sayeedah Musa

Economist | Banking & Business Analyst|
Mental Health Advocate | Writer | Entrepreneur

[Ziyad Yakubu @Ziyad_yakubu]

Let me tell you something, my friend.

The North’s problem is real. Nobody serious should deny it. The poverty is real. The out-of-school children are real. The insecurity is real. The failure of leadership is real.

But if you want to understand the North, you cannot start the story from “they have had presidents.”

That is too shallow for a region with this much history, geography, trauma, religion, power politics, colonial distortion, elite failure, and security pressure.

The North did not wake up one morning and decide to hate education. There is a history behind that suspicion.

When the British entered Northern Nigeria, they met an already established Islamic political order. There were emirates, courts, scholars, taxation systems, trade routes, Islamic schools, judges, administrators, and a ruling class that already had its own idea of civilization.

Then colonial rule came with Western education, missionary activity, new courts, new administrative structures, and new incentives.

In many parts of the South, Western education entered through mission schools and became a ladder into the colonial economy. In much of the Muslim North, it carried a different meaning. It was not just “school.” It was seen by many as a vehicle for Christian influence, colonial loyalty, cultural erosion, and the weakening of existing Islamic authority.

That stigma did not come from the sky. It came from conquest, mistrust, and the way Western education arrived.

This is why the North’s education problem cannot be reduced to stupidity or laziness. It began partly as a defensive reaction to a real historical threat.

But here is the hard truth: the suspicion has outlived the threat.

A reaction that may have made sense under colonial pressure became destructive when the modern state began rewarding literacy, science, bureaucracy, technology, engineering, and formal administration.

At some point, protecting identity became indistinguishable from trapping children outside the future.

That is where Northern leadership failed badly.

The old Northern elite understood the danger earlier than people admit. Sir Ahmadu Bello did not sit down and say, “Let the North remain backward.” His Northernization agenda was a deliberate attempt to produce Northern teachers, administrators, civil servants, professionals, and political leadership quickly enough to prevent the region from being swallowed inside a new Nigerian state dominated by the already Western-educated South.

That agenda had flaws, but it worked in one important sense: it created a Northern administrative class.

The problem is that later leaders inherited the power but not the developmental seriousness.

They inherited the slogans, the emirates, the titles, the political machinery, and the federal access, but not the discipline of mass education, industrial policy, rural development, teacher training, agricultural modernization, and serious security planning.

So yes, the North has produced presidents.

But producing presidents is not the same as producing development.

Power without developmental discipline becomes distribution. It becomes appointments, contracts, pilgrim boards, federal slots, elite bargaining, and recycled patronage.

And geography also matters.

The North is not sitting beside the Atlantic like Lagos or Port Harcourt. It is tied to the Sahel. It shares long and porous borders with Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Benin. When Libya collapsed, when weapons spread across the Sahel, when jihadist networks expanded, when climate stress hit pastoral routes, when Lake Chad communities were weakened, when Niger and Mali became unstable, the North inherited those shocks directly.

A farmer in Zamfara, a trader in Maiduguri, a herder around Sokoto, or a community in Katsina is not dealing only with “Nigerian leadership failure.” They are living inside a regional security crisis.

That does not excuse bad leadership. It explains why lazy comparisons are weak.

The North also suffered from the Nigerian resource curse in a particular way. Once oil money became the centre of the Nigerian state, productive regional economies were weakened. Groundnut pyramids, cotton, hides and skins, textiles, agriculture, local industry, and regional planning lost importance. Politics became a struggle for federal allocation instead of a competition to build productive capacity.

The North had land. It had people. It had agriculture. It had trade routes. But the oil state taught every region to look toward Abuja.

That destroyed initiative everywhere, but it damaged the North deeply because its strongest assets required long-term planning: irrigation, agro-processing, education, rural roads, livestock systems, border trade, and security coordination.

Now, after saying all that, responsibility must be accepted.

Northern leaders failed their own people.

They allowed almajiri children to become political decoration instead of a national emergency. They allowed banditry to grow from local criminality into a parallel economy. They allowed schools to decay. They allowed girls’ education to become negotiable. They allowed clerics and politicians to play games with reform. They used poverty as an election structure. They built loyalty through dependence.

That part is true.

