By Umar Ardo

There is a paradox Northern Nigeria can no longer avoid. After six decades of producing Presidents, Heads of State, Vice-Presidents, ministers, military rulers and political kingmakers, why does the North remain, by nearly every objective measure, the poorest and least well-educated region of Nigeria? The numbers are not in dispute. The National Bureau of Statistics’ Multidimensional Poverty Index (2022) found that of Nigeria’s 133 million multidimensionally poor people, 65 per cent – some 86 million – live in the North, with state-level poverty incidence ranging from 27 per cent in Ondo to 91 per cent in Sokoto. UNESCO and UBEC estimates put Nigeria’s out-of-school population at between 18 million and 20 million, the overwhelming majority of them in the North – the largest of such population in the world! These are not the statistics of a region locked out of power. They are the statistics of a region entrenched in power but locked out of the benefits of its own power.

This is not an accusation against the North as a whole. It is a challenge to its leadership class. From Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and Alhaji Shehu Shagari through the military era; from Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Muhammadu Buhari, to Vice-Presidents Atiku Abubakar, Namadi Sambo and Kashim Shettima; from David Mark to Bukola Saraki; from Ghali Na’abba, Aminu Masari, Aminu Tambuwal, Yakubu Dogara, to Abbas Tajuddeen, Northerners have occupied the commanding heights of the Nigerian state, both executive and legislative, for a substantial part of our national history. Yet political dominance has not produced equivalent economic transformation. Muslim or Christian, the result is the same. That is the paradox the North must confront.

It would be unfair to attribute every failure of northern development to individuals, but the question must be asked: why did decades of access to the highest levers of national power fail to produce a sustained transformation of northern security, education, agriculture, industry, infrastructure and human capital? The answer is simple – the fundamental mistake has been to confuse political power with developmental power! A Northerner in Aso Rock or as Speaker is not, by itself, a development policy. Appointments, contracts and influence are no substitute for productive capacity. Political economy offers a vocabulary for this distinction: in the terms made famous by Acemoglu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail, extractive arrangements concentrate power in order to distribute spoils, while inclusive arrangements mobilise power to build capability. Northern Nigeria’s political class perfected the first without constructing the second.

The purpose of political power is not to occupy office. It is to produce outcomes. And this is true in both civil and military rules. In fact, the point becomes hardest to evade during the military era. Between 1966 and 1999, military governments exercised near-absolute authority over national resources, and northern officers held the supreme office for much of that period. Yet the era ended with the North still marked by educational backwardness, low agricultural productivity, weak industrialisation, poverty and inadequate infrastructure. Command authority was deployed to consolidate office, not to build the irrigation schemes conceived decades earlier and still underdeveloped today – Sokoto-Rima, the Chad Basin, Hadejia-Jama’are – nor the technical colleges and power infrastructure the region required. In short, the North did not lack access to power. It lacked the ingenious transformation that power was supposed to produce.

The civil democratic record raises the same question. Shehu Shagari presided over the second oil boom. Umaru Musa Yar’Adua inherited a country of enormous possibilities, though his presidency was tragically shortened by illness. Muhammadu Buhari returned to power in 2015 with an overwhelming northern mandate and extraordinary expectations. Buhari’s eight years are especially instructive. His administration implemented significant national infrastructure programmes and confronted formidable security and economic challenges. Yet by 2023 the North remained the epicentre of the country’s poverty, its educational deficits had deepened and insecurity had metastasised from insurgency in the North East into banditry across the North West and North Central. The question is therefore not whether Buhari did anything for the North. It is whether the historic opportunity of a northern presidency was converted into a historic programme of northern transformation. If I say the evidence does not support a confident yes, I am actually putting it most mildly.

Nor should the Vice-Presidents, Senate Presidents and NASS Speakers escape scrutiny. They have held the second, third and fourth highest offices in the federation. Under the Constitution, they are no ceremonial figures. They are all members of the National Council of State, National Economic Council and the Vice President even discharges executive functions at the President’s pleasure. Their offices are ultimately what the holders make of them. The relevant question is therefore not how many Northerners obtained appointments, but what strategic transformation of the North these officers championed – through the National Economic Council, the budget process or their personal political capital. How many children were returned to classrooms? How many hectares of irrigation were cultivated? How many dams were commissioned? How many railway lines were constructed? Did Rivers Niger and Benue get dredged? How many industries established? How many agricultural value chains transformed?

