How Zamfara State is spearheading a renaissance in the North How Zamfara State is spearheading a renaissance in the North Share Today, we welcome a Guest Columnist in the person of Sesugh Akume, a public policy analyst and businessman, who is offering his personal reflections on how Zamfara State is making progress in healing the wounds of a broken people. Until recently, Zamfara was one of the most depressing states in Nigeria. Everything coming from there was bad news for the past two decades, until Bello Matawalle was elected Governor in 2019 by a sheer act of providence. Zamfara tops in virtually all the underdevelopment indices in Nigeria, where 91 per cent of the population live in extreme poverty. Zamfara fared spectacularly poorly in the education sector. Even in a situation where the pass mark was drastically lowered for Zamfara pupils, very few were enrolled for the National Common Entrance Examination. In 2018, the pass mark for entrance into the Unity Schools for Abia pupils, for example, was 130 out of 200; for Zamfara it was two for girls and four for boys. Even at that, Zamfara had a problem fielding candidates. In 2019, some 25,000 children from Lagos scrambled to get spaces in the Unity Schools out of 75,635 candidates who wrote the National Common Entrance Examination. Zamfara had only 59 candidates.