By AbdulSalam Muhammad

KANO—Elder statesman, Tanko Yakasai, yeterday, implored northerners to stop grumbling over their low socio-economic status and think out of the box to effect a change.

Tanko Yakasai

Yakasai, in an interview with Vanguard, said: “Grumbling doesn’t take anybody anywhere, what carry people forward is creative ideas.

“Muting concrete ideas that can take the North and northerners forward, ideas that can lead the North to turn its attention to the improvement and modernisation of agriculture in the region” need to be exploited for the benefit of northerners.

He added: “Ideas that can make our Federal and state governments introduce irrigation farming, which can expand the production capacity of our agricultural produce manifold within a comparatively short period of time and create job opportunities for our teaming population and empower them economically, thereby taking them out of poverty on a permanent basis.

“Our leaders in public and private sectors should invest in modular power generation to create an enabling condition for the transformation of the North from an agrarian economy into industrial one.

“It is one of the trajectories to find a permanent solution to our manifold problems as northerners.

“God has blessed the North with land and natural resources as well as the population that can exploit the resources for the benefit of all.”