NORTH CENTRAL: THE HINGE OF THE FEDERATION AND THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD
North Central has fed, defended and helped hold Nigeria together. Professor Iyorwuese Hagher argues that the next twenty years must convert that historic sacrifice into security, industry, human capital, technology and shared regional prosperity.”
NATIONHOODLEADERSHIPLIFE
Iyorwuese Hagher
9/15/202617 min read
A Call to Memory, Responsibility, Unity and Regional Renewal, 2026–2046
By Professor Iyorwuese Hagher, OON
Adapted from my guest lecture at the North Central Development Commission Summit 2026, Abuja Continental Hotel, Abuja, 14–15 September 2026.
There are moments in the life of a people when statistics are no longer enough.
There are moments when another conference, another communiqué, another committee and another promise become too small for the historical moment before us.
There comes a time when a people must stop merely asking what government intends to do for them and begin asking what history now demands of them.
For North Central Nigeria, I believe this is such a moment.
I did not go to the North Central Development Commission Summit merely to present another paper.
I went to issue a summons.
A summons to memory.
A summons to responsibility.
A summons to unity.
And, above all, a summons to build.
We speak today of a Great Leap Forward for North Central over the next twenty years. But no people can leap forward if they do not know where they are standing. And no people can understand where they stand if they have forgotten the road by which they arrived.
WE MUST FIRST REMEMBER WHO WE ARE
North Central is not merely six states and the Federal Capital Territory arranged on an administrative map.
It is a civilisational meeting ground.
It is a geographical hinge.
It is one of the places where Nigeria repeatedly meets itself.
The Niger and Benue do not simply meet at Lokoja. They symbolise something fundamental about who we are: streams coming from different directions and becoming more powerful through meeting.
Roads from the North descend through us. Roads from the South rise through us. Food moves through us. Commerce moves through us. Armies have moved through us. The Federal Capital of the Republic sits within our geography.
The Tiv, Idoma, Igede, Igala, Nupe, Gbagyi, Berom, Afizere, Eggon, Alago and numerous other peoples have occupied this central belt for generations, alongside many other communities whose languages, institutions, cultures and historical experiences form one of the richest human mosaics in Africa.
The historical Middle Belt and today's official North Central geopolitical zone are not identical concepts, and we should not collapse one carelessly into the other. Yet the continuities are profound.
This has always been a region of encounter—of migration, resistance, trade, war, cultural exchange, coexistence and survival.
These were never empty lands waiting for history.
They were peoples struggling to remain in history.
That history must matter to our development.
Because development without memory can produce roads without direction, institutions without identity and prosperity without belonging.
THE FEDERATION AND THE MEANING OF NORTH CENTRAL
Nigeria's six geopolitical zones arose from our continuing national search for balance in an extraordinarily diverse federation.
I was privileged to participate in the 1994–1995 National Constitutional Conference where questions of regional balance, representation, power and national belonging were intensely debated.
Today, North Central, North East, North West, South East, South South and South West may not constitute separate constitutionally sovereign levels of government, but they have become an important part of Nigeria's practical political grammar.
They influence representation, development, political inclusion, appointments and the distribution of national opportunity.
There is a lesson in this.
Nigeria has not survived because our differences disappeared.
Nigeria has survived because, again and again, we have searched for structures through which our differences can coexist.
Federalism is not the burial of identity. Federalism is the discipline of belonging together without ceasing to know who we are.
I therefore believe that the people of this region should become simultaneously more deeply Nigerian and more consciously North Central.
There is no contradiction.
A confident region strengthens the federation.
A people who know who they are can participate in Nigeria without resentment and without self-erasure.
WHAT NORTH CENTRAL HAS GIVEN
For generations, we have given.
We gave land.
We gave food.
We gave soldiers.
We gave labour.
We gave intellectuals.
We gave public servants.
We gave cultural space.
We gave political accommodation.
And too often, we gave blood.
Our communities learned the disciplines of coexistence. We learned languages beyond our mother tongues. We made room for one another. Christianity and Islam became powerful parts of our common experience even as our indigenous languages and traditions sometimes receded in our homes.
North Central became, in many respects, one of Nigeria's great schools of coexistence.
