A word for northern states’ governors-elect

Your Excellencies, pardon me for using this public medium to divulge the personal sacrifices required of you to individually and collectively salvage the north from its current multifarious challenges. I humbly remind you particularly the 12 new members of the Northern States Governors’ Forum (NSGF) of the most enduring lesson learnt from the 2015 elections. […]

Your Excellencies, pardon me for using this public medium to divulge the personal sacrifices required of you to individually and collectively salvage the north from its current multifarious challenges.
I humbly remind you particularly the 12 new members of the Northern States Governors’ Forum (NSGF) of the most enduring lesson learnt from the 2015 elections. It has confirmed to all that the era of getting in to elective positions or retaining them through impunity is over. Do not forget that, in 2011, 14 of you were governors on the platform of the then dominant People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Today, the party’s non-performance over the years has reversed that trend and it is history. By the time you assume duty on Friday May 29; only three of you (respectively from Gombe, Kogi and Taraba states) would be from the PDP. The remaining 16 of you are from the All Progressives Congress (APC).
The crisis of underdevelopment that has over the decades bedeviled most parts of the north but worsened in the past six years is so serious that each of you should have since he was announced as governor-elect hit the ground running. You should be ready by now to strike a decent and quick departure from the existing aberrations in your states. With just one week to your taking oath of office, whoever has not planned what he intends to achieve within his first one hundred days, six months and one year in office, should realise that he is starting late. You should have also outlined your individual long-term development plans to cover your four years in office. Anything short of this amounts to lack of planning.
This is the sort of un-seriousness that led to the failure of some of the out-going governors. Many of them prodigally wasted ample time celebrating or promoting themselves at the expense of improving the quality of life of their people. They were intoxicated by the hoodwinking privileges of power and thus engaged themselves in worthless matters. Some of them were busy fighting their deputies or masterminding unwarranted impeachment of their state assembly speakers. Others spent much of their time planting billboards on nearly all major roads in their states; receiving traditional titles from every emir or chief or oba that was ready to make an offer; making promises that were surely never to be fulfilled; and squandering state resources on unconstitutionally authorised issues to the detriment of statutory responsibilities such as workers’ salaries. These are some of the mistakes of your predecessors that plunged the north in to its present state of socio-economic quagmire, which history we do not want its repeat under your leadership.
Beside the billions of dollar loans accessed by northern states and the over N10 trillion they collectively received from Federation Account in the past 16 years, the infrastructural development in the region is by no means proportionate to the huge funds that accrued to the 19 northern states. The only feat which the region has to show for these earnings include limited access to primary healthcare coupled with an alarming increase in diseases; more number of school-age children, yet with little teaching and learning taking place in dilapidated classrooms; more people to feed, yet with few farmers and fewer tractors; and a relatively wasted generation of youths who lack employable skills. You do not require consulting any book or visiting any website to get convinced that the north has retrogressed in recent years.  
A society that ignores the needs of its teeming youths, including gainful employment is ultimately setting the stage for self-destruction. If young boys and girls are usefully engaged, they will be too busy to have time to listen to advocates of insurgency, thuggery, robbery or drug addiction. Begging (whether on the streets or through phone calls) has regrettably become a popular ‘enterprise’ of northerners who were once known to be industrious and self-reliant. Whether at home or in other regions of the country, some trades have since become synonymous with northern youths. At home, they are sachet-water hawkers, truck pushers, commercial motorcycle (okada) operators, and scrap metal scavengers. In the southern part of Nigeria, they are cobblers, houseboys, gatemen or night-watchmen. Subhanallahi!
For north to assume its relevant position in the political economy of the country you must jointly resolve to regain the region’s lost glory of once being a home for groundnut and cotton pyramids. The region’s industrial estates must be revived. The vast agricultural potentials of the north must be explored and developed. The half-dead agricultural extension services unit in the state ministries of agriculture; must be resuscitated and backed with a strengthened tractor hiring schemes.
Basic education has not been receiving the attention it deserves in the north. While the system is still full of unqualified teachers, NCE graduates are roaming the streets in search of jobs. Counterpart- funding of the Universal Basic Education must be improved. I beg of you to kindly stop the politics played with the Almajiri programme by some of the out-going governors. It is time, I suppose, we had a strategic regional development plan to confront challenges that are common to most northern states. The task ahead of you is really herculean but we will continue to pray to Allah to make it easy for you.
Your Excellencies, I dissuade you from using late Alhaji Sir Ahmadu Bello’s name to achieve personal political gains. This was a man who as the premiere of northern region successfully did the work that is today shared among the 19 of you. I appeal to you to re-evaluate the activities of the Sardauna Foundation that was hijacked in 2008 from the Gamji Members Association (GAMA). The NSGF after taking it over suddenly subverted the initial proposals by GAMA (whose brain-child the Foundation was). GAMA had planned to appoint prominent northern traditional rulers and elder statesmen as members of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees (BOT). The NSGF’s out-gone chairman instead appointed his colleagues as BOT members; leaving out even the National Patron of GAMA, Justice Mamman Nasir, who the NSGF thought was better fit to serve as chairman of the Foundation’s Advisory Board. But should we keep changing BOT after every four years?
While wishing you a successful tenure, we pray to Allah (SWT) to guide you and us aright, amin.