LAMENTATIONS about poverty are  becoming rituals that issue from most gatherings of the North’s leadership.

Fortunately, enough voices within the North blame the region for failing to use 38 years of leading national governments to develop the North. Governor Aliyu Babangida of Niger State shifts the blame to traditional rulers, who he said discourage education.

Traditional rulers blame governors. They are all right. The North’s low scores on human development indices benefited from all round neglect of its peoples by the elites, who want the less educated to folk around them as if it is the essence of their leadership.

Every aspiring Northern leader thinks blaming others for the poverty in the region is the perfect shot to promote himself. Things are worse — many northern leaders cannot situate the roles they played in taking the North years back, away from the solid foundations that Sir Ahmadu Bello laid.

If there are security concerns in the North, it is blamed on poverty. When Northern elites launch empowerment programmes that reduce young people to commercial motorcycle riders, without skills, without education, and without a future, in case they survived accidents that are part of their profession, the blame belongs to others.

Senator Ahmed Makarfi, Governor of Kaduna State for eight years and Senator for four years, all on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, which has controlled the Federal Government in 13 years and dominated the country, last August launched his own attack on enemies of the North.

What did he do in eight years of occupying executive space in Kaduna State? Poverty is not peculiar to the North. Government policies have alienated ordinary people, denied them abilities to fend for themselves as governments appropriate all properties, without using them for the prosperity of Nigerians.

The North is unique in the great length its leaders go through to stall the enterprising spirit of the people. They do not encourage education. They know a mass-educated North will be out of their control. They further use ethnic and religious sentiments to mould the North into an unapproachable block of beliefs that hurt the region.

The rates for incidence of poverty in the North are high. The average is over 80 per cent, when the national average is about 60 per cent. “About a quarter (25 per cent) of the working-age citizens are not in the labour force at all. Only 10 per cent of the labour force is in formal waged employment with the rest in the low paid insecure sector,” Richard Sandall of the World Bank said at a public event last year. “Despite its riches from oil and growing economy, waged employment in Nigeria is actually falling. Only with job growth can Nigeria meet its commitments to poverty reduction and its Vision 2020 objectives.” Sandall is right.

Makarfi had said: “Though crises are a part of human nature, our experience in Kaduna has taught us that government has a singular leading role to play in reducing their frequency, averting them where possible, blunting their ferocity when they inadvertently happen as well as rapidly containing them and returning situations to a state of normalcy. This can be done by simply, but importantly, earning the confidence of the people.”

He admitted that: “Religious and ethnic inclinations are beginning to dwarf service and development and the capacity to deliver them. This is what usually heightens tension. Sometimes, the scope of crises widens because Nigerians are highly mobile.”

Is there anything new in this position? The North, and other parts of Nigeria, need new leaders, those who will not spend years talking about the same challenges in different ways, as they have been doing with electricity and education.