The answers to these questions will tell us whether Northern political leaders measured success by who controls Abuja, rather than by what Abuja produces for their people. A cycle of capturing power, distributing patronage, building loyalty and fighting to retain power can produce a powerful political class without producing a powerful economy.

Even though our leaders always have excuses, but these excuses also have their limits. Yes, colonial education policy created a deficit the First Republic could not close. The collapse of the groundnut economy and the Structural Adjustment Programme of 1986 deindustrialised the entire country. Since 2009, insurgency and banditry have devastated the entire North. These are real constraints, and they deserve serious consideration. But they do not survive examination as explanations. They applied with equal force to the South, which nonetheless built functioning commercial and industrial economies. No structural constraint prevented northern-led governments from declaring an education emergency, completing a single major irrigation scheme or building technical colleges at scale. Structural constraints explain slow progress; they do not explain its absence. And at some point, a political class that has controlled the federal government for the majority of Nigeria’s independent history cannot credibly portray itself as powerless before the federal government.

The deepest indictment against the North is that Northern power produced a prosperous northern political elite without producing a corresponding prosperous northern population. The distance between the federal patronage elite and the Almajiri child in the street is itself a political economy that demands explanation. This critique is therefore not North against South. It is the northern political class against the northern masses – and it is a question of political maturity, not regional disloyalty.

The North has land, livestock, agricultural potential, mineral resources, strategic geography, enormous markets and, above all, huge population. Its greatest unused resource, however, is human capital. Millions of northern children and young people lack the education, skills, health and productive employment needed to convert population into prosperity. A large population is not automatically an economic asset; population becomes an asset only when it becomes productive. The northern political class has consistently failed to organise the region to achieve that.

The choice before northern voters is no longer abstract; it is named. INEC’s final list of candidates, published at the end of October 2026, sets three leading tickets before the nation – and the North is the principal battleground of all three. First, the incumbent ticket. President Bola Tinubu and Vice-President Kashim Shettima seek a second term on the platform of the All Progressives Congress: a South-West/North-East, Muslim-Muslim pairing. Their record is before the electorate – the ‘Renewed Hope’ reforms of fuel-subsidy removal, foreign-exchange unification and tax reform; continued investment in rail and road infrastructure; and a recent turn toward state policing. The questions northern voters must put to this ticket are precise: after three and a half years with a son of Borno as Vice-President, what has measurably changed for the northern child in the classroom, the northern farmer in the field and the northern village in security? And what, with figures and dates, is promised for the next four years that the first term did not deliver?

Second, assuming they are able to upturn the Justice Lifu’s judgment on appeal and return on the ballot, the Atiku Abubakar–Rotimi Amaechi ticket of the African Democratic Congress: a North-East/South-South pairing balanced by religion. Atiku was Vice-President for eight years, during which the Obasanjo administration privatised scores of state enterprises and secured Nigeria’s landmark external-debt relief of 2005–2006; he now campaigns on restructuring, state policing and private-sector-led growth. Amaechi governed Rivers State for eight years and, as Minister of Transportation from 2015 to 2022, delivered the Lagos–Ibadan and Itakpe–Ajaokuta–Warri railway lines. The questions for this ticket are equally precise: when last in high office, what measurable transformation did either man deliver in the North – and why should this time be different?

Third, the Peter Obi–Rabiu Kwankwaso ticket of the Nigeria Democratic Congress: a South-East/North-West pairing, Christian-Muslim. Obi governed Anambra State for eight years on a reputation for frugality, savings and measurable gains in basic education and security; his campaign theme is moving Nigeria ‘from consumption to production’. Kwankwaso governed Kano twice, served as Minister of Defence, commands the formidable Kwankwasiyya movement and is remembered for mass school-enrolment drives and the overseas scholarship scheme that sent thousands of Kano students abroad. The questions here cut deepest: does Obi’s production agenda carry a northern chapter with named projects, states and budgets? And will Kwankwaso’s scholarship legacy be converted, at federal scale, from personal patronage into permanent institutional capacity?