But a people must never become so generous that they disappear inside their generosity.
A region must not contribute so much to the federation that it forgets to build itself.
That is why I have described the period before us as a kind of payback season.
Let nobody misunderstand me.
I do not mean revenge.
I do not mean hostility toward another region.
I do not mean entitlement without responsibility.
Nigeria must fairly recognise the enormous deposit North Central has made into the Nigerian project.
But, even more importantly, we must pay ourselves back.
We must pay ourselves back through education.
Through productivity.
Through enterprise.
Through unity.
Through security.
Through culture.
Through industrialisation.
Through disciplined leadership.
Through peace.
And through regional cooperation.
We cannot wait for someone else to love North Central more than we love North Central.
We cannot outsource our destiny.
ABUJA CANNOT REMAIN AN ISLAND
The decision to move Nigeria's capital away from Lagos was about far more than finding vacant territory.
Nigeria was searching for a national centre—somewhere centrally located and accessible, with sufficient space and the symbolic capacity to serve as a common Nigerian home.
It found that place in Central Nigeria.
That gives Abuja enormous symbolic significance.
But symbolism is not enough.
We must confront an uncomfortable question:
Can the political capital of Africa's most populous country remain an island of prosperity surrounded by underdeveloped productive communities?
Every day Abuja consumes enormous quantities of food, construction materials, housing, professional services, healthcare, hospitality, education, logistics and technology.
Why should this massive market not become the engine of production from Makurdi, Lafia, Jos, Minna, Lokoja, Ilorin and the wider region?
Imagine Benue feeding Abuja through organised agro-processing corridors.
Imagine Plateau vegetables and potatoes entering the capital through refrigerated supply chains.
Imagine Niger's agricultural scale connected to sophisticated storage, processing and logistics.
Imagine Nasarawa transforming proximity to Abuja into an industrial and manufacturing advantage.
Imagine Kogi's confluence becoming a genuine logistics asset.
Imagine Kwara deepening its position as a bridge between North Central and western commercial corridors.
This is not fantasy.
It is organisation.
Abuja must cease to be merely the Federal Capital located inside North Central. It must become the first great market and economic engine room of North Central.
The Federal Capital should become the launch market for Made-in-North-Central Nigeria.
FROM FOOD BASKET TO PROSPERITY BASKET
Benue is proudly called the Food Basket of the Nation.
But the agricultural strength of North Central extends through Niger, Nasarawa, Plateau, Kogi and Kwara.
For generations, we have carried food to Nigerian tables.
But we must ask a more difficult question:
Has the region that carries food also carried wealth home?
Too often, the answer is no.
We produce; others process.
We harvest; others warehouse.
We cultivate; others finance.
We sell raw commodities; others manufacture brands.
We carry the climate risk.
We carry the insecurity risk.
We carry the transportation risk.
We carry the price risk.
Yet a disproportionate part of the value is frequently captured farther down the chain.
A food basket can still become a poverty basket.
That must end.
Our yam must meet processing.
Our soybean must meet industry.
Cassava must meet starch, flour, ethanol and animal feed.
Citrus must meet cold chains and juice factories.
Livestock must meet veterinary science, dairy, leather and modern meat processing.
Our minerals must meet lawful local industry.
Our cultural assets must meet film, music, publishing, fashion, tourism and intellectual property.
Our young people must meet technology, artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship and global markets.
North Central must stop exporting raw potential and importing finished prosperity.
The Food Basket must become a Prosperity Basket.
THE REGION THAT FOUGHT, BLED AND HELD
There is another part of our history that should neither be romanticised nor forgotten.
The peoples of Central Nigeria have made enormous contributions to Nigeria's military history.
During the colonial period and the Second World War, men from Middle Belt communities left their farms and families to fight in wars determined far from their homes.
After independence, the region continued to produce soldiers, officers and national military leaders.
Then came the Nigerian Civil War.
We must speak of that painful period with humility because Nigerians died on all sides.
But humility must never become amnesia.
At the moment the federation confronted possible disintegration, General Yakubu Gowon, a son of today's North Central, bore the burden of federal leadership while thousands from the Middle Belt and other parts of Nigeria fought in the federal forces.
