Former Senate President, Senator David Mark, has said that the challenges plaguing Northern Nigeria are largely self-inflicted, attributing them to decades of leadership failure, complacency, and internal contradictions.
Speaking in Abuja on Saturday at the third plenary session of the Northern Political Summit, Mark declared that Northern leaders must accept responsibility for the alarming poverty, insecurity, and underdevelopment that have besieged the region. According to him, the North is in decline not because of external sabotage but due to leadership that has consistently failed to harness the region’s vast human and natural resources for collective progress.
“The North has no excuse to be this backward,” he stated. “We are blessed with land, population, rich culture, and history. Yet, we are the most impoverished, the most insecure, the most educationally disadvantaged. These are not accidents. They are direct consequences of how we have governed ourselves.”
Mark warned that the cycle of violence, poverty, and illiteracy has become self-perpetuating, fueled by a lack of vision, poor governance, and divisive politics. He said that the region’s elite have over time exploited ethnic and religious sentiments to consolidate power without delivering meaningful development.
“Our people have been abandoned. Rural communities are deserted due to banditry and terrorism. Children are out of school. Youths are unemployed and disillusioned. We cannot continue to pretend this is normal,” Mark said.
He stressed the need for the North to return to its core values of honesty, justice, hard work, and unity. According to him, only a committed leadership that rises above narrow ethnic or religious interests can rescue the region from total collapse.
Mark also called for sincere investment in education, agriculture, youth empowerment, and infrastructure, stating that until the region prioritizes people over politics, it will continue to trail behind the rest of the country.
He further urged political leaders to stop shifting blame and face the truth: “Until we admit our failures, we cannot begin to fix them.”
The former Senate President, now interim leader of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), emphasized that real change will not come through slogans or sentiment but through selfless leadership and the political will to do what is right.
