The Arewa Consultative Forum’s 25th anniversary should have been a moment of sober pride a chance to honour a quarter-century of dialogue, coordination, and leadership in Northern Nigeria. Instead, it has forced us to confront a bitter truth: the region is failing its people, and failing them in ways too deep and too dangerous to ignore.
For years, speeches have celebrated unity, invoked Ahmadu Bello, and called for collective purpose. But beneath these familiar refrains lies a North that is not merely stagnating it is unraveling.
A Society Where Kindness Is Becoming Fatal
Across the North today, what we might call kindness killing has taken root. Teachers determined to enlighten the next generation are abducted. Health workers serving remote communities are attacked. Volunteers in humanitarian corridors are targeted by criminals who understand that social cohesion threatens their power.
When compassion becomes a risk factor, a society is in moral free fall. The North’s greatest tragedy is not only the violence itself, but how normal it has become to lose those who serve.
This cannot be the region that claims lineage from the Sardauna, a leader who saw education, social reform, and public service as sacred duties.
Governance Has Thinned Into a Skeleton
The deeper problem is painfully clear: governance in the North is now too weak to perform even its most basic functions.
Local governments increasingly exist only on paper. State governments outsource their failures to Abuja while hoarding authority they rarely use responsibly. Traditional institutions once anchors of order are besieged by politicians, criminal networks, and social decay.
We cannot resolve insecurity when local governance is hollow. We cannot build industry when power supply, taxation, and regulation exist in an uncoordinated fog. We cannot claim unity when every layer of administration is bent under the weight of unmet needs and unkept promises.
Where governance thins, disorder thickens. Northern Nigeria is living proof.
Human Capital: The North’s Bleeding Wound
The facts are unforgiving: the region that once championed mass education now has the worst human capital indicators in the country. It carries the world’s largest burden of out-of-school children. It lags in literacy, nutrition, job readiness, and access to health care.
This is not just a social failure it is a future failure.
Demography, often celebrated as destiny, becomes a nightmare when a society cannot educate, equip, or empower its largest generations.
A region that cannot lift 60 million children into functional schooling cannot navigate a future where Nigeria’s population will exceed 400 million. A region where youth unemployment fuels instability will not survive the next wave of global competition, automation, and demographic pressure.
Our leaders speak often of unity, but unity is meaningless if it does not produce educated, healthy, secure citizens.
Unity Without Accountability Is Just a Comforting Lie
For decades, the North has been told that its problems can be solved through unity. But unity in what direction? Unity toward what purpose?
Unity without accountability is not a virtue. It is a political sedative one that numbs introspection and shields leaders from consequence.
The greatest threat to the North is not external manipulation. It is the internal refusal to confront our own failures.
No amount of nostalgia can compensate for the region’s alarming decline in governance quality, educational access, and economic viability. No amount of rhetoric can erase the reality that millions of young Northerners are being raised in conditions that undermine their potential before they even begin.
The Path Forward Requires Honesty, Not Flattery
If the North is to step back from the edge, three actions are unavoidable:
- Rebuild governance from the ground up, starting with empowered local governments, accountable state administrations, and community-led security reforms.
- Treat education and human capital as an emergency, not a slogan beginning with mass literacy drives, teacher retraining, and rebuilding public school systems like critical infrastructure.
- Redefine unity as shared responsibility, not shared silence. A region that cannot criticize itself cannot save itself.
The North does not need comforting speeches. It needs truth-telling, reform, and courage.
The region stands today at a historic crossroads. The path we take now will determine whether our children inherit a future shaped by dignity and opportunity—or a future defined by fear, loss, and squandered potential.
The time for polite reflection has passed. The time for decisive rebuilding has arrived.
If the North is to rise again, it must finally confront what it has long avoided: the failure to build, to protect, and to govern.
Only then can unity be more than a slogan and hope more than a memory.
May the next 25 years be more productive.
Otunba Segun Showunmi
The Alternative.
