From Agaju Madugba, Katsina
The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has personified the unenviable insecurity status of the northern parts of Nigeria, saying that it walks openly with two legs and spreads death, grief, wanton poverty and misery across the region with each step.
“Insecurity is walking with two legs in the northern parts of the country,” the CNG President, Jamilu Charanchi, said in Katsina on Saturday.
He spoke at the opening of the group’s engagement programme, canvassing community participation in tackling socio-economic challenges bedevilling Northern Nigeria.
The group traced the tag of the “most backward region of Nigeria” to what it described as several decades of leadership decay in the north, “resulting in the collapse of societal values, immorality, and lack of leadership values.
Charanchi said, “These challenges have over the years culminated in pervasive leadership crises leading to poverty, unemployment and illiteracy, evident in the high number of out-of-school children and insecurity across the north.
“The region remains the least developed, grappling with drug abuse, youth restiveness, the collapse of social values and high levels of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and insecurity all of which translate to skewed socio-economic indices in relation to other regions of the country.
“Thus, the CNG believes that there is a need for a paradigm shift from government-based to society-based solutions that will enable the comprehensive assessment and a coordinated approach to addressing the underlying causes of these challenges by members of the community.”
In a message he sent at the ceremony, Governor Umaru Dikko Radda noted that his administration has initiated a number of programmes aimed at tackling certain socio-economic ills and underdevelopment across the state.
“We have initiated scholarships for indigent students in Nigeria and foreign lands to study and Katsina State has become a role model in tackling insecurity by creating a Ministry for Internal Security, establishment and engaging over 1500 Community Watch Corps which reduced the issue of insecurity to 70 per cent. Katsina also spent over N30 billion on agriculture.
“The administration has employed 30,000 teachers, renovating schools and equipping them with learning materials,” the Governor said.