By Jibrin Ibrahim, Senior Fellow, Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja
“A trend analysis of where Arewa is headed in the next 25 years will reveal a clear pathway to ANNIHILATION. “
Presentation to Arewa Consultative Forum 25 Anniversary Celebrations, Kaduna, 22nd November, 2025
I am glad that ACF has asked me to give a ten-minutes presentation on Arewa in the next 25 years. This is an indication that there is a new interest in trend analysis or futures studies within the leadership of this organisation. This is an interdisciplinary field that systematically explores and analyses possible, deplorable, probable, and/or preferable futures to inform decision-making today. It differs from prediction which is a disciple for people with spiritual insights. Trend analysis is a social science which uses a combination of scientific forecasting and foresight to help societies and organizations manage uncertainty, prepare for change, and work towards a more desired future. Key methods include scenario planning, and it often examines trends across social, technological, economic, environmental, and political (STEEP) categories.
A trend analysis of where Arewa is headed in the next 25 years will reveal a clear pathway to ANNIHILATION. There is no soft way of describing the current outcome we are chasing. Every day, we are warned that to survive as a people, we must change our ways and move away from the massive level of public corruption and self-aggrandisement that makes it virtually impossible for governments to do their work of producing public goods for the people – security, welfare, good health, infrastructure and so on. The simple message from trend analysis is that we must change We must improve governance or perish. The problem is those in government are not interested in listening. The governing class we apparently elected do not have the empathy to listen to what the people need desperately? As for the people themselves, so far, they have demonstrated an inability to impose their will on their leaders, in spite of occasional explosions of discontentment and anger.
Trend analysis looks at likely outcomes based on current data. My trend analysis for the next decade is as follows – I am not sufficiently bold to talk of 25 years’
1) The Arewa Consultative Forum would be unable to organise another big event similar to this 2025 bash because their leaders would be too scared of abductions and random killings to travel from their base to Kaduna. In desperation, ACF may change their standing rules to meet in Abuja, and if that is not possible, in Dubai where many of them will be based.
2) The struggles for the emancipation of Biafra, Niger Delta and Oduduwa Republics from the exploding Federal Republic of Nigeria would have reached an advanced stage and the “international community” would gleefully line up supporting one side or the other thankful that their dream of 1967 is coming to pass.
3) Arewa would discover with shock and dismay that there is no Republic emerging in the North as its constituent zones of the Caliphate, Borno, Middle Belt and the majority, i.e. the others, comes to the conclusion that they have no interest in a marriage of convenience BUT have no capacity or will for independent existence.
4) The winners, to our collective shock, will be the six million private citizens who have procured small arms and light weapons and are using them to rob their neighbours, kill the men, sexually assault the women, stop farming and promote starvation turning this beautiful country into hell.
This is what projections from trend analysis are telling us as things stand today. In other words, it is the worst-case scenario. The purpose of futures study or trend analysis however is to ensure that the worst case does not happen. That preventive measures are taken to ensure that much better outcomes emerge. I believe that the essence of this 25th anniversary celebrations is to engage in deep reflections to change the trajectory we are on to a better one. This would require telling ourselves the truth. Let us take inspiration from the Sardauna of Sokoto and his Government.
In 1965, the Northern Nigeria Regional House of Assembly passed the Grazing Reserve Law to give legal backing to grazing reserves and stock routes that were customarily recognised. Grazing reserves are areas of land demarcated, set aside and reserved for exclusive or semi-exclusive use by pastoralists. The purpose of enacting the law was to respond to a problem identified in a research report by the World Bank that the rapid increase in population growth and expansion of agriculture in Northern Nigeria was creating a trend of conflict generating mechanisms between farmers and herders that could precipitate a major national crisis within the next 25 years, i.e. by 1990. A total of 417 grazing reserves all over Northern Nigeria to separate the farmers from the herders.
The short-term goal was to prevent conflicts between farmers and herders that could affect social cohesion in the region. The plan had a long-term goal which was to change nomadic pastoralists to settled and semi-settled agro-pastoralists and ultimately mixed farmers. Mixed farming is a system of farming in which crop growing is combined with keeping livestock for profit. The grazing reserves were to be provided with watering points, veterinary outposts to improve new breeds and animal health, pasture development and marketing channels. Implementation was halted by the coup. The process was lost in restructuring as the civil war and state creation led to the loss of governance knowledge and programming on a pan northern basis and the anticipated growth of conflicts arrived with no anchor to address it at both the federal and state levels.
My only message to this meeting is that trend analysis, futures study should be a major focus if we need to save both Arewa and Nigeria. ACF needs to go beyond my ten minutes and prepare a proper study to guide its work.
