NORTHERN politicians, eggheads, traditional rulers, and opinion leaders, on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, gathered in Kaduna to assess the two-year administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The ‘assessment parley’ was put together to enable them to make an informed decision on whether to go along with him in 2027 or dump him for another candidate.
Their verdict at the end of the talk shop wasn’t that favourable, as the North gave him a long shopping list which literally said “Perform in these areas, or you will not enjoy our support in 2027.”
The assessment parley, tagged: ‘Two-day Interactives session on Government-Citizens Engagement’, with the theme ‘Assessing Electoral Promises: Fostering Government-Citizen Engagement For National Unity’, was held at the Arewa House, with Tinubu sending a high-level team of over 10 senior government officials to attend.
Organized by the Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation, (SABMF) with the full support of the Arewa Consultative Forum, (ACF), the talk-shop was a bold statement from the North on the direction the 2027 election would take.
The Chairman, Board of Trustees of the ACF, Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu, fired on all cylinders when he told the gathering that the North gave Tinubu 64 per cent of the entire votes he got across the country, which eventually gave him the presidency in 2023. Hear him: “Northerners went out en-masse on the 25th of February, 2023, and cast their ballots for Bola Tinubu.
At the end of the day, 5.6 million out of the total 8.8 million votes he got (or 64%), came from the North. And yet, two years into the four-year tenure of President Tinubu, the feeling among the people of the North is, to put it mildly, completely mixed. To our surprise, those who did not support him, did not vote for him, and hardly wished him well have emerged from nowhere and are trying to push a wedge between him and the North. Whether or not they are succeeding, we do not know.
But we cannot pretend not to observe that President Tinubu’s budget priorities, his infrastructural projects, his appointments and other executive actions, have, over the last two years, largely sidelined Northern Nigeria. As far as we can see, nothing or little is being done to address the major issues of concern to the North, details of which were presented to him in writing by various groups over the years.”
He was not done, as he went ahead to list insecurity, low budgetary allocation to agriculture, poor electricity supply to the North, lack of functional health care system, the rehabilitation of the Ajaokuta Steel project, continuous search for crude oil up north, political appointments to Northerners, and the rehabilitation of more roads across the North as some of the areas the Tinubu government should quickly look into in other to pacify the region ahead of the 2027 polls.
To show that the North is actually getting the short end of the stick, Dalhatu used the 2025 budget size of N1.013 trillion to buttress his argument. According to him, the entire North ended up with a mere N24 billion in the budget. Now, he wants the President to “start, re-start, expedite, or complete the construction of some of the major roads that are of great strategic importance to Northern Nigeria”. These include the Abuja – Kaduna- Zaria – Kano; the Ilorin – Jebba- Tegina – B/Gwari- Kaduna road; the Abuja – Lokoja- Okene – Auchi road; the Zaria- Funtua – Gusau – Sokoto – Ilela road, the Keffi – Akwanga – Jos – Bauchi – Gombe – Yola road, the Calabar – Ogoja – Wukari – Numan- Biu – Maiduguri road; the Wudil – Kafin-Hausa – Katagum – Potiskum road; the Kano – Katsina road, the Enugu – Otukpo – Makurdi road, the Gombe – Biu – Damaturu – Gashua – Gusau road; the Lambatta – Lapai- Agaie – Bida – Mokwa road, and the Birnin-Kebbi – Yauri – Kontogora – Makera – Tegina road.
Again, he cited the example of a press statement published by the Federal Ministry of Works on the 5th of May, 2025 with the title: ‘President Tinubu Has Approved The Allocation Of N787.14 Billion And $651.14 million For Road Projects’. When the total sum was broken down region by region, the North, again, he said, got a meagre amount from the federal government. According to him, the
Southwest got N1.394 trillion, the Southeast got N205 billion, the Northwest, N105 billion, and the Northeast, N30 billion.
These figures, he added, should be read together with the figures that the federal government had earlier allocated to some federal projects such as the Lagos – Calabar Highway, valued at N15 trillion; the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, valued at N195bn; the Lekki Corridor, valued at ($651.7m, equivalent of N978bn; the Outer Marina Shoreline, valued at N176.5bn; the Second Niger Bridge, valued at N148bn; the Delta State Section, valued at N470.9bn; the Enugu – Onitsha road, valued at N150bn, and the Benin – Lokoja road, valued at N305bn.
The North, he said only got a meagre presence with the approval for the rehabilitation of the following roads: the Maiduguri – Monguno at N21bn, the Abuja -Kaduna – Kano at N242bn; the Sokoto – Zamfara-Katsina – Kaduna at N105bn; the Wusasa – Jos at N18 billion, and the Cham – Numan, at N9.3bn.
