By Ochereome Nnanna
THE   recently concluded Northern Economic Summit in Kaduna provided another opportunity for soul-searching over failed dreams in the northern part of Nigeria. For me, it was an opportunity to ponder the failed dreams of Nigeria as a nation.

I am not hereby placing the blame for Nigeria’s under-performance solely on the doorstep of our leaders from the North. Everybody has a slice of the blame just as everybody has a role, duty and responsibility to turn the situation around. I am singling out Northern leaders because “to whom much is given, much is expected”.

In our 50 years of independence, Northerners led the country for a total of 37 years. The British colonial masters manipulated the system and handed over power to the North as the new overlords of the emergent entity. Northern politicians could win federal elections without bothering to campaign in the South. It was, therefore, not necessary for the new masters to draw up a plan to build a nation of proud citizens who truly belonged.

Rather, Northern leaders came to Lagos, the then capital of Nigeria, like conquerors, to dominate an imperial booty. The Northern leaders’ parochial blueprint turned Nigeria into a country where subsisting sharp differences in ethnic, religious, sectional, indigene/settler, cultural and linguistic relationships blunted the imperative of common citizenship.

There is no gainsaying the fact that the leaders of the Northern Region also had a visionary agenda for economic and political development of their region, just as did their peers in the Eastern, Western and Midwestern regions.

Even with its educational disadvantage, the North as a region never lagged behind in growth, especially in the areas of agriculture and industrialisation. When some people talk about Northerners as “parasites”, it has nothing to do with the ordinary people. The evidence of the sheer industry of the people of the North is there for all to see.

Even after the nation had long been brought down to its knees by bad leadership with Northern leaders at the commanding heights, it is the ordinary people of the North who now feed the nation through, largely, subsistence agriculture.

If you come down to many cities in the South, the bulk of the daily paid labourers waiting at street corners to be hired for the most menial of jobs are people from the Northern part of the country. If these people are given the necessary encouragement and assistance, they will constitute a major part of the growth engine of a new Nigeria in terms of human capacity.

The alleged “parasitism”, however, resides at the top echelon of the Northern leadership. Sadly enough (and true to the nature of parasites), the malaise has spread to the elite from all sections of the country. It is no longer a preserve of people from a section, but we will not forget who introduced it and why.

If Nigeria was seen as booty of Northern leaders at independence, it became doubly so after 1970, when the North successfully led a coalition of all other Nigerian nationalities, with the full technical assistance of some world powers, to prevent the secession of Biafra, which was chiefly championed by the Igbo people.

The military, under the leadership of the North with their coalition partners, the West, saw Nigeria’s economic and political commonwealth as their well-deserved plunder of conquest. In the euphoric scramble for this oil-fired commonwealth, the military leaders failed to carry the ordinary people of the North along as Sardauna Ahmadu Bello and his disciples had done.

Where the Sardauna spent sleepless nights thinking of how to uplift the quality of lives of the Northern people to the extent of neglecting to enrich himself and family, the reverse was the case for the successor military buccaneers and their civilian cronies. The new class became so engrossed in the “grabfest” that they forgot the common people.

Consequently, as Nigeria crumbled the North crumbled even faster since its common people had not yet been capacitated enough to compete with their peers from the South in a modern world. Northern leaders allowed the imperial mentality maliciously implanted in their psyche by the British colonialists to take them too far away from the orbit of reality.

As a result, Nigeria as a nation could not be built and the North as a former region could no longer move forward. Even the parasitic elite can now no longer count on their imperial privileges because the scientific mechanisms of democracy and constitutionalism have reduced the imperial powers which only colonialism and militarism can maintain.

What is the way forward for the North? The answer is simple. The way forward for Nigeria is the way forward for the North, not the other way round. In other words, the North must no longer see itself in the old light of an imperial power over Nigeria. For 50 years, it was tried, tested and it failed.

Nobody can bring it back. Northerners must begin to see themselves as part and parcel of a Nigerian nation that belongs to everyone, where there are neither special privileges nor special impediments for any citizen based on tribe, religion, language and what have you. Because of its remaining geopolitical advantages, the North has a duty to lead the way in the search for a new Nigeria based on brotherhood, justice and equal rights.

When Nigerians are ready to choose a Northerner as president of Nigeria, we will not look for the Atikus, Babangidas, Ciromas, Kaitas and Yakassais who still live under the delusion of regional superiority complex.

We will look for the El Rufais, Nuhu Ribadus, Buba Marwas, Shamsideen Usmans and especially the Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’s: men of vision, decision and action; patriots who are not slaves to their religious and regional circumstance, but people who have demonstrated their capacity to work for Nigeria and all Nigerians.