AN APPRAISAL OF THE ACF, 2000 TO 2025: LEADERSHIP, LIMITS AND THE NORTH’S UNFINISHED WORK.

For twenty five years, the Arewa Consultative Forum has presented itself as the conscience and rallying point of Northern Nigeria. It emerged in 2000 at a delicate moment in our national journey, when the North was struggling with post military political fragmentation, loss of cohesion, and the need for a common civic platform in the new democracy. The ACF was meant to unify the region, articulate its concerns, protect its interests, and serve as a moral compass in difficult times.

Today, in 2025, the question confronting us is simple but fundamental: has the ACF fulfilled its purpose, or has the North outgrown an institution that has remained static while our crises have accelerated?

This is not an emotional question. It is an existential one. The North is in the grip of insecurity, poverty, educational collapse, youth alienation, extremist manipulation, and deepening religious tension. A region with enormous population, land, history and influence has become the epicentre of the country’s most disturbing indicators. If ever there was a time for the ACF to function as a serious regional compass, it is now.

And yet, the ACF remains largely symbolic, respected but not decisive, loud in rhetoric but limited in impact. To understand why, we must go back to the beginning, examine what it was designed to be, evaluate what it has become, and interrogate the leadership culture that shapes it.

1) What the ACF was created to do.

When Northern leaders converged in 2000 to form the ACF, their intentions were noble. They sought to restore regional unity, create a platform that would transcend party politics, defend Northern interests within a democratic framework, promote education, strengthen agriculture, and encourage peaceful coexistence.

The ACF was never intended to be a government agency, a development commission, or a security institution. It was created as a consultative forum, an advisory and advocacy platform, drawing its legitimacy from the moral authority of its elder statesmen.

This is both its strength and its limitation.

2) The leadership ecosystem and the burden of continuity.

From inception, the ACF was dominated by respected elder statesmen: former heads of state, ex governors, retired generals, former ministers, senior civil servants, business elites, and traditional power brokers. On the surface, this offered gravitas, access and authority.

But decades later, it is clear that this leadership culture carries a heavy burden.

Most ACF leaders were themselves actors in the political and economic decisions that shaped today’s Northern reality. They held key positions in federal and state governments, controlled budgets, supervised ministries, influenced policy, and oversaw the trajectory of regional institutions including the NNDC.

This creates two problems.

First, the ACF struggles to confront the failures of Northern governors, traditional institutions, or elite networks because such confrontation would implicate its own leaders, their peers, their protégés, or their political allies.

Second, the ACF’s instinct is consensus, not disruption. It is an elite club built for unity, not for accountability. It avoids polarising confrontations and tends toward the safe route: statements, communiques, appeals, and nostalgia.

This is why, despite its visibility, the ACF has not yet transformed into a driver of modern regional development.

3) The ACF and the NNDC: separate institutions, same elite network.

There is a widespread assumption that the ACF and the New Nigeria Development Company are institutionally linked. They are not.

The ACF is an advocacy body.

The NNDC is a development and investment company owned by the 19 Northern states.

However, the people who run both institutions often come from the same elite circle. For example, the current Chairman of the ACF Board of Trustees is also a long serving Chairman of the NNDC. The same applies to many ex governors, ministers and business actors.

This overlapping leadership blurs the lines of accountability. The ACF is reluctant to criticise NNDC failures because its own leaders are tied to the same networks. The NNDC, meanwhile, has underperformed as an engine of industrialisation, but the ACF has neither the structure nor the political appetite to demand reform.

What we have, therefore, is not institutional linkage, but elite ecosystem capture.

4) What the ACF has achieved.

Fairness requires acknowledging that the ACF has contributed value in certain areas.

It has:

• preserved a pan Northern platform despite growing political and ethnic fragmentation,

• issued statements that kept Northern issues in the national conversation,

• offered a symbolic point of reference on matters of regional concern,

• intervened rhetorically during national crises,

• maintained channels of communication between influential Northern actors across party lines.

These are not trivial achievements. Unity is hard to maintain in a region as large and diverse as the North. But symbolic value is not the same as strategic impact.

5) Where the ACF has failed, and why.

The ACF’s most glaring shortcomings are seen in the domains of insecurity, youth engagement and religious tension. But to be fair, these failures must be understood in light of the ACF’s structural limitations.

a. Insecurity: the ACF has influence, but no instruments of action.

