Real reason why Northerners are angry about Obi’s references to the poverty in the region

Media scholar, Professor Farooq Kperogi on Saturday waded into the controversy generated by Peter Obi’s reference to the poverty in the North in an April 18 Twitter thread.

POLITICS NIGERIA reports that Kperogi said Northerners are resentful of the Labour Party presidential candidate’s oblique references to the poverty in the North “because he is an “outsider” who is in addition resented for asking the “Church” to “take back” its “country” and for characterizing the 2023 election as a “religious war” between Muslims and Christians”.

This newspaper recalls that in a series of tweets on April 18, Obi said, among other things, that he was “committed to lifting people out of poverty and I remain committed to transforming Nigeria starting from the North to every part of the nation.” This rankled many northerners, particularly northern Muslims, who understood the tweet as a backhanded, stereotypical vilification of their region.

Kperogi wrote in his weekly column: “Obi’s spotlight on the North is, of course, balanced on a thick thread of irrefutably solid statistical evidence. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), of the 133 million Nigerians who writhe in unspeakably stifling multidimensional poverty as of the end of last year, 86 million (which represents 65 percent) live in the North.

“The North constitutes 54 percent of Nigeria’s population (and 70 percent of its landmass), so if the region makes up 65 percent of the nation’s poorest population there’s clearly an imbalance. Given that context, it’s reasonable that Obi chose to call attention to the poverty in the North, as he had done many times in the past, and to invoke it as the launching pad of his commitment to transform Nigeria. (Had he spotlighted the South, he might also have been accused of regional self-centeredness!)

“But to expect all northerners to process Obi’s message the way I’ve done is to have a limited understanding of human behaviors and motivations. You see, every region in Nigeria, as I’ve pointed out in the past, has its stereotypical vulnerabilities about which it is sensitive.”

He continued: “From religious extremism to endemic child abandonment, from 419 email scams to “baby factories,” from child trafficking and prostitution in foreign lands to disabling alcoholism, from credit card scams to kidnapping, etc. Nigerians can, and often do, easily territorialize crimes and negative traits within their national space.

“These stereotypical territorializations of crimes and negative stereotypes are often considered offensive when they are uttered by “outsiders” but tolerated, sometimes praised even, when they are uttered by “insiders.”

“Many northerners have called attention to the endemic poverty in the North and got praises for it. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, for instance, has been brutal and unsparing when he calls attention to poverty in the region and the culture that conduces to it.

“When he spoke at the fourth Kaduna Investment Summit on April 3, 2019, Aliko Dangote, the world’s richest Black person who is incidentally a northern Nigerian, also said way worse things about poverty in the North than Obi could ever say.”

Kperogi concluded: “Nigeria is ranked at 157th out of 189 countries on the human development index. While the overall socio-economic condition in the country is a cause for concern, the regional disparities are in fact very alarming,” he said. “In the Northwestern and Northeastern parts of Nigeria, more than 60 per cent of the population lives in extreme poverty.”

“No northerner had a problem with Dangote for what he said. In fact, many northerners lauded his forthrightness. Northerners are resentful of Obi’s oblique references to the poverty in the North because he is an “outsider” who is in addition resented for asking the “Church” to “take back” its “country” and for characterizing the 2023 election as a “religious war” between Muslims and Christians.”