The Tragicomedy Of The Hausa-Fulani: A Nation At War With Itself

The unabridged version 

By Mohammed Bello Doka 

In Nigeria today—as it has been since the amalgamation of 1914—there has always been debate, tension, and competition between tribes, tongues, and regions. The Igbo versus the Yoruba in the South. The Ijaw versus the Itsekiri in the Niger Delta. The Tiv versus the Jukun in the Middle Belt. The list is endless, exhausting, and eternally tragic.

These rivalries have produced political instability, electoral violence, and in some cases, bloodshed that lingers in communal memory for generations.

But in the North today, something far more stupid, far more disorienting, and far more tragicomic has emerged.

The argument now is between the Hausa and the Fulani.

Yes. The same two groups whose identities have been politically, culturally, and religiously integrated for over two centuries. The same two groups who intermarried, shared Islamic scholarship, built political institutions together, and created a fusion that even British colonialism could not break.

Today, a band of deluded, misguided, and mischievous people have taken it upon themselves—either as Hausas who want to avenge what they term "genocide" committed by Usman bin Fodio against the Hausas over 200 years ago, or as Fulanis who see themselves as an embattled, persecuted minority—to tear this ancient fabric apart.

On social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and X, an army of algorithm-driven hate-mongers spreads inflammatory content aimed at rewriting the Hausa-Fulani relationship into one of distrust and betrayal. They ignore not only history but also the current structural challenges confronting the region.

And here is the cruelest irony of all: many of these same people, these digital warriors, are today being killed by bandits. Their villages are razed. Their daughters are abducted and raped. Their sons are turned into ransom bargaining chips.

They cannot face the bandits killing them today.

They cannot save themselves.

But they have resurrected a grievance from the 19th century—a grievance that predates Nigeria, predates colonialism, predates everything they know—and turned it into a modern crusade.

They argue, in their madness, that the bandits are somehow continuing the Usman bin Fodio jihad. That the Fulani herders killing and kidnapping today are soldiers in a 200-year-old war.

Rather than face their real killers, they want to chase the remaining Fulanis—their neighbors, their in-laws, their business partners—out of what they call "Hausaland."

This is not patriotism. This is not self-defense. This is collective suicide performed as performance art.

And the audience is laughing perhaps bleeding.

The Enemy Within The Mirror

But let us not pretend that the Hausa-Fulani social media war is the only madness afflicting the North.

Far from it.

These same people who want to avenge a 200-year-old "genocide" are being robbed blind by their political leaders. Their children are malnourished—3.5 million children under five suffering from severe acute malnutrition across the North, with MSF treating 294,000 children across seven northern states between January and September 2025 alone. That is a 43 percent increase from the previous year. In Katsina State alone, 70,000 malnourished children were treated by June 2025, including 10,000 hospitalized in serious condition. The most severe form of malnutrition—nutritional oedema—rose by 208 percent. And still, 652 children died in MSF facilities because help came too late.

These same people who scream about ethnic purity on Facebook are being maimed and killed by bandits while their governors fly private jets to foreign medical trips.

And yet, every election season—regardless of the manufactured Hausa-Fulani tension—they mix and share themselves into groups. They sing the same praise songs. They wave the same party flags, wear the same branded shirts and caps. They support the same politicians who have abandoned them, stolen from them, and left them to die.

Hausa and Fulani, together, queueing behind a billionaire politician who owns mansions in Dubai while they cannot afford a bag of rice.

On social media, they throw tantrums at each other. They call each other names. They threaten violence. They rewrite history with the confidence of the ignorant and carlous illiterate.

Yes, they are a minority mostly chasing social media clouts. The silent majority of Northerners still understand that Hausa and Fulani are not enemies. But the rhetoric, the threats, the dehumanizing language—it is becoming troubling. And history has shown us how societies unravel. Not all at once, but step by step, lie by lie, silence by silence.

