By Mohammed Bello Doka
18 June, 2026
There is a haunting silence echoing across the villages of Zamfara, the ravaged farmlands of Borno, and the collapsing classrooms of Katsina. It is not the silence of peace. It is the deafening quiet of a civilization that has lost its moral compass. We gather in Abuja and London to diagnose the Northern Nigerian quagmire—the banditry, the record hunger, the mass illiteracy—and we point fingers at politicians, foreign mercenaries, and climate change. But we are deliberately avoiding the festering, gangrenous wound at the heart of our tragedy.
We have completely collapsed the system of mentorship that once held our societies together.
Today, the North is bleeding. In 2025 alone, banditry claimed 2,724 lives and over 3,141 souls were abducted—including nearly 400 schoolchildren in Kaduna. Poverty has ravaged the region with a staggering 57.4% rate compared to just 21.2% in the South. Over 10 million children roam the streets without education, and literacy in the North-West languishes below 40%. Nearly 6 million people in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe now face crisis-level hunger. We are trapped in a cycle where poverty fuels insecurity, insecurity destroys schools, and destroyed schools perpetuate poverty.
But these are merely symptoms. The root cause is a generation raised without fathers, without guides, without mentors.
The Great Betrayal of Our Children
In the olden days, no Emir ascended the throne without sitting at the feet of wise counselors. No scholar issued a fatwa without decades of tutelage under a master who corrected his ego. No trader built a fortune without learning ethics, patience, and communal responsibility from an elder who had walked the path before him. Mentorship was the sacred thread that wove our values—mutunci, hakuri, gaskiya—into the fabric of leadership, business, and faith. It was the mechanism that ensured continuity, character, and accountability.
Today, that thread has been severed by our own hands.
Look at the elite. The wealthy politician, the billionaire contractor, the cloistered religious leader—where are their children? They have outsourced the mentorship of their offspring to expensive private academies in Lagos and exclusive boarding schools in the United Kingdom. These children return with foreign accents, disconnected from the soil of their ancestors, trained to manage portfolios but completely alienated from the communal soul of Arewa. They do not know the Gandu system; they cannot speak the language of the peasant. Their mentors are Western textbooks, not the village imam or the district head who once grounded leaders in local realities.
For the struggling middle class, hope has been outsourced to a crumbling, rotten local education system. Overcrowded classrooms, unpaid and demoralized teachers, and a colonial curriculum have become the de facto mentors of our children. Instead of learning integrity, they learn survival. Instead of foresight, they learn how to cheat exams and cut corners. The system does not produce thinkers; it produces desperate job-seekers.
And for the poor—the vast, silent, hungry majority—mentorship has been outsourced to the hypnotic, glowing screens of social media. With over 70% of Nigeria's out-of-school children in the North, the smartphone has become the village elder. But what wisdom does it dispense? Degenerate skits, get-rich-quick scams, and the glorification of thuggery. The poor are not being mentored; they are being brainwashed by algorithms designed to distract, not elevate.
The Tyranny of Toxic "Godfatherism"
Let us be brutally honest about the "mentorship" plaguing our political and economic spheres today. When a Northern elite takes on a "mentee," he is not looking for a successor; he is looking for a slave. He seeks sycophants who will protect his corrupt empire and brainwash the public in his favor. He deliberately suppresses the mentee's unique vision because an independent, successful protégé is a direct threat to his throne.
Conversely, when the desperate, hungry youth seeks a mentor, they are not looking for wisdom or character development. They are looking for access—access to cash, to political protection, and to the brutal power that keeps the bandits at bay. The young man does not ask, "What values do you uphold?" He asks, "What contracts can you give me?" This transactional rot has turned mentorship into a parasitic relationship. The mentor breeds dependency; the mentee breeds ingratitude. Neither builds the Northern nation.
The Entertainment Industry: A Moral Abattoir
Nowhere is this collapse more glaring than in our entertainment industry. We have left the cultural shaping of an entire region to the most morally bankrupt individuals among us—influencers and musicians who grew rich not through virtue, but through viral notoriety. These are men and women with massive followings, yet they lack the basic education to differentiate right from wrong.
Instead of using their platforms to resurrect our dying traditions—our poetry, our history, our proverbs—they have turned the industry into a mercenary tool for the political class. They are paid propagandists, willing to peddle any narrative for a fat check. In their desperate, undignified quest for clicks, likes, and views, they glorify thuggery, promote drug abuse, and mock the very institutions that once held us together. And the followers—largely uneducated, unemployed, and famished—consume this trash like manna from heaven. They are being mentored by empty vessels, and they are filling themselves with emptiness.
The Foreign Vultures Circling Overhead
This vacuum of native mentorship has left us vulnerable to foreign exploitation. With a porous 1,497-kilometer border with Niger, arms and fighters flow freely across our frontiers. The geopolitical chess game between France, Russia, and the United States plays out on our soil. Niger's military junta accuses France of funding Boko Haram with billions of CFA to destabilize the Sahel. Whether true or not, our leaders lack the institutional memory and strategic mentorship to negotiate from a position of strength. They trade sovereignty for arms. They become puppets dancing to foreign strings because they have no local elders to remind them of the cost of selling out. The bandits are partially fueled by illicit mineral exploitation—gold and uranium—extracted by foreign interests in collusion with local proxies.
Our leaders have no mentors to tell them that the path of the sellout leads to ruin. Because the mentors are dead. We killed them with our greed.
The Way Forward: The What, The Why, and The How
We cannot fix this by simply throwing money at "mentorship programs." That is a bandage on a severed artery. We cannot have a successful mentorship system without a clear, binding, and ruthless Development Plan.
For every successful mentorship system, there must be an aim, a plan, and a system—the WHAT, the WHY, and the HOW.
· The WHAT: What are we mentoring our children for? Without a target—be it agricultural mechanization, ethical governance, or technological innovation—mentoring is just wandering aimlessly in the dark.
· The WHY: Why should they listen? Without a compelling narrative that ties their personal success to the collective survival of Arewa, they will continue to listen to the corrupt influencer and the predatory godfather.
· The HOW: How will we sustain it? Without a structured system integrated into our state budgets, religious institutions, and traditional councils, these efforts will crumble with the next election cycle.
Conclusion: Build Mentors or Build Coffins
This is not a call for pity; it is a clarion call to war—a war against intellectual laziness, cultural decay, and the deliberate underdevelopment of our people. The foreign powers exploit us because we are fractured. The politicians buy our entertainers because we are distracted. The bandits recruit our youth because we are desperate. And we are desperate because we have no one to show us a different path.
Arewa does not need another billionaire hoarding wealth in Dubai. Arewa does not need another ruler drunk on power and adulation. Arewa needs mentors—men and women of character, integrity, and competence who will pour their souls into the next generation. But a mentor without a roadmap is just a wanderer. A mentee without a destination is just a soldier without a war.
In our next article, we shall dissect the practical scaffolding of this vision: the Arewa Development Plan. We will outline the specific economic pivots, educational overhauls, and security reforms required to pull our region from the abyss.
But first, we must confess our sin. We have abandoned our elders for foreign textbooks, our scholars for social media, and our values for viral clicks. The North has no fathers today. We are orphans ruling a graveyard. It is time to rebuild the family—starting with the soul.
The North must choose: Build mentors, or build coffins. There is no middle ground.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
Tags
Opinion