THE NORTHERN ECONOMIC SUMMIT

On Thursday 17^th of March, the G-20, a group of pro-Jonathan PDP elders organized a Northern Economic Summit at the Trade Fair Complex, Kaduna. The Summit was preceded on Wednesday by a Technical Session of Experts which examined the nature of the underdevelopment of the north, its economic assets and strengths as well as limitations and weaknesses. It also examined options available to the region, and the roles which Local, State and Federal Governments, the Private Sector and the communities can play in re-inventing the northern Nigerian economy and placing it on the path of growth and development.  The Summit was attended by President Goodluck Jonathan, Vice President Mohammad Namadi Sambo, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Oladimeji Bankole and a host of other dignitaries. Papers were presented on various aspects of the Northern Nigerian economy, with recommended strategies on creating synergies and momentum among governments, the Private Sector and the communities in the North. In the end, a number of recommendations were adopted, and a commitment was made to pursue strategies for implementing them, but with a specific slant towards Jonathan’s Presidency.

          The Summit provided ample evidence of the deeply paralyzing poverty of the north. This poverty was evident in the obvious fact that the Summit was organized basically to shore up support for President Jonathan in the north by a group which is virtually irrelevant in the North or current Nigerian politics. Although it adopted an excellent strategy of attempting to focus on, and find solutions to underdevelopment of the north, this was not its primary goal. Consequently, it was boycotted by major segments of the Northern political establishment, intelligentsia and private sector, largely because these had issues to settle with President Jonathan and his G20 supporters.

          But the most glaring absence was that of Governors, most of them from the PDP stock, and the group with the most to gain by the Summit, and with the most to say about reviving the northern economy and addressing its dangerous levels of poverty and insecurity. It could be the case that many PDP Governors are attempting to put some distance between them and President Jonathan as a strategy for successfully walking a political tightrope in their respective States. It could also be the case that Northern Governors have nothing to offer in fora such as the Northern Economic Summit, although many of them sent Deputies and other officials. Or perhaps they were too busy campaigning to be re-elected, or install their own successors into offices which will have a tremendous impact in the lives of Northerners.

          The poverty of leadership in the North is evident in the type of people who played key roles in the Summit. These elderly gentlemen are both the cause and the consequence of the failure of the North to have a leadership succession plan. People who worked with the Sardaunas and Balewas are still clinging to the strings of powerlessness of the North, when their own grandchildren should be running the affairs of the North. It is little wonder that the house built by the leaders of their generation is fast crumbling. The North is busy fighting against itself in Plateau, in Bauchi and Borno states. It cannot find a common political platform to confront its many political problems; and its young people are either being wasted as almajirai, or are receiving no education or skills even though some of them go to schools; or wait every four years for elections so that they can earn a few Naira as political thugs.

          The north has frittered away its huge potential to develop as Africa’s entire breadbasket. Its infrastructure has decayed beyond repairs. It has been so substantially de-industrialized that even small and medium scale enterprises have virtually disappeared. The north now virtually lives on subventions from petroleum resources, and is being deservedly treated as a beggar region in a nation that by the day moves further ahead of it.

          These were some of the revelations of the Northern Economic Summit, an event engineered to give President Jonathan a foothold into political north. If President Jonathan had looked very deeply into the type of crowd that attended the Summit, he would have observed that it represented a fringe in the north, and may not, as it appears to promise him, deliver the north to him. He would also have wondered about what became of the old north, whose awesome political clout made it the bedrock of Nigerian politics. If it has to take President Jonathan’s supporters to organize an Economic Summit to look at the north, this should tell him that the north’s disunity may not make it difficult for him to win an election, with or without the old north. Because without leadership the old north is gone.