Families surrendered sons.
Communities buried young men.
Nigeria survived.
No region owns Nigerian unity.
But no federation should survive by forgetting those who paid for its survival.
And this is precisely why the future of North Central cannot be built on sacrifice alone.
Sacrifice is not a development strategy.
THE NUMBERS THAT SHOULD TROUBLE OUR CONSCIENCE
History alone cannot justify development.
The present must also speak.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics' 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index, 66.3 per cent of the population of North Central—approximately 20.19 million people—was multidimensionally poor.
The comparable figures reported for the South West, South East and South South were 40.0 per cent, 49.0 per cent and 62.6 per cent respectively.
North Central's incidence was below the very severe levels recorded in the North East and North West, but higher than every southern geopolitical zone.
This is not a statistic we should recite and move on from.
It should disturb us.
How can the geographical centre of Nigeria remain so far from the centre of Nigerian prosperity?
How does a region that feeds the federation contain more than twenty million multidimensionally poor people?
How does a region hosting the Federal Capital remain insufficiently connected to the immense economy circulating within that capital?
The scandal is not simply that poverty exists.
It is the distance between our resources and our outcomes.
We have fertile land, yet farmers remain poor.
We have rivers, yet irrigation remains inadequate.
We possess minerals, yet too little value is locally manufactured.
We host Abuja, yet too little of its enormous market has been systematically integrated into regional value chains.
We have millions of young people, yet too many meet unemployment before opportunity.
Then insecurity intensifies everything.
A dead farmer produces no yam.
A displaced farmer produces no soybean.
An abandoned village generates no local economy.
A frightened investor builds no factory.
A child growing up in displacement without adequate education carries a wound into the future.
This is why I insist:
Security is economic policy.
Peace is infrastructure.
Justice is development.
Human dignity is capital.
THE NCDC: AN INSTRUMENT, NOT A DECORATION
The North Central Development Commission represents an historic opportunity.
But a commission alone will not transform a region.
The first danger is not necessarily lack of money.
The deeper danger is confusing expenditure with transformation.
A borehole here.
A classroom there.
A road somewhere else.
A politically attractive contract somewhere else.
Thousands of isolated projects can be commissioned while an entire region remains structurally poor.
North Central does not merely need projects.
North Central needs a system.
The NCDC must become the strategic brain of an integrated regional economy.
It should build data systems that survive office-holders.
It should coordinate master plans that cross state boundaries.
It should build investment platforms capable of attracting private capital.
It should establish public development scorecards so that citizens can see what was promised, what was funded, what was delivered and what failed.
A serious development institution must also tell us when we fail.
If a scorecard exists only to praise government, it is propaganda.
Development intelligence must allow truth to travel upward.
The Commission must therefore outlive the politics of the moment.
The twenty-year plan must belong to the region—not merely to one administration.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE VILLAGE
Let me illustrate the danger before us with a village story.
Once there was a large village divided into seven quarters.
They drank from the same river.
They traded in the same market.
They married across the same footpaths.
They attended one another's funerals.
But they had become experts in one profession: remembering their differences.
One morning, a huge elephant entered the first quarter and began destroying farms.
The people cried for help.
The second quarter answered:
“That elephant entered from your side. It is first your problem.”
Soon the elephant moved into the second quarter and destroyed yam barns.
The third quarter responded by calling an emergency meeting—not to chase the elephant, but to determine whose constitutional responsibility it was to chase elephants.
While the meeting continued, the elephant entered the market.
One group demanded a committee to establish the elephant's state of origin.
Another argued that leadership of the chase must rotate fairly among the seven quarters.
A young man was already taking photographs.
“If this elephant is going to destroy our village,” he said, “at least let the content go viral.”
Meanwhile, the elephant continued eating.
Finally, an old woman stood.
“My children,” she asked, “has this elephant shown anybody an indigene certificate?”
“No, Mama.”
“Did it ask which quarter owned the yam before eating it?”
“No, Mama.”
She answered:
“Then while you are busy giving the elephant a state of origin, the elephant has already made all of you citizens of the same problem.”
They laughed.
And finally they acted.
