By Mohammed Bello Doka
29 June, 2026.
Following my recent article, Reflection: How Festus Adedayo Exposes the Yoruba Project to Destroy the North, from OBJ to BAT, I received an overwhelming number of emails, messages, and comments. I am particularly responding to those from the South who, rather than contemplating the dissolution of this dysfunctional union, propose a return to regional government with total resource control. To me, this is merely an official way for the South to absolve itself of any responsibility for the monumental challenges facing the North today. It is a convenient escape route, a way to claim federalism while ensuring the structural imbalances that have enriched the South and impoverished the North remain firmly in place.
Let me state this categorically: I believe the North is far better equipped to fix its own challenges alone than under any regional arrangement where the federal government retains control over security, defense, international relations, and the economy. Under such a regional setting, the North would continue to be the supplier of cheap food and raw materials to Southern industries. We would remain a dumping ground for Southern processed products, perpetually locked into an economic relationship that extracts our value and returns it to us as finished goods at inflated prices. The economic divide would not narrow; it would widen. Our agriculture would remain untaxed and unmonetized, our minerals would continue to flow southward for refinement, and our people would remain consumers of Southern wealth rather than creators of their own prosperity. The federal government would still control the security apparatus that has failed to protect our farmers and communities, leaving us vulnerable while Southern cities enjoy relative peace and uninterrupted commerce. And the economy, still centrally managed, would continue to prioritize Southern infrastructure over Northern survival, as evidenced by the fourteen to fifteen trillion naira allocated to the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway while Northern roads crumble and the River Niger, which powers the national grid, receives a pittance for maintenance.
The hypocrisy of this sudden Southern embrace of regionalism is breathtaking. Let us remind ourselves of history. Nigeria began as a democracy with a federal constitution that guaranteed a large measure of autonomy to three, and later four, regions. The First Republic, from 1960 to 1966, operated a parliamentary democracy modeled along British lines with powerful regions controlling their own resources, police, courts, and civil services. It was the South that destroyed this arrangement. In January 1966, a group of mostly Igbo army officers staged a bloody coup, assassinating the Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the Premier of the Northern Region, Ahmadu Bello, and the Premier of the Western Region, Samuel Akintola. The coup plotters suspended the regional constitution, dissolved all legislative bodies, banned political parties, and formed a Federal Military Government that was more central in nature. General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo who emerged as Head of State, then promulgated Unification Decree No. 34 in May 1966, which abolished Nigeria's federal structure and consolidated power at the centre. Northerners interpreted these actions as an Igbo-led conspiracy to impose domination over the North. The South dissolved the regional system that gave us autonomy. The South imposed a unitary, centralized military regime upon us. And now, after decades of military rule and centralization, the same South claims to be the victim and demands a return to regionalism to "save Nigeria." This is not a call for justice. It is a call for Southern control dressed in the language of federalism.
The truth is that the only thing uniting the South today is its desire to destroy the North. This is not rhetoric; it is a documented historical pattern. Olusegun Obasanjo sowed the seed of Northern economic destruction through privatization policies that systematically dismantled Northern industry, closing eighty-four companies across the North, killing all textile factories in Kaduna by the end of 2007, and throwing over one hundred and seventeen thousand textile workers into unemployment while Southern industries flourished. Goodluck Jonathan sowed the seed of our security challenges, presiding over the deterioration that allowed Boko Haram to metastasize and banditry to take root. And now Bola Ahmed Tinubu is institutionalizing the destruction, placing every instrument of state power in Yoruba hands, using anti-corruption agencies as weapons against Northern elites while Southern figures with credible financial accusations face no action, relocating federal institutions to Lagos, and systematically disenfranchising the North through insecurity that threatens elections in eight frontline Northern states. The South sowed the wind of centralization in 1966, and now it reaps the whirlwind of a centralized federal system that it controls. Yet it blames the North for the fallout and claims victimhood. This is historical revisionism of the highest order.
