I sat down recently with Major General Lawrence Onoja, retired. We were discussing security in Northern Nigeria—banditry, insurgency, kidnapping and communities sleeping with one eye open. Then our conversation strayed.
I reminded him of the Zaria Road Stadium in Jos, which he set in motion as military governor of Plateau State between 1986 and 1988. Nearly four decades later, it remains unfinished. Onoja has since served the Army and the nation, retired and watched a son become a General. A military generation has reproduced itself; the stadium has not produced a completion certificate.
Then he struck the real nail. He recalled their struggle to preserve the old New Nigeria Development Company—NNDC—and how, properly governed, it could create jobs and reduce the restiveness consuming the region.
Our digression had returned us to security. Security is not only the soldier at a checkpoint. It is also the factory whistle, the functioning school, the productive farm and the apprentice with a future. When industry dies, recruiters of violence inherit the factory gate.
Welcome to the Arewa dance: Old Skool, Disco and Blues.
The Old Skol remembers a North that once thought institutionally: development corporations, textile mills, food-processing plants, banks and agricultural schemes. Its imperfect leaders understood that political power without an economic base was borrowed splendour. NNDC embodied a serious idea: pool resources and turn geography into shared prosperity. Still owned by the nineteen northern states, what it lacks is not ancestry but ambition, governance and scale.
Then came the long retreat from production.
Kaduna, once celebrated as the “Manchester of West Africa,” became a graveyard of looms. Kaduna Textiles Limited, Arewa Textiles and United Nigerian Textiles once carried industrial communities on their backs. By 1997, all three were barely functioning; by 2007, they had closed. A scholarly history reported that about 175 Nigerian textile mills had stopped production since the 1990s, leaving only twenty-four operating by early 2010. It traced the decline to unstable policy, obsolete machinery, costly imported parts, weak power infrastructure, falling cotton production and trade pressures—not to one convenient villain.
The names now read like an industrial obituary: Kano Textile Printing, Bagauda, Gaskiya, Chalawa, Gusau and Sokoto Textiles; the sugar dreams of Bacita and Lafiagi; oil mills in Kano and Gombe; Bauchi Meat Factory; Steyr tractors; Arewa Metal Containers; Kaduna Fertilizer; Sokoto ceramics; and the contraction of Peugeot Automobile Nigeria. Some closed, others were privatised, renamed or reduced to skeletal operations. The verdict remains devastating: assets meant to multiply livelihoods became evidence of leadership without maintenance.
Every dead factory killed an ecosystem. The worker lost wages; the food seller, customers; the farmer, a buyer; the council, revenue. Children left school and despair became available for recruitment. Northern insecurity did not begin only in forests. It also began in classrooms that stopped teaching and government houses that stopped thinking.
Now comes the Disco.
Arewa has caught up with every social vibe: luxury hotels, lounges, shisha corners, destination weddings, rappers, influencers, immaculate aso ebi, convoys and “vibes and Insha Allah.” A wounded people are entitled to joy. The scandal is celebrating consumption while neglecting the production that sustains it.
Our political class has perfected this disco: commission a gate, rename a road, distribute appointments, pose beside an excavator and call it transformation. Across Arewa sit white-elephant projects with hippopotamus appetites—they swallow budgets and produce nothing. The Zaria Road Stadium is one brutal metaphor: permanently “ongoing,” useful to successive governments because it is never finished.
Underneath plays the Blues. UNICEF’s 2024 situation analysis found Nigeria’s out-of-school children overwhelmingly rural, northern and poor; seven northern states had primary exclusion rates above 50 per cent. We cannot leave half a generation outside school and feign surprise when anger acquires an ideology, weapon or drug habit. We cannot neglect girls, Almajiri children and technical colleges, then hold summits to ask where the crisis came from.
Northern leadership has failed its people, but it did not fall from Mars. It is produced among us, protected by silence and rewarded with votes, praise-singing and selective outrage. Ranka shi dade may express courtesy privately; in politics it too often becomes citizenship on its knees. We interrogate a leader’s religion and ethnicity more fiercely than his budget. We defend “our own” while his children study abroad and ours sit idle. Poverty and patronage constrain citizens—the victim does not share equal blame with the powerful. Yet no society is rescued while accountability is treated as betrayal.
And religion? The problem is neither Islam nor Christianity, but piety sprayed like perfume over incompetence. Faith that fills worship centres while tolerating empty schools, stolen allocations, abused girls and hungry children has become ceremony. Insha Allah affirms trust in God; it is not an alibi for refusing to plan.
Was Arewa ever united? Not as one people with one history. The Sokoto Caliphate, Borno, Hausa city-states, emirates, kingdoms and Middle Belt nationalities carried different memories of power. Colonial rule bundled these differences into a political North; later elites made it a bargaining identity. Diversity did not destroy Arewa; its manipulation did. Unity should mean cooperation around interests no state can secure alone.
And what geography: immense farmland, river basins, Plateau highlands, Sahelian sunlight, minerals, livestock corridors, ancient cities and borders towards West and Central Africa. But geography is not automatic wealth. Without roads, storage, irrigation, power, broadband and security, vast land becomes vast ungoverned space. Climate pressure sharpens competition while criminals exploit borders that commerce should have mastered.
Could Arewa become a hub of Nigeria’s digital rise? Yes—but not through portal launches and ceremonial laptops. Jos, Kaduna, Kano, Ilorin, Minna and Bauchi could anchor innovation corridors. That demands dependable power and broadband, serious schools and technical colleges, research funding, local venture capital and access for women. Population is not power when uneducated and unskilled. It is pressure.
Could Arewa lead a modern meat, milk and leather industry? Nigeria has more than twenty million cattle, yet imports around 60 per cent of its milk. That should shame a region holding much of the livestock economy. Better land governance, feed, veterinary care, breeding, cold chains, traceability, humane abattoirs, dairy processing and finished leather could transform livelihoods and conflict. Kano leather reaches luxury markets abroad; exporting hides while importing expensive finished goods is colonial economics wearing a northern cap.
NNDC could matter again—not as a nostalgic bureaucracy or retirement home for loyalists, but as an independent, professional and publicly audited regional investment company. Let it pool capital behind cotton-to-garment corridors, solar manufacturing, agro-processing, livestock clusters, logistics, digital infrastructure and mass apprenticeships. Publish its holdings. Measure jobs, exports and returns. Remove political cousins from its boardroom.
Security must reach the community before violence does. That means policing, but also justice, functioning councils, early warning, schools, clinics and livelihoods. A drone cannot compensate for an abandoned child; a checkpoint cannot substitute for an economy.
Arewa has danced long enough to inherit glory, elite spectacle and collective grief. Old Skool gave us memories. Disco gave us distraction. The Blues is giving us the bill.
It is time to change the music—from ranka shi dade to what have you delivered? From population as a boast to people as skilled capital. From religious performance to moral responsibility. From federal access to regional production. From unfinished monuments to finished lives.
Otherwise, the North will keep dancing at the edge of a grave it has mistaken for a stage. If the north wins, Nigeria wins!
