Politics of the North’s educational backwardness (1)
Written by Rotimi Fasan
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
THE Northern arm of the Nigerian ruling elite in the last months of last year held a summit that generated attention largely for reason no more than the belated realisation by the Northern oligarchy that something urgent has to be done about the North’s educational backwardness.

Virtually all states north of the Niger River fall into the category of what is politically defined as educationally disadvantaged.

This is a serious matter in a country with a low national literacy level- just about 25 per cent. Indeed the North, being a huge part of Nigeria with huge population figures, must account mainly for the country’s low literacy.

The strange thing is that in the nearly half a century of Nigeria’s independence the educational gap between the North and the South has shown little inclination to being closed.

And with statistics suggesting that more, not less, Nigerian children of school-going age from the North stay out of school, it is clear that the country is not about resolving a major issue of discord between the north and the south.

The fact being that the educational imbalance between the north and the south has a political manifestation in the country’s “federal character” or “quota” system. These are policies of affirmative action designed to ensure equality/equity in ideally competitive situations such as appointments or admission into federal agencies.

The application of such policies has often been marked with acrimony even in the most organised societies as between Whites and African-Americans or Hispanics in the United States.

Some Whites have even argued that the phenomenal rise of Barack Obama was both aided by and a subtle manifestation of an affirmative action policy.

In Nigeria many Southerners believe those federal character and quota system policies have not only played havoc on merit but have been applied to the clear disadvantage of Nigerians of Southern origin.

There is no doubt that there will always be the need for one policy or another of affirmative action in a multi-ethnic set-up with a twisted federal constitution like ours.

Such affirmative steps sometimes assume a gender dimension as we have in Nigeria, as elsewhere, where a certain percentage of positions in public offices or educational institutions are reserved for women. Affirmative action as a political strategy is largely corrective.

That is, it is meant to correct observed shortcomings which if left unattended would be detrimental to good relations.

If eligibility into certain positions is solely based on the attainment of a certain level of educational qualification, for example, it is apparent that certain regions of the country would always lose out. Federal character and quota system become handy policies in such situations.

But as corrective tools they do not necessarily have to be without time limit or they would outlive their usefulness and become harmful even to those they were meant to help.


Which is one reason they have proven detrimental to good relations in Nigeria where their application has been basically political and then in circumstances seen as unduly favourable to the North.

What is worse, the application of the policy does not seem to be working within a time frame nor is it being monitored to see to what extent it has corrected the anomaly it was designed for, namely, closing the wide educational gap between the North and the South.

There will never be a time limit to the application of Nigeria’s affirmative action policies for so long as nothing or little is being done to address the slow pace of education in the North.

And to the extent that the widening educational gap between the North and the South remains to that extent would Nigeria’s development be held back and her attainment of nationhood remain a mirage.

This is another way of saying that the problem of the backward educational development of the North is a problem for all Nigerians (Hausa, Igbo, Ijaw, Yoruba etc), inviting a solution that cannot be left alone to the North.


But as in every other human problem those directly concerned must recognise there is a problem and take the first steps in finding a solution for it. Which is the very area the Northern ruling elite has been remiss in the many decades it has been in the leadership saddle.

Thus, the realisation by the current class of the ruling elite that something urgent needs to be done is a welcome development, however late it has taken in coming.

What we now have to examine is the strategy it wants to adopt in addressing the matter. But before that a word or two on previous attempts to address the lingering problem of educational backwardness in the North.

It is one of the cruel ironies of Nigeria’s political history that the North whose leaders have ruled Nigeria for the best part of the country’s independence should bear the unenviable distinction of being the poorest region in the country. That point was again affirmed by Chukwuma Soludo the Central Bank Governor only recently.

Nigerians from other regions particularly the Niger-Delta may find such a claim difficult to accept and for very good reasons too.

Governance in Nigeria is more or less a family, group or ethnic business. Nigerian leaders govern first in their own interest, then in the interest of their families and their ethnic groups.


http://nigeriaworld.com/cgi-bin/axs/ax.pl?http://odili.net/news/source/2009/feb/17/312.html

I dunnoooo,


The South is pretty bleeped up too. I wasn't impressed to my trip in Ibadan. Dirty Dirty Dirty. Poor people, and robberies in abundance.

One must carry a visible weapon to not get harassed.