By our reporter| Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi, on Monday said the north will destroy itself if it doesn’t change and that no northern leader can afford to be happy in the midst of problems facing the region.
Sanusi who spoke at the occasion marking governor El Rufai’s 60th birthday celebration in Kaduna state government house said as a leader, repeating the same thing and expecting a different result shows that something is wrong.
According to him, real change can only occur in the north through those who do things differently.
He said, “It is almost correct now to say that, if you are seen as normal, if you are a governor in the north or a leader in the north, and you are seen as normal in the sense that you continue to do what your predecessors have been doing, doing the same thing, which has been normalised, then, there is something wrong with you. You are part of the problem.”
“The real change in the north will come from those who are considered mad people, because you look around and say if this is the way we have been doing things, and this is where we have ended up, maybe we need to do things differently.
“If the north does not change, the north will destroy itself. The country is moving on… If we don’t listen, there would be a day when there would be a constitutional amendment that addresses these issues of quota system and federal character.
“The rest of the country cannot be investing, educating its children, producing graduates and then they watch us, they can’t get jobs because they come from the wrong state, when we have not invested in the future of our own children.”
“Nobody who is a leader in northern Nigeria today can afford to be happy.”
“You cannot be happy about 87 percent of poverty in Nigeria being in the north. You can’t be happy with millions of northern out-of-school children. You can’t be happy with nine states in the north contributing almost 50 percent of the entire malnutrition burden in the country.
“You can’t be happy with the Boko Haram problem. You can’t be happy with all the issues.
“So, we wish Nasir a happy birthday, but we do not want him to be happy as a leader. Because you are happy when you think you have reached a state of delivering and taking your people to where you want them to be.”
The outspoken emir commended governor el-Rufai’s reforms in the education sector, noting that what the governor is doing in the sector is what will save the north.
El-Rufai, he said, should be celebrated as a public officer who is addressing the core problems of the region.
“If you look at what Nasir is doing in Kaduna, with 40 percent of his budget in education, that is the only thing that is going to save the north. I know that, when we say these things, they don’t go down well,” he said.
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