10 things Nigeria’s Northern States Governors Forum has to do to narrow the socio-economic gap between the two halves of the country

Ayo Akinfe 

(1) On February 4, 1931, at the beginning of the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialisation campaign, Joseph Stalin told the the First All Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry:  “We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in 10 years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.” I am perplexed that the elite in northern Nigeria do not hammer home this point every morning, afternoon and evening. They simply need to bridge the socio-economic gap between northern and southern Nigeria 

(2) For starters, they need to dedicate a minimum of 40% of their state budgets to education annually 

(3) Every northern state must pair with a sister state in southern Nigeria and make sure they keep apace when it comes to number or schools, hospital beds, kilometres of tarred roads, etc. These indices should be monitored by an independent body 

(4) Every northern state must set itself a minimum target of attracting $1bn in foreign direct investment annually 

(5) Every northern state must scrap spending on religious events like pilgrimages, mass marriages, building mosques, etc and spend that money on opening technical vocational colleges. Every local government area must have at least one technical vocational college 

(6) Every local government area must have at least one food processing plant that processes crops like groundnuts, millet, sorghum, gum arabic, etc 

(7) Every state must have a de-indoctrination centre where misguided and misled youths are offered therapy, counselling and vocational training. These centres will obviously serve as disarmament facilities too 

(8) Every state must set itself a 10-year deadline by which time it will become economically self-reliant. The idea is that after 10 years, every state in northern Nigeria will withdraw from the federal allocation programme 

(9) Given the abundance of sunlight across northern Nigeria, every state must set itself the goal of meeting all its power needs from clean energy within 10 years. Industries that will be built around this include solar farms, panel manufacturing, transformer manufacturing, etc 

(10) Each governor is legally obliged to create a minimum of 10,000 jobs a month. A failure to do so for two successive months will trigger automatic impeachment proceedings