Brothers, let us speak plainly, not in whispers, not in slogans, but in the hard language of reality.
We often ask why wealth runs past our doorsteps without stopping. Why factories rise in other states while our youths queue for opportunities that never arrive. Why investors fly over our cities and land elsewhere. The easy answer is to blame individuals. The harder truth is to examine ourselves.
Because prosperity does not begin with money. It begins with mindset.
Business Is Not Charity—And Praise Cannot Pay Salaries
Let us start where many of our conversations go wrong. A business is not built on goodwill alone. It is built on value, sustainability, and legacy. The purpose of enterprise is simple: solve a real problem in your community, jobs, access to goods, affordability, dignity, development, and do it in a way that pays for itself. Welfare without profit becomes charity. And charity, by definition, survives only as long as donors remain generous.
Praise cannot fix broken machines. Applause cannot settle supplier invoices. Respect cannot keep the lights on.
A business is a system that consistently creates value for others and earns a reward for doing so. If people do not urgently need what you are offering, marketing will always feel like begging. Revenue is not the goal, sustainable profit is. Without it, there is no continuity, no growth, no legacy.
The Katsina Question: Why Capital Builds Elsewhere
Recently, a serious debate erupted over why the Waziri of Katsina, Alhaji Ibrahim Ida, chose to site most of his companies outside Katsina State. One side accused him of denying local youths employment and opportunity. The other side argued that he learned from the bitter experiences of those who tried to build enterprises at home and watched them collapse.
To understand this, let me take you back.
A friend of mine, a journalist in Katsina in the late 1980s, once shared a story that deserves to be told again and again. He had the rare privilege of interviewing the late Dr. Hamza Zayyad, Wazirin Katsina, a world-renowned economist and Managing Director of Phoenix Investments.
For context, Phoenix Investments was a major consultant in the 1986 privatization of British public corporations, including British Telecom. After that success, General Ibrahim Babangida offered Dr. Zayyad a ministerial post. He declined. But when asked to head Nigeria’s Technical Committee on Privatization and Commercialization, he accepted and led the country’s first serious attempt at privatizing public assets.
One day in Katsina, during an interview at Dr. Zayyad’s Rafin Dadi residence, the journalist dropped his prepared questions and asked bluntly:
“Why do wealthy businessmen like you invest elsewhere instead of here, where thousands of young people could benefit from jobs and experience?”
Dr. Zayyad asked for the camera to be turned off. Then he gave a lesson.
He said he owned nearly ten cottage industries near the Katsina Steel Rolling Mill. They were run by his own relations as commercial ventures. Yet, every month, he had to write cheques to pay workers’ salaries.
“Why?” the journalist asked.
Dr. Zayyad chose silence.
“The Problem Is Not Management. It Is Attitude.”
Months later, the same journalist met Dr. Lema Jibril, another successful entrepreneur. Dr. Jibril had set up a milk and ice cream factory in GRA Katsina, alongside several enterprises in Funtua. One by one, they collapsed.
When asked if the problem was managerial, Dr. Jibril replied with a sentence that still echoes:
“The problem is not managerial. It is attitudinal.”
Let that sink in.
Culture as Capital—or as Liability
On January 5, 1991, during the launch of Gidauniyar Katsina, the late Dan Masanin Kano offered a blunt historical reflection. He traced why Kano rose as a commercial empire while Katsina declined. Even if Katsina fulfilled all the conditions for empire-building, he said, its people must first overcome their love for appropriating other people’s rights.
Then he laughed and added, “Tsohon gari mai tururuwa mai gafiya.”
Everyone laughed. But the message landed like a stone.
Culture, brothers, is not poetry. Culture is economics. It determines whether a factory thrives or dies. Whether a warehouse grows or is emptied in the night. Whether investors return, or warn others to stay away.
The Cost of Betrayed Trust
From 2001, Katsina Flour Mills, under foreign management, produced some of the best products in the country at highly competitive prices. Trucks lined up daily to distribute goods across Nigeria. Then the expatriate manager went home for the end-of-year holidays.
By mid-January, when he returned, even the company safe was gone.
Government prosecuted the General Manager, Accountant, and Storekeeper. The case dragged.
More recently, Mangal Rice Mills, one of the most promising agro-industrial projects in the region, capable of absorbing local rice production and creating massive wealth, was nearly brought to its knees by pilfering and financial mismanagement.
These are not stories of lack of capital. They are stories of lack of character.
Roads Alone Do Not Bring Investors
We often wait for government to lay asphalt, string power lines, and sink boreholes. These matter. But in this century, they are not enough.
The real magnets for investment today are:
A highly skilled labor force. A viable market or proximity to one. And the character of the environment, how contracts are honored, how assets are protected, how people behave when no one is watching. We complain when investors choose Lagos. But Lagosians spend fortunes educating their children in the skills industries need, engineering, technology, finance, logistics, applied sciences.
Katsina, for example, sits on diverse mineral resources. But extracting value from them requires people trained in chemistry, chemical engineering, analytical instrumentation, spectrophotometry, distillation systems, solvent handling, safety protocols, and environmental certification.
Degrees in sociology and political science are important. But factories, refineries, and processing plants run on skills.
Skills, Schools, and the Scandal We Ignore
To achieve success in attracting investors, local or foreign, requires more than denigrating individuals. Our institutions must begin to produce skilled technicians; our engineers must answer their names; and above all, we must begin to respect teachers, who in turn, must be what their names indicate.
It is a quiet scandal that until 2021, a faculty of agriculture did not exist in any university in a state that is over 90% agrarian, Katsina. Without a faculty of agriculture, extension workers could not be trained. And without extension workers, farmers were left without modern techniques, improved seeds, or scientific guidance.
The result was predictable: dwindling productivity, wasted land, and lost income.
You cannot preach industrialization while starving the very institutions that produce the hands and minds to run it.
Reorientation Is Our First Infrastructure
Brothers, no policy will save a society that refuses to save itself.
Attracting investment, local or foreign, requires more than attacking individuals or shaming businessmen. It requires a collective redefinition of values and a conscious commitment to live by them.
Who should lead this effort?
Our traditional rulers.
Our ulama.
Our teachers.
Our parents.
All of us.
Government can assist. It cannot substitute for character.
Previous campaigns for cultural reorientation failed not because the slogans were wrong, but because the society never truly owned them.
The Hard Truth—and the Hope
Let us be honest with ourselves.
If a businessman must pay salaries from his pocket instead of from profits, the problem is not the market. If a factory collapses under theft and mismanagement, the problem is not electricity. If investors flee after one bad experience, the problem is not geography.
The problem is trust.
And trust is built slowly, through daily discipline.
Brothers, prosperity will not come because we demand it. It will come when we become the kind of society that deserves it.
When contracts mean something.
When work is respected.
When public property is treated as sacred.
When skill is valued more than shortcuts.
When profit is seen not as exploitation, but as proof of value created.
Economic revival is not first a budget line. It is a moral choice.
The road to wealth does not begin in the treasury.
It begins in the mind.
