EVERY year after JAMB releases its top scorers, Nigerians rush to celebrate brilliance. Pictures trend, names circulate, schools rejoice, and parents beam with pride. But this year, one painful thing stood out again: not one Northerner made the top ten.
Sit with that for a moment. Not one.
This is not East versus West or North versus South. This is about the future of millions of children quietly slipping through our fingers while we argue politics, trends, leaks, and tribe on social media.
Not North West, not North East, not North Central. The entire North was absent. Something is deeply wrong.
And instead of arguing defensively as we always do, maybe it is time we sit down and ask ourselves hard questions. And before we rush to blame JAMB, village people, or the government alone, we need to ask ourselves difficult questions. What exactly is happening to us? What exactly is happening to education in the North? What are parents doing? What are schools doing? What are leaders doing? And perhaps most painfully, what are our children becoming?
Because this did not happen overnight.
Where did we miss the road? Is it the schools, the government, the parents, or the children themselves? Or is it all of the above? Because this is no longer something we can brush aside with tribal sentiments and online arguments. This is a warning sign.
The painful part is that Northern children are not dull. Far from it. We have some of the brightest minds in this country. We have children capable of excellence, but brilliance without guidance dies quietly. Potential without discipline fades away, and unfortunately, we are raising a generation drowning in distraction.
Phones have become the new parents, TikTok has become the new teacher, and social media now raises many children more than their mothers and fathers do. And the painful part is that many parents have surrendered. A teenager can spend eight hours memorizing dance trends, celebrity gossip, TikTok sounds, and Instagram drama, but cannot spend thirty minutes reading a book without frustration. We joke about it online, but the damage is becoming visible in real life.
TikTok is slowly carrying away the attention span, focus, discipline, and future of many young people. Some parents no longer monitor homework. They no longer ask what their children are learning in school, and some believe paying school fees is enough parenting. Others are too busy chasing survival to notice their children are slowly drowning academically.
Before anybody misunderstands this, social media itself is not evil. There are young people making money online, building businesses, learning skills, and creating opportunities through these platforms. But what exactly are many of our children consuming there? What values are they learning? Who are they imitating? Discipline has reduced, reading culture has collapsed, and curiosity is dying.
Once upon a time, children feared failure, but today, many fear boredom more than failure. They cannot sit quietly to study because their minds are addicted to constant entertainment.
Many Northern youths may not be visible in spaces of innovation, education, technology, research, or intellectual conversations, but check the comment sections of meaningless online gossip, fights, dragging, scandals, and vulgarity on blogs — their presence is loud and immediate. Their comments flood timelines within minutes. Sadly, the younger ones are watching and copying them. When serious matters trend, many young people show little interest. That culture slowly shapes priorities, ambition, what children admire, and what they aspire to become. And parents must take some responsibility too.
Some parents no longer parent. They are too busy, too tired, too distracted, or too emotionally absent to monitor their children properly. A child can lock themselves inside a room with a phone for ten hours, and nobody asks questions. Some parents know every asoebi colour for weddings this year, but do not know their child’s academic performance.
Some schools are also failing. How do you produce students who pass exams through cramming instead of understanding? How do children graduate from secondary school barely able to write properly or think critically? Students are now “helped” during WAEC and NECO examinations. We all know that — let’s not pretend.
This failure is not just about poverty or poor infrastructure because there are children in this country who still excel because someone pushed them to. Someone supervised them. Someone insisted that books mattered. Sadly, that insistence is disappearing.
But even with all these factors, we must still tell ourselves uncomfortable truths. We cannot continue normalising mediocrity. We cannot keep celebrating noise over knowledge, and we cannot abandon discipline and then act shocked when the results arrive publicly for the whole country to see.
This conversation is not about insulting the North. It is about mourning what we are gradually losing.
A generation that once valued knowledge deeply is becoming addicted to distraction. A society that once respected scholars is now producing children who idolise influencers with nothing meaningful to offer. And if we do not correct this now, the gap will only grow wider.
We need to raise children who can think, read, compete, create, and lead. We need homes where education matters again. We need parents who monitor not just what their children eat, but what they consume online. We need schools that inspire excellence, not just certificates.
Most importantly, we need to stop pretending everything is fine, because it is not.
And the absence of Northern names on that JAMB list is not just a statistic. It is a message.
This conversation may make people uncomfortable. Good. Some discomfort is necessary.
Because if an entire region can disappear from the top 10 today, what disappears tomorrow?
Voice just cleared its throat.
- Kabara is a writer and public commentator. Her syndicated column, Voice, appears in News Point Nigeria newspaper on Monday. She can be reached at hafceekay01@gmail.com.