THE CULT OF POVERTY: How Politicians in Arewa Manufacture Hunger for Control By Khaleed Yazeed

THE CULT OF POVERTY: How Politicians in Arewa Manufacture Hunger for Control

By Khaleed Yazeed

There is no mystery to the poverty choking Northern Nigeria. It didn’t fall like rain from a cloud. It wasn’t woven into our fate by God. And it didn’t drift northward from the South. It was manufactured. Designed. Engineered. By men who live among us, rule over us, and smile through our suffering, the Northern Oligarchy.

These are not leaders. They are architects of collapse. They sit in marble mansions paid for by inflated contracts. They sign fake agreements in luxury hotels while mothers in their hometowns give birth on bare clinic floors. They call themselves defenders of the North, yet every move they make carves deeper wounds into its soul.

They are not afraid of poverty. They depend on it. They are not at war with hunger. Hunger is their tool, their leash, their silent enforcer.

Let no one tell you the system has failed. No, it has succeeded, exactly as it was built to. It is not broken. It is functioning with terrifying precision. Designed to keep the average Northerner poor, obedient, uneducated, and eternally grateful to the same men who are crushing him.

This is how they do it. They begin with education. Not to uplift you, but to cripple you. Schools across the North rot under leaking roofs. Teachers go months without salaries. Students sit on bare floors with no chalk, no books, no hope. More than 70% of Nigeria’s out-of-school children are in the North, not by accident, but by design. An educated youth asks questions. A literate girl becomes a mother who raises thinkers. That is what the cult fears, so they keep the people in darkness.

Then they reach for religion, not to inspire you, but to chain you. They don’t fund imams who speak truth to power, they pay clerics who preach obedience to tyranny. Friday after Friday, the message is the same; “Don’t question your leaders. It is God’s will.” And still, the children of those same politicians study abroad in secular schools, while they pay scholars here to glorify servitude. Religion, once the heart of our community, is now their most effective muzzle.

They seize the media next. Journalists vanish when they ask the wrong questions. Radio hosts are fed scripts filled with praise-songs and false achievements. Try to speak up, and your voice will vanish from the airwaves. A governor who hasn’t built a single road will be praised as a visionary. A senator who stole empowerment funds will be introduced as a philanthropist. The people are being fed illusions while their realities rot.

Contracts are the bloodline of the cult. The same five companies, tied to the same ten men, rotate billion naira contracts like a family heirloom. Projects are announced with great ceremony, rural roads, farm tools, youth training, but nothing ever arrives. A borehole exists only on paper. A training center turns out to be a locked, empty building. And when a whistleblower speaks? They disappear. Or they’re transferred to obscurity.

But the cult is not satisfied with money alone. They need silence. And so, they turn to fear. Rituals in hidden shrines. Blood oaths before elections. Spiritual blackmail whispered through village corridors. Activists vanish. Voices die. And the people remain afraid, afraid of spirits, of soldiers, of speaking the truth.

This is not misgovernance. This is calculated sabotage. This is not mere corruption, it is a cult of poverty, enforced by fear, maintained by lies, and worshipped by cowards in kaftans.

Meanwhile, Northern billionaires, many of them nothing more than errand boys for these politicians acquire new jets and estates. They smile in agbadas beside presidents, but cannot fix a school in their hometowns. They receive money meant for youth empowerment, and instead build guesthouses in Dubai. They are not business moguls. They are traffickers in the suffering of their own people.

They don’t want to develop the North. They want to own it.

That is why you see mosques where there should be factories. Bags of rice where there should be rights. Prayers for peace instead of strategies for justice. The poor are made to beg for what they already own. And when they dare to ask why, they’re told to be patient, that “it is God’s test.” But it’s not God testing them. It is man destroying them.

So who will speak for the silenced? Who will challenge the cult?

The North has brilliance. But brilliance has been buried beneath a mountain of fear and tradition. The North has strength. But that strength has been drugged with tribalism and cheap politics. The region is bleeding not from lack of resources, but from a lack of resistance.

If you remain silent, you are serving the cult.

If you defend thieves because they share your name, you are upholding the chains.

If you choose blindness because the truth hurts, then know this, you are not neutral, you are part of the machine.

The North will rise, not when we elect another son of the soil, but when we educate ourselves, unlearn our fears, confront our clerics, and tear down this cult brick by bloody brick.

The real war is not between North and South, the real war is between those who see and those who choose to remain blinde.

• K-Y