I was part of the OECD and the World Bank team that in 1993-94 conducted the West African Long-Term Perspective Study – 1995 to 2020. We spent a year conducting a detailed study, reading the tea leaves of where Nigeria was headed in the next 25 years. Sadly, all our projections of the dangers ahead that should be avoided have come to pass. We drew attention to rapid population growth rate, producing a youth bulge due to a significant decline in infant mortality, and posed the question whether we would benefit from the demographic dividend if we educate and train the youth and diversify the economy to provide jobs or we do nothing and suffer the blows from a demographic bombshell. We did nothing and the bombs have gone off.
We observed the rapidity of rural-urban migration and pointed out that the cities were developing vast slums, as young people left their villages to cities with neither training nor education, thereby transferring rural poverty to concentrated urban squalor. A society with a vast lumpen hustler population surviving day-by-day in a difficult informal economy, creates a vast “precariat” that would promote instability. That is what we now have. We warned the governments that the universal compulsory primary school scheme introduced in 1976 had been abandoned by most Northern state governments and there will be consequences. We drew attention to the urgent need to implement it, as our future depended on it. No one in government cared. Today, Nigeria has the largest population of school-age children in the world, who are out of school and no government has seen it as a national emergency over the past three decades.
We drew attention to the rise of religiosity and the penetration of the religious arena by informal religious actors, following the outbreak of the Maitatsine violence in the early 1980s, which we said could balloon into significant levels of violent extremism. We drew attention to the socio-economic crisis in the Sahel as a possible trigger and many in power thought it was mere speculation, until Boko Haram became part of our lived realty. We also drew attention to the rapid expansion of both agriculture and pastoralism in the same space, leading to violent conflicts and a run on arable land in the Middle Belt, which is where we are today. These were our projections for the 2020s, handed over to governments in 1994. Nothing was done.
Two year ago, the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa did a trend analysis of Nigeria in 2050 and they covered essentially the same grounds. They drew attention to what the data is saying today – that everything is more dire now than it was previously. Over four decades after the introduction of compulsory universal basic education, over 30% of the population is illiterate with the numbers for Arewa being much higher. The country is in chronic crisis, with an essentially bankrupt economy that has sank into a debt trap. Nigerians have never been so unsafe, with multiple insurgencies, widespread banditry, separatist agitations, policy discontinuities, massive corruption and a level of poor governance that presents an existential threat.
The study showed graphics demonstrating that Nigeria and Malaysia where at a similar level of economic performance at independence, but today the latter country has transformed its economy and moved far ahead, while we remain in crisis. Nigeria is not on track to achieve most of the SDGs by 2030, and is forecast to have the highest number of poor people globally by 2050. Internally, there is a poverty polarity between Northern and Southern Nigeria, with the North lagging far behind. Nigeria has one of the world’s lowest tax revenue-to-GDP ratios, leaving little fiscal space for productive expenditure. The public health and education sectors are incapacitated by mismanagement, corruption and inadequate funding.
Nigeria can and must address the security challenges it faces by providing the leadership for the security forces to be properly equipped and encouraged to do its work. It is still possible to promote national cohesion and social inclusion by ensuring a fair distribution of socio-economic amenities across the states. The government needs to set up a national social protection programme to support the poorest and most vulnerable to reduce poverty and inequality.
Nigeria’s population is forecast to increase to over 450 million by 2050, by which time it will be the third most populous country in the world. Although Nigeria has great agricultural potential, the sector is unable to meet the nutritional demands of a rapidly growing population. Nigeria has made little progress in export diversification. The country remains a rentier economy but, currently, even that is lost as a significant portion of the petroleum produced is stolen and sold by private, government and security cabals that have become pipeline bandits. Macroeconomic instability, a skills shortage, an unfriendly business environment and infrastructure deficits constrain productivity and growth in the non-oil sector.
The situation is bad. Nonetheless, with aggressive but reasonable policy interventions, Nigeria could have a significantly brighter future if we have a leadership with vision and competence. This is the major challenge posed to Nigerian citizens today.
Nigeria can and must address the security challenges it faces by providing the leadership for the security forces to be properly equipped and encouraged to do its work. It is still possible to promote national cohesion and social inclusion by ensuring a fair distribution of socio-economic amenities across the states. The government needs to set up a national social protection programme to support the poorest and most vulnerable to reduce poverty and inequality. Also, there is the necessity of intensifying the struggle against corruption, improving public financial management and domestic revenue mobilisation by accelerating digitalisation to enhance tax efficiency, and addressing the infrastructure gap by creating an enabling environment for public-private-partnerships in infrastructure development.
