I am particularly passionate about Northern Nigeria for many reasons. It’s the region where I fully started my journalism career. Even though I began practising journalism at the defunct Satellite Newspaper in Enugu before my graduation, it was during my National Youth Service at Triumph Newspaper in Kano, where I served for three years, that my journalism foundation was laid. It was Triumph that took me to Benue as a correspondent, where I met my wife, also a Northerner from Kogi State, and Triumph sent me to Lagos, from where I migrated to Champion, Thisday, and New Telegraph Newspapers.
So I am always at home with Northerners, especially the lower class, who are more down-to-earth in their relationship.
After reading last week’s warning from the United Nations, the World Food Programme, UN-WEP, that 17 million Northerners face acute hunger, I decided to write this memo to Northern leaders, anchoring it on the two Katsina wheelbarrow pushers I befriended in Abuja at different times. I met Hassan in 2010, and Shamsudeen in 2026, and their contrasting stories tell the story of the North, yesterday and today.
From the high-brow estates of Abuja, the bustling of the city, and the squeak of rusty wheelbarrows provide a rhythmic backdrop to daily life in Nigeria’s capital. The boys behind the handles are mostly migrants from the North, pushing away the city’s waste to scrape together a living.
But their stories are not identical. Separated by a decade and a half, the contrasting realities of two young men from Katsina State expose a tragic truth about the failure of governance, proving that having your “own sons” in the seat of power means absolutely nothing without effective policy.
Part I: Hassan and the Golden Era of a waste collector (2010)
In 2010, Hassan arrived in Abuja. He was twenty, energetic, and full of purpose. He took up the trade of a waste collector. Armed with a plastic bucket and a heavy iron wheelbarrow, he walked from house to house, sorting trash for a small fee.
For Hassan, Abuja was not a permanent displacement; it was a seasonal economic engine.
“Life was good then,” Hassan recalls, a faint smile breaking through his weather-worn face. “Hassan worked in Abuja only during the dry season. Every month of May, as soon as the first rains blessed the earth, he packed his small bag and took a vehicle back to Katsina.
From May to October, Hassan was a proud farmer, cultivating millet, guinea corn, and maize on his ancestral lands. He belonged to a generation that saw Abuja as a tool to buy fertiliser and seeds. When he worked, the country was mourning one Katsina son, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, and yet the structural reality of his hometown allowed him to thrive. Hassan had a life of dignity—rooted in the soil of Katsina, supplemented by the trash of Abuja.
Part II: Shamsudeen and the ‘prison’ of the capital (2026)
Fast forward to today. The squeak of the wheelbarrow belongs to 25-year-old Shamsudeen, who also hails from a village outside Katsina metropolis. But Shamsudeen’s wheelbarrow feels heavier, anchored by deep, inescapable desperation.
The month of May has come and gone. The rainy season is in full swing, yet Shamsudeen remains on the scorching asphalt of Abuja, hauling garbage. He cannot go home.
“If I go back to the farm, the bandits will either take my head or take my life savings for a ransom. They killed my father, and as the first child, I now take care of my mother and siblings. I am even married with two kids,” Shamsudeen says, his eyes deadened by fear. “My father’s farm has been overgrown with weeds for three years. The village is empty. Abuja is hard, and packing dirt is shameful, but here, the only thing that dies is my dignity, not my body.”
Shamsudeen is the face of a modern catastrophe. He is trapped in a paradox: an able-bodied farmer forced to live off urban waste because his home state has become a playground for terror.
The Cruel Paradox of the ‘Katsina Throne’
The tragedy of Hassan and Shamsudeen’s contrasting fates lies in the political history of their home state. Between Hassan’s seasonal migrations and Shamsudeen’s permanent exile, Katsina State produced two heads of state: President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and President Muhammadu Buhari.
For a combined total of nearly eleven years, Katsina sons sat on the highest throne in the land. By the flawless logic of identity politics, Katsina should be the most prosperous, secure, and food-secure state in the federation.
Instead, the opposite is true. The decade following 2010 saw a rapid descent into poverty, mass displacement, and industrial-scale banditry across the Northwest. The state that held the presidency produced more poor, displaced, and traumatised people than at almost any other point in its history.
Just last week, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) dropped a chilling warning: more than 17 million Nigerians across nine northern states—including Katsina—are currently facing severe, acute hunger. The crisis, the UN notes, is expanding rapidly because violence is driving farmers off their lands. Shamsudeen’s empty farm is a single statistic in that 17-million-man nightmare.
Prioritising policy over personality
The contrasting lives of Hassan and Shamsudeen offer a harsh lesson for the Nigerian electorate.
It shows, with devastating clarity, that who occupies the seat of power does not matter. What matters is the policy implementation.
Eleven years of Katsina presidents did not build a fortress of security for the rural farmers of Katsina. It did not create sustainable agricultural subsidies, nor did it secure the borders of the local governments from marauding gangs. Tribal sentiments and regional pride do not fertilise crops, nor do they stop bullets.
Hassan’s good life in 2010 was a product of a system that still possessed a baseline of security and economic predictability. Shamsudeen’s misery in 2026 is the direct result of years of institutional decay, unchecked insecurity, and failed economic policies that occurred right under the noses of his kinsmen in power.
As Shamsudeen empties another dustbin into a communal skip in Abuja, he doesn’t think about the glamorous portraits of presidents that used to hang in Aso Rock. He thinks about food, survival, and the home he may never see again. The throne was proud, but the streets were hungry. Northern leaders, it’s time to think and redirect your concerns to the poor, not the self-advancement of the elites.
Today, what the geopolitical North is building is a time bomb waiting to explode, and when it happens, there will be no hiding place. If General Rabe Abubakar cannot be saved but dies like a fowl in the forest in the hands of ordinary criminals, it’s only a matter of time.
. Abonyi is Editor @Large based in Abuja.
