SENATOR Ahmed Makarfi was governor of Kaduna State for eight years. Thereafter, he was in the Senate for four years, but the people denied him a space when he sought re-election, though his party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, returned him unopposed in the primaries.

It is great to hear him discuss poverty in the North with the flourish he did at a book launch in Abuja last week. He analytically linked the unrest in the North to high illiteracy and poverty levels. He was right.

However, he failed to say what he did in his 12 years of occupation of democratic spaces, eight in executive capacity, to solve these problems in Kaduna, where the bombs have been going off, though in less succession than in Maiduguri.  Nor what the present governments that his party dominates can do to stop them.

Poverty is not peculiar to the North. In all parts of the country, policies of various governments have resulted in alienation of the people and gross denial of their abilities to fend for themselves as governments appropriate all properties, without an inkling of how to use them for the prosperity of Nigerians.

What appears unique to the North is the extent that its leaders go to ensure that the people are not enterprising. They do not encourage education, apparently in morbid fear that if the people were educated, they would ask more questions about how their governments use their resources.

They further use ethnic and religious sentiment to wield the North into an unapproachable block of belief in things and ways that hamper the future of the region. The same leaders lament its poverty.

Unemployment rates are grim no matter where and who states them. They are drearier in the North even with agriculture soaking up the figures. The current figures may not be representative of the real situation. Rural unemployment is hardly reckoned with, the stand being that the rural populace is uneducated, unskilled, and unemployable.

Without bating an eye, we readily admit rural Nigeria only as mere statistics. “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 August.

“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, but job growth makes demands on functional education systems, as well as infrastructure that will enhance the creation of the jobs. Too much emphasis is laid on earnings from oil. The sector employs less than one per cent of the labour force. It demands high skills that are not readily available in the current circumstances.

Makarfi continued, “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.”

Makarfi missed the point by thinking in blinkered regional terms. When the North or any part of Nigeria is poor (even the ECOWAS region), it affects the capacity of other parts to live well. What solutions would he propose from his eight-year experience as governor?

We can do better by confessing our roles in the poverty that hit Nigeria and seeking forgiveness through measures that will ameliorate it. The situation is too tenuous for apportioning blames and moribund analyses. Makarfi knows these, but like his class, he has elected for half measures, expecting full results.