The North Is Fast Asleep, We Must Wake Her Up Or She Succumbs

by Mohammed Bello Doka 

24 May, 2026.

The North stands on the precipice. Not the kind of precipice that allows for a slow and gentle descent, but the kind where the ground has already begun to crumble beneath the feet of more than 100 million souls who call this region home. According to the most recent authoritative demographic data from the National Population Commission, the 19 northern states and the Federal Capital Territory collectively house over 110 million people, representing more than half of Nigeria's total population. This is not a small community or a minor constituency. This is a civilization of more than 100 million human beings, a population larger than that of Germany or France or the United Kingdom, and yet this giant lies in a coma, breathing but not living, existing but not thriving. Around her, the vultures of poverty, ignorance, and violence circle with increasing confidence. The question before us is no longer whether the North will wake, but whether she will wake in time to save herself, or whether she will succumb to the decay that has been allowed to fester in every corner of her political and social existence. Make no mistake, the current political structure is not merely failing the North. It is systematically destroying her, and those who hold the reins of power are either too blind to see the destruction or too comfortable in their thrones to care.

The statistics are not mere numbers. They are the screams of a dying civilization. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has reported that nearly 1 in 7 people nationwide, which amounts to approximately 35 million Nigerians, are likely to face acute food insecurity during this year's lean season from June to August, and the burden falls overwhelmingly on northern Nigeria . 35 million human beings facing hunger. That is more than the entire population of many African nations. In the northeast and northwest alone, an estimated 6.4 million children aged 0 to 59 months are projected to be acutely malnourished through September 2026, including 2 million suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition . 6.4 million children whose bones will grow brittle, whose minds will never develop to their full capacity, whose futures will be stolen before they have even learned to dream. The United Nations has declared this one of the world's largest hunger crises, and the IPC analysis has confirmed that across the northeast, northwest, and north central regions, high rates of disease, weak health systems, inadequate food consumption, and insecurity linked to armed conflict, insurgency, and clashes between farmers and herders are driving these high levels of acute malnutrition . The philosopher Ibn Khaldun, writing in the 14th century, understood this dynamic with terrifying clarity. He recorded the words of Aristotle as establishing political wisdom in 8 sentences, the last of which declared that justice is the harmony that makes the world a garden. 7 centuries ago, Ibn Khaldun concluded that injustice ruins civilization, and the ruin of civilization has as its consequence the complete destruction of the dynasty. The North is watching this prophecy unfold in real time.

The education crisis is equally devastating. While the federal government has made efforts to reintegrate children into schools, with the Minister of Education reporting that more than 1 million children have been returned to classrooms in the last 30 months , the scale of the problem remains catastrophic. The government's own mapping exercise has revealed that in Kaduna State alone, despite revisions to earlier estimates, approximately 700,000 children remain out of school . When this exercise is completed across all northern states, the total number of out-of-school children in the region remains in the millions, and the Minister of Education has stated that while the revised national figure is below 8 million, this is still far too high . A generation is being raised in ignorance, and ignorance is the most fertile soil for extremism, banditry, and despair.

The drug abuse epidemic among northern youths has reached catastrophic levels. According to the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, approximately 15 million Nigerians aged 15 to 64 have used illicit substances excluding alcohol and tobacco, a prevalence rate of 14.4 percent which is nearly 3 times the global average. The NDLEA has reported that between January and March 2026, the agency made 3,913 arrests, secured 581 convictions, and seized over 113,000 kilograms of illicit substances. Between January and March 2026, the NDLEA also secured 974 convictions, including 11 drug kingpins sentenced to a combined 254 years in prison. What is most alarming is that these drugs are terrifyingly accessible. Tramadol tablets are sold for as little as 500 naira, bottles of codeine syrup for under 1,000 naira, and young people in rural communities have turned to sniffing petrol fumes, glue, paint thinners, and vulcanizing solution because they cannot afford even these cheap alternatives. Experts from the Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Aro Abeokuta, have disclosed that roughly 75 percent of their patients present with drug-related problems. The NDLEA Chairman, Brigadier-General Mohamed Buba Marwa, has warned that the majority of drug users are within the productive age bracket of 25 to 39, meaning that the North is losing not only its children but its workforce, its parents, its future leaders to an epidemic that the political class refuses to acknowledge.

