In the early 2000s, then Vice-President Atiku Abubakar made a remark that still echoes in the corridors of power today.
Visibly exasperated, he told journalists that some of the most prominent Northern elders and politicians would corner him in Abuja and, at the slightest excuse, beg him to sack a fellow Northerner holding a juicy federal appointment. “They will come to me,” Atiku recounted, “and say ‘this man is from my village, he is not performing, remove him and put my own person’.” The former Vice-President called it a disease.
Twenty years later, the disease has not only refused to go into remission; it has mutated into a more virulent strain.
Today, the patient on the operating table is *Dr Bello Mohammed Matawalle,* Minister of State for Defence and former Governor of Zamfara State. In the last fortnight, the calls for his sacking have reached fever pitch. Politicians, security analysts, newspaper editorials, and even anonymous WhatsApp broadcasts have declared him the sole architect of every bandit bullet fired in the North-West. Hashtags trend, old video clips are dug up, and petitions are flying to the Villa faster than Nigerian Air Force jets escorting the minister’s convoy (a juxtaposition that itself fuels public rage).
Yet almost nobody is asking for an investigation. Nobody is demanding a judicial commission of inquiry, a Senate probe, or even a simple performance audit of the Ministry of Defence since May 2023.
The prescription is unanimous and immediate: sack him today, ask questions never.
This reflex the eagerness to devour our own is not new. It is the same reflex that saw Northern governors and elders cheer when President Obasanjo sacked General Victor Malu as Chief of Army Staff in 2001. It is the same reflex that made some Northern leaders celebrate the removal of General Abdulrahman Dambazau as Chief of Army Staff in 2010, and later as Minister of Interior in 2019. It is the reflex that watched silently while Dr Ibrahim Kpotun Idris, a Northerner, was hounded out as Inspector-General of Police in 2019 amid allegations never proven in any court.
Each time, the loudest voices calling for blood were Northern.
Jealousy and envy, as ugly as those words sound, are the twin engines of this phenomenon. In a country where political appointment is often seen as the ultimate jackpot, the rise of one person is interpreted as the robbery of another.
Zamfara politics, in particular, is a brutal zero-sum game: gold mines, cattle routes, federal patronage, and the sheer prestige of having “your man” in Abuja. Insiders know better: it is the continuation of a bitter feud that started long before Matawalle becamethe Governor.
But envy alone does not explain the full pathology. There is also the perverse incentive of moral grandstanding. It has become politically profitable for a Northerner to be seen as the loudest critic of another Northerner in power. It signals to southern audiences (and to the Villa) that “we are not clannish; see, we are even harder on our own people.” It is the same logic that made some Northern intellectuals celebrate the 2015 defeat of President Goodluck Jonathan while ignoring the fact that Muhammadu Buhari’s victory came overwhelmingly from Northern votes.
Performative self-flagellation has become a currency.
The consequences are catastrophic. Every time we succeed in pulling down one of our own without due process, we send three messages:
Northerners in high office are disposable the moment things go wrong, evidence be damned.
The surest way to destroy a Northern appointee is to mobilise ethnic or regional sentiment against him.
Southern presidents (or any president, really) can always find willing Northern collaborators to legitimise the sacrifice of Northern interests on the altar of “national balance”.
The security crisis in the North-West is real and heartbreaking. Thousands have been killed, millions displaced, and entire communities now pay taxes to bandits. But scapegoating one man, however flawed his record will not end it. The problems are structural: underfunded and overstretched armed forces, collapsed local intelligence, illicit mining fuelling war economies, porous borders, and a justice system that rarely convicts a single high-profile bandit sponsor.
These issues predate *Matawalle’s* governorship and God forbid may survive his ministership, whoever replaces him.
If we truly want accountability, let us demand it properly. The National Assembly can constitute a bipartisan panel to investigate the conduct of the Ministry of Defence since 2023. Let governors who negotiated with bandits (under whatever guise) appear and explain their decisions. Let us audit the billions allocated for arms and equipment that never translated into battlefield success. Let the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission trace the money trail from mining sites to bandit camps. That is how mature polities hold leaders to account not through Twitter storms and press conferences.
Until we break this cycle of cannibalism, the North will continue to shoot itself in the foot while the rest of the country watches in amusement.
President Tinubu, himself a master of the long game, should resist the path of least resistance. If Dr Matawalle has committed offences, let them be proven in the open, not whispered in the dark corners of ethnic rivalry. And if he has not, let him be allowed to work or fail on the strength of his record, not on the volume of his detractors.
The Northern political elite must choose:
keep devouring our own and remain perennial juniors in the Nigerian project, or finally grow up and defend competence and due process, even when it is politically inconvenient.
Because the day we stop being the first to sharpen the knife for our brother’s neck is the day we truly begin to heal.
The North had better wake-up!
Muhammad Iskeel Abdullahi,
For:
Journalists For Development.
Tags
Opinion