The North “must fix its social and religious problems” to Move Forward – Emir Sanusi

Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II has said that the Northwest and Northeast regions of the country are among the poorest parts of the world.

He added that progress for the region, will start from fixing its social and religious problems.

The Emir made this known in an Instagram post on Thursday. He wrote:

We are living in denial. The North-West and the North-East, demographically, constitute the bulk of Nigeria’s population, but look at human development indices, look at the number of children out of school, look at adult literacy, look at maternal mortality, look at infant mortality, look at girl-child completion rate, look at income per capita, the North-East and the North-West Nigeria, are among the poorest parts of the world.

As far back as 2000, I looked at the numbers, Borno and Yobe states, UNDP figures: Borno and Yobe states, if they were a country on their own, were poorer than Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

Nobody saw this because we were looking at Nigeria as a country that averages the oil-rich Niger Delta, the industrial and commercial-rich Lagos, the commercially viable South-East, and you have an average.

Break Nigeria into its component parts, and these parts of the country are among the poorest, if it were a country. And we do not realise we are in trouble. For the region to leap forward developmentally, it must fix it’s social and religious problems.

Women and children must be loved, not beaten, the region must do away with the 13th century mindset of religion and culture. The northern Muslims had adopted an interpretation of culture and religion that was rooted in the 13th century mindset, which refused to recognise that the rest of the Muslim world had moved on.

We need to understand the roots of the problem of northern Nigeria. Burning books, it happened in Kano. What is the crime of those books? They were writing about (love), and love apparently is supposed to be a bad word. In a society where you don’t love your women and you don’t love your children, you allow them to beg, you beat up your women, why should anyone talk about love?

Photo Credit: Instagram – @sanusilamidosanusi