An open letter to the northern elite: Your legacy is burning

Let us begin with a fact that should shake every one of us to our core: in the recently released 2025 national university entrance examinations, not a single one of the top ten candidates in the entire country came from Northern Nigeria. This is not a mere statistic; it is the final report card on […]

Let us begin with a fact that should shake every one of us to our core: in the recently released 2025 national university entrance examinations, not a single one of the top ten candidates in the entire country came from Northern Nigeria. This is not a mere statistic; it is the final report card on six decades of failed leadership. It is your report card. And it reads “catastrophic failure.” 

We are here to speak a raw, unfiltered truth. The North is on fire, and the architects of this conflagration are not just anonymous forces, but the very class entrusted with its stewardship: the political, traditional, and bureaucratic elite. The 13 million Almajiri children roaming the streets of Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, and other core Northern states are not an act of God; they are a man-made humanitarian crisis, a direct result of your collective neglect, selfishness, and catastrophic prioritization of power over people. 

To understand how we fell so far, we must look back. We did not start from a position of ignorance. Pre-colonial Northern Nigeria was a beacon of learning, with a sophisticated, well-regulated Tsangaya (Qur’anic) system that attracted scholars from across West Africa. This system was systematically dismantled by British colonial policy, which defunded our indigenous education while promoting Western education in the South, deliberately creating a developmental gap. But our true betrayal came after independence. When we inherited political power, our leaders had a choice: launch an educational Marshall Plan to catch up, or consolidate political control over an uneducated populace. They chose the latter. The creation of 19 states from a powerful region fragmented our unity into dependent fiefdoms, competing for federal crumbs instead of building human capital. 

The result is what we see today—an educational genocide. The once-revered Almajiri system, where children migrated for knowledge, has been deformed into a network of child neglect and exploitation. These 13 million children are not in school; they are on the street, hungry, vulnerable, and utterly unprepared for the modern world. Worse, they are a prime recruiting ground for the very bandits and insurgents tearing our region apart. You are now spending billions in “security votes” to fight a monster that you created and continue to feed through your negligence. 

Look at the map of Nigeria’s development, and the truth is undeniable. States in the South and the more Christian-influenced Middle Belt like Plateau and Benue have drastically lower numbers of out-of-school children. This is not a coincidence. It is the direct result of a cultural and religious priority placed on formal education—a priority our leadership has failed to instill and fund. While their children are in classrooms, ours are begging at intersections. While their elites build universities, our elites build palaces. 

But the failure runs deeper than just poor governance; it is a systemic cancer of selecting and rewarding failure. You chose the wrong persons as governors, and these governors, in turn, recommend their cronies and lackeys—people exactly like them—to be made ministers, ambassadors, and heads of parastatals. 

You fraudulently elect local government chairmen and councillors with no qualifications, who run the councils as their personal fiefdoms, squandering the allocations that should build primary schools and clinics. Then, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, you turn around to blame the President for appointing the “wrong people” to represent the North in his cabinet. You had every opportunity to protest these appointments and present credible alternatives, but you chose not to. Why? Because the system you built thrives on patronage, not merit. 

In the end, we have the wrong people representing us at every level—from the council to the federal cabinet. And then we complain that we are not getting our fair share. The problem is with us. For as long as we choose and reward the wrong people for positions of power, we are actively building our own underdevelopment and signing our own death warrant. 

The insecurity you fund with security votes is a direct product of the uneducated, hopeless youth you abandoned. Your businesses fail because the Northern market is poor and insecure. Your political relevance is eroding because an uneducated populace can be manipulated for a season but cannot produce the leaders or the intellectual capital to compete in a knowledge-driven world. The chaos is no longer at your gates; it is in your living rooms, kidnapping your kin and threatening your assets. 

But there is a path to redemption, though it demands a sacrifice and a radical rethinking you have so far been unwilling to make. We must declare a Five-Year Educational State of Emergency across all Northern states. This is not a time for token gestures. It requires a radical commitment of a minimum of 40-50% of every state’s budget to education. We must establish a Northern Governors’ Performance Accountability Council with real teeth—one that publishes scorecards naming and shaming failing leaders and ties federal allocations to verifiable results in the classroom. 

Crucially, we must have the courage to admit that a one-size-fits-all national curriculum has failed our peculiar context. We are too far behind to simply follow the same pace. Therefore, during this emergency period, we must excuse ourselves from the rigid national curriculum and mandate our own experts to develop a Northern Educational Curriculum (NEC). This curriculum would be tailored to our present reality and ambitions. It would integrate core literacy and numeracy with vocational skills, digital literacy, and a modernised, reformed Islamic studies syllabus. This is not about lowering standards, but about creating a relevant and accelerated pathway to ensure our children can both compete nationally and meet the specific economic needs of the North. 

The Almajiri system must be transformed, not abandoned. We must take those 13 million children off the streets and place them in modern, integrated schools that use this new, relevant curriculum. We need a “Northern Teachers Corps” to recruit and train the best minds to teach this generation. 

The 13 million out-of-school children are not just a problem; they are the greatest untapped asset the North possesses. If educated under a system designed for their success, they could power an economic renaissance. The choice is yours. You can continue on the path of self-interest and be remembered by history as the generation that presided over the collapse of a great region. Or, you can choose redemption. You can invest in the child in Rijiyar Zaki and secure a legacy that will outlast any bulletproof car or foreign bank account. 

The time for excuses is over. The youth are watching, and history is waiting. The final act of your leadership will be judged by what you do next.

 

Malam Hussain mni, sent this piece from Jos