Dr. Kabiru Danladi Lawanti warned recently in a televised interview: "Genocide never begins with violence. It begins with language—systematically crafted to dehumanise, divide, and desensitise. Rwanda and Yugoslavia were not failed states; they were fractured societies, where identity was weaponised through the media until violence felt logical. Northern Nigeria today is not Rwanda. But some of the same psychological architecture is quietly forming—this time, across the digital landscape".

He is right. And he is also frighteningly alone in saying so.

Who Supplies The Bullets? (Spoiler: It'S Us)

Let us now address the elephant in the room—the one no one wants to name.

Yes, the overwhelming majority of the bandits are Fulanis. Many of them live in the bush. Many of them were once herders who lost their cattle routes, their grazing reserves, their dignity, and then their humanity not to the Hausas but to greed, to elite dominance and most often the same gluttons they celebrate every election year.

But here is the question that no one on social media wants to answer:

Who are the informants?

Who are the suppliers of arms and logistics?

Do the Fulanis in the bush manufacture their own bullets? Do they assemble their own AK-47s? Do they build their own bombs in makeshift factories hidden inside the villages of Zamfara?

No. Of course not.

The informants—the people who tell bandits when a village is unguarded, when a wealthy family is hosting a wedding, when a school is full of children who can be ransomed—are their neighbors. Their fellow villagers. The people who buy bread in bulk—20 to 100 loaves at a time—to feed the bandits in hiding. The people who buy petrol in jerrycans and disappear into the bush. The people who suddenly have money, who marry new wives, who build new houses without any visible source of income and travel to Hajj to stone the devil.

As the Commissioner of Police, Sanusi Buba, once explained: informants are not only those who provide criminal gangs with information but also those who supply essential commodities like motorbikes, fuel, food stuff, recharge cards, and many others. And most of these informants, he said, reside within the very communities that are being attacked.

So yes, the bandits are Fulani. But who feeds them? Who informs them? Who buys them the fuel for their motorcycles?

Hausas. And other tribes. And sometimes, tragically, even the victims themselves, bargaining for their lives.

The logistics suppliers, the arms dealers, the food vendors, the recharge card sellers—they are not Fulanis from the bush. They are Northerners. They are our neighbors. They are us.

And then there are the larger forces—the Europeans, the Americans, the Brits who manufacture the arms and allow them to flood the Sahel. The global arms trade is a river of dollars, of Naira et al, and Nigeria is at its delta. But where are the protests in the North against the foreign powers arming our killers? Where are the social media campaigns demanding that the West stop supplying weapons that end up in the hands of bandits?

There are none. Because it is easier to hate a Fulani neighbor than to understand the global political economy of small arms.

So the same Northern victims cannot unite to fight:

1. The bandits killing them today.

2. The Europeans, Americans, and Brits producing arms and allowing them to reach the bandits.

3. The logistic suppliers and informants living among them.

4. Their political leaders, who have the resources to provide security but choose to embezzle instead.

5. The military and police officers who take bribes from bandits and look the other way.

Instead, they want to avenge a supposed 200-year-old genocide.

Who is deceiving the Northerners?

The answer, as always in tragedy, is themselves.

The Ransom Economy And The Politics Of Rice

If the security situation is not maddening enough, consider the economic logic—or rather, the complete absence of it.

The same people who cannot afford to procure arms, set up a vigilante, or defend their own villages can somehow contribute and pay hundreds of millions of naira to bandits for peace deals.

Peace deals that will not last a year.

Peace deals supervised by the same government and security agencies that are supposed to protect them.

Communities like Offa in Kwara State now spend over N10 million monthly on security operations—funded entirely by contributions from well-meaning individuals. This covers salaries for vigilantes, vehicles, motorcycles, fueling, and other logistics. The community has established a vigilante structure to complement security agencies through intelligence gathering and patrol operations, using limited arms permitted by law. But as Air Vice Marshal Abdul-Ganiyu Olabisi (Rtd), a member of the Offa Security Committee, noted: "This is not sustainable".

And yet, the government offers no support. No funding. No institutional backing. Communities are left to fend for themselves while politicians collect security votes that disappear into private accounts.

