I am writing this article mainly for the
benefit of Southern Nigerians who have
never been to the North, and mostly
have a warped and inaccurate view of
the North. I have been driven to write
this out of my many personal
experiences, and those of friends and
family, as has been shared with me.
This is mainly an educative piece about
what Northern Nigeria is in reality; a
complete, holistic picture of this region.
To make this piece a simple read and
easy-to-follow, I am going to write it
around 5 common perceptions about
the North and
debunk them:
Religious Perception: The general
belief held by most Southerners about
the North is that the region is not just
mainly Muslim, but wholly Muslim.
Whenever I meet someone from the
South and introduce myself, I am
correctly placed as a Christian. But
once I am asked my state and I say
Borno State, the next question
becomes, ‘Are you a Muslim?’ This is
despite my name being a very common
Biblical name, Mark, which is the
second Gospel. Matter of fact, I have
been asked that question while
attending a church programme, with a
Bible conspicuously held in my hands.
You could imagine my surprise at that
question. This has also been the
experience of a lot of friends with
common names such as ‘Emmanuel’,
‘Daniel’, etc.
To start with, out of the 19 Northern
states, at least 5 have a majority
Christian population: Plateau,
Adamawa, Nassarawa, Taraba and
Benue. At least 6 more have at least
40% Christian population. These states
include Niger, Gombe, Kaduna, Kogi,
Kwara and either Borno or Bauchi. That
then leaves only Kano, Kebbi, Katsina,
Jigawa, Sokoto, Yobe and Zamfara as
having Muslim populations above 60%.
How then are we all seen as Muslims?
This misconception could be excused
when the person has an Arabic name,
as there are many Northern Christians
who bear names such as Jamila,
Habiba, Halima, Sadiq, and Yunusa and
so on. But when the person has an
obvious Christian name and is even
attends church services, you really
begin to wonder.
Ethnic Perception: Another common
perception of the North is that we are
all Hausa. My usual response to this is
to borrow the logical argument of
Simon Kolawole, the Editor-in-Chief of
THISDay Newspapers. In an article in
which he attempted to educate his
largely Southern readership base about
the North, he went thus:
“If out of the estimated 250 tribes in
Nigeria, we can say that the South-
West is mainly Yoruba with a few other
tribes around Badagry area, the South-
East wholly Igbo and the South-South
being most diverse in the South with
about 40 tribes, that still leaves the
remaining 200 tribes in the North.”
How then are we reduced to one single
ethnic group, Hausa? It is only the
North-West that is close to being
homogenous, mainly Hausa and Fulani,
but with still some minority tribes in
the Zuru area of Kebbi State and the
multi-diverse Southern Kaduna. The
North-East and North-Central is filled
with tribes, many of whom I have never
even heard of. For example, Adamawa
State is so diverse that the largest
ethnic group, the Fulani, is just 3% of
the entire population. In my home state
of Borno, there is a local government so
diverse that from one village to
another, you are likely to meet an
entirely different ethnic group. The
number of tribes there are so many
that we just address the people as
‘Gwoza people’, after the name of the
local government.
Even though we all speak Hausa as a
lingua franca in order to communicate
amongst ourselves as trading partners
over the centuries, that doesn’t make
us Hausa people as much as
communicating English doesn’t make
you and I English people. As a matter of
fact, in the North-East, Hausa people
are a minority and virtually non-
existent in the North-Central region.
Intellectual Beliefs: Now, this is one
belief that whenever I am confronted
with, it takes me a great deal of self-
control not to flip out and lose my
temper. Times without number, when I
tell people I am from Borno State, I am
asked how come I speak such good
English. What the hell? What am I
supposed to speak? Arabic? The
general expectation is that someone
from the North is not supposed to be
this learned, this well-spoken and
articulate in English, this
knowledgeable. I remember when a
friend asked me if my mother went to
school, and the surprised look on his
face when I told him that my mum
earned her masters’ degree over 20
years ago. There was also a time when
my dad met someone at the Lagos
International Airport and they got
talking. When my dad told him his
profession, the man, in a fit of surprise,
exclaimed, ‘I didn’t know that there
were professors in the North’.
I admit the fact that the North lags
behind the South educationally,
especially the North-West and the
North-East. But this is not due to our
inability to comprehend what we are
being taught, but rather due to the
incompetence of leadership in the
region to give education its premium
importance as a form of human
development. We, like every other
human being on the face of this earth,
can excel when given the opportunity.
Talent and intellect abounds
everywhere. Opportunity, however,
does not. I personally know of many
Northerners who have excelled
nationally and internationally. Daily,
the story of young men like Ahmed
Mukoshy, who is born, bred and
schooled in Sokoto, and yet, rose above
his environment to become one of the
emerging forces in IT in this country in
his early 20s inspires me. This is just
one example among many that I could
cite but for the lack of space.