The North, the Youth and Precarity
Public Trust in the Nigerian State Project has collapsed and the country’s political settlement which has been based on diverting public resources for the benefit of regional elite coalitions is imploding under the impulsion of debilitating poverty in the North, the youth bulge and the rising agency of the precariat. The result is the massive rise of insecurity and the youth procure and use small arms and light weapons to extract their own share of the famous “national cake”.
Poverty in Nigeria is not evenly spread. The number of people living in poverty in the Northern region has been increasing since 2011 and in 2016, it represented 87 percent of all poor in Nigeria. In contrast, the South is achieving greater progress, with around 12 percent of its population living in poverty in 2016. In general, inequality has increased in recent years, as indicated by the Gini coefficient increase from 0.36 to 0.42 between 2011 and 2016, a situation that fuels instability and conflicts which is our concern in this report.
The most important contemporary problem for Nigeria is the lack of opportunity for the youth. We have developed a huge youth bulge that has been growing rapidly. This is happening at a time in which formal opportunities for employment are declining and having a job has become a minority experience. The North is the most affected region in the country in this regard. The North, especially the North East and North West are the most backward region of Nigeria in all social sectors. It has the highest birth rate in the contemporary world, the lowest level of economic development, the least access to education and the poorest network of health facilities and staff. The population of the North is growing at a higher rate than the rest of the country thereby deepening poverty rates.
Education
The North is also behind in educational attainment across the country. As of 2018, the gross enrolment rate in elementary schools in Nigeria stood at 68.3 percent. The South West recorded the highest enrolment for female with 73% while the North East recorded the least with 59.7% enrolment for male. The result of this process is that there is a very large proportion of Northern youth who are not in school, not in the family house and not in regular paid employment. They live precarious lives in urban centres doing menial daily-paid jobs and are engaged in the informal sector. Living in the cities, these marginalised youth who are often glued to the social media know about the massive wealth being enjoyed by a few and conspicuous consumption of the obscene ruling class. They feel marginalized, are often angry and feel completely abandoned by society. They are a precariat ready for violence and their time has come. The Northern Precariat is today one of the major agencies of social action in the country creating significant levels of insecurity.
Insecurity
The state of insecurity in Nigeria has reached an unprecedented level as bands and gangs of the precariat go on rampage daily. Well-coordinated commando-like operations by gunmen are organised against rural communities where people are kidnapped for ransom, their houses burnt and their property looted. Similar attacks are also conducted against the army and police. These attacks are now occurring in virtually all geopolitical zones in the country. FormerGovernor and current Defence Minister Bello Matawalle of Zamfara State estimated when he was governor that there were no fewer than 30,000 gunmen spread across more than 100 camps in and around the state when he was in power. They have collected N970 million as ransom from the families of their victims in the eight years between 2011 and 2019 and killed 2,619 people and kidnapped 1,190 others. For years now, significant proportion of farmers cannot go to their farms out of fear so food insecurity is on the horizon. Given the seriousness of the situation.
General Abdulsalam Abubakar, Chairman of the National Peace Committee, told Nigeria that there are six million weapons circulating in the hands of non-state actors in Nigeria and they are using them. The death toll, he estimates is 80,000 while about three million people are internally displaced. The country finds itself at a point in our national trajectory where young Nigerians feel sufficiently marginalized from the STATE and SOCIETY to procure arms and engage in self-help which they define variously as banditry, scotched earth attacks on innocent village communities accompanied by mass rape and other forms of sexual violence, in addition to killing security agents, and even declaring an Islamic Caliphate in Nigeria.
Nigeria as an Ungoverned Space
State crisis is symbolised by the fact that rural Nigeria is characterized by the absence of the State and its security agencies and it is therefore not surprising that the blight of armed banditry has spread and impacted negatively on lives and livelihoods. The massive proliferation of small arms and light weapons in the Nigerian hinterland has provided the means for agency in the spread of violence. The phenomenon has dramatized the expansion of ungoverned spaces in the country. Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence of institutional decay at all levels of governance.
Understanding Leadership
One of the most important variables in determining the advancement or retardation of a people is the quality of the leadership they have. Leaders can inspire and mobilise the people towards progress or the opposite. They can promote unity and show the necessary direction of travel to lead to progress or create conditions for the disintegration and decomposition of the Nation. What then is Leadership and what does it mean for someone to lead? Leadership is a process of giving purpose (meaningful direction) to collective effort, and causing willing effort to be expended to achieve collective purpose. Leadership has to do with the ability of the leader to show the right path to the group or people they lead and to be able to make them see the need to go the way they should. Leadership is showing the way and helping or inducing others to pursue it. This entails envisioning a desirable future, promoting a clear purpose or mission, supportive values and intelligent strategies, and empowering and engaging all those concerned. Being a leader is therefore having the disposition and skills to think, plan and act for the larger community. The role of the leader is to see for the people, help and orient them. The leader also has to persuade the people on the best pathway towards and improved future. Leaders therefore need the intellectual sagacity and wisdom to convince people on the best way forward, which will sometimes appear to be the most difficult path.
