Nigerians/Africans don’t love to solve problems. They just talk about it, pass around blame and that is it. I am still surprised that the North has no serious plans of ending insecurity in the North. Typical of us all, they think the insecurity will end with prayers or some sort of luck.
The chief driver of insecurity in the North is economic inequality, factors influencing it include access to education and poverty. Yet, there are no concerted efforts to end this.
The North can not end insecurity without declaring a war on population growth. Parents must be forced to give birth to only that which they can train without breaking the banks and the almajiri system must be prohibited. Household size is a huge influencing factor for poverty.
- JAMB Registrar Professor Oloyede, Fear Allah!
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I read a well-educated Northerner a month back on Facebook pointing to Elon Musk and some Western advocates of population increase as evidence that the North ( Nigeria) does not need population control. He didn’t get the context. Western countries can play with population growth because they have successfully made use of population control to plan for their development, having succeeded at that for decades, they now have the luxury to experiment with population growth. We have no such luxury
We believe by throwing money at the problem we can solve every problem. Yesterday, I read the VP flagged off the construction of an N47b permanent head office for the North East Development Commission and I began to cry. We are incurable. That commission can do with a small office while ensuring that 80% of its funding goes to where it’s most needed- reducing the out-of-school children in the north and improving the quality of education and access to business capital for its many youths.
In two years, that agency would have been overburdened with redundant staff members and its recurrent will make up 70% of its expenditure. Of the remaining 30%, irrelevant capex targeted at office expenditures will take the bulk, while the aim for which the agency was set up takes the least.