I find it outright disgusting whenever
people claim that if not for federal
character and ‘zoning’, no Northerner
would be able to compete in this
country. Last week, I was shocked
when a friend said only 10% of
Northerners in the Federal Civil Service
deserved their places on merit, and
went on to add that if he had not
known me personally and I were to get
a job with the Federal Government, he
would believe that I did not earn it on
merit. The most ridiculous one I
encountered was when earlier this year,
former Minister of Finance, Dr Mansur
Mukhtar was appointed a World Bank
director. Most of the commentators on
the 234Next article announcing this
achievement for this Nigerian and
Nigeria made the ludicrous assertion
that the appointment was done to
please the North, that Dr Mukhtar did
not merit it. Little did they know that Dr
Mukhtar had worked at the World Bank
and the African Development Bank,
prior to his heading Nigeria’s Budget
Office on the invitation of the then and
present Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala and former World Bank
Managing Director, who also
recommended him for the post of
Finance Minister when she rejected
former President Umaru Yar’adua’s
invitation to join his government. What
is even worse is that they did not care
to know: their minds were already
made up and could not be confused
with the facts.
Geo-Political Beliefs: Another
common belief among Southerners and
most especially spread by Southern
newspapers is that the entire 19
Northern states act and think as one
when it comes to issues of Northern
politics. This is one of the biggest
untruths about the North. Whenever
Northern Nigeria is mentioned, the
people of Benue, Kogi and Kwara states
do not feel it refers to them.
Geographically, they are part of the
North; politically, however, they and
the entire Middle-Belt act
independently. This can be clearly in
the last elections where President
Goodluck Jonathan won in 7 Northern
states, even against his strongest
opponent, General Muhammadu
Buhari, who is a Northerner. This was
something I am sure a lot of people in
the South, save for the political savvy,
did not see coming.
One common sight of this perception
being entrenched by newspapers is
when politicians of Northern extraction
speak on national issues. I have
innumerably seen a washed-out
Northern politician, without any
influence or popularity speak regarding
an issue, and the next day,
newspapers carry bold headlines
saying, ‘North rejects this’ or ‘North
plans to do that’, quoting the same
washed-out politician as speaking for
the entire North. I have rarely seen a
Bola Tinubu speaking and being
quoted as the mouthpiece of the entire
Yoruba ethnic group, or a Chief Edwin
Clark for the Ijaw people. Methinks this
is a way of selling newspapers by
capitalizing on the image of the North
as one single, political force which
moves in a particular direction all-
together
Cultural/Social/Economic Belief:
Admittedly, as people of the same
region, we share a lot in common
culturally and socially in the general
terms: our mannerisms, modes of
dressing, traditional titles (apart from
paramount rulers with the exception of
emirates), etc. Despite that, the Jukun
in Taraba and the Kataf in Kaduna are
very different in the specifics, as even
the Bura and Marghi people of Borno/
Adamawa States. To pick the attitude
of one ethnic group in the North and
attach it to all the others, is to put it
mildly, a very short-sighted way of
knowing and understanding the people
of Northern Nigeria.
Another belief in the South is that the
entire North is but an empty land mass
with nothing but trees. I remember the
controversy of the 2006 census when
Kano State was said to have a slightly
higher population than Lagos State.
Many of my Southern friends called it
‘an impossibility’. In the words of one of
them, ‘Lagos is so populated that when
you throw grains of rice into the air,
they wouldn’t land on the ground, but
on people’. However, they all forgot to
factor in land mass, because Lagos
State is a much smaller state than
Kano State, and hence has the highest
population density in Nigeria, hence
making it look as though it was way
more populated.
There are cities in the North that have
been thriving economically, such as
Kano and Kaduna. As a matter of fact,
Kaduna State was adjudged by the
World Bank in the year 2009 as the
best place to do business.
Lastly, the most retrogressive belief
about the North in the South is that the
entire North is a hotbed for violence. As
much as we have had more than our
fair share of ethno-religious violence,
there are many states that have never
experienced one, including states such
as Zamfara, and others as Nassarawa
and Benue.
I have not written this as a criticism of
the people of Southern Nigeria, but
rather, in the hope that this will be an
enlightenment of the South about the
North. It amazes me when I see that
despite the fact that we have been a
country for almost a century, yet, a lot
of people down South know little or
nothing about their fellow Nigerians in
the North, but know about Europe and
America.
I have also realized that we as
Northerners have allowed others to say
our story for ourselves, hence have
given it distortions, deletion and
generalizations. What has happened
over time is what the writer
Chimamanda Adichie, in her TED talk in
March 2009, at Oxford, England,
describes as ‘the danger of the single
story’, where a single story of the North
as a region of poor, illiterate, lazy,
Hausa Muslims who do nothing but
connive to lord over this country
politically and kill Southerners’ has
been repeated so much that it is seen
as the truth. This is the kind of stuff
that creates stereotyping, which in her
words, ‘not that it is untrue, but that it
is incomplete’.
This is one reason I still see the
significance of our NYSC scheme,
choked with problems as it may be. We
need to know each other more. Let us
override this stereotypical mind-set and
seek to learn about each other with
open minds and seek the complete
story that gives a holistic picture of our
country.

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