A few days ago, this newspaper published an editorial urging Northern leaders to abandon the tiresome habit of shifting blame and instead work genuinely with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to slay the monster that has been consuming the very fabric of the North from within. That commentary was met with the usual mix of tepid agreement and defensive murmuring. But this week, a voice from within the Northern establishment itself has said what needed to be shouted from every rooftop years ago.
Former Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido has done something that qualifies as remarkable only because so few of his peers have dared to attempt it: he has told the unvarnished truth. In a recent interview with Premier Radio in Kano, Lamido insisted that Northern leaders must own their collective responsibility for the region’s security catastrophe. He swept aside the comfortable fiction that bandits and insurgents are external agents smuggled into the region by mysterious enemies. Instead, he pointed the finger exactly where it belongs—at home.
“Where are Boko Haram members and bandits coming from? They are our children from the North. They were not thrown from the sky. They are among us, and today they seem stronger than us because of moral decay”, Lamido said.
This is the kind of brutal honesty that has been conspicuously absent from Northern political discourse for far too long. For years, state governors, traditional rulers, and federal legislators from the region have perfected the art of blaming the Federal Government for every atrocity committed within their jurisdictions. They have howled for more military deployments, more fighter jets, and more federal bailouts, all while staring studiously at the floor as rot consumed their own households.
We know the Federal Government has its own failures to answer for. The security architecture of Nigeria remains over-centralised, and President Tinubu is not above criticism. But it is not merely dishonest—it is contemptible for Northern governors to behave as though they are helpless spectators to the catastrophe unfolding in their domains.
What exactly have these governors been doing? Where are the results of their state police trusts? What has become of their local security outfits? How many bandits have their internally generated security budgets neutralised? These are not federal questions.
Lamido cut through the nonsense when he asked: “What is the essence of power? You are governor in Katsina, Sokoto or Zamfara, yet criminals have taken over your people. Where is the power? In diplomacy, if you cannot protect your people, whoever controls them has become their leader. The rogue simply becomes the governor.”
No honest discussion of Northern insecurity can avoid the elephant that has trampled the room. The region is home to a staggering population of able-bodied young men who are neither in school, nor employed, nor engaged in any productive activity whatsoever. This is not an accident of fate. It is the direct consequence of decades of indolent governance, the systematic neglect of public education, and a political class that has cynically weaponised the Almajiri system as a charitable relic while it metastasised into a recruitment pipeline for banditry.
Bandits are not emerging from a vacuum. They are being conscripted from the ranks of these idle young men—youths who have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no reason to believe in a society that has abandoned them. Governors have wrung their hands and blamed the federal character of the police. They have blamed climate change. They have blamed neighbouring states. They have blamed everybody except the person in the mirror.
How many of them have launched serious, sustained, adequately funded programmes to absorb these young men into vocational training, agriculture, or formal employment? The answer is vanishingly few. And until that changes, no number of soldiers, no fleet of fighter jets, and no amount of federal emergency funding will deliver lasting peace. You cannot shoot your way out of a demographic disaster that you refuse to acknowledge.
To be fair, not every Northern leader has been silent or evasive. In September 2025, Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani made remarks that mirrored Lamido’s position. Speaking at the launch of a book by the late Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gumi, Governor Sani warned against the politicisation of insecurity and rejected the fantasy that bullets alone could solve the crisis.
“Insecurity cannot be resolved solely through the use of firearms,” he said. “Whoever makes such a claim is only playing politics. We must fear God and stop deceiving the people because that approach will not work.”
Governor Sani correctly identified poverty, unemployment, and the neglect of rural communities as the heart of banditry. He distinguished the North-West’s crisis from the ideologically driven insurgency in the North-East. He has since championed the Kaduna Peace Model—a framework centred on dialogue, community engagement, and addressing root causes.
But where are the other governors? Where are the emirs and chiefs who command moral authority over their people but have used it to preside over weddings and turbaning ceremonies while their domains burn? Where are the Northern elders who gather at every funeral and wedding to lament the state of the region but never seem to agree on any concrete action beyond issuing another communiqué?
The silence from the rest of the Northern establishment has been deafening. And that silence is complicity.
Lamido concluded his interview with a warning that should be carved into the entrance of every government house in Northern Nigeria. He dismissed the petty sectarian and political divisions—APC versus PDP, Qadiriyya versus Izala—that have paralysed the region’s ability to respond to a common existential threat.
“If it were an Igbo man or Yoruba man or a Christian, we could perhaps argue differently. But this madness is happening among us. People from the region must tell themselves the truth to overcome the challenges”, he said.
That truth is brutal but inescapable. Northern leaders have been the primary custodians of their people’s security, welfare, and future. They have failed catastrophically in that custody. The Federal Government is not a nursemaid hired to clean up every mess made by children who refuse to responsible. The governors of Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kaduna, Niger, and other affected states must look into the mirror and answer one simple question: what have you done with the powers and resources entrusted to you?
President Tinubu has shown willingness to support the region. He has deployed military hardware and personnel. He has approved funds for security operations. But he cannot govern Northern communities from Abuja. He cannot sit in the councils of traditional rulers. He cannot provide jobs to every idle youth wandering the streets of Gusau or Sokoto. That is the job of the leaders who were elected by the people of those states. That is the job they have conspicuously failed to do.
The timing of Lamido’s statement is critical, for it coincides with a rare and significant military breakthrough in the North-East that his fellow Northern leaders should be celebrating rather than ignoring. Over the past week, joint air and ground strikes conducted by Nigerian troops in close coordination with the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) have killed at least 175 Islamic State fighters, including several high-profile commanders . Among the dead is Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, described as the group’s deputy leader globally and a figure central to terrorist financing, recruitment, and attack planning targeting not just Nigerians but civilians around the world . The operation, which destroyed terrorist checkpoints, weapons caches, logistics hubs, and financial networks across the North-East, marks the first successful targeting of a senior militant leader in more than a decade of insurgency in Nigeria. No American or Nigerian troops were harmed.
Northern leaders who have spent years blaming the Federal Government for insecurity now have a clear choice: continue the blame game or rally behind an operation that has delivered what their own security apparatuses could not for over ten years. The United States has acknowledged that the strikes would have been impossible without Nigerian intelligence and targeting support—proof that this is a genuine partnership, not a takeover.
President Tinubu has already thanked the Trump administration for its leadership and pledged more decisive strikes against terrorist enclaves. The governors of Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, and other affected states should be the first to commend this effort, to demand its expansion, and to complement it with the kind of grassroots, non-kinetic strategies, job creation, education, and rehabilitation of idle youths, that Lamido and Governor Uba Sani have rightly insisted upon. Silence or continued carping in the face of such tangible results is not just ungrateful; it is a dereliction of duty to the long-suffering people of the North.
The blame game must end. Northern governors must stop acting like aggrieved bystanders and start acting like responsible stewards. Sule Lamido has spoken the truth. Uba Sani has shown an alternative path. The question now is whether the rest of the region’s leadership has the courage to follow—or whether they will continue to fiddle while the North burns.
If they choose the latter, history will record that the leaders of the North stood by, pointed fingers, and did nothing while their own house was consumed by fire. And history will not be kind.
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