Yet the most damning indictment of the current leadership came into sharp focus during the recent All Progressives Congress primaries held across the country on May 21, 2026. Across the north, the same people who have been killed, raped, and abused by bandits and insurgents were paid tokens to gather en masse and rubber-stamp the choices of the political godfathers. According to reports, 13 incumbent governors seeking re-election in 2027 were set to return as consensus candidates with no rivals for their tickets . States where the process was a mere affirmation of incumbents included Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Zamfara, and Sokoto . The same communities where children go to bed hungry, where mothers have lost husbands to bullets, where young girls have been stolen from their schools and never returned, these communities were mobilized with a few thousand naira and some bags of rice to wave their hands and cheer for the very leaders who have presided over their destruction. How desperate must a people be to receive warmly the representatives of a system that has abandoned them to hunger, ignorance, and violence. The warning signs are everywhere, written in blood and tears across the 19 states of the north, but those who hold power have covered their eyes and stopped their ears.

It is clear that all hope is lost in the current crop of leaders in the North. They have no ideology. They have no blueprint. They have no philosophy beyond the accumulation of wealth and the preservation of their own positions. They do not care if the North burns, as long as they are not the ones standing too close to the fire. Plato understood this pathology when he wrote through the voice of Socrates that the state in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, while the state in which they are most eager to govern is the worst. The north is overrun with men who crave power not because they wish to serve but because they wish to consume. They are the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, and the people of the north are the prisoners, watching the flickering images and believing that this darkness is all that exists. Someone must enter the cave and lead them out.

The solution begins with a complete and total rejection of the current political structure. Not reform, not renovation, not the reshuffling of the same tired faces into different ministries. The North requires a revolution of the mind, a fundamental reorientation of what politics means and who has the right to practice it. The first step is to seize power from the docile leaders who have treated governance as a business venture and the people as raw material to be exploited. This does not mean violence, for violence has already brought us nothing but grief. It means organization, mobilization, and the systematic building of alternative power structures that operate outside the corrupt patronage networks that have strangled the north for decades. It means refusing to vote for any candidate who cannot articulate a clear political philosophy rooted in the actual needs and aspirations of the northern people. It means holding traditional rulers accountable for their complicity in the destruction of their own domains.

The new political structure must be built on a philosophy that is authentically northern, drawing from the deep wells of culture, religion, and tradition that have sustained this region for centuries, but interpreting them for the challenges of the 21st century. Ibn Khaldun wrote that the world is a garden the fence of which is the state, and the state has the authority that defines proper behavior, and proper behavior becomes policy when directed by the ruler. The ruler, he continued, is an institution supported by the soldiers, and the soldiers are helpers who are maintained by money, and money is sustenance brought together by the subjects, and the subjects are servants who are protected by justice. This is not a call to authoritarianism. It is a call to accountability. The north has forgotten that the subjects are not servants of the ruler but servants who are protected by justice. When the ruler ceases to provide justice, the contract is broken, and the people have not only the right but the duty to demand a new arrangement.

The blueprint for northern transformation must include the immediate establishment of a Northern Development Corps, modeled not on the corrupt and inefficient government agencies that currently exist but on the disciplined, mission-driven organizations that transformed post-war Germany and Japan. This corps would be responsible for a compulsory one-year service for all northern youth who have completed secondary education, during which they would receive basic military training to address the security crisis, agricultural training to address the food crisis, and teaching certification to address the education crisis. Within 5 years, this corps would deploy 1 million young people across the north as community guards, agricultural extension workers, and classroom instructors. Within 10 years, the corps would have created an entire generation of northerners who understand that their survival depends not on waiting for handouts from Abuja but on working together to rebuild their own homeland.

The economic pillar of the new structure must prioritize agricultural processing and manufacturing over the extractive economy that has enriched only the political class. The north has vast reserves of gold, tin, limestone, and uranium, and its agricultural potential remains largely untapped, but the current structure allows these resources to be extracted by companies registered in Lagos or abroad, with minimal royalties flowing back to the communities from which the wealth is taken. A new political structure would ban the export of all unprocessed minerals and agricultural commodities, requiring that value-addition happen within the northern states. This would create factories, processing plants, and the jobs that young people desperately need. This is not socialism. This is the common sense that built every successful economy in human history.