The North has sacrificed enormously to Nigeria. We produce over seventy-five percent of the nation's staple crops, including rice, maize, sorghum, millet, and beans. In 2025 alone, national rice production stood at 9.37 million metric tonnes, with Northern states contributing the bulk. We produce ninety percent of Nigeria's livestock, feeding the nation's protein needs. Our dams—Kainji, Jebba, Shiroro, Zungeru—account for eighty percent of national hydro capacity, powering the grid that lights Southern cities. We host seventy percent of Nigeria's mineral deposits, including gold, lithium, limestone, and now significant discoveries of platinum and rare earth elements in Kaduna State, described by the Minister of Solid Minerals as a world-class polymetallic mineral province. Over seventy million hectares of arable land lie beneath our feet, representing nearly eighty percent of Nigeria's cultivable area, capable of producing enough food to feed the entire continent if properly harnessed. Yet what do we receive in return? Insults. Threats. Six to eight hours of electricity daily while the South enjoys twelve to eighteen hours. A single coastal road costing more than three times the combined budgets of ten Northern states. Twenty million Northern children out of school. The highest maternal mortality rate in the nation. Over forty percent of our population living below the poverty line. And intellectuals like Festus Adedayo telling us our suffering is self-inflicted.
A marriage where one partner makes it an article of faith to destroy the other cannot be redeemed by simply sharing kitchens. That marriage can only be dissolved. The South destroyed the regional system that gave the North autonomy. The South imposed centralization. The South now controls the central apparatus. The South uses that apparatus to extract our wealth, marginalize our people, and blame us for our suffering. And now the South wants to return to regionalism, not to empower us, but to absolve itself of responsibility for the chaos it created. Let us go our separate ways. Let us stop pretending that regional government will solve anything when the federal government still controls the security forces that are deployed against us, the economy that extracts our wealth, and the courts that legitimize our dispossession. Let us stop pretending that we can reform a system that was designed to exploit us.
To those who think the North cannot survive alone, I say: think again. We have a population of over one hundred and thirty million people, making us more populous than most African countries. We have over seventy million hectares of arable land, traversed by river basins and aquatic reservoirs that allow for three seasons of harvest every year, yet only twenty-three percent of that land is fully utilized. We hold vast deposits of gold, lithium, cobalt, diamonds, zinc, iron ore, and rare earth elements. Zamfara State alone possesses sixty out of the country's total solid mineral deposits. The Kushaka schist belt is one of Nigeria's known gold mineralized belts. Nasarawa State hosts significant lithium deposits. Kaduna State has been confirmed as a world-class polymetallic mineral province with significant deposits of gold, nickel, copper, lithium, and rare earth elements of exceptionally high grades. If the North chose to die of starvation, let her die, for she would deserve neither to live nor tears. But she will not die. She will thrive.
From year one of independence, the North will raise the needed capital to fund its government simply by taxing agriculture and its exports southward, which today we cannot do because of one Nigeria. Our current predicament deprives us of these funds through the non-taxation of agriculture and the tax bills that rob us of our Value Added Tax to the South. The new VAT sharing formula, based on consumption, disadvantages the North, where poverty is highest and consumption lowest, while the South, with its thriving industrial and service sectors, captures the lion's share. We are taxed on what we consume, but the taxes we could have collected from our agricultural production and mineral exports flow southward, captured by Lagos and Port Harcourt, refined and monetized in Southern cities, and then returned to us as development aid we never asked for and infrastructure that never comes.
The North is not a conquered territory. It is a sleeping giant that records every slight. The records are being kept. The tables will turn. Let us go our separate ways, not in anger, but in the sober recognition that some unions were never meant to last. Nigeria was built by the British for their convenience, not for our prosperity. The South destroyed the regional system that worked for us. The South imposed a central system that works for them. The South now demands a return to regionalism to escape accountability for the devastation they have wrought. We have spent sixty years trying to make this union work, and the evidence is overwhelming: it does not work for us. It will never work for us. The only thing that will save Arewa is the courage to walk away.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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