How the northern elite deliberately underdeveloped northern Nigeria

The underdevelopment of Northern Nigeria is a profound tragedy with deep historical roots, extending far beyond simplistic ethno-religious explanations. While ethnic hegemony, and religious conservatism have played painful roles, they have been systematically instrumentalized and perpetuated by a ruling elite that have, for decades, prioritized power preservation over people’s progress. These Northern elites, a consortium of traditional aristocrats, political stalwarts, religious manipulator and bureaucratic beneficiaries, engineered a political economy of deliberate stagnation, the toxic fruits of which are the pervasive insecurity and instability crippling Nigeria today.

Behold, the genesis of this crisis lies in a calculated governance model built on exclusion and ignorance. Post-independence, the Northern elite, wary of the more educated South and the potential loss of their own hegemony, consciously failed to invest in mass, modern and futuristic education. Education was not seen as a universal right or a tool for development, but as a threat to a social order built on feudal loyalty and religious misinterpretation controlled by a select few. Schools remained inadequate, and curricula often emphasized religious studies over the critical thinking, science, and vocational skills necessary for socioeconomic mobility and engagement with a fast-advancing modern world. This created a vast population left behind, dependent on traditional structures, and vulnerable to manipulation.

In essence, this deliberate educational deficit served a direct political purpose. An uneducated populace is easier to govern through fear, sentiment, indoctrination and dogma. By keeping the masses (across Northern Nigeria) in a state of economic precarity and intellectual dependency, the elites ensured a reliable voting bloc and a buffer against progressive challengers. Poverty was not an unfortunate byproduct of policy but a tool of exploitation and control. Year after year, staggering budgets were consumed by opaque contracts, political patronage, and sheer graft, while infrastructure crumbled, healthcare collapsed, and industries died. The famed groundnut pyramids and vibrant textile cities of the North were allowed to vanish, not by accident, but through a criminal neglect of diversification and a failure to create an economic environment beyond primitive rent-seeking. At once, the elites, collectively seemed blind to the bleak future of the region, but not to that of their kits and kins!

Religious conservatism, arguably a genuine cultural force, was amplified and weaponized within this vacuum. When people are denied quality secular education, economic opportunity, and a functional social contract, they naturally seek meaning, identity, and hope elsewhere. The elite, through their control of traditional Islamic institutions and their willingness to fund and empower extremist Salafist clerics as a counterforce to more moderate Sufism, fostered a religious landscape increasingly intolerant and divorced from the practical needs of development. This created a fertile ground for radical ideologies that offered simplistic explanations for complex miseries; explanations that always pointed fingers at external enemies, “corrupting” Western influences, or other religious groups, never at the northern elite themselves.

This writer wonders why every Northern Politician(s) appeares to suddenly become “activists” and “voice of the masses” every time a Southerner presides over the affairs of the nation. But, when our brothers from the North is in charge, “activism” is considered as sin, and the masses are left to “pray to Allah for a better Nigeria?” What hypocrisy!

Backed by a feudal lord named Muhammadu Buhari, Northern Nigeria has for decades, been a draw-back to the rest of the nation. Rather than open the region to innovations and progress, these same elites would rather create instability and religious cornerstones to hold the entire nation to ransom. Overtime, foot soldiers and agents of destructions used by northern politicians against the nation outgrow their masters. Interests changed. Goals diversified.

The inevitable explosion of this volatile mix is the catastrophic insecurity we witness today. The army of unemployed, uneducated, and disillusioned youth, products of this system, became the perfect recruiting ground for Boko Haram, banditry, and other violent enterprises. Boko Haram’s initial rhetoric, though twisted and brutal, correctly identified the elite’s “Western education” as a system that had failed the North, though it offered only nihilism in return. Banditry is essentially a savage form of primitive accumulation, a criminal economy born from the ashes of legitimate opportunity. The elite’s response has often been cynically transactional, at times negotiating with or even allegedly sponsoring these groups for political leverage, further embedding violence into the political ecosystem.

Therefore, to attribute the North’s underdevelopment and Nigeria’s insecurity solely to religion is to absolve the architects of this disaster. The real condemnation falls upon the generations of northern elites who chose to rule over people rather than develop a nation. The bulk of the blames should fall on so-called religious leaders of northern extraction who deliberately misinterprets the Holy Books for their own gains. Guilty are also northern politicians and oligarchs who traded textbooks for dogma, factories for feudal praise-songs, and infrastructure for private jets, laciviousness, and, importantly, foreign bank accounts! They cultivated a wilderness of despair and are now shocked that monsters have emerged from it.

To crown it all, the insecurity ravaging Nigeria is not an external invasion; it is a homegrown harvest, the bitter yield of seeds sown in the barren fields of bad governance, intentional ignorance, and exploitative conservatism. Until this truth is confronted, and the stranglehold of this failed elite is broken through mass arrests of sponsors of terrorism, genuine mass education across Northern Nigeria, inclusive economic revitalization, and accountable governance, the cycle of violence will continue, consuming the future of an entire region and holding a nation hostage. May the sun shine tomorrow…

Adoke writes from Abuja, Nigeria.
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