The security pillar must recognize that the current arrangement, where the federal government controls all police and military forces, has failed catastrophically. The IPC analysis has confirmed that armed conflict, insurgency, and clashes between farmers and herders continue to drive displacement and acute malnutrition across the north . The north needs a regional security framework that operates under unified command but draws its personnel and intelligence from the communities it protects. This framework must integrate reformed traditional institutions, with emirs and chiefs regaining their historical role as custodians of local security, but only on the condition that they meet measurable benchmarks for reducing violence in their domains. Those who fail should be removed, and while the hereditary bloodline must not be jettisoned, competence must be prioritized within the same family line. A clear guideline must be set: within each ruling house, the candidate for the throne shall be selected based on demonstrated ability to maintain peace, deliver development, and uphold justice, with the elders empowered to pass over an incompetent heir in favor of a more capable relative from the same bloodline. This preserves tradition while ensuring that leadership serves the people rather than the other way around.

The educational pillar must address both the quantity and quality of schooling. The current system, which leaves millions of children in Quranic schools without basic literacy and numeracy, is a crime against those children and against the future of the north. A new political structure would mandate that every Quranic school incorporate a curriculum of mathematics, science, and civic education, funded by a tax on the wealth of the political elite who have enriched themselves while the children of their constituents go untaught. Parents who refuse to send their children to school should face consequences, and girls must be given special incentives to attend and complete their education, including conditional cash transfers that make it more profitable for a family to educate a daughter than to marry her off as a child bride.

The ideological pillar must articulate a clear answer to the question that nobody in the current political structure dares to answer: what does the North aim to achieve. The answer is not complicated. The North aims to achieve a future where no child goes to bed hungry, where every girl and boy completes at least 12 years of quality education, where no community lives in fear of bandits or insurgents, where young people have dignified work that allows them to marry, build homes, and raise families, and where the wealth of the north belongs to the people of the north. This is not utopian. This is the baseline standard of decent human existence, and it has been achieved in dozens of countries that started with far fewer advantages than the north possesses. The only missing ingredient is political will, and political will will not emerge from the current crop of leaders who have grown fat on the misery of their people.

The North is fast asleep, and we who love her must wake her up. This is not a task for politicians. It is a task for every parent who has watched a child fall ill from malnutrition, for every teacher who has struggled to instruct 50 students in a classroom without a roof, for every farmer who has watched bandits steal the harvest he spent months cultivating, for every young person who has looked at the future and seen only a void. The philosopher Socrates, who was executed by the democracy of Athens for the crime of telling the truth, taught that an unexamined life is not worth living. The north has been living an unexamined political life for decades, accepting the lies of its leaders, accepting the crumbs that fall from their tables, accepting the degradation of its children as if it were the natural order of things. It is not natural. It is not inevitable. It is the result of choices made by human beings who have chosen to enrich themselves at the expense of their own people, and those choices can be unmade by other human beings who choose differently.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, as recorded in Sahih Muslim, "The best of your leaders are those whom you love and they love you; you pray for them and they pray for you. And the worst of your leaders are those whom you hate and they hate you; you curse them and they curse you" . This hadith is authentic and verified from Sahih Muslim, Book of Leadership (Kitab al-Imarah), hadith number 1228. The political class of the north has earned the hatred of the people they claim to serve. They have broken every covenant, violated every trust, and exhausted every reservoir of patience. The time for waiting is over. The time for waking has come.

We must wake her up, or she succumbs. There is no third option. The north cannot continue on its current trajectory for another decade without collapsing into a failed region, a cautionary tale that historians will cite alongside the great civilizational collapses of the past. But collapse is not destiny. It is a choice, and the choice belongs to the people of the north. Wake up. The dawn is still possible, but only if enough of us refuse to sleep through the sunrise. The north is calling. She is calling from the hungry bellies of her 6.4 million malnourished children, from the empty desks of her millions of out-of-school youth, from the burned fields of her farmers, from the tears of her widows. She is calling for leaders who will lead, for citizens who will demand accountability, for a political structure that serves the people rather than devouring them. She is calling, and we must answer before it is too late.

Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected] 

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