The Arewa Economic Renewal Forum (AERF), has said that poor leadership has been the major reason for the high poverty rate in northern Nigeria.
The Forum said this during a press briefing in Abuja.
Speaking at the event, the Chairman of AERF, Ibrahim Yahaya, said, “Over the years, Nigeria, and especially the North, have suffered an epileptic form of leadership, borne out of a lacklustre attitude of elected persons to engineer the much-desired economic prosperity by exploiting regional assets, demographic potentials, geologic advantages and agricultural benefits for economic, infrastructural and human development.
“The resultant consequence for our region is poverty, sub-standard education, lack of asses to credit financing and other negative underdevelopment indicators.
“No doubt, the size and dimension of the population of the Northern region displaces, in terms of size, any other African country apart from Nigeria itself.
“In other words, if this region would have been a country of its own, it would still remain the most populous country in Africa and one of the 10 most populous in the world.”
He lamented that while the Northern region of the federation accounts for over 70 percent of the total arable landmass in Nigeria, geologically created in such an advantageous way that it could allow for 12 months of agriculture as it is traversed with river basins and aquatic reservoirs that would allow for three seasons of harvest every year, only about 23 percent of the landmass is fully utilised for agricultural purposes.
Also, he stated that out of the over three million hectares of potential dry season agriculture river basins, less than one million hectares is inefficiently utilised yet Nigeria have about ten river basin development authorities in existence for over 45 years.
He added that the inability of successive administrations to exploit these resources in mainstreaming human development as the most dominant factor in development planning has remained the region’s greatest albatross.
He further said, “In terms of access to finance and credit for investment and development from the National Financial System, the northern region has consistently over the last 10 years been shortchanged, sometimes by a deliberate policy of the government and private financial institutions.
“The gross distribution of development and investment finance by government institutions and other financial institutions has always been skewed in favour of other regions, enterprises and institutions in Nigeria”, Yahaya lamented.
He further lamented that over the last five years, about seven of the biggest banks in Nigeria do not accept real estate assets as collateral for any business in the entire North except for assets in Abuja.
“Over the last 10 years, loan portfolios for Nigerian banks have equally been in favour of other regions and to the disadvantage of the entire Northern region with some slight exceptions for Abuja.
“This same trend is visible in other financial institutions, including development finance institutions owned by government and special intervention funds provided by budgets and or central bank of Nigeria special intervention financing,” he said.
The AERF Chairman, therefore, said it had become compelling for anyone vying for the position of the president to come up with a strategic blueprint to economically transform the North.