As expected, there was immediate push back from the Presidency, with the Minister of Works, Engineer Dave Umahi listing all projects done by his ministry and showing that no single section of the country has been left behind. The Secretary to the Government of the Federation, George Akume, who led the federal government team, also pleaded with the North to support Tinubu in 2027, with the promise that power would return to the region by 2031.
Dalhatu is indeed a good representative of Northern Nigeria. In a federation, there is nothing wrong with a region advocating for more federal presence from those in power, what Dalhatu failed to tell Nigerians is whether a similar shopping list was handed over to former President Muhammadu Buhari when he was elected President for eight years. Was an assessment of his eight-year tenure ever done by the ACF? After all, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Many northern leaders kept quiet when one of theirs held forte at the helm of affairs even though most of them knew that his regime was a disaster. However, the take away for me from the talk shop was the late acknowledgement that the North is pained by the little priority given to education by leaders from the same region. Dalhatu, in his speech, admitted that the North is in trouble, as proven by the most recent World Bank estimates of out-of-school children put at 20 million, 80 per cent of whom are in the North.
But again, he put the blame squarely on the doorsteps of the federal government when he stated that the sector is grossly underfunded. He is also of the view that teachers training and welfare must be improved in the North. Let me quote some of the measures he recommended to improve the lot of the educational sector. “We must make the implementation of the UBE scheme more efficient and ensure that all children of school-going age do actually go to school, including the children of nomadic herdsmen, fishermen, and other itinerant tradesmen. As a matter of fact, the President should be advised to relaunch the UBE Scheme and commit the country to a comprehensive, free and compulsory basic education in Nigeria.”
I am happy that Dalhatu and other opinion leaders in the North have finally seen what many of us saw as a ticking time bomb decades ago when the agitation began in the South that the North is not placing much priority on education. The fad in the North is for parents to send their children and wards to Madrasa (Qur’anic School), with little or no attention given to western education. From their early ages, children are sent to far-off places to learn the Qur’an, and many elites in the region soon started to use the cultural and religious practices to hold down the masses.
I think that Dalhatu should be told that it is already too late in the day for the North to be emphasizing the importance of western education. The toddlers of the past two decades who were denied western education have now become brainwashed adults and now being used as foot soldiers by Boko Haram terrorists, bandits, and kidnappers in the entire North. When Mohammed Yusuf who founded Boko Haram was looking for a name for his group, Boko Haram (‘book, or western education is forbidden’) became the adopted catch-phrase.
The neglect of those children years ago is largely responsible for the unfortunate acts of terrorism now facing the entire country. Perhaps Dalhatu should come to the South west to see what Northern youths – those who chose not to take up arms against their fatherland – are doing to survive. Many of them – uneducated – have taken up menial jobs to survive. Some are riding Okada, while some are picking waste as scavengers (popularly called Baban bola – the waste man), yet some are into shoe shining and other sundry jobs just to make ends meet. Most of them sleep in makeshift sheds along the rail line, some, on top of refuse heaps at dump sites or wherever night meets them.
The criminals among them are into burglary, always on the lookout for completed but not yet occupied houses which they strip of all its wiring, iron doors, and windows. They have become a nuisance in the South while their bigger brothers up North are into kidnapping, banditry, and terrorism.
Dalhatu should be told the plain truth that the billions of Naira that the federal government has devoted to fighting insecurity in the entire North could have been put into infrastructural development of the entire country if Northern children are educated. If elites like him had embraced mass education, as it is being done in the South, we would not be in the mess we are in right now. Dalhatu should provide answers to the nomadic education policy of the Jonathan administration and what eventually became the lot of the scheme.
A former education Minister, Adamu Adamu, in 2022, told the world that the Almajiri system of education which sought to infuse western education into Qur’anic school was poorly implemented after several billions of Naira was spent on the scheme. Adamu was in charge of the Ministry of Education for eight years and he should be bold to tell the world what he did to correct the poor implementation of the policy by the Buhari government that he served.
Again, it should also be pointed to Dalhatu and other Northern leaders that education is under the concurrent list on the Constitution and Northern governors should point out what they did to improve the lot of northern youths through education. Northern governors should be made to show more interest in the education of northern youths by providing the needed environment and infrastructure at the primary and post-primary levels. They should get competent teachers with the right motivation to salvage the sordid state of education in the North.
For how long would the country continue to admit students into unity schools with low grades all in the name of coming from educationally disadvantage states? Still, it is better late than never. If the North is now ready to change the narrative on education, all hands must be on deck to turn the situation around, and quickly. Islamic clerics, parents, opinion leaders, and government at the local, state, and federal levels must be fully involved and carried along.
It is when all the stakeholders are on the same page in their desire to give qualitative education to youths, particularly the largely uneducated Northern youths, that the nation would be on the road to solving the security challenges we are currently battling.
See you next week.
- Akintunde is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Glittersonline newspaper. His syndicated column, Monday Discourse, appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Mondays.