Prof. Usman Yusuf
The words of Thomas Aquinas, the foremost scholastic thinker and one of the most influential philosophers, are as true and fitting today as when they were said centuries ago: “He who is not angry when there is a just cause for anger is immoral. Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.”
On 19 Tuesday, 2025, Nigerians awoke to the devastating news of a bandit attack in the village of Gidan Mantau in Malumfashi LGA of Katsina state that resulted in the massacre of 55 innocent villagers.
These terrorists, estimated to be about 100 on motorcycles, rode into the village at dawn and gunned down 30 worshippers in a mosque while praying morning prayers, then killed 25 more villagers at random.
A large unverified number of villagers was said to have been carted away like cattle into the terrorists’ forest den for ransom. They were said to have put up checkpoints preventing entry or exit into the village during their operation, which lasted hours.
Where were the Police, Military, State Community Watch Guards, the state and the federal government, whose primary constitutional responsibility is to protect the lives and welfare of citizens? The Governor was on his annual holiday abroad, but wait, his deputy, who was acting for him, wrote an SOS letter to the President and Commander in Chief, who was on an official trip to Japan and had not handed powers to the Vice President.
So, the people of Gidan Mantau and Katsina state, which has now become the killing fields for bandits, are left on their own until the President returns.
There is no way of spinning it; the state and federal governments and all security agencies have failed the people of Gidan Mantau and Katsina state, where 24 out of its 34 LGAs (70%) are currently under siege by bandits. The shocking reality is that Borno state is now safer and more secure than Katsina state.
It is time to accept this and stop making excuses and reinforcing failure like it is being done repeatedly.
Over the last six years, I have consistently said that while the military has a definite role, there will not be a military solution to the fight against banditry and that the war on banditry can never be won on the battlefield. All banditry-related security problems are local, and their solutions must be found locally.
The political, military, and intelligence leadership in the state and federal capitals have refused to invest in understanding these local problems and involving local stakeholders in finding solutions. That is why big plans from Abuja without local involvement have not worked over the years and will never work.
Governments at all levels and the security agencies have remained in denial of the fact that there can never be peace and security in Nigeria without addressing social issues that fuel insecurity, like poverty, hunger, illiteracy, youth unemployment, corruption and bad governance.
It is time to do things differently because the ship of state has drifted, and citizens are very angry.
Northern Nigeria is on the verge of the worst hunger of our lifetime. If urgent steps are not taken, it could potentially be of the same magnitude as that seen in the devastating Ethiopian famine of 1983-1985, which resulted in an estimated 1 million fatalities and millions more displaced and impoverished.
What is worrisome is that this hunger is not brought about by drought or war but by the deliberate economic policies of the federal government, with the complicity of and the irresponsible leadership of the governors in the affected states.
In a country that is not experiencing drought or officially at war, President Tinubu’s economic policies have resulted in millions of Nigerians, predominantly women and children, going to bed hungry with no certainty of having anything to eat when they wake up.
In hospitals all across the country, hunger is now the first diagnosis in children and adults, particularly women patients, regardless of the admitting diagnosis.
This unfolding tragedy is leading to dangerous insinuations by many in the north of a systemic and deliberate policy by President Tinubu’s government to starve, conquer and subjugate the people of the region politically and economically.
The International Community and aid Agencies like the United Nations, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and most recently, the Vatican have lent their voices to the urgency of this tragedy.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) raised the alarm that in the last year, it has seen a 200% increase in the number of patients admitted for malnutrition and that its feeding centres in northern Nigeria are overflowing with patients, mostly women and children, being treated on mattresses on the floor.
Two Nigerian Newspapers recently published a report from the MSF on the alarming scourge of hunger in Northern Nigeria.
On its front page on Friday, July 25, 2025, The Daily Trust Newspaper reported that 400 children with severe malnutrition are admitted daily to MSF’s feeding centre in the Northwestern state of Kebbi.
The Punch Newspaper of the same day also reported that MSF recorded the death of 652 children from severe malnutrition in the first 6 months of 2025 in the Northwestern state of Katsina.
In another report published in the July 9, 2025, edition of the Daily Trust Newspaper, the Nigerian Red Cross Society stated that over 5.4 million children are currently malnourished in the nine security-challenged Northern Nigerian states of Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, Sokoto, Katsina, Zamfara, Niger, Benue, and Kano.
President Tinubu’s government’s response to this tragedy is to go into denial mode.
Instead of acknowledging the enormity of the problem and taking urgent life-saving steps to avert this impending disaster, it is busy issuing weak defensive rebuttals in the face of the stark and tragic realities on the ground.
President Tinubu has never hidden the fact that his allegiance is first and foremost to himself and his ambition, with everything else coming a distant second.
At a time when Nigerians are facing excruciating poverty, cost-of-living crisis, hunger, and worsening insecurity, with hundreds of lives lost daily all across the country, President Tinubu is fixated on his reelection in 2027 instead of fixing the hardships his policies are causing citizens.
