Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has said that the rising wave of “insecurity and poverty escalating in northern Nigeria must be treated as a national emergency not a regional concern,” stressing that the situation has reached a critical stage.
Dogara made the remarks on Tuesday, the 30th of September, 2025, in Abuja while speaking at the Nigeria Investment and Industrialisation Summit (NNIIS) 2025, convened by the Northern Elders Forum (NEF). He lamented the continuous violence plaguing the North, describing it as alarming.
According to him, “the magnitude of killings in the North had spiritual implications,” adding that the bloodshed signals the region is “operating under a curse because it is human blood.” He explained further that such a curse causes people to “sweat without results,” a condition he linked to the daily struggles of northerners that yield little or no progress.
The former Speaker emphasised that no form of progress can take place without safety, urging leaders in the 19 northern states to give security top priority. He pressed for collective action, stating that “if it would mean pulling all the 19 northern states’ resources together to tackle insecurity, they must do it, if not all their conversations here will amount to nothing.”
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Dogara also charged the region to rely less on external interventions. He insisted that northerners must “take their destiny into their own hands” by adopting bold and radical measures capable of reversing the current decline.
He warned that Nigeria’s future depends heavily on the development of the North, arguing that the country cannot move forward if the majority of its people are left behind. In his words, “the development of northern Nigeria is not a regional prerogative but must be seen as a national emergency, believing that if the vast number of people we have in the North are not developed, Nigeria is going nowhere.”
The summit deliberated on four central themes, including power with a focus on bridging energy deficits through decentralisation and partnerships, agriculture with a shift from subsistence farming to agro-industrial growth, the digital economy and innovation aimed at unlocking opportunities through technology, and mining with emphasis on inclusive and sustainable exploitation of mineral resources.