Farmers brought drums.
Hunters brought knowledge of the bush.
Young people brought speed and energy.
Women protected the children and organised food.
Elders coordinated the quarters.
Together, they drove the elephant away.
Our own elephant has many names:
Poverty. Insecurity. Displacement. Unemployment. Broken infrastructure. Weak productivity. Ethnic suspicion. Religious mistrust. The waste of young talent.
None carries an indigene certificate.
These problems cross state boundaries without asking permission.
The lesson is not that our identities should disappear.
The seven quarters remained seven quarters.
The lesson is that some dangers are too large for one quarter to defeat and some opportunities are too great for one state to capture alone.
SEVEN DUTIES FOR THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD
Our twenty-year development plan must therefore become a covenant of duties.
1. Recover Peace and Productive Land
Our displaced people cannot become permanent refugees in their own region.
Where conditions permit safe return, communities must not be returned merely to ruins.
Security, housing, schools, clinics, roads, water, livelihoods and trauma recovery must form part of a single reconstruction strategy.
Productive land must return to productive people.
2. Industrialise Agriculture
Processing must follow production.
Industrial clusters should reflect comparative advantage, not merely political convenience.
Storage, irrigation, commodity finance, cold chains, certification, agricultural intelligence, logistics and export markets must operate as one ecosystem.
The farmer must no longer remain at the poorest end of a value chain built upon the farmer's labour.
3. Connect the Region
We must plan roads, rail opportunities, inland waterways, logistics hubs, markets and broadband across state boundaries.
Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Plateau and the FCT should increasingly be viewed as one interconnected economic geography.
4. Power Production
Industrial development without dependable electricity is rhetoric.
North Central must pursue an appropriate combination of hydro resources, solar energy, grid expansion, distributed power and other viable energy sources, particularly around productive and industrial clusters.
5. Convert Minerals Into Industry
A mineral underground is geological information.
It becomes development when it creates lawful enterprise, local processing, manufacturing, employment, responsible community benefit and environmental stewardship.
Mining without industrialisation risks reproducing another raw-material economy.
6. Develop the Human Mind—and Prepare for the New Economy
Our greatest natural resource walks on two legs.
We must produce engineers, doctors, teachers, agronomists, scientists, technicians, artisans, entrepreneurs, artificial-intelligence specialists, designers, filmmakers and other creative professionals.
Technical education must become a prestigious pathway into productivity.
But we must also understand that while we repair the economy we inherited, another economy is already arriving.
Artificial intelligence, digital services and the creative industries are changing the way value is created, distributed and traded around the world.
UN Trade and Development has reported that creative industries account for a measurable share of GDP across many countries, while creative-services exports have become a trillion-dollar global market.
Nigeria's National Artificial Intelligence Strategy and the 3 Million Technical Talent programme also point to the direction of travel.
North Central should therefore create a Digital and Creative Economy Enterprise Window within its wider development strategy.
Not another certificate programme.
A pipeline from skills to enterprise.
From enterprise to finance.
From finance to markets.
And from markets to sustainable jobs.
Our young people should be able to build software services, animation and film studios, design firms, data enterprises, e-commerce ventures, technology-enabled agricultural services and other businesses capable of selling to Nigeria and the world.
Women must be intentionally included.
A Women's Enterprise and Digital Inclusion Window should support women-led businesses with digital skills, incubation, finance, market access and AI-enabled productivity tools.
The practical test should be simple:
Can a young woman in Makurdi, Lafia, Minna, Jos, Lokoja or Ilorin build a viable business, reach customers beyond her immediate community and employ others without first having to relocate to Lagos or leave Nigeria?
The digital economy is not a substitute for agriculture, roads, electricity or factories.
It is a force multiplier.
AI can improve agricultural intelligence.
Digital platforms can widen markets.
Technology can reduce SME costs.
Film, music, publishing and design can convert culture into intellectual property.
The future economy must be woven into the physical economy we are rebuilding.
7. Build a North Central Development Intelligence System
Every road, clinic, school, displaced settlement, agricultural cluster, mineral deposit, industrial site and investment opportunity should become visible within a living regional data architecture.