Meanwhile, the same people who cannot defend themselves can somehow bribe their way into the army. They pay recruitment officers. They cut corners. They forge documents. And then they are sent to the war front—without adequate weapons, without proper training, without body armor.

Or worse, they are maimed and killed not in battle, but in the barracks—by their own commanders, by negligence, by the corruption that has turned Nigeria's military into a money-making venture for some actors within the system.

A retired Colonel, a former director at the Office of the National Security Adviser, recently raised the alarm: "National security has been monetized. It's like a business now. People say politics, churches, now security. Everybody is grabbing what they have. There are multi-billion generals in the military now. We have seen local governments collecting money, saying they will give this and then take their own part. This is a source of making cool money".

He recalled videos circulating from Kaduna and Niger States, showing soldiers complaining about how their superiors withheld allowances or diverted funds meant for operations. "Their boss takes half and gives them no ration," he said. "I'm told if you go to Abuja, many new buildings you are seeing probably belongs to one of the officers or people involved in maintaining our security".

And yet, the Northern masses say nothing. They protest nothing. They demand nothing.

But give them rice and noodles—just a bag of rice, a carton of Indomie, a few thousand naira—and they will queue behind their tormentors on election day. They will vote for the same governors who abandoned them to the bandits. They will re-elect the same senators who have never visited their villages. They will clap for the same presidents who fly over their suffering in presidential jets.

The rice-and-noodles politics of Northern Nigeria is not just corruption. It is a statement. It says: our dignity has a price, and that price is one bag of rice per voting adult.

What is wrong with the people?

I ask this not as an outsider. I ask this as a Northerner. As someone who shares their blood, their faith, their soil. I ask because I do not understand how a people can be so brilliantly resilient in surviving bandit attacks and so catastrophically stupid at the ballot box.

What is wrong with us? 

The Vicious Cycle Of Betrayal

No one will ever protect the North for us. Only us. And no one but us.

This is a simple truth. It is not complicated. It does not require a PhD in political science. It requires only the admission that we are alone—that the federal government does not care, that the international community does not care, that no cavalry is coming over the hill.

And yet, when politicians who actually want to change things emerge—when a governor builds a factory, when a businessman or a politician invests in the North, when a leader tries to break the cycle of poverty and dependency—what happens?

The same tormentors pay media influencers. Influencers who are also suffering from the same banditry, the same hunger, the same poverty. They pay them to denigrate those politicians. To call them names. To accuse them of infidelity to "the Northern cause"—whatever that means anymore.

These influencers—with their thousands of followers, their blue checkmarks, their performative outrage—will hate on the politicians who invest within their own people. They will sabour businesses that are trying to provide jobs. They will sabotage the very industries that could employ their followers, their cousins, their children.

Why?

Because chaos is profitable for them. Because their relevance depends on Northern suffering. Because if peace comes, if prosperity comes, if development comes—who will need their angry tweets? Who will share their conspiracy theories? Who will fund their propaganda?

They are, in the truest sense, merchants of misery.

And the Northern masses eat it up. They share the videos. They retweet the lies. They applaud the sabotage. And then they go back to their hungry children and wonder why nothing ever changes.

The Traditional Rulers And The Scholars: Scapegoats Or Spectators?

Let me be clear about something, because there is a tendency—especially among Southern commentators—to blame Northern traditional rulers and Islamic scholars for the region's problems.

I do not.

I will not.

The traditional rulers have been stripped of their constitutional powers. The 1999 Constitution totally ignores the existence of traditional rulers and does not find it fit to include even the chairmen of states council of chiefs as members of the Council of State. As the Sultan of Sokoto, Sa'ad Abubakar III, reminded the National Assembly through a memorandum: "There is currently no law at federal level or a constitutional provision recognising the Nigerian Traditional Institution".

Before the 1976 local government reforms, the Sultan noted, "there were never any recorded serious incidents of religious, ethnic or land related conflicts where hundreds of lives were lost as is obtained nowadays." General Ironsi's 1966 unitary government decree and General Gowon and Obasanjo's 1976 local government reform decrees stripped traditional rulers of their powers and gave them to local government councils, "thereby giving birth to the present insecurity and corruption".

