Northern Nigeria is in a crisis of three dimensions: political, economic, and cultural. The now open feud between Nasir El-Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu is symptomatic of the political dimension of this crisis. The bandwagon effect that pushed four northern states—Bauchi, Kano, Katsina, and Kebbi—to shut down schools in the middle of the term for Ramadan, is but a symptom of the cultural dimension of the northern crisis.

Scarcely any religious injunction in Islam mandates shutting schools for Ramadan. If anything, the action undermines the very essence of Ramadan fast. The whole point of fasting in Islam is that the Muslim would forgo the pleasures of food and spousal intimacy from dusk to down in order to demonstrate the Muslim virtues of fortitude, forbearance, patience, and sacrifice in the name of Allah. This is why Muslims who do the fast are enjoined to avoid overfeeding during iftar.

Moreover, most primary school kids do not fast, nor are they required to do so. Fasting becomes mandatory for a Muslim only from puberty onwards, a stage most primary school kids would not have attained. The school children in later years who do fast either for real or for practice know the drill, and are happy fast alongside their school duties. This is the practice case with two billion Muslims the world over. Besides, if we must close schools for Ramadan, then we might as well close the hospitals, the markets, the government offices, and everywhere else.

If state governments genuinely want to help, they can extend Ramadan feeding to schools for both schools and teachers alike, rather than close the schools for a whole month in the middle of the term. The disruption and loss of school time, and the impacts on the school calendar would far exceed any advantages of this policy. The states in question are already among the worst across many indices of educational development in Nigeria: school enrolment, learning retention, school completion, as well as WAEC and NECO grades, and university admissions. There is little question that this policy will only depress all of these outcomes further in those states.

So, why have the governors done it? The answer lies in the politics of religion and the cultural crisis of northern Nigeria with which we began. For a long time, northern Nigeria was the pivot of political and cultural power in this country. Its economy trailed behind, yes, but was still hopeful in by the 1990s. Other Nigerians who didn’t admire the North, envied it, and for the same reason that the North exuded an assured confidence in Nigerian affairs that others lacked.

By 2003, however, decline had set in, which today, has spiraled into near demise. As I write this, the North is plagued by stratospheric levels of poverty and unemployment, drug abuse, and terrible scores in just about every index of human development ever devised. On top of these, the North is at war on three fronts in each of which northerners are both victim and perpetrator: insurgency in the North East, banditry in the North West, and communal conflicts in the North Central.

How did we get here? One answer is the loss of cultural identity, and by implication, political direction in the North. There used to be an ideal called “One North, One Nigeria”. Many subscribed to it, and were proud of it. You could be Hausa or non-Hausa, Muslim or Christian, from Makurdi or Maiduguri. Yet, you felt yourself a proud member of the same geopolitical and cultural northern family, a sense of belonging you shared with others even if you would never meet or know them. Of course, there were cracks, but up to the 1990s, that sense of oneness held: the North was paradoxically the most culturally diverse and still the most culturally unified part of Nigeria.

It was no accident. Far-sighted leaders, chief among them the late Sardauna Ahmadu Bello and his associates, cultivated this broad-based cultural and political community. They did so through compromise and an abiding commitment to justice and equality for all. One North, One Nigeria, these leaders said, and meant it. That North has all but vanished today. The tolerance and compromise necessary for shared community have gone. Words like justice and fairness for all, and their import have all disappeared from the diction of today’s leaders, as they have in the minds of the led. Only a generation ago, they were still current and frequent. Thus, with these guardrails of a shared sense of oneness gone, everything else has followed too.

The North’s real strength was always its cultural harmony in diversity. That has now broken down. Where once even just Hausa would suffice for all, the region’s broad-based identity has today splintered into previously unknown factions like the “core North”, “the Muslim North”, ‘the Middle Belt’ (read the Christian North), “indigenes”, “settlers”, and so on. Moreover, as the splinted splinters even further, sectarian referents like Izala’, ‘Tariqa’, ‘Shiite’, etc, have become pronounced, while still mutually exclusive, all the way to Sharia riots and Boko Haram.

One outcome of all these is that as cultural revisionism took hold, northern Nigeria has become less tolerant, less compromising, less purposive or strategic, and evidently more violent and more politically unstable. This weakness has made it easier for outside interests, both domestic and foreign, to manipulate the North for their own ends, the very thing Sardauna and his associates did all to avoid.

Moreover, being so divided, the North no longer has any meaningful political or economic agenda within the Nigerian federation like the old belief that, we northerners will not only survive the harsh politics of federal Nigeria, but will build a diverse but viable society in which all can thrive. Three generations of northern leaders lived and died for that ambition. Today’s leaders, however, have been unable or unwilling to provide a new and inclusive vision that all can connect with or follow. This is how we end up with leaders who see closing schools down for Ramadan as good policies for which they expect our praise. Are we serious here?

A final outcome is the unending political competition between Muslims and Christians. In his Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (2018), the Nigerian sociologist Ebenezer Obadare makes three interesting arguments. First, Obadare says, Pentecostal Christianity, which emerged in Nigeria in the 1980s, saw the whole debate about Sharia in the North as a political and cultural affront, and mobilized all rhetorical resources against it. This in turn, he says, pushed Muslims on the defensive and counterattack, a reactionary approach that strengthened Muslim politics in Nigeria but got out of hand in uncharted waters like Boko Haram. The result, he concludes, is a distinctly “Pentecostal domination” of Nigerian politics since the country’s return to democracy in 1999.

This is what the school closures illustrate. Over the past two decades or so, Nigeria’s religious politics has been such that whatever one group wants, the other group is sure to go against it. If the Muslims say give us Sharia, the Christians would say not here, not on our watch. If the Muslims say move your Miss World pageant until after Ramadan, the Christians would say close your eyes. If the Christians say don’t lynch people for blasphemy, the Muslims would reply blaspheme and see what happens to you. If the Christians say no child marriage, the Muslims would reply remove the log of teenage pregnancies in your eyes first? The default setting for both sides is disagreement for the sake of disagreement, as these few examples illustrate.

This is what the school closures would achieve, even if that is not the intention. But as with similar instances of this default tendency in Nigerian religious affairs, it is the North that will suffer the consequences. That is what we should all reflect upon.