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As governor, Nasir El-Rufai did not fail to express the frustration of the people against insecurity in Kaduna state. Instead, he amplified their voices in seeking support from the federal government and repeatedly called for carpet bombing of forests where they operate from. The result was that the people of the state saw in him a governor who spoke for them and defended their right to cry. Perhaps that informed the reason they defended his choice of Uba Sani as successor. El-Rufai may have believed that, given Uba Sani’s background in activism, Sani would be at the forefront of defending the rights of the people. Reality now shows that activism is worlds apart from governance. That is where the irony lies.
Uba Sani built his political identity on the scaffolding of civil rights advocacy. He was a pro-democracy crusader during Nigeria’s numerous military dictatorships. He campaigned for a democracy where people would have the right not only to elect their leaders but also to speak their minds. Yet, with him as governor, the people of Kaduna state cannot speak out against the insecurity ravaging their homes. They also cannot condemn what they have endured at the hands of bloodthirsty bandits. This is because the machinery of the Kaduna state government has now been turned against those who dare to speak. The Kaduna people are shocked that their governor, once celebrated as a senator who spoke uncomfortable truths, has unravelled and now shows a face that neither his admirers nor his critics anticipated. He now presents himself as a man who would rather silence the messenger than confront the message.
The message, in this case, is brutally simple. Kaduna State is bleeding. Communities in the southern senatorial zone, the Chiefdom areas, and scores of local government districts continue to suffer from terrorism, kidnappings, farmer-herder clashes, and the general collapse of security. Families are fleeing ancestral farmlands. Schools are shut, and markets are deserted. The dead are counted by the dozens weekly. This is the lived reality for millions of Kaduna residents, not opposition propaganda. These residents go to bed each night uncertain whether morning will find them alive or in the enclave of kidnappers.
Sadly, despite this lived reality, political appointees, including commissioners, special advisers, senior aides, and elected representatives of the people who dared to publicly articulate their constituents’ pain, have reportedly faced swift and punitive consequences from the Uba Sani government. For the government, loyalty to the governor is to be demonstrated not through service delivery or honest counsel, but through maximum silence. The governance maxim in Uba Sani’s Kaduna is: Complain about the killings and lose your job. Those who raise their voices to draw attention to the insecurity ravaging their local governments and communities risk the ire of the state government. Elected representatives of the people who dare to speak on behalf of their suffering constituents risk being ostracised from the Kaduna State Government House. Under this mandate, not even community leaders like district heads are spared.
The most disturbing aspect of this suppression is not merely that it is undemocratic, but that it is militantly irrational. Threatening, demoting, or sacking officials for raising alarms about insecurity does not make Kaduna more secure. It does not return a single kidnapped child. It does not rebuild a burnt village. It does not compensate a farmer who has abandoned his land out of fear of being hacked to death on his own soil. The terrorists do not read press releases from Government House. They are not deterred by the governor’s anger at aides who complained too loudly. If anything, enforcing silence only deepens the state’s vulnerability, because a government that punishes those who report the problem cannot honestly claim to be solving it.
Some people say that a leader who demands silence in the face of mounting catastrophe is delusional. Others describe such leaders as delusional and dangerous. Delusional because no amount of forced quietude will change the security reality on the ground. Dangerous because in silencing credible internal voices, the governor destroys the feedback loop through which functional governments learn, adapt, and respond. When traditional rulers and district heads, who oversee troubled districts, cannot honestly give feedback to the governor about what is happening in their domains, or even amplify their voices using the mass media, for fear of losing their jobs or facing reprimand, the governor ends up governing a fiction. He makes decisions based on curated reassurances rather than harrowing truths. The state pays for that fiction in blood.
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The question is this: what exactly is Uba Sani afraid of? Is the public acknowledgement of insecurity in Kaduna state an admission of failure? If that is what he is afraid of, then that calculation is as cynical as it is cowardly. What citizens expect, and have every democratic right to demand, is honesty, effort, and accountability. They expect a governor to acknowledge the problem and explain what his government is doing about it. They expect a government that welcomes difficult conversations as inputs to better policy, not as provocations to be crushed. Perhaps the governor needs to look at the El-Rufai template again. Not only did El-Rufai speak out against insecurity, but he also maintained a quarterly publication that analysed the insecurity trends across the senatorial zones and local government areas through the Ministry of Internal Security and Home Affairs under Samuel Aruwan’s watch. By so doing, he also encouraged the people to speak out against insecurity and suspicious movements within their communities.
Rather than build on this, Uba Sani appears to have opted for a bunker mentality that mistakes the appearance of stability for stability itself. He does not project strength by going this route, but rather advertises fear. Strong leaders do not silence critics; they engage them. Confident governments do not sack officials for speaking to the media about insecurity; they convene security councils, hold stakeholder forums, and demonstrate through action that the cry has been heard and taken seriously. He must know that citizens speak to the media when leaders plug their ears and refuse to hear their cries.
What makes Uba Sani’s transformation particularly striking, and somewhat troubling, is the biography he used to reach the governorship. As a senator representing Kaduna Central, he was conspicuous among those who challenged executive recklessness. He was the kind of politician who understood that democratic governance requires a culture of accountability, that citizens must be free to articulate their grievances without fear of retribution, and that elected and appointed officials serve the people, not the other way round. He rode into Kaduna’s Government House on the back of that reputation.
However, there is still time for Governor Uba Sani to recover the democratic credibility he appears to be squandering. He could begin by making clear, through words and deeds, that his administration welcomes accountability and honest reporting from within its own ranks. He could reinstate those who have been sanctioned for raising legitimate security concerns. He could hold open town halls in affected communities and listen, without defensiveness, to what citizens have to say. He could demonstrate that a government serious about solving a problem does not shoot the messenger. He has everything within him to demonstrate that he is not the silencer-in-chief.
However, if he continues down the current path, history will record him harshly. It will record him as a governor who governed a state at war with itself and chose, in that moment, to declare another war against the voices of those crying out for help. It will record him as a man who was given the extraordinary opportunity to be both a good governor and a consistent democrat, and who chose instead to be neither. Uba Sani must realise that silencing people does not make them safer. It only ensures that when they die, fewer official voices will have been on record demanding otherwise. That is not leadership. That is abandonment dressed in authority. This is also not governance but the management of perception at the expense of lives.
Uba Sani must appreciate that elected representatives are the voice of the voiceless in a democracy and that muzzling those voices is inconsistent with democratic norms. He must also appreciate that democracy is about the governance of a society through transparent, accountable, and participatory institutions. As a matter of fact, a democracy where officials fear speaking the truth has already surrendered a vital part of its soul.
