By TUKUR DANMUAZU
(First posted in March 2020 and later published online in February 2021)
“We must ask and take our fair share of every government employment at whatever cost. No people have ever prospered when their resources, opportunities, and chances are blocked and dominated by others. Our constant preaching of peace must stop: justice and equity must be our new slogan.”
Northern Nigeria has more graduates and professors than South Africa. The real problem is not as Southerners paint it and you echo it like empty halls.
Practically, millions of Northerners are either unemployed, misemployed, or underemployed. Our problem is that our chances are blocked, and our resources are dominated by Southerners who paint the wrong picture for fools to believe them.
75% of government spending is cornered by Southerners via the domination of salary earning, contracts, projects, bail outs, and other interventions. Trade and industries are dominated by Southerners who have easy access to multi-billion credit facilities, courtesy their domination of state financial structure and instruments, and institutions.
Every ministry is dominated by them. All our markets are monopolized by them due to their control of capital that enable them to finance business and take more risk due to ease of access to money. They control their markets by regular disruptions of our businesses officially and by direct frequent violence unofficially. Their control of and easy access to liquidity enable them to be more enterprising business wise. They buy our goods cheap and sell theirs exorbitantly.
To preserve the exploitative status quo, they spread false version of the reality. They centralize oil as the main source of wealth so that our attention will be far away from other sources of wealth they dominate. Oil is less than 10% of Nigeria’s GDP. They tell us we are the parasite and we are lazy and we are uneducated to instill a sense of guilt, self hate, and inadequacy in us. We swallow all these falsehood uncritically because we made our source of daily information their media and books. They over concentrate on our weaknesses and ignore almost completely their own weaknesses. An average Southerner having mild cold will almost by default blame it on Northerners and will not lack northerners who “speak the truth” to agree with him.
How can uneducated people have a multitude of unemployed graduates? How can lazy people be producing the food of the nation? Why do millions of Southerners troop to the poor parasitic North and refuse to leave? The South said so, and it is?
What we need is a political economic solution. We must take control of our local markets, our institutions and our businesses in their land must be given due attention and protection and any act of disruption by way of constant destruction must be paid back in due measure without listening to their victimship outcries. They fear separation more than us because their weak economic foundation, especially the west entirely dependent on controlling government resources.
We must ask and take our fair share of every government employment at whatever cost. No people have ever prospered when their resources, opportunities, and chances are blocked and dominated by others. Our constant preaching of peace must stop: justice and equity must be our new slogan.
The real problem is believing in the propaganda of the enemies, which saps our resourcefulness and infuses our senses with feelings of backwardness that really do not exist or are caused by false perception. The greatest defeat one can suffer is to see oneself as projected by one’s enemies.
Almajiri is a system suffocated by lack of finance. Poverty is a direct result of economic domination and exclusion. Degrees are not unavailable. Marrying four wives will not stop as it is never a problem but a great social system. Once we assert control on what is rightly ours, that self concious timidity will evaporate and be replaced by confidence and bold enterprise. Until to the seventies, we were the richest people in Africa. As the central government grows and takes control of resources, our wealth progressively dwindles. As the southerners intensify drums of hate and aggression, we draw back to give peace, which is never forthcoming, a chance.
Try asking for proportionate representation in all government employment in all institutions and at all levels. They will cry out about mediocrity supplanting merit as if those half literate southerners dominating the place are Einstein incanates. Or they will blackmail you with Islamization.
Try treating their traders in our markets as they treat ours and they will cry xenophobia as if the regular denial of market space, heavy taxation, constant disruption of business and officially sanctioned harassment of our traders in their land does not exist.
Try replacing Southern union leaders and foreign sponsored NGOs operating in the North with our own people, and they will start wailing about marginalization.
Well, their era of dominance and false propaganda is coming to an end with the coming of age of young northerners who could no longer accept marginalization because of blackmail or threat. These new bold Northern youth have seen how Southerners cowered when asked to leave the North two years ago. Their cries for secession are empty ruse.
We will be better off without them, and they will definitely be worse off without us. They know we lack nothing, while their millions selling substandard, fake good, drugs and inordinately high interest bank loans fleecing the north and feeding on cheap food and services will have nothing on returning back home Their franchise firms and industries will lose over 100 million costumers overnight, which is more than their home market demand.
Soon, we will ask for equity or call it quit. We know who we are, and we know our strength.
