The North of Nigeria is a land of paradoxes that have finally turned poisonous. It is a region that organises and meets more fervently and asserts its political will more aggressively than any other part of the federation.

From the Northern State Governors Forum, NSGF, to the Northern Elders Forum, NEF; Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF; and a plethora of “youth” forums, the calendar is perpetually marked by summits of “leaders” clad in flowing embroidery. Yet, as these men retreat into air-conditioned chambers to deliberate on the “North’s interests”, the land they claim to represent is conflagrating.

It is time to be blunt: the North, historically, has been an expensive, debilitating drag on the Nigerian project. For decades, the Arewa elite has treated Nigeria as a personal fiefdom, ruling for 46 of our 65 years of independence, producing a region that has become a global headquarters for multidimensional poverty and fertile ground for jihadist terror.

The statistics are indicting. While the South struggles to build human capital, the Northern elite reinforces a traditional, almost pathological, disdain for Western education among the Talakawa. While the leaders of the East and West push for mass literacy as the engine of freedom, the Northern aristocracy chooses a different path. They pamper their own children in the best of schools around the world, while leaving the children of the poor to roam the streets as Almajiri. These abandoned millions are a ticking time bomb, radicalised and weaponised by the very clerics and politicians who should have protected them.

Now, the jungle has matured. The seeds of the Almajiri system have blossomed into the thorns of Boko Haram, ISWAP, Mahmuda, Ansaru, Lakurawa, armed Fulani herdsmen and a hydra-headed monster of banditry that has turned the North into an open theatre of wars and criminality.

The audacity of the Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF, reached a new, annoying peak last week. After their 38th board meeting in Abuja, the Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu-led group admitted that the North has effectively plunged Nigeria into a “state of war”. They demanded that President Bola Tinubu adopt a “war-time approach,” redirecting national resources away from infrastructure, health and education toward the security budget.

This is the height of morbid self-entitlement. Since 2012, Nigeria has budgeted between N32.88 trillion and N33.02 trillion on a security crisis birthed and bred in the North. In 2020, we spent N974 billion; by 2025, that figure has ballooned to a staggering N6.57 trillion. We are burning the nation’s future to put out a fire lit by the selfishness and visionlessness of some Northern leaders.

By calling for a “war-time” redirection of funds, the ACF is essentially asking the peaceful, law-abiding taxpayer in the South and the Middle Belt to surrender their right to development to pay for the North’s self-inflicted wounds. Why should the child in Umuahia or the trader in Akure go without roads, schools and hospitals because Northern leaders failed to educate their youth? Why must the rest of the country live in a state of perpetual fear and economic stagnation because certain elites fostered “chummy” relationships with global jihadist networks for political leverage?

My people have a proverb: “Nkita agagh ara nsi eze eree ewu”—the dog cannot eat excrement while the goat suffers the rotten mouth. The Northern leadership has eaten the “excrement” of bad governance, religious extremism and feudal oppression, yet it is the “goat” of the Nigerian federation that is suffering the stench. We are being made to pay for the wickedness of a class of people who were pampered by the state through school, given the juiciest federal appointments, and yet ended up pushing their region – and Nigeria – back towards 1804.

Let us speak of the “united” North. It is a myth—an illusion created to extract resources from the centre. This “unity” only exists when there is a need to negotiate for a larger share of the national cake or to block progressive policies. Where is this unity when it comes to stopping the jihadists advancing through Niger, Kwara, Kogi and Benue? Or dismantling the nursery beds of terrorism? The truth is that many of these leaders are complicit. They sponsor the violence, sabotage government efforts and import more foreign Islamist guerrillas, only to turn around and play the victim when the monster they reared begins to eat them.

The North is the frontline of Nigeria’s agricultural sector, yes. It is a vast land with a peasantry willing to toil. But agriculture cannot sustain a nation when the farmers are being slaughtered in their fields by the very “bandits” some of their leaders import, finance and protect.

Nigeria is suffering from a terminal disease, and the Northern elite is the primary vector. There is a limit to how long a body can sustain a gangrenous limb. If the ACF and their ilk continue to demand that the entire nation be sacrificed on the altar of their failure, they must not be surprised when some parts of the country begin to look for the exit door. Separation or de-amalgamation is no longer a fringe conversation; it is fast becoming a logical conclusion. People who cannot agree on the basic values of education, secularism, constitutionalism and the sanctity of life should never have been forced together.

Arewa leaders, hear this: your entitlement mentality has become a death warrant for the country. You have ruled for 46 years and produced a region that is stunting the nation and diminishing Nigeria before the world. That is enough. If you cannot lead your people out of the dark ages, do not expect the rest of us to sit in the dark with you. Nigeria’s future depends on people being forced to stand on their own.

If the North cannot find its way, it should at least stop blocking the way of everyone else.