Let no one deceive you, the recent rattling of the political cage by the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) two years before the 2027 general election is a clear sign of panic because they can smell defeat at the polls.
It is also a desperate tactic to force the opposition to show their hands so that Tinubu can destabilise their parties, send out government Gestapo Agencies after them and wear them out financially with the funds accumulated from the removal of fuel subsidy. But most importantly, it is a deliberate effort to distract Nigerians from the abysmal failures of Tinubu’s stewardship.
It is suicidal for any politician to alienate his electoral base, but this is exactly what President Tinubu has done throughout the first half of his 4-year term.
He has picked an unnecessary and unwinnable fight with the North and its people, a region that accounted for 62% of his total votes.
Below are some examples to support this assertion;
Tinubu’s blatant and unapologetic Yorubacentric appointments to his government and federal agencies are a direct violation of sections 14(3) and (4) of Nigeria’s 1999 constitution, as amended.
Section 14(3) mandates that the composition of the Federal Government and its agencies’ conduct of their affairs should reflect the Federal Character of Nigeria.
This promotes national unity, ensures loyalty, and prevents dominance by any particular region or ethnic group.
Section 14(4) extends this principle to state and local government levels, emphasising the need to recognise diversity and promote a sense of belonging.
Section 153(1) establishes the Federal Character Commission as a body to give effect to the Federal Character principle, as outlined in Section 14.
The commission is tasked with ensuring the equitable distribution of public posts and socio-economic infrastructures across the different federating units of Nigeria.
President Tinubu’s Yoruba ethnic group controls all the levers of Nigeria’s economy, including the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank (CBN), the Accountant General of the Federation, the state oil company NNPCL, the Tax Agency FIRS, the Customs Service, the Blue Economy (NPA, NIMASA and Shippers Council), the Maritime Bank, the Bank of Industry (BOI), PENCOM, and many others.
It is an existential threat to Nigeria’s national security and cohesion as a nation that only one out of the over 300 ethnic groups in the country controls the economy.
Under President Tinubu, the management of the economy has been very opaque.
Nigerians were told that removal of fuel subsidy will free up funds for social services and reduce Nigeria’s need for borrowing. But the reverse has been the case so far. This government borrowed more in 2 years than Buhari’s government did in 8 years, with nothing to show.
There is no accounting for the savings from fuel subsidy removal or accruals into the FIRS, Customs, NNPCL, or the Blue Economy, which are all controlled by the President’s Yoruba kinsmen.
With the passive submission and acceptance of the state governors, members of the National Assembly (NASS), some Clerics and the silence of the elites, President Tinubu has inflicted a sudden and very cruel hunger and hardship onto a region that is already very fragile and vulnerable with the sinister goal of using hunger as a tool to conquer and subjugate its people.
Infrastructure development has been unacceptably lopsided, favouring the President’s Southwest geopolitical origin and the Yoruba ethnic group. The recently passed tax bills were essentially designed to favour the president’s home state of Lagos and exclude the rest of the country.
The North perceives Tinubu as the first Commander-in-Chief that is hands-off and nonchalant to the insecurity that bedevils the region.
The persistent and irritating propaganda spewed by his security handlers on the false narrative that security in the region is improving while the contrary is the case, is seen as insensitive and adding to the growing unpopularity of the President and resentment among the people in the region.
President Tinubu’s selective empathy and response to states and citizens affected by insecurity and natural disasters are obvious. After the massacre in Yelwata, Benue state, the President visited with all his security chiefs and the Secretary to the Federal Government, where he addressed a town hall cum political rally.
The first Lady also visited Benue and Plateau states, where she donated N1 billion to the victims of banditry in each state.
Hundreds of people killed daily in other northern states by bandits and Boko Haram, or those killed and displaced by floods in Mokwa, Niger state, and Maiduguri, were not worthy of her charity.
This false “love” for the people of Benue and Plateau states is because President Tinubu and the First Lady are now feverishly courting northern Christians for their votes in 2027 after ignoring them in his 2023 Presidential bid.
The visit of the President’s son to the North during the Holy month of Ramadan, received with full protocol by state governors, his disrespectful visit to Clerics and traditional rulers and his dancing and handing out of cooked take away rice to youths like refugees or conquered people, was seen in the region as an insult to Islam, its leaders and people.
Engineering and allowing the Kano Emirate tussle to fester and the balkanization of Lamido of Adamawa’s power is seen as a direct assault on traditional institutions in the north.
The unashamed and dangerous race to a one-party state and the calculated sowing of discord in all opposition parties, including the new kid on the block, ADC are creating resentment of the federal government.
Crass Omo-Logo celebrations by the governors and the President in the northern states he visited, while people are hungry and angry, are seen as insulting and insensitive.
My generation has seen and benefited from a better Nigeria.
Wherever I address Nigerian youths, I remind them that Nations are built by the youth, not the aged and call on them to resist this government’s sinister attempt at balkanizing Nigeria along ethnoreligious fault lines for their selfish electoral gains.
Yusuf is a Professor of Haematology-Oncology and Bone Marrow Transplantation.
