What unfolded is not a policy disagreement — it is a naked exposure of a long-running contradiction that many have sensed but few have articulated so bluntly.
The Northern Elders Forum suddenly remembers “regional ownership” when a gold refinery is proposed for Lagos.
Gold, they argue, belongs to the North and must stay within Northern geography.
Yet the same voices are perfectly at ease with a refinery in Kaduna processing crude oil extracted thousands of kilometres away in the Niger Delta.
No outrage.
No moral argument.
No talk of “resource ownership.”
That hypocrisy is not accidental.
It is structural.
When Bello Matawalle stood before cameras as Zamfara Governor, proudly displaying gold bars refined from his state, his words were not careless — they were revealing.
He dismissed complaints about federal revenue sharing with open arrogance, effectively saying: this one is ours; mind your business.
No lectures about national unity then.
No sermons about “One Nigeria.”
So, let’s be honest: “One Nigeria” is selectively invoked.
It appears when southern resources are on the table, and disappears the moment Northern resources come into play.
If oil were discovered in commercial quantities in Sokoto, Zamfara, or Katsina, there would be no ambiguity.
No pipelines stretching southward.
No refineries conveniently relocated.
No talk of national entitlement.
Not a single drop would move without Northern control.
Everyone knows this — including those pretending otherwise.
What makes this moment dangerous is not the gold refinery debate itself, but the growing awareness it has triggered.
People are no longer arguing from emotion alone; they are connecting patterns.
They are seeing how access, ownership, and power are negotiated differently depending on who holds the resource.
And this is where the real shock lies: the assumption that the South will always accept this imbalance is collapsing.
This is not noise.
It is pressure building beneath the surface — political, economic, and psychological.
Treating Southern intelligence as disposable, assuming grievances will forever be swallowed in the name of unity, is a strategic miscalculation.
History is unforgiving to those who mistake silence for stupidity.
A political tsunami does not announce itself with slogans. It begins when people stop believing the story they’ve been told — and start asking who truly benefits from it.
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