Our traditional rulers today are figureheads. They preside over marriages. They settle minor disputes. They cut ribbons at ceremonies. But they have no police. They have no courts. They have no constitutional role in security or governance.

So no, I do not blame them. They cannot change anything because we have not given them the power to change anything. We have made them ceremonial, then demanded that they govern. It is cruel and it is hypocritical.

What of the Islamic scholars?

The same applies. How many of us listen to them? How many of us respect them? How many of us act according to what they preach from the pulpit?

If a politician climbs a podium and gives a command, 80 percent of his party men will listen. If a sheikh climbs the same pulpit and gives the same command—in the name of Allah, with Qur'anic verses—will 80 percent listen?

No. They will nod. They will say "Ameen." They will go home and do exactly what the politician told them to do, because the politician has the money, the power, the rice.

But the truth is that even the clerics are compromised. Many of them have become politicians themselves. Many of them take money from governors to deliver sermons praising them. Many of them have abandoned the prophetic mission to become court imams for corrupt rulers.

And the people know this. So they have stopped listening altogether.

So no, I do not blame the scholars either. They are human. They are weak. They are as trapped in this system as everyone else.

The problem is not the leaders. The problem is us. We do not respect anyone who does not have a gun or a bag of money. And then we wonder why our leaders are all gunmen and thieves.

The Other North: 500 Tribes And Counting

Before I am accused of reducing the North to a Hausa-Fulani binary, let me state clearly: the North is not just Hausa and Fulani.

There are over 500 other tribes in Northern Nigeria. The Tiv, the Idoma, the Igala, the Nupe, the Gwari, the Ebira, the Kanuri, the Margi, the Bura, the Jukun, the Kuteb, the Chamba, the Kamwe, the Higgi, the Mafa—the list goes on and on.

Some are Muslims. Some are Christians. Some still follow traditional religions passed down from before Nigeria , before Usman bin Fodio, before the trans-Saharan trade, before Islam ever reached the Sahel.

These groups are not spectators to the crisis. They are victims of it. In many cases, they are the primary victims. The bandits do not ask for your tribe before they abduct you. The kidnappers do not check your religion before they shoot you. The politicians do not care about your ethnicity before they steal your share of the national budget.

Every single one of these groups suffers from the same bad governance, the same insecurity, the same poverty, the same maternal mortality rates that see 1,549 women die per 100,000 live births in Jigawa State, 1,100 in Bauchi, 1,025 in Katsina and Kano.

Every single one of them has children who are out of school—80 percent of Nigeria's 20 million out-of-school children are in the North, with Bauchi at 54 percent, Sokoto at 52 percent, Yobe at 49 percent, and Borno, Gombe, and Taraba at 48 percent each.

Every single one of them is hungry. The UN World Food Programme warns that nearly 35 million Nigerians will face severe food insecurity during the 2026 lean season—the highest level recorded in a decade. In Borno State alone, 15,000 people are projected to face catastrophic hunger (IPC Phase 5), one step away from famine. And yet, due to funding shortages, the WFP has been forced to cut assistance for 1.3 million people. Over 150 nutrition clinics in Borno and Yobe are shutting down, affecting more than 300,000 children under two.

But when the social media warriors talk about "the North," they mean Hausa and Fulani. They mean their narrow, tribal, self-serving vision of what the region should be. They ignore the other 500 tribes entirely, except when they need to blame Muslims for the region's problems or accuse minorities of "sabotaging" Hausa-Fulani political supremacy.

This is the tragicomedy within the tragicomedy. Even as we kill ourselves over a 200-year-old grievance, we are ignoring the 500 other groups who share our suffering and deserve our solidarity.

The Reckoning That Will Not Come

The title of this piece is "The Tragicomedy of the Hausa-Fulani: A Nation at War with Itself." I chose the word "tragicomedy" deliberately.