But the answer is not to mock the North. The answer is to study what worked before and update it.

Ahmadu Bello’s Northernization agenda can be reimagined for the 21st century.

Not as ethnic exclusion or nostalgia. But as a serious regional human-capital project.

Mass teacher training. Boarding schools in secure zones. Integrated Qur’anic and formal education. Technical colleges tied to agriculture, energy, construction, mining, and logistics. Girls’ education backed by stipends and community negotiation. Agro-industrial clusters around Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Sokoto, Bauchi, Gombe, Niger, and Borno. Livestock modernization instead of pretending open grazing can survive modern population pressure. Border security tied to trade, not just soldiers and checkpoints.

Other societies have faced versions of this problem.

Bangladesh attacked female education with stipends, community-level incentives, and a clear national push. Indonesia did not abolish its Islamic schools; it integrated many of them into a modern education pathway. Malaysia used state policy to expand opportunities for historically disadvantaged Malay communities, though with its own flaws. China took poor inland regions seriously through infrastructure, rural industry, technical training, and state coordination.

The lesson is simple: you do not fix historic backwardness by insults. You fix it with policy, discipline, and elite seriousness.

So yes, my friend, criticize Northern leadership. I do it too.

But do not flatten a whole region into “they had presidents and still failed.”

That is lazy analysis.

The North’s crisis is a product of bad leadership, colonial disruption, educational mistrust, Sahelian geography, oil-state laziness, elite capture, and security collapse.

And the way forward is also clear.

The North must stop hiding behind history.

The South must stop pretending history does not matter.

And Nigeria must understand that if the North remains broken, the country will not be stable, no matter how much one region mocks another online.

[Yusuf Dauran @usouph]

It was never just content bro, all he has been doing is painting our own corrupt realities for us.
We have fallen off, we became insensitive to the issues instead, the billions now trillions stolen no longer shocks us, the 10-20 people kidnapped and or killed now 100s no longer surprises us, we don’t even think it could be us anymore.
The dilapidated schools he shows us are no longer shocking and we are used to seeing them, like before, all na norms.

[Abba Lawal @AbbaLawal__]

“Wa Kana Abubuma Saaliha”.

In Suratul Kahf Allah told us the story of some orphans whose wealth and inheritance were hidden for them by their father without them knowing about it even.

He sent a whole messenger and a very knowledgeable man of high repute to fix a wall it was buried under simply because their father was a good man. To them, the messenger and scholar were strangers they probably never saw again.

Prophet Yusuf had 11 brothers that all hated him so much so that they threw him in a well despite him being an innocent child.

“Giving them siblings” is not a guaranty that they’ll be all united and happy and loving each other. At the same time not having siblings doesn’t mean they’ll not have people that’ll stand for and by them.

Just strive to be a good person and parent, pray hard and put your trust in Allah.

[Omoyele Sowore @sowore]

Anyone justifying mass murder simply because @realDonaldTrump believes the world is his playground should brace themselves for a world of resistance.

Power without accountability always meets opposition. History has shown that when leaders overreach, people organize, mobilize, and push back.

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

You're hilariously mistaken because the US did the exact same thing to Islam, just not directly. Through its primary muslim vassal state Saudi Arabia, millions of petrodollars were funnelled into the Muslim World League starting in the same period in the 1970s.

Prior to the MWL, Islam was one of the world's strongest pro-leftist influences. Muslim countries overwhelmingly adopted socialism (since Islam's tenets are fundamentally aligned with socialism), which made Islam a similar kind of threat to the Christian Liberation Theology in Africa and South America.

So the Yanks and the Saudis deployed the MWL and put hundreds of millions of dollars behind it. Its mission was to export Wahhabi/Salafi Islam (which until that point was a niche sect of Sunni Islam which most Muslims did not even regard). The Wahhabi movement exported a politically neutered, pro-Capitslist version of Islam where collectivist doctrine was replaced by endless performances of individual piety and economic rewards in exchange for quiet compliance and doctrinal alignment.

It might not surprise you to know that the Izala Movement in Nigeria, which emerged in 1979 and introduced widespread disturbance and fanaticism to Nigerian Islam, was directly funded and incubated by the Saudi MWL, under the careful watch of the US State Department.

