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North represents all that is wrong with Nigeria, Yoruba elders reply Arewa

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North represents all that is wrong with Nigeria, Yoruba elders reply Arewa

The North has been described as constituting all the problems and obstacles plaguing Nigeria’s development.

These problems according to the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE) range from terrorist acts, wanton killings by herdsmen, religious crisis to other negative indices of quality of life.

This was stated by the secretary general of the YCE, Dr. Kunle Olajide, when he spoke on Thursday in Oshogbo, the Osun State capital, at the first memorial lecture of Nathaniel Abimbola, organised by the state council of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ).

He was responding to the alleged statement by the chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and a former Inspector General of Police, Alhaji Ibrahim Coomassie, who said that Nigeria could not survive without the North.

But speaking at the memorial lecture of Abimbola, a reporter with the Osun State Broadcasting Corporation, who died in an accident along the Ife-Ibadan Expressway last year, Olajide wondered how Nigeria cannot do with the North whose menaces such as Boko Haram have continued to cost the country billions of naira and human resources.

“The newspapers reported the Arewa Consultative Forum as saying that Nigeria cannot survive without the North. Whatever was meant by that statement credited to the ACF chairman remains to be understood.

“However, I congratulate him for accepting that the North as it is today represents all that is wrong with Nigeria. The North-East is ravaged by insurgency costing the country billions of dollars annually. The North-West is home to religious crisis, the North-Central is ravaged by herdsmen of northern extraction. Collectively the North is home to all negative indices of the quality of life. Infant mortality rate is highest in the North.

“Illiteracy rate is highest in the North and the number of out-of-school children is highest in the North. The poverty index in the North is high while the twin evil bedeviling the North is feudalism and religious fatalism. It will not be out of place to say the North has in fact been dragging Nigeria down since independence. All sorts of mischievous phrases were coined by the very tiny political / military elite of the North to give undue advantage to the North,” the YCE secretary said.

READ ALSO: ‘Without the North, Nigeria can never survive’- ACF

Speaking further, Olajide explained how the North staged-managed the military coup that saw President Shehu Shagari removed from power on December 31, 1983, saying that the northern oligarch fearing that there could be revolution in the country, allegedly planned the coup with the military in order to ensure that power remained in the North.

Olajide, who was visibly unhappy with the “Nigeria cannot survive without the North” comment, went further to say that the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo spent greater part of his political career and his resources struggling to liberate the talakawas of the North from their elite, but that feudalism and religious fatalism frustrated his efforts.

“Let me assure Alhaji Coomassie that much as we want a fair and egalitarian Nigerian society, it is not at all costs. The rest of Nigeria will survive, flourish and join the league of first world countries within two decades if the North exits. If it desires to leave Nigeria, join me in saying goodbye to the exiting North, I wish them a safe journey into the desert,” he added.”

 

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