By Lawan Musa Danlami (Baba Lawan)
December 28, 2025
For more than two decades, Northern Nigeria has steadily moved from promise to precarity. The widespread insecurity, entrenched poverty, youth alienation, and even the growing whispers of foreign security interests on Nigerian soil did not emerge suddenly. They are the cumulative result of prolonged leadership failure since the return to civil rule in 1999. Political economist Claude Ake once observed that Africa’s fundamental problem is not the absence of resources, but the failure of leadership to convert those resources into meaningful human development. Northern Nigeria stands today as a painful illustration of this insight.
At the heart of this crisis lies the systematic neglect of education. Public schooling deteriorated while population growth surged, leaving millions of children without access to quality learning, skills acquisition, or viable pathways to employment. Reports by UNICEF and the World Bank consistently show that Northern Nigeria accounts for one of the largest concentrations of out-of-school children in the world. Scholars such as Attahiru Jega have long warned that mass educational deprivation does not merely produce illiteracy; it creates a population that is politically manipulable and economically expendable.
This neglect manufactured vulnerability. As development economist Paul Collier has demonstrated, societies with large numbers of unemployed and uneducated youths are statistically more prone to violence and instability. In Northern Nigeria, abandoned children became easy targets for recruitment into extremist movements, criminal gangs, and bandit networks—not necessarily driven by ideology, but by hunger, exclusion, and desperation. Many others, completely innocent, became victims of collective violence and military operations for crises they neither caused nor understood.
Rather than confront these dangers, much of the political class adapted to them. Poverty itself became a political instrument. Richard Joseph’s theory of prebendalism helps explain how public office in Nigeria is often treated as a source of personal entitlement rather than public service. Within this system, youths are mobilized not as citizens with rights and futures, but as tools—used as political thugs during elections and discarded afterward. Jean-François Bayart’s notion of the “politics of the belly” further explains how elites maintain power through patronage while society deteriorates beneath them. In Northern Nigeria, this meant grooming enforcers instead of engineers, mobilizing mobs instead of mentoring minds.
The management of public resources reveals the same pattern of failure. Despite oil revenues, ecological funds, security votes, and massive federal allocations, many northern communities remain without functional schools, hospitals, clean water, or basic infrastructure. Development theorist Amartya Sen argues that development must be measured by the expansion of human capabilities, not by the size of budgets or revenues. Judged by this standard, Northern Nigeria’s post-1999 leadership record is deeply troubling. Oil wells coexist with illiteracy, budgets exist without classrooms, and allocations flow without accountability. As Nigerian scholar Pat Utomi and organizations such as Transparency International have repeatedly emphasized, corruption is not merely the theft of money; it is the systematic destruction of opportunity and life chances.
Perhaps the most tragic irony lies in elite reproduction. While public institutions collapsed, political leaders ensured private excellence for their own children—elite schools, foreign universities, and global networks. Frantz Fanon warned that post-colonial elites often inherit power without transforming exploitative structures, becoming local substitutes for colonial rulers. Northern Nigeria’s ruling class reflects this pattern, with power circulating among familiar faces while the majority remain excluded. The same abandoned youths are then mobilized during election cycles to sustain the very system that marginalizes them. Over time, this has eroded faith in democracy itself. As Larry Diamond notes, democracy without social justice ultimately loses legitimacy and breeds instability.
The internationalization of insecurity is therefore unsurprising. When a state fails to secure the welfare of its people, external actors inevitably move to fill the vacuum. Security scholar Barry Buzan reminds us that insecurity is not merely military; it is social, economic, and political. Northern Nigeria’s crisis has attracted external attention because its internal foundations—education, opportunity, trust, and governance—were neglected for too long.
Yet this moment is also a moral reckoning. Decline is not destiny. Regions fall because of decisions, not fate. Chinua Achebe’s famous assertion that Nigeria’s problem is fundamentally a failure of leadership remains painfully relevant. Northern Nigeria now faces a historic choice: continue recycling power, poverty, and despair, or pursue accountability, inclusive education, youth empowerment, and genuine development. History is already recording this chapter, and beyond history lies moral judgment. Leadership, especially in a region that values faith and justice, answers not only to the people, but to God and posterity. The question is no longer what went wrong, but whether those in power are willing to change course before neglect hardens into irreversible collapse.
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