The goal was twofold:

1. Create a class of indoctrinated jihadi militants who could be used by the US as a proxy army to do the dirty jobs it couldn't be seen doing (Sahel, Afghanistan, Northern Nigeria, Syria etc), and more importantly,

2. Permanently distort popular Islamic doctrine and subordinate it to brutal US-aligned monarchies, such that it can never play the powerful pro democracy, anti-capitalist rolr it once played in the Middle East (the nexus of the inhabited world) in the mid 20th century.

Once again, nothing - NOTHING - is off limits to these people.

[Omar Mustafa @Omar_Mustie]

Many northern governors will stand on the day of reckoning in front of Allah and account for the billions they stole in the name of Ramadan feeding.

[sayeedah Musa @xayeesh]

@jon_d_doe You felt you were being disrespected already before this, build a relationship with your husband, have discussions, feel like a wife first.

[Dr. Baridueh Badon @BadonB]

I pay 42% tax every month in Germany but if:
1. I loose my job, the govt pays me 60% of my salary and help to find a new one
2. I have access to 3 years leave if I have a baby with a percentage of my salary and my job will wait for me until I resume.
3. Education is free in govt schools from primary to PhD
4. For every child I have, they get paid €250 monthly until they turn 18
5. I can buy a monthly ticket of €56 monthly and can travel all around the country via train (not high speed) and buses.
6. At any emergency, once you call the ambulance, it arrives within 20 minutes
7. Deffribilators and SOS access are available at every train station and high ways.
8. If I get stock in a country, I call the govt and they come to my support.

Let me stop here.

You that will pay about 30% tax in Nigeria that was copied 90% from the UK tax law, what will you get?

[Michael Taiwo @AskMichaelTaiwo]

Never make the mistake of assuming that a person of peace is unskilled at war.

[sayeedah Musa @xayeesh]

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[sayeedah Musa @xayeesh]

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[sayeedah Musa @xayeesh]

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[Abdool Esq. @ellwahabb]

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Failing to attend court dates can lead to serious consequences, including forfeiting bail or facing additional charges. The process of arraignment, pre-trial motions, and trial can be long, but each stage is designed to protect the rights of both the accused and the public. Understanding these procedures can prevent unnecessary complications and ensure a fair trial.

Legal representation is critical throughout this process. A competent lawyer can explain the nuances of criminal law, file necessary motions, and protect your interests. By being informed and proactive, Nigerians can engage with the justice system confidently and ensure that their rights are respected.

[Sir Dickson @Wizarab10]

Someone would graduate with First Class. You would claim it is not by First Class that all the First Class graduates you know are suffering. Only Pass and 3rd Class graduates are making it.

When people celebrate marriage, you claim it is not an achievement. But when your friend gets engaged and married, excitement wants to kill you. When you get engaged and married, you shut down social media with celebration. When people don't celebrate with you on what is supposedly not a celebration by your own admission, you call them haters.

You find it easy using your uncle and father's friends' connect. You also want to marry a rich man. You want to be successful to give a solid foundation to your kids. But you are envious, jealous, and hateful of rich men's children, and people whose own connect are their own parents, who gave them a solid foundation.

Even on this app, you attack people that have big followers and question people who follow them. You accuse them of thinking they have sense just because they have large followers. But you're doing "follow for follow back" to grow your follower base. You hate influencers but want to become one.

I would have called it witchcraft, but I understand. Success has no real enemy. It is a natural victim of envy.

[Richard Medhurst @richimedhurst]

You can't expect democracy overnight in countries that got their independence barely 80 years ago, after being raped & pillaged by the West for 400 years.

This is fantasy.

One secures sovereignty, resources & infrastructure first, then democracy. Otherwise you'll have neither.

[sayeedah Musa @xayeesh]

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[sayeedah Musa @xayeesh]

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[Sir Dickson @Wizarab10]

Respect is earned.

Na we dey beg for visa, do hallelujah challenge for visa, and give testimony testimony for visa. Na why dem no fit respect us.

We give so much fuck about their visa and what they think of us. If we actually love this country, we would focus on building it and not giving a fuck about the West.

[sayeedah Musa @xayeesh]

@Tech_babby Hi

[sayeedah Musa @xayeesh]

@AramideOyekunle Interested