TIME IS RUNNING OUT. THE DOOR IS CLOSING UP. LET MY PEOPLE BREATHE.
Clement Betiku.
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE NORTHERN ELITES: PAST, PRESENT, AND EMERITUS.
To: The Custodians of Power, Wealth, and Influence in Northern Nigeria,
Subject: Is Governance Also Haram?
Distinguished Elders, Excellencies, and Leaders,
I write this not with the polished diplomatic etiquette that has long shielded our region from the truth, but with the raw, agonizing frustration of a citizen watching the fabric of our society turn into ash.
For decades, we have sat in air-conditioned halls across Kaduna, Kano, Abuja, and Lagos, discussing the “Northern problem” as if it were a complex, mathematical mystery. We look at the statistics of our collapse with performative sighs. But the time for pretense is over. The crisis is no longer a distant data point, it has walked directly onto the streets of our nation’s major cities.
1. The Street View of Our Collective Ruin.
Walk through the streets of Abuja, Lagos, or Port Harcourt. You will see an endless, heartbreaking procession of displaced northern nursing mothers, toddlers clinging to their wrappers, millions of out-of-school children navigating traffic just to survive.
For too long, the convenient narrative pushed from the state capitals has been that this is a “cultural problem” that our people simply resist formal education or prefer a lifestyle of wandering. This is a lie. Parents do not willingly send their five-year-old children across the Niger River to beg. They do so because their home states have stripped them of every alternative. We are witnessing a humanitarian refugee crisis disguised as urban poverty, and our leadership is treating it like a municipal nuisance.
2. The Truth We Pretend Not to Know.
Let us stop the hypocrisy. We know exactly why the numbers of out-of-school children are soaring.
😭 Entire communities have been under constant, unremitting warfare and takeover by terrorists and bandits.
😭 Ancestral territories have been lost.
😭 Farmlands, fishing basins, and vital irrigation streams have been seized, completely obliterating the agrarian economy that once sustained millions of self-sufficient families.
These women on the streets of the South are not looking for “greener pastures”, they are fleeing the graveyards we allowed their towns to become.
They have buried their husbands, lost their youth to bandits, and seen their villages burned. To add insult to injury, state authorities have quietly abandoned or actively denied the existence of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, preferring to keep these victims invisible rather than face the political embarrassment of their own sovereign failure.
3. The Inhumane Racket of Secrecy.
While the citizens lose their homelands, their livelihoods, and their rights, the authorities have not lost a single Kobo of their resources.
Every single month, billions of Naira from the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) flow into local government areas that are entirely overrun by bandits. Where does that money go? With no schools to build, no clinics to run, and no roads to pave in these red zones, these allocations vanish into a black hole.
This has evolved from simple corruption into a massive, self-replicating industry of human misery. To hijack resources meant for a displaced population requires a long chain of accomplices, from treasury officers and compromised auditors to co-opted community leaders and silent legislators. By sharing the loot, an entire generation of public administrators has been initiated into an inhumane racket.
They no longer have the incentive to end the security crisis, because the crisis justifies the unaccountable “Security Votes” that fund their lifestyles.
Our historic manufacturing factories and textile mills have closed, replaced entirely by this booming syndicate of exploitation.
4. The Searing Question: Is Governance Also Haram?
It is in the crucible of this frustration that we must ask the ultimate, uncomfortable question, is good governance also haram (forbidden) to you?
By your actions, it appears that transparency is haram. Empathy for a displaced mother is haram. Ensuring a child in a rural village learns to read and write is haram. You have inverted the very philosophical foundation upon which the North was built.
Centuries ago, the intellectual architect of this region, Sheikh Usman dan Fodio, left us an immortal blueprint:
✍️”A kingdom can endure with unbelief, but it cannot endure with injustice.”
By choosing to protect the syndicate over the people, you have chosen systemic injustice. You have weaponized the collective misery of the populace to secure your hold on power and wealth.
5. The Script for the Solutions.
If we are to rewrite this tragic script, it will not happen through your communiqués or committees. The citizens must now draft their own terms of engagement through three radical pillars:
A. Breaking the Secrecy with Sunlight!
We must move away from broad complaints and begin hyper-local financial and physical project tracking. If a state budget claims funds were deployed to a warzone LGA, citizen networks must document and broadcast the empty plots of land. We must strip away the administrative darkness that allows the accomplices to protect each other.
B. Localized Economic Sovereignty!!
We must bypass co-opted state machineries to rebuild grassroots resilience. This means deploying decentralized, community-led infrastructure off-grid energy, localized water frameworks, and domestic industries. When rural communities reclaim their economic independence, they can no longer be forced into compliance by the racket.
C. Targeting the Institutional Enablers!!!
The politicians are merely the face, but the banks, civil service directors, and local contractors are the spine of the racket. Civil society must pivot to strategic litigation, asset tracking, and the blacklisting of complicit financial institutions and contractors who handle stolen local government allocations.
My Final Warning ⚠️
The masses fleeing the North are the smoke, and the fire is the rot in our governance systems. You cannot extinguish the smoke while fueling the fire.
If you continue to treat the state as a private cash-cow while an entire generation grows up uneducated, traumatized, and displaced, the syndicate you built to protect your wealth will ultimately be the instrument of your own destruction.
History is writing this script in real-time. The question is whether you will dismantle the racket yourselves, or wait for the sheer weight of human misery to collapse the walls around you.
Wallahi Tallahi, the clock is ticking faster than usual.
Yours faithfully,
Comrade, IG Wala.
A Voice from the Grassroots.