The North has witnessed unprecedented levels of violence since 2010: Boko Haram insurgency, banditry, mass kidnappings, rural displacement, farmer and herder clashes, criminal militias, and now rising religious tension.

The ACF has issued countless communiqués condemning these incidents. It has urged federal action, called for improved intelligence, and demanded community policing. But condemnation is not strategy.

The ACF does not have the mandate, funding, logistics, or institutional architecture to:

• run early warning systems,

• deploy mediators,

• coordinate with security agencies,

• build deradicalisation programs,

• conduct conflict mapping,

• supervise local government response.

Those responsibilities belong to governors, security agencies, traditional institutions and federal ministries.

But where the ACF deserves criticism is in its reluctance to confront state-level failures, especially misuse of security votes, abandonment of rural communities, and politicisation of local conflicts. These issues lie at the heart of Northern insecurity, and the ACF has often chosen silence over truth.

b. Rising religious tension.

Religious extremism and mob violence have become increasingly common, fuelled by poverty, ignorance, and irresponsible preaching.

The ACF has avoided direct confrontation with extremist rhetoric, partly to preserve unity, partly because many clerics and emirs close to the Forum prefer delicate handling. But silence has costs. A region cannot preach unity while evading the hard conversations about intolerance and manipulation of religion.

c. Youth alienation and demographic reality.

The North has the youngest population in Nigeria, with millions of unemployed and uneducated youth. They are the backbone of both the crisis and the future. Yet the ACF remains almost entirely geriatric, with little direct engagement with youth groups, innovators, civil society or modern influencers.

This gap is dangerous because the North’s biggest shifts are happening among the young, not the old.

6) External factors that complicate the ACF’s role.

It would be unfair to assess the ACF without acknowledging the external forces that limit any regional platform.

These include:

• centralised policing that gives states limited security control,

• Sahel terrorism spilling into Nigeria through Niger and Chad,

• desertification pushing herders south and intensifying conflict,

• national economic shocks that deepen poverty,

• federal policy inconsistencies across administrations.

These factors are bigger than the ACF and cannot be solved by it alone. But they do not remove the need for the Forum to adapt, modernise and collaborate intentionally.

7) What the ACF must now become.

If the ACF is to remain relevant over the next twenty five years, it must evolve beyond the elder council model and embrace a modern, structured, professional approach.

a. Build a Northern Development Secretariat: A small, technocratic unit of economists, security analysts, policy experts, education specialists and researchers that produce actionable plans, not just communiqués.

b. Create a Northern Security and Peace Compact: With governors, clerics, emirs, police, DSS and civil society at one table, meeting regularly, sharing intelligence and coordinating responses.

c. Launch a Northern Youth Participation Framework: A formal youth wing that engages Northern students, entrepreneurs, digital creators and professionals, making the ACF a truly intergenerational institution.

d. Reform engagement with NNDC: Set measurable KPIs for NNDC investments, ensure transparency, and demand accountability for industrial performance.

e. Produce an annual Northern Governance Performance Index: Rank states on education, agriculture, security, transparency, poverty reduction and job creation.

f. Expand religious moderation and interfaith engagement: A serious platform to address extremist rhetoric, promote tolerance and rebuild social cohesion.

These are not cosmetic reforms, they are structural transformations.

8) Finally, the North cannot continue like this.

The ACF matters because Northern Nigeria matters. It has been a stabilising symbol, a bridge across political divides, and a reminder of a shared identity. But symbolism cannot solve today’s challenges.

The North is facing a demographic time bomb, an agricultural crisis, chronic insecurity, and a cultural drift toward intolerance. These realities demand a new kind of leadership. ACF can either rise to this responsibility or become irrelevant in the face of a changing generation.

The purpose of this appraisal is not to destroy the ACF or dismiss its contributions. It is to insist that the time for ceremonial leadership is over. The North needs a modern, strategic, data driven, youth inclusive and accountable regional institution.

If the ACF is willing to reform, it can play that role. If it is not, then history will record that an institution created to unify and uplift the North became too comfortable with nostalgia and too unwilling to evolve.

The stakes are too high. The future of the North is too important. We cannot afford another twenty five years of symbolic advocacy without real transformation.

#yb-Nov25