-By Abdul Mahmud
Dr. Bashir Kurfi, a former scholar in Public Administration at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and a man who refuses to bow to orthodoxy, recently observed that the southern elites should protest against the northern elites for bearing the cost of their irresponsibility.
It is a bold assertion, persuasive precisely because it draws strength from curated memory. For decades, sections of the northern elite have honed the politics of displacement, converting structural failure into a narrative of victimhood and external sabotage. Responsibility is endlessly declaimed or sometimes recast as the fault of history, colonial inheritance, regional imbalance, or the imagined hostility of others. This cultivated habit of excuse-making has become a political craft in itself, a means of masking failure while living in denial. Here, accountability is not merely avoided; it is rendered illegitimate, portrayed as an unfair demand imposed by adversaries rather than a civic obligation owed to the governed. Yet, any temptation to contrast this with the so-called “morally superior southern elites” collapses under closer scrutiny. Self-congratulation has long displaced self-scrutiny, as loud claims of progress, modernity, and enlightenment obscure deeply rooted habits of exclusion, corruption, and moral indifference.
The language of merit and advancement advanced by both geographical sections of the national elite and their supporters often serves as a convenient alibi, allowing elite capture to proceed under the banner of regional exceptionalism. If the northern elite evade responsibility through grievance, the southern elite evade it through triumphalism. Between the two, the citizen is left with no moral refuge, only competing myths that justify failure while insulating power from consequences.
Northern elites are celebrated for grandiloquent pronouncements on unity, development, and morality. They promise transformation but deliver stagnation. They speak of education while the region remains a desert of literacy, where enrollment figures mask a mass of uneducated youth and schools crumble under neglect. They preach an agricultural renaissance while malnutrition festers, rural communities are abandoned, and irrigation projects lie in rusting silence. They talk of industrialisation while local economies remain dependent on government largesse from Abuja. Corruption becomes not a scandal but a tradition, a rite of passage into power. Public infrastructure in the north tells the story of neglect more eloquently than speeches. Roads disintegrate, electricity remains a luxury, hospitals are monuments to absence, and clean water flows only in theory. Governors appear with fanfare to inaugurate projects that vanish as soon as cameras leave. Security is presented as a moral and cultural issue, yet decades of failed policing and recurring insurgency are shrugged off as misfortunes. Education, health, infrastructure, and security are left to chance while elites accumulate wealth, power, and prestige. Their failures are exported in blame, and in appeals to history, ethnicity, or religion. Yet, let us not pretend that the southern elite is a repository of competence or integrity. Southern elites enjoy their imaginary moral superiority while indulging in the same incompetence. The South accumulates debts with exuberance, borrows with abandon, and applauds itself for infrastructural projects that collapse within a few years. Governors and legislators steal openly, businesses thrive on political patronage, and the social contract is routinely violated. Health care is underfunded, education is increasingly privatised for those who can pay, and urban centers remain unplanned jungles where life is bestial, brutish and short.
The southern elites’ failures are conspicuous in their feeble responses to crises. Floods destroy communities where emergency plans are paper buffers. Transport collapses under the weight of bad planning. Electricity is scarce, water is scarce, governance is scarce. They lecture, they condemn, they protest, but poor governance continues. Their moral outrage is selective, their complaints episodic. Corruption in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, and other southern capitals mirrors the northern patronage networks in structure if not in style. The southern elite believes it is immune, superior, and innovative, but the truth reveals only adaptation of the same vices to local circumstances. One might ask whether Kurfi’s call has merit if the southern elite cannot even claim competence. Protesting northern failures without confronting southern failures is hypocrisy masquerading as moral indignation. Nigeria is littered with examples of southern elites failing spectacularly. Lagos State owes billions in debts. Rivers State is writhing from elites’ fights over its resources. Delta and Edo States oscillate between grandiose declarations of development and the steady reality of urban chaos. The elites’ ability to amass wealth contrasts sharply with their failure to build enduring legacies.
Northern elites fail by neglect, southern elites fail by indulgence. The north deflects blame to the past and to others, the south revels in self-flagellation while repeating the same patterns. Both elites perpetuate poverty, insecurity, and underdevelopment. Both exploit ethnicity, religion, and regional sentiment to distract citizens from their failures. Citizens are left to navigate collapsed schools, inadequate hospitals, and non-functional roads while elites debate loudly in private clubs, social media platforms, and political conventions. Education provides a stark illustration. Northern elites pride themselves on historical institutions such as Ahmadu Bello University, Bayero University, and others, yet their policies yield mass illiteracy in primary and secondary schools. Southern elites boast universities and polytechnics, yet governance in the region often favours wealth, influence, and connections over merit. Both regions produce graduates who can recite theory but struggle with application, innovation, or problem-solving. Health care, too, reflects the dual failure. Northern hospitals lack staff, equipment, and medication, producing unnecessary deaths. Aishatu Umar died after a pair of scissors was allegedly left inside her abdomen during a surgical procedure at the Urology Centre in Kano state. Southern hospitals are overcrowded, underfunded, and often prohibitively expensive. Immunisation campaigns succeed sporadically, emergency response is haphazard, often resulting in deaths. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently accused a hospital of negligence over the death of her 21-month-old son.
Kurfi’s call for southern protest is tempting, dramatic, and rhetorically satisfying, but it falters under scrutiny. It assumes a competence and moral authority that southern elites cannot claim. The northern elites’ failures are egregious, systemic, and destructive, yet the southern elites mirrors the same structural indifference in different guise.
To protest without introspection is to miss the point. To lament northern irresponsibility while ignoring southern complicity is moral posturing. If Kurfi insists, let the protest begin with both northern and southern elites simultaneously. Let both target neglect, incompetence, corruption, and the chronic failure to build their regions rather than personalities. Let both demand accountability, competence, and foresight. Let them challenge excuses, deflection, and the endless parade of promises that never materialise. Only then does Kurfi’s assertion escape the narrow confines of regional moralism and enter the territory of genuine public scholarship.
Nigeria suffers not because one region fails, but because all elites fail differently, predictably, and consistently. Northern elites fail with grand narratives of history and victimhood, southern elites fail with self-flagellating and congratulatory spectacles of competence and progress. Citizens pay the costs. Kurfi’s assertion excites, provokes, and invites reflection, yet it should also invite humility. Protest, if it is to mean anything, must begin at home, in every elite enclave, and in every hollow institution across this divided country.
Nigeria deserves elites who deliver rather than lecture, build rather than blame, and govern rather than perform theatrics. Until that happens, the theatre of irresponsibility continues, with citizens as perpetual spectators.