The general impression amongst Nigerians is that leadership is about enjoyment, ceremonies, pomp and pageantry, living the high life in government house, moving around in comfortable jets and having direct access to monies in the public treasury. The reality however is leadership is hard work. It requires loads of self-discipline and sacrifice to achieve set objectives. The leader gets insults and attacks and their egos get bruised often. It is this lack of understanding of the leadership task that is partly responsible for the way and manner most people struggle for leadership positions across the continent of Africa. What is in their mind is to get very rich or to punish communities or regions they have problems with. In Nigeria, our national predicament is clearly due to poor leadership.
Leadership and the North
The first set of Northern leaders were trained at Katsina College established in 1921. Annual assessments were conducted by their teachers and 75% of marks were awarded on the basis of character. Elements for assessment included punctuality, honesty, leadership responsibility and ability to work with others. The leadership that ran the North and the Federal Government under Ahmadu Bello and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa were trained under these conditions. They had a vision and John Paden’s book on Ahmadu Bello describes in detail how the provincial mentality they came to Katsina College with was transformed into a Northern Nigerian outlook. They were collectively groomed into a vision for the unity and development of Northern Nigeria. It is important to emphasise that none of that first-generation leadership was focused on personal wealth, nor the culture of self-aggrandisement. They were punctual and will not keep people waiting for them for hours as many leaders today are fond of doing. They were very disciplined in how they ran both their personal and professional lives. They did not acquire properties and did not grow rich through corrupt deals. Although they did not go far academically, they had enough general knowledge to understand contending issues in the policy arena and had a very good command of the English language which gave them the confidence to relate with others from the South or from outside the country. Finally, they had imbibed the ethics of personal behaviour and the ethos of good governance and public service.
Today, you have governors in Northern Nigeria who spend over 80% of their time outside their States, living in Abuja and hoping from one foreign country to another. They regularly misappropriate a significant part of their State budgets and have no sense of the leadership responsibility to deliver public service. They feel no commitment to pay the salaries of workers of the entitlements of pensioners. They are very intolerant of criticisms and get the police to harass their critics.
Governing Nigeria is no easy task and the country’s problems are so many and so deep that governance processes have to be pursued with urgency. For eight years, President Buhari acted as if he had all the time in the world and it is precisely because of that that all the problems he met on the ground worsened over period. He simply refused to govern the country.
Criteria for Good Leadership Selection
In his classic lecture on leadership qualities – “Mutumin Kirki: The Concept of the Good Man in Hausa Society”; Anthony Kirk-Green defined the attributes that people seek for in good leaders. They are truthfulness, compassion, integrity, trust and generosity for those in need. Wealth and material success were not considered important attributes in the selection of leaders. Today, those who can provide the biggest bribes for the biggest number emerge as our leaders and this culture must change. We must develop an overwhelming consensus that political leadership cannot remain the only job for which no qualification appears necessary except to have a lot of money, usually, stolen money. The following criteria are proposed to guide citizens as they set out to nominate and elect their political leaders
A) Integrity
Only people of proven integrity should be considered for leadership. People know who are the persons of good character in their communities and it is necessary that before party primaries, widespread discussions are held to identify people with integrity to be considered for positions. Many of such people may not propose themselves for public office knowing the high level of monetisation of our politics and might therefore rule themselves out for consideration. The benefit of community involvement in the process is that is that resources could be raised collectively to support their candidature. People who have been known, formally or informally, to have been involved in corruption must be ruled out of consideration at the outset.
Competence
Leadership requires people with a vision of what they want to achieve for their society. Of course, those who want to present themselves can get good consultants to write up a vision and programme for them. It is therefore important to define competence on the basis of track record of proposed candidates – professional background and accomplishments, community engagement and service, views expressed on political, economic and social issues. There has to be minimum education standards, degree or higher national diploma. Finally, age and good health are key factors. People over seventy years should be encouraged to stay out of politics because they are unlikely to have the energy for the enormous work involved in running a country as large and complex as Nigeria.
C) Democratic or Civic Credentials
Governance success requires respect and knowledge of how democracies work at their best. The good profile for a democratic player includes respect for due process and the rule of law. Even more important is the disposition to be always ready to promote participation of members – community, political party, assembly etc. In order words, people with an ingrained civic culture. The search for consensus is important as long as it does not involve sacrificing core principles. Thorough and open discussions of policy programmes before their adoption is extremely important. We must move away from politics as brute expression of power or manipulation. We must stand for a civic culture that builds citizenship..