It is a tragedy because people are dying. Children are starving. Mothers are bleeding out in delivery rooms. Young men are picking up rifles because the state has abandoned them. Young women are being sold as brides to bandits because their families needs protection that the government cannot provide.

It is a comedy because the response to all this suffering is so absurd, so irrational, so self-defeating that it would be hilarious if it were not happening to us.

A people who cannot fight the bandits killing them today want to fight a ghost from 1804.

A people who cannot hold their governors accountable for stealing security votes want to hold a grudge against their Fulani neighbors for something their great-great-great-grandfathers may or may not have done.

A people who cannot produce a single vaccine or bullet or textbook want to argue on Facebook about who truly owns Kano.

This is tragic. This is comic. This is Arewa.

Until the day the people of Northern Nigeria realize who benefits from their woes—until they recognize that the ethnic agitators, the corrupt politicians, the informants in their midst, and the global arms dealers are all feeding on their suffering—the North will remain backward.

Poor. Sick. Hungry. And endlessly, endlessly arguing about the past while the present burns around them.

The graves are not yet full. But history is watching. And it never forgives those who saw danger and did nothing.

An Open Letter To The Northern Masses

So here is my message—not as a journalist, not as an intellectual, not as someone who has figured it all out, but as a Northerner who is tired. Tired of the excuses. Tired of the blame-shifting. Tired of watching my people die while we argue about who started what two centuries ago.

Stop looking for external enemies. The enemy is in the mirror. The enemy is the informant in your village. The enemy is the politician you keep re-electing. The enemy is your own refusal to organize, to demand accountability, to say "enough."

Stop waiting for the federal government to save you. They will not. They have their own problems. They have their own corruption. They have their own ethnic politics. The cavalry is not coming. You are the cavalry.

Stop paying ransom to bandits. Every naira you pay is a bullet in the next victim's head. Organize vigilantes. Arm yourselves within the law. Refuse to negotiate with terrorists. Make banditry unprofitable.

Stop voting for thieves because they gave you rice. That rice costs them nothing. Your dignity costs everything. The next time a politician offers you noodles for your vote, look them in the eye and tell them: "My vote is not for sale. My child's future is not worth a bag of rice."

Stop fighting the Fulani. Your neighbor is not your enemy. The bandits are your enemies. The informants are your enemies. The corrupt politicians are your enemies. The arms manufacturers in Europe and America are your enemies. Your fellow villager who sells fuel to bandits is your enemy. But the Fulani family living next door, whose children play with your children, whose daughters are also being kidnapped—they are not your enemies.

Stop listening to the social media agitators. They are not your leaders. They are not your scholars. They are not your traditional rulers. They are algorithms wearing human faces, profiting from your anger. Unfollow them. Block them. Report them to the authorities were necessary. Digital hate speech is not freedom of expression; it is the first step toward mass violence.

Start investing in your community. Build schools. Build clinics. Build vigilante groups. Hold your local government accountable. Attend town hall meetings. Demand to see the security vote budget. Make governance expensive for thieves.

Start educating your children. The North has 20 million out-of-school children. That is not just a statistic; it is a recruitment pipeline for bandits and terrorists. Every child in school is a child not holding a rifle. Every girl educated is a generation saved from malnutrition and maternal death.

Start speaking truth to power—not on Facebook, but in person. At the palace. At the mosque. At the polling unit. Demand that your leaders account for their stewardship. And if they cannot, vote them out.

No one will protect the North for us. Only us. And no one but us.

This is not a slogan. It is a survival strategy.

The tragicomedy of Arewa will continue for as long as we allow it. The curtain will not fall on our suffering until we stand up, walk to the stage, and refuse to play our assigned roles any longer.

The choice is ours. It has always been ours.

And history is watching.

The writer is a Northerner who refuses to accept that his people are incapable of change. The views expressed are informed by open-source data, including reports from the UN World Food Programme, UNICEF, MSF, the National Bureau of Statistics, and verified Nigerian media platforms.

Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected] 

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