Focus on Development of Northern Region, Fulani Group Tells Buhari

By Seriki Adinoyi in Jos

The National Chairman of Gan Allah Fulani Development Association of Nigeria (GAFDAN), a Fulani socio-cultural group, Alhaji Saleh Bayari has tasked President Muhammadu Buhari to apply political will to deliver qualitative infrastructural dividends to the northern region currently facing infrastructural deficit.

Bayari, who has equally tasked the northern leaders to call Buhari’s attention to their needs, said the critical state of the North’s infrastructure, needs an urgent attention.
The former National Secretary of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) gave the advice yesterday in his acceptance speech when he was conferred with the title of Garkuwan Matasan Arewa by the Northern Students Assembly of Nigeria (NSAN) in Jos.

Bayari who was a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Jos Crisis inaugurated ed by former President Goodluck Jonathan, lamented that he has never read a story that northerners requested Buhari to build hospitals, construct roads or sink boreholes for them.
He said, “We have never tell Buhari that this is what we want you to do for us, even in Daura, Katsina; they don’t tell Buhari that we want you to sink 10 boreholes for us, construct five roads, or build seven hospitals for us; I never heard any of such appeal.”
He explained that the people of Niger Delta extraction and those of other parts of southern Nigeria were always demanding the government to develop their regions for them.

“You hear them say if the government didn’t develop their region for them there wouldn’t be an oil exploration. They have agitated for 13 per cent derivation. But the northerners have never said that if government didn’t do some infrastructure for them that maize, tomatoes or cattle wouldn’t be taken to the South”, he said.

He added that in the Niger Delta there were people that aren’t doing anything but at the end of the month they would be paid N65, 000, while in the North there were more than three million people looking for job of an N18, 000 minimum wage and the region didn’t ask government to do anything about it.