We cannot intelligently transform what we cannot accurately measure.
CULTURE IS ALSO CAPITAL
I have spent much of my intellectual life studying theatre, culture and development.
I cannot accept any theory of development that constructs physical structures while diminishing the human spirit.
Development is not concrete alone.
Development is memory.
It is identity.
It is dignity.
It is meaning.
It is the ability of people to recognise themselves as authors rather than victims of history.
North Central's extraordinary cultural diversity is not simply a difficulty to be managed.
It is capital.
Our theatre, festivals, languages, literature, music, cuisine, crafts, indigenous knowledge and stories can become industries and instruments of social cohesion.
In the digital age they can also become exportable intellectual property.
Kwagh-hir taught me long ago that communities do not require permission from the powerful to interpret their own world.
Ordinary people possess artistic and intellectual technologies through which they expose arrogance, communicate knowledge, ridicule oppression and imagine alternatives.
The people of North Central must therefore refuse to become spectators in somebody else's development drama.
They must become the principal actors.
A WORD TO THE YOUNG PEOPLE
To the young people of North Central, I say this directly:
Do not inherit only our grievances.
Inherit our unfinished work.
Do not allow anybody to reduce your identity to a victim of violence, a displaced person, an unemployed graduate, a social-media spectator or a partisan foot soldier.
You are heirs to land.
You are heirs to culture.
You are heirs to courage.
You are heirs to memory.
You are heirs to strategic geography.
Your generation must build companies where ours built committees.
Build data where we kept files.
Build processing plants where we sold raw produce.
Build digital markets where we waited for allocations.
Preserve the languages disappearing from our homes.
Build peace where we inherited suspicion.
Do not merely ask:
“What will North Central give me?”
Ask instead:
“What has history placed in my hands to give North Central?”
LET US SUMMON THE WITNESSES OF HISTORY
And we must also remember those who struggled before us.
Imagine, for a moment, that figures such as Da Rwang Pam, Pastor David Obadiah Vrengkat Lot, Senator Joseph Sarwuan Tarka, Patrick Dokotri, Bitrus Rwang Pam, Chief Solomon Daushep Lar, Joseph Dechi Gomwalk, Da Wash Pam, Dr. Olusola Saraki, Wantaregh Paul Iyorpuu Unongo, Aper Aku, Air Commodore Dan Suleiman, John Bala Takaya, Yima Sen, Sunday Tyoden, George Onyikere and Peter Achimugu could return and stand before us.
Men from different eras, communities and traditions, yet remembered in different ways in the long struggle for Middle Belt dignity, recognition and political voice.
What would they ask us?
Would they understand why a region rich in fertile land, rivers, minerals, culture and human talent still sends so many children into poverty?
Would they be satisfied to see farmers separated from their fields and families displaced from ancestral communities?
Would they accept that we have become experts at remembering our differences but amateurs at organising our common strength?
Would they believe that we have been faithful custodians of the inheritance for which earlier generations sacrificed?
They cannot return to answer us.
But one day we too will become ancestors.
Another generation will call our names.
And they will ask:
When insecurity came, what did you do?
When poverty persisted, what did you build?
When young people were leaving, what opportunities did you create?
When your languages were disappearing, what did you preserve?
When Abuja expanded beside you, how did you connect your people to its prosperity?
When the North Central Development Commission was established, did you turn it into transformation—or another bureaucracy?
We must begin preparing our answer now.
FOUR MOVEMENTS TO 2046
Twenty years must not become an excuse for postponement.
It must become a framework for disciplined sequencing.
2026–2031: Secure the Foundations
Prioritise peace, reconstruction, resettlement, reliable data, agricultural recovery, urgent infrastructure and the first serious pipelines connecting skills to enterprise.
2031–2036: Accelerate Production
Expand power, connectivity, agro-processing, industrial clusters, technical education, logistics and SME development.
2036–2041: Integrate the Regional Economy
The six states and FCT should increasingly function as an integrated production system in which capital, labour, knowledge, technology, energy and goods move with progressively less friction.
2041–2046: Compete Beyond Nigeria
North Central should increasingly position itself as a competitive West African platform for food processing, strategic minerals, clean energy, logistics, technology, education and culture.
