public issues (First published in Vanguard.