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For many years since the rise of culturally motivated banditry and Islamist-inspired terrorism in northern Nigeria, the region and its elite have blamed everything and everyone but the main culprits for the widespread insecurity ravaging the country. When it was no longer a problem of Goodluck Jonathan’s “cluelessness” it became an issue “climate change, poverty and illiteracy” under the northern presidency of Muhammadu Buhari, just as it has been politicized in President Bola Tinubu’s Nigeria to be a “weak and uncaring of the North” government. And whenever government proposes a hard military approach towards tackling the menace of insecurity, the religious, political and technocratic establishment of the North, speaking through a man known as Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gumi, will urge for restraint and instead ask government to negotiate with bandits terrorising the people of the region.
In fact, leading lights of the North including the late President Buhari, prominent Islamic cleric, Sheikh Gumi, former minister and Arewa Consultative Forum chieftain, Bashir Dalhatu, and former executive secretary of NHIS, Professor Usman Yusuf, among many others, have called on the federal government to grant amnesty to terrorists operating in the region as was the case with Niger Delta militants under the administration of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. And when Buhari, one of the region’s was beloved politicians, emerged as President of Nigeria in 2015, hush and mum over escalating violence arising from banditry was urged in order to protect the image of “one of our own” in power. So, for many years, states like Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna, Kebbi and most parts of the North West were devastated by mass killings, abductions, kidnapping-for-ransom and highway robbery without the outside world knowing much of the orgy of violence, as the people were urged to suffer in silence in order to protect the image of President Buhari.
To make matters worse, anybody or group that decided to speak out and call for government action to protect the lives and properties of the region was usually viciously attacked, defamed, ostracised and hated intensely by a horde of ‘Buharideens’ in a manner that portrays them as worse than infidels, with their Muslim and Arewa bonafides called to question. A prominent example of this intense persecution of those who were trying to save the people of the region from themselves was when Sheikh Muhammad Nuru Khalid, the Imam of Apo legislative quarters Jummat mosque in Abuja, was sacked from his position for being too vocal in exposing the insecurity in the Muslim North and his persistent call on President Buhari to act. Interestingly, the chairman of the mosque committee that pronounced his sacking was Senator Saidu Dansadau, from Zamfara State, the headquarters of banditry in northern Nigeria, where his Dansadau village had all but been wiped out of existence by bandits. Consequently, due to a combination of untamed Islamism, pacifism and identity political correctness, Arewa was positioned on the road to Afghanistan, where numerous jihadi terror groups such as Lakurawa, Mamuda, Ansaru and others have turned the region into their playground.
Apparently hamstrung by the pacifist sentiment in the region, President Tinubu, a politician with his eyes set on his re-election, may have decided to play along by adopting the so-called “non-kinetic” approach to insecurity in order not to hurt the sensibilities of the leadership establishment of the region. In the three years since he has been President, a number of kidnapping incidents involving mass abduction of schoolchildren in Niger, Kaduna and Kebbi states had the abductees released through negotiations under the guise of “non-kinetic” approach to tackling insecurity. And this drew criticism against the Tinubu administration from many Nigerians, including me. But unbeknownst to me and many other Nigerians, this pacifist approach is as far as Arewa’s home-grown terrorists restrict their terror franchise at home, as the first major attempt to extend their jihadi terror activities from Arewanistan to Yorubaland met a different Tinubu, the President and Commander-in-Chief of Nigeria’s armed forces.
The first signal that Yorubaland was not Arewa was the fact that when jihadi terrorists made landfall in Orire community of Oyo State, where multiple school locations were attacked and children, along with their teachers, were abducted by elements of the Ansaru, an al-Qaeda affiliate, people of the region rose up with a united voice and demanded action from their son, President Tinubu.
In fact, massive protests were organized against their own in Aso Rock, calling on him to act decisively. I did not hear any Yoruba Muslim cleric advocating for dialogue or negotiation with the terrorists because they were “our brothers.” Not even our friend, Professor Ishaq Akintola, the one-man riot squad of MURIC. But in Arewa, they were asked to pray for President Buhari and Muslim clerics declared any form of protests against insecurity and bad governance ‘haram.’ And when afrobeat icon and Nigerian from Yorubaland, David Adeleke, aka Davido, took his advocacy to the international arena during his FIFA World Cup 2026 opening ceremony performance to press for the release of the abducted Orire schoolchildren and their teachers, it was Dauda Kahutu, aka Rarara, a local Hausa singer from northern Nigeria, who fiercely criticized him for “harming Nigeria’s reputation” on the global stage.
With the people of Yorubaland rising up in unison against terrorism and asking their son in power in Aso Rock to act decisively, it has become clear that indeed Yorubaland is not Arewanistan where terrorists and bandits are glamorised and treated like rock stars.
Buoyed by the progressive and sensible stand of Yoruba people in reaction to the Orire abduction, President Tinubu launched an unprecedented, first of its kind and never seen before military operation that successfully secured the rescue of the Orire abductees, with surgical precision. For the first since the civil war, we saw the full might of the Nigerian state deployed heavily with resounding success against terrorists. In the case of the Orire incident, the Tinubu government refused to negotiate and did not deploy the so-called non-kinetic approach to secure their release. It was full blast kinetic.
After successfully securing the release of the abductees and the neutralization of the assailants, Nigeria’s security services arrested their collaborators across the country while charging two of their leaders in custody to court, where they were speedily tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Apparently dissatisfied with this judgement, the DSS has appealed the judgement asking for death penalty for the leaders of the terror group. This clearly shows that, if government is willing to work, it can work. A major obstacle to security of lives and properties in northern Nigeria has been the deliberate complication of the simple issue of culturally motivated Fulani banditry and religiously motivated terrorism, which is nothing but a violent manifestation of Islamism.
Today, Fulani banditry and violent jihadism that were nurtured to monstrosity in Arewa pose an existential threat to the Nigerian state. Arising from wrong cultural and religious practices, the northern region has set itself on fire that is threatening to engulf the whole country, but with the Orire rescue and the imminent establishment of state police, it should be clear to the North and its leaders that the rest of Nigeria may no longer be willing to endure the collective incineration from their religious and cultural self-immolation.
