By Dikkon Wurma
Dear Dr. Adamu Tilde
I find myself compelled to write a little rejoinder on a short post that you have made here some days ago.
You made a comparison between the North and South in relation to diaspora remittances that you said is often neglected when economic developments of the two regions are compared.
In the end, you called on the Northern youths to get out of their comfort zones and seek for what’s stored outside Nigeria. Now this is what I think.
The Economic Advancement Of South-West Nigeria
When these kinds of comparisons are made, there is danger of measuring yards with litre. In terms of sociological make-up, the North and South are two different entities despite being in the same country.
The average northerner is more attached to the immediate society where he/she grows up. There are vast number of extended family 👪 that one must keep closer to. Almost every weekend, there are weddings that one ought or must attend.
All these “communities” are part of the social makeup of the individual. Uprooting oneself from them into an entirely alien, often hostile regions of the world could be devastating to the individual. Ask any northerner outside on how they cope with loneliness, you will hear stories. A simple logic today is to go their social media accounts. You will find it replete with events that are happening here in the North while they are thousands of miles away.
Part of what you have taken for granted, of course I don’t doubt your honest concern on the development of our youths, is your complete obliteration of the difference that defines the dream of an average northerner and an average southerner.
In the discourse on migration, the major argument is that people are running away from poverty into richer parts of the world. Now, the desperation to migrate in the average southerner is completely absent in the mind of an average northerner. Look at Nigerians crossing the Sahara into Europe and check their origins from Nigeria.
There are particular towns in Nigeria where the success of a family is determined by the number of kids abroad! Follow NAPTIP and hear stories. We are daily told that the North is poorer. But northerners are majorly contented in their own quarters, leaving their simple but fulfilled life. I have met a southerner in Germany. He didn’t hesitate to advise me to bring up my wife outside Nigeria so that we can have kids born in a Western country. In this manner, our kids can get dual citizenship. That’s what his sister and her husband have done. I told him that is not part of my plans. I want to finish my studies and go back home. We simply have two different dreams. None of us say the other is wrong. Another friend, also from the South, told me he would never come back to Nigeria. I asked him that his mother would like to see him. He flatly told me that if he comes back, she would die! She wants him there.
In the end, I think it’s important to question the whole notion of “success.” Success is relative. What one society considers an attainment of success could be the exact definition of failure in another society. I think you are leaning so much on the materiality, neglecting other areas that bring comfort to the mind. I know people who measure their success daily not by how much money they earned but by how many congregational prayer they attend.
Psychologists know better.
I don’t intend to hierarchize in the dichotomy of North/South. I simply want to show that each has its own unique dreams and aspirations. There is no point of exposing our youths to dreams that do not reconcile with their realities.
Thank you for starting the debate.
Your brother,
Dikkon Wurma.
03.02.’20
Dikko is a PhD Candidate at Bigsas Bayreuth University, Germany.
