Posted by From DESMOND MGBOH, Kano on
Successive Northern governors have been given hard knocks for allegedly failing to use proceeds from oil to boost agriculture in the region.
Successive Northern governors have been given hard knocks for allegedly failing to use proceeds from oil to boost agriculture in the region. Former Lagos State police commissioner, Alhaji Abubakar Tsav, who tongue-lashed the governors during a chat with Daily Sun, said he shared the view expressed by the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) last week that the Northern leaders turned the region a leech on the oil-producing Niger Delta.
Tsav, a Northerner from Benue State, however, disagreed with the position held by Niger Delta leaders, which suggested that the North had been living on contributions of the other parts of the country.
According to him, 'when there was no oil in that region, the whole country depended on money made from groundnut, cotton, cocoa, palm produce, tin, columbite, et cetera to develop the entire country." Tsav said every region in the country was contributing its own share to the national development.
He stressed that the notion of the development of the country should not be confined to physical and structural, but should include other indices, such as educational and scientific, all of which, he recalled, the North had been contributing to the overall growth of the nation. He noted that only recently, the University of Sokoto developed a solar energy that was significant to the country.
The retired police chief also acknowledged that the North had done significantly well in the area of crop and diary farming and had, therefore, been feeding the nation.
He, however, lambasted the successive northern governors for allegedly failing to use the proceeds from oil, over the years, to boost agriculture in the region and turn it into a foreign exchange earner.
Tsav stressed that serious-minded leaders would have since used the proceeds from oil revenue, not only to improve on agricultural produce from the region, but converted the sector into a foreign exchange generating source.
According to him, the indulgence and selfishness of the successive Northern governors had denied the region its deserved accomplishment.
'These accidents of history, called governors, instead of (developing the North) used the money for self-aggrandizement. These northern governors have made the giant North a parasite on oil."
Asked to comment of the way forward for the people of the North without resort to federal revenue as a sole source of survival, Tsav said the solution was for the people to elect credible persons as their leaders, lamenting that the quality of the leaders that usually emerged as governors in most states in the region, was poor.
He regretted, however, that that option was almost impossible as according to him, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would never allow the people to choose the right leaders that could salvage the situation.
He said the other option was to dutifully prosecute all former governors, who had stolen or had misappropriated public funds to serve as a deterrent to serving governors in the North and other parts of the country.
He again lamented that that option was also endangered by the same PDP factor, accusing the party of interfering in the smooth wheel of justice in Nigeria, by reducing the nation's judicial process to a family affair.