Across Northern Nigeria, state governments find themselves caught in a fiscal paradox of their own making: public wage bills have grown so large that even a 232 percent surge in federal transfers since 2022 has deepened dependency rather than relieved it. Only Kaduna and Kwara, among more than a dozen northern states, can cover their personnel costs from revenues they generate themselves — a quiet measure of how far most of the region's economies remain from self-sustaining vitality. The question economists are now asking is not merely whether states can meet payroll, but whether the structura