The dates themselves are not sacred.
The discipline is.
Twenty years is long enough to transform a region.
It is also long enough to waste another generation.
LET US BECOME MORE FEDERATED—AND MORE OURSELVES
My final appeal is political, but not partisan.
Emotional, but not sentimental.
Let us become better Nigerians by becoming better custodians of North Central.
Let us become more conscious of North Central without becoming less committed to the federation.
Let the Tiv child understand that the prosperity of the Nupe child strengthens him.
Let the Berom understand that the security of the Idoma strengthens her.
Let the Gbagyi, Igala, Eggon, Alago, Afizere, Igede and every other people of this region understand that our diversity is not an argument for fragmentation.
It is an invitation to federation.
We do not need to erase our identities to become one region.
The Niger does not stop being the Niger because it meets the Benue.
The Benue does not stop being the Benue because it joins the Niger.
They become mightier because they meet.
So must we.
A stronger North Central will create a stronger Nigeria.
But we cannot continue saying, “We fed Nigeria,” while our farmers remain poor.
We cannot continue saying, “We defended Nigeria,” while our villages remain unsafe.
We cannot continue saying, “We host Abuja,” while our regional economy remains disconnected from its enormous market.
We cannot celebrate our diversity while our languages, cultures and indigenous knowledge quietly disappear.
The time has come to convert memory into policy.
To convert sacrifice into infrastructure.
To convert land into industry.
To convert culture into enterprise.
To convert youth into productive power.
To convert Abuja into a regional market.
To convert diversity into strength.
And to convert the North Central Development Commission from an institution on paper into an engine of transformation.
We must pay ourselves back by ending the politics of small divisions.
By protecting farmers.
By educating children.
By preserving languages.
By building factories.
By creating businesses and jobs.
By making peace a regional project.
And by refusing to hand another generation the same excuses we inherited.
North Central has given enough excuses.
We have given enough blame.
We have given enough blood.
Now we must give ourselves a future.
Let this Great Leap Forward begin not merely in the plans of the Commission, but in the conscience of every North Central citizen.
Let it begin in the governor's office.
Let it begin in the village square.
Let it begin in the university laboratory.
Let it begin on the farm.
Let it begin in the factory.
Let it begin in our churches and mosques.
Let it begin in the home where a mother teaches her child the language of the ancestors alongside the languages of the wider world.
Let it begin in the mind of the entrepreneur who decides to build here rather than merely complain here.
Arise from fear.
Arise from fragmentation.
Arise from dependency.
Arise from the habit of waiting.
Remember what we have given.
Remember what we have endured.
Remember who we are.
And then let us build what we deserve.
Not through anger.
Not through violence.
Not through resentment.
But through intelligence.
Through unity.
Through enterprise.
Through justice.
Through courage.
Through work.
The region that helped hold Nigeria together must now develop the capacity to hold prosperity within itself.
The region that feeds Nigeria must industrialise its food.
The region that hosts Nigeria's political capital must acquire economic capital.
The region whose communities have experienced displacement must become a region of secure homes.
The region that supplied soldiers must now manufacture peace.
The region that stood for the federation must now stand for itself—confidently, peacefully and productively—and thereby strengthen the federation itself.
This is our call to arms:
Not to destroy, but to build.
Not to divide, but to federate.
Not to mourn forever, but to transform.
The elephant is already in the village.
History will not forgive us if we spend the next twenty years arguing about which quarter saw it first.
History has received our sacrifice.
Let the future receive our achievement.
North Central, arise.
Let the Great Leap Forward begin now.
DOWNLOAD THE FULL CONFERENCE DOCUMENT HERE: THE GREAT LEAP FORWORD.
Selected References
National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022.
Federal Capital Development Authority, The History of Abuja.
Federal Republic of Nigeria, Report of the 1994–1995 National Constitutional Conference.
Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Nigeria.
Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy / NITDA, 3 Million Technical Talent Programme.
UN Trade and Development, Creative Economy Outlook 2024.
Iyorwuese Hagher, The Kwagh-hir Theater: A Weapon for Social Action.
Professor Iyorwuese Hagher, OON
This I Believe