Open letter to northern Nigerian political leaders

Esteemed northern leaders – governors, commissioners, Hisbah boards, traditional rulers and legislators – I write not to insult but to confront us with a truth too bitter to keep swallowing.

This year, Kano approved N1.5 billion for 3,000 couples. Katsina is sponsoring 1,000 couples; Zamfara 100 couples. Mass weddings are paraded as welfare. But sirs, let’s ask the hard question: What exactly are we wedding?

We are wedding illiteracy to illiteracy. When both partners cannot read a prescription, calculate school fees and have no trade beyond “survival,” we are not forming families, we are duplicating poverty. A ring doesn’t create income. A certificate of marriage doesn’t create jobs. Please stop cloning poverty; marry skills, not just couples.

Our gross domestic product (GDP) grows when we produce goods, services and ideas. But we celebrate population growth as if it were production. Three thousand new households without land, factories, clinics or schools is like building 10 floors on sand. The building will fall. It is falling already. You cannot eat GDP. And GDP cannot feed children born into homes with zero economic base.

When you marry two people without income and they have six kids they cannot feed, the children will hit the streets. And those street kids don’t disappear. In 15 years they become the statistics for crime, drug abuse, banditry and the terrorism we cry over today.

We are not having babies, we are manufacturing future headlines for the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and United Nations (UN) reports.

Also, malnutrition is killing our children like chickens. When eight mouths share one meal, the smallest bodies lose first. Stunting, kwashiorkor, measles, diarrhea are not “God’s will;” they are math. Calories in calories needed equal death. Our under-5 mortality rate is the verdict on our choices.

There are broken homes from day one. A wedding does not cure unemployment or trauma. Illiteracy plus poverty, plus desperation equal divorce, domestic violence and children who would grow up learning that marriage equals suffering and father equals absence.

Terrorism does not start with ideology, it starts with hopelessness. Boko Haram, bandits, cults, do not recruit PhDs, they recruit boys who were “produced” but never raised.

This is not religion. Islam demands nafaqah – the ability to provide. Christianity says: “He who does not provide for his household is worse than an unbeliever.” And our tradition says: “Know the family you are joining.”

No religion encourages backwardness. What we are doing is weaponising religion to dodge responsibility. Piety without planning is negligence with prayers.

We ignore the women and the future. Mass wedding plus zero family planning education equal women’s bodies broken by back-to-back pregnancies. Maternal mortality is the hidden tax we don’t budget for.

When seven kids share zero books, public schools collapse into daycare centres. Mental health dies under shame and hunger and we pretend that we would “fix it later.”

The deepest cut for us is that we are not cursed; we are making choices with consequences. Marrying poverty to poverty and calling it “empowerment” is like pouring petrol on fire and calling it rain.

So what is the plan, leaders? N1.5 billion for dowry, furniture and N100,000 “capital”…, then silence – no skills training, no literacy classes, no job placement, no follow-up.

The real plan seems to be: “Push the problem 18 years forward and let the next governor handle the street kids.”

The following are what will change everything: Take half of that budget, and before any wedding, invest in adult literacy, plus numeracy, at least for six months. If you can’t read, you can’t budget. Invest in vocational training, such as carpentry, tailoring, solar installation, farming tech, phone repair. Give skills, not just furniture. Also talk about family planning, plus health education: not to stop births but to space them so that mothers and children would survive. Marriage counseling, where you teach conflict resolution, is also very necessary because a home without peace is a prison.

Marriage should equal skills, plus income, literacy and planning. Anything less is a photo-op, not policy.

Those of us in Abuja see the results daily: beggars at Area 1, almajirai at traffic light spots, mothers selling sachet water with babies on their backs. That is not “the poor,” that is the child of the wedding we cheered 10 years ago.

The North does not lack faith, it lacks foresight. If we want a North that leads Nigeria, we must stop producing children without infrastructure. We must stop treating population as wealth.

Give us leaders who think right, even when there is no election. Give these couples more than a ceremony; give them a future.

The children we fail to feed today will be the men we fail to jail tomorrow. The choice is yours.

Dr Zainab Suleiman Buhari sent in this material.

UPDATE NEWS:

Nigerians can now invest ₦2.5 million on premium domains and profit about ₦17-₦25 million. All earnings paid in US Dollars. Rather than wonder,

click here to find out how it works.