The Northern Perpetual-Power Promise — Act V: The Paradox of Power Without Development

The most striking single fact about Northern Nigeria, after sixty-four years of disproportionate federal political control, is that it is the poorest part of the country. On every measurable indicator of human development — income per head, multidimensional poverty, school enrolment, female literacy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, electrification, formal employment, life expectancy — the North-West and North-East geopolitical zones rank last among the six zones of the Federation. The North-Central zone (the Middle Belt) consistently ranks fourth. The South-West, South-South and South-East zones consistently rank first, second and third in some order across indicators. The pattern has held across every National Bureau of Statistics survey since the first NBS *Nigeria Living Standards Survey* of 1985, through the NLSS rounds of 2003, 2009, 2018 and 2022.

## The 2022 NBS Multidimensional Poverty Index

The National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022, the most comprehensive contemporary baseline, recorded the following multidimensional-poor headcount ratios by zone:

• North-East: 76.5 per cent
• North-West: 75.8 per cent
• North-Central: 66.3 per cent
• South-South: 50.9 per cent
• South-East: 49.1 per cent
• South-West: 40.1 per cent

Absolute numbers tell the same story differently. Of the 133 million multidimensionally poor Nigerians the 2022 survey identified, 86 million (65 per cent) lived in the three Northern zones. The five worst-performing states on the index — Sokoto (90.5 per cent), Bayelsa (88.5 per cent — the single Southern outlier driven by Niger Delta deprivation), Jigawa (87.7 per cent), Kebbi (87.0 per cent) and Gombe (86.2 per cent) — included four Northern states. The five best-performing states — Ondo (27.2 per cent), Lagos (29.4 per cent), Abia (29.8 per cent), Edo (35.9 per cent) and Anambra (40.3 per cent) — were all Southern.

## Education and female literacy

The 2018 NDHS recorded the proportion of women aged 15–49 with no formal education by state. In the North-West it ranged from 66 per cent (Sokoto) to 45 per cent (Kaduna). In the South-West it ranged from 6 per cent (Lagos) to 15 per cent (Osun). The disparity is replicated in every UNICEF, UNESCO, and federal Ministry of Education survey of the last twenty years. The Out-Of-School Children figure of roughly 18.5 million in Nigeria (UNESCO 2022 — the highest in the world) is approximately 70 per cent Northern, with girl-child non-enrolment in the North-West and North-East exceeding 50 per cent.

The Almajiri system — the historic Quranic apprenticeship by which Northern boys are sent to live with mallams for religious education — encompassed an estimated 10 million children in the North in 2019, according to the federal Ministry of Education's audit. The 2020 federal *Compulsory, Free Universal Basic Education Act* applies to every Nigerian child of school age but is unenforced in Northern states with the constitutional authority over primary education. The state-level political will to enforce primary-school attendance among Almajiri children has, for sixty years, not existed.

## Insecurity

The poverty figures interact with the security figures. The Boko Haram insurgency (2009–present) has killed an estimated 40,000 Nigerians and displaced more than 2 million, almost entirely in the North-East. The banditry crisis in the North-West (Zamfara, Kaduna, Katsina, Sokoto, Niger) has killed an estimated 10,000 Nigerians since 2018 and made large tracts of the four states ungovernable for periods at a time. The Middle Belt herder-farmer conflicts in Plateau, Benue, Nasarawa and southern Kaduna have killed an estimated 8,000 since 2010. The North-East and North-West together host approximately 3.5 million internally displaced Nigerians, the largest IDP population in West Africa.

## The paradox

The paradox the data names is straightforward and uncomfortable. The region that has supplied the federation with the majority of its Heads of State, the majority of its security-service heads, the majority of its federal cabinet seats, the majority of its federal allocations through the state-equality and population-weighting components of the horizontal formula, and the constitutional veto on every major federal reform of the last sixty-four years, is also the region with the highest poverty rates, the lowest literacy rates, the worst maternal and infant mortality rates, the largest IDP population, and the most active armed insurgencies in the country.

Four competing explanations are offered for the paradox.

1. The colonial inheritance argument. The British policy of indirect rule, the restriction of Western mission schools, the deliberate insulation of the North from Southern intellectual and religious currents, and the under-investment in Northern infrastructure between 1900 and 1960 produced a literacy and human-capital deficit at independence that no subsequent administration has addressed at the scale required.

2. The political-economy argument. Federal allocation has been treated by Northern political and traditional elites as a rent to be captured rather than a resource to be invested. The Almajiri system, the persistence of feudal land tenure in the emirates, the under-collection of internally generated revenue by Northern state governments (Lagos generates approximately 70 per cent of its budget from IGR; most Northern states generate less than 10 per cent), and the consequent dependence on the monthly federal allocation have produced a system in which political power is the principal economic activity.

3. The security-and-religion argument. The North-East and North-West insurgencies are the consequence rather than the cause of the underdevelopment; they have made development planning impossible and have absorbed federal capital expenditure that would otherwise have funded schools, clinics and roads. The Boko Haram and banditry response has cost the federation an estimated ₦11 trillion in direct expenditure since 2010 (BudgIT 2023 estimate) — capital that did not go to the schools whose absence helped produce the insurgents.

4. The federal-character argument. The Federal Character Principle has been honoured in appointments without being honoured in the underlying institutional functions. A Northern Inspector-General of Police whose force is concentrated in Lagos, a Northern Comptroller-General of Customs whose service collects 80 per cent of revenue at the Apapa Ports, a Northern Chief of Army Staff whose forward deployments are in the South-South — the federal positions are held but the federal capacity is not exercised in the North.

The four explanations are not mutually exclusive. Each is supported by part of the documentary record. None is sufficient on its own to explain the persistence of the paradox across six decades. What all four agree on is that political power at the federal level has not translated into developmental outcomes at the regional level — that the Lyttleton settlement delivered the North a parliamentary majority it has retained, and that parliamentary majority has not delivered the North the developmental outcomes a majority might have been expected to extract.

The perpetual-power promise — the structural inheritance of the 1914 amalgamation, the 1946 Richards Constitution, the 1954 Lyttleton seat distribution, the 1959 Robertson invitation, and the 36 states of Decree No. 36 of 1996 — has, on the evidence of the 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index, served the political class of the region without serving the region. That is the inheritance the Sixth Alteration of 2026 and the constitutional debates of the next decade are negotiated against. The numbers — the population numbers Nigeria refuses to count, the poverty numbers Nigeria has documented in detail — are the same numbers seen from two different angles.