The standard must apply to all: no northern vote should be delivered to any of them on the strength of identity, sentiment or incumbency. Identity is not a development policy – not for the incumbent and not for any challenger. Northern political organisations, like the LND, civic groups and professional associations are formulating a Northern Development Compact – an instrument to be signed and dated, against which every candidate can be scored publicly. It contains nine commitments, each with a quantified target and an outline costing:

One: Education. Return 10 million out-of-school northern children to the classroom on a credible path to universal basic literacy within a decade; at an estimated N65,000–N100,000 per child per year for teachers, materials and feeding, this implies N650 billion to N1 trillion annually – less than half of one per cent of GDP, and a fraction of what the region loses yearly to banditry and unproductive idleness. Two: Irrigation. Bring 1,000,000 additional hectares under irrigation within eight years by completing and expanding Sokoto-Rima, the Chad Basin, Hadejia-Jama’are, Bakalori, Dasin Dams and Zauro schemes, against Nigeria’s irrigable potential of over three million hectares; at standard development costs of US$5,000–10,000 per hectare, N8 trillion–16trillion over the period – an investment with direct returns in grain, vegetables, livestock fodder and farm employment.

Three: Livestock. Fully implement the National Livestock Transformation Plan across the 12 northernmost states – the federal design originally costed at N179 billion over eight years – with ranches, grazing corridors, veterinary services and dairy cold chains, ending the herder–farmer conflict that has destroyed more northern wealth than any single economic policy. Four: Power. Deploy 2,000 solar mini-grids and dedicated power to 50 agro-processing clusters, at an estimated US$2 billion to US$3 billion largely mobilisable from private capital under clear tariff and off-take frameworks, anchored on the northern rail spine.

Five: Technical education and youth employment. Build or rehabilitate 100 technical colleges and apprentice one million northern youths within four years – approximately N400 billion – converting the region’s youth bulge from a security risk into a skilled workforce. Six: Healthcare. Raise the Basic Health Care Provision Fund from one to two per cent of the Consolidated Revenue Fund and deploy the increment to primary healthcare centres across northern local government areas, with basic emergency obstetric care within reach of every northern community.

Seven: Security and rural protection. Recruit, train and equip 50,000 community and state-police personnel across the northern states, estimated at N250 billion over four years, so that farmers can return to their fields and markets can reopen – because no other compact item succeeds while the countryside is unsafe. Eight: Agro-industrialisation. Establish 50 agro-industrial clusters along the Kaduna–Kano and Kano–Maradi rail corridors, backed by industrial land titles, power, single-window regulation and export financing, at an estimated US$1–2 billion in blended public-private finance. Nine: Dual-carriage roads and standard gauge rail lines for both goods and passengers connecting all northern states with eight years.

In total, the Compact implies roughly N20 trillion–N30 trillion over eight years – in the order of 1.8 per cent of GDP per year. That is not a fantasy figure; it is what serious governments commit when they stop confusing the budget of government with the business of development. Every presidential candidate – incumbent or challenger – should be publicly scored against these nine commitments in open town halls to be organised by LND and other groups in all the state capitals of Northern Nigeria, and every northern vote should be earned through character, competence, due process and this credible, dated, costed programme – not conferred as an automatic gift of geography, ethnicity or sentiment.

By INEC’s revised timetable, the presidential election holds on Saturday, January 16, 2027; campaigning, which opened on August 19, 2026, closes on January 14, 2027. The candidates are known and the instrument now exists: the Compact above! The choice before northern voters is between politics as inheritance and politics as accountability. The question is no longer ‘Whose turn is it to become President?’ It is: ‘Which candidate has signed, and can be held to, the Compact?’

Let me conclude by stating that for too long, northern politics has asked: who is occupying Aso Rock? The better question is what Aso Rock has done – and will do – for the northern child who cannot read, the graduate who cannot find work, the farmer who cannot irrigate his farm, the entrepreneur without electricity, the family that lives below the poverty line and the villagers that are insecure. The real test of northern leadership is not how often the North has captured power. It is what the North has built with the power it captured. In the nine weeks before Nigerians vote, the northern electorate holds an instrument it has rarely used: the power to demand, in writing and with signatures, what decades of political dominance failed to deliver.

The North does not need another political victory that merely changes the occupant of the Presidential Villa – whether the returning incumbent, the veteran challenger or the new pairing from the South-East and Kano. It needs a political victory that changes the condition of its people. And before asking Nigerians for another mandate, every candidate should be prepared to answer one question – with the Compact signed as evidence: After all these years in power, why is the North still waiting for the development that power was supposed to bring?

Ardo PhD, resides in Abuja