•NWDC must move from plans to people’s lives — Sambo
By Ibrahim Hassan-Wuyo
A strong call for a coordinated economic rescue of the North-West reverberated in Kaduna on Saturday as top federal lawmakers, development experts and regional stakeholders converged on the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Conference Centre for the North-West Development Summit.
The summit, themed “Advancing a Coordinated Regional Development for North-West Nigeria,” served as a rallying point for confronting what speakers described as the region’s central challenge — not the absence of resources, but the lack of coordination.
Deputy President of the Senate, Senator Barau I. Jibrin, said the North-West must deliberately reposition itself to shape Nigeria’s economic trajectory through strong regional institutions rather than fragmented and isolated interventions.
According to Barau, the establishment of the North-West Development Commission (NWDC) was a strategic response to decades of disjointed development efforts that failed to produce sustainable and system-wide impact across the region.
While noting that the North-West remains Nigeria’s largest agricultural belt and home to tens of millions of citizens, he lamented that the region continues to grapple with insecurity, infrastructure deficits, youth unemployment, climate stress and limited access to social services.
“These challenges do not respect state boundaries; therefore, our solutions must rise above them,” Barau said, stressing that the summit represented a call to political coordination and policy coherence.
He assured that the National Assembly would provide the legislative backing and oversight required for the NWDC to succeed under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda, urging stakeholders to move beyond rhetoric and focus on systems that deliver real improvements in people’s lives.
In his welcome address, Chairman of the Senate Committee on the NWDC, Senator Babangida Hussaini, painted a grim picture of a region that once powered Nigeria’s economy through groundnut pyramids,
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