The North must not pass the buck By Kunle Oyatomi

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The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves , that we are underlings.-a line from the play Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.

Our compatriots in the North are not taking sufficient lessons from American President Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) who kept a sign with the phrase, ‘’the buck stops here’’, on his desk in the Oval Office. He installed the sign to remind him that day-to-day as the president, he was solely responsible for the policy-decisions he took and went on to implement. He wouldn’t blame others if he failed. He couldn’t afford to pass the buck or shift responsibility if things went awry and his subjects decided to stone him, as it were, for nonperformance. True leaders, according to Truman’s tested philosophy, must brutally examine themselves and own up to their shortcomings as they seek redress.

But here in Nigeria, while Truman benefited greatly from his motto and sailed the US through tough times after the grueling Second World War, the lords and elites of Northern Nigeria are banding into a whining lot to cast aspersions on the government of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu for a host of challenges the region has experienced lately.

Sadly, again, they fail to heed the line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where Cassius tells Brutus not to trace Rome’s travails to the stars, gods or fate. Cassius argues that ‘’people are in charge of their own lives and that their own actions determine their fate.’’ You’re the architect of your success or failure, he insists. Don’t blame others; don’t pass the buck, nor look outside yourself for what’s impeding your moves to success.

Consider the power breakdown that rocked the north for weeks.  The leaders up north are needlessly heaping blame on the central government. Really? For years the authorities have criminally neglected to tame the raging banditry that engaged in savaging and vandalizing the power infrastructure in their communities. The hoodlums had had a field day, operating with impunity and abandon. Little or nothing was done to stop them…Until finally, it became a norm. Shiroro-Kaduna went under, crippling the sector, and turning on the danger signals.

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As they recorded these triumphs against the state, there was a move elsewhere, Yobe and Borno, both in the northeast. They rubbished the electricity plants, such that darkness was the order of the day for months. Let’s please note northern elite held sway in such power bureaucracies as TCN and NERC while the assaults on the energy infrastructure were taking place. So there can’t be any charge that the problem arose from a so-called nonchalant attitude of a southern president.
The opposite is actually the case. Because there’s the story of one power minister of northern extraction who allegedly re-routed the whopping sum of N33b to BDCs. Pray, wouldn’t this humongous figure have fixed the battered sector he was overseeing? In addition, couldn’t this be turned into a weapon to return the millions of out-of-school kids in the north back to the classrooms, and save the polity from the ticking time-bomb they are at the moment? It is unrealistic then to accept the position of some key northern elements that Tinubu’s administration is to be held responsible for these challenges in the north. Let them look inwards, as counseled by Cassius in Shakespeare’s popular work I quoted above.

The past few days have also witnessed an avalanche of reports saying Tinubu’s presidency has an architecture without a balance in its security appointments. In particular, following the appointment of, Maj.Gen. Olufemi Oluyede as Acting Chief of Army Staff, it was alleged that it there are more of those from the president’s ethnic stock in the upper echelon of Nigeria’s security edifice. How wrong! These narrow-critics haven’t done their homework well. They would have discovered that of the 20 top-level security appointees under Tinubu, only five are from the southwest, the president’s area, with the northwest bagging eight. So, where lies the charge of ethnicity?

They have labelled ‘Yorubanisation.’. This is just being coined to paint the false picture of a hardworking man who is turning the table to undo the harm inflicted on the country by wasters wrongly called managers of the economy. It is largely the handiwork of those who want to clandestinely work towards a return to the years of locust. The north must be careful to shun overtures to draw it into a net that would worsen its condition, already made dire by its leaders who are really stragglers.

But there’s a northern group which while the rage on the president’s tax reforms lasted, stood on the side of sublime reason. The Progressive Northern Youth Forum, PNYF, threw its support behind Tinubu’s position on the bill to review Nigeria’s tax laws. The body said the president’s rejection of the recommendation by the National Economic Council, NEC, was a good move. It would be recalled that governors from the 19 northern states along with prominent traditional rulers in the area had collectively decided to oppose Tinubu’s move.

PNYF’s Secretary General, Abdulkadir Bala said in a statement: ‘’If the governors genuinely cared for their constituents, they would have taken advantage of the opportunity to provide input and proposed changes during legislative process, rather than calling for the withdrawal of the bills from the National Assembly…What is the Northern Governors afraid of? Clearly, they are afraid of taking responsibility. They want to continue being financial sustained by the Federal Government without making any efforts to develop their own revenue-generating initiatives. There is no evidence that the current northern Governors have effectively utilized all the allocations they have received from President Tinubu’s federal government.’’

I believe like these young compatriots based in the north that if that region is to break away from the long spell of medieval fiefdom in which it is trapped like a genie in the bottle, its leaders must first delivered from the deadly game of passing the buck. The fault for the backwardness of the region lies in them, not in the government of Bola Tinubu or some phantom or ghoulish conspirators.

Oyatomi Esq., is on the Board of the Independent Media and Policy Initiative, IMPI, a think tank based in Abuja.