By Mohammed Bello Doka
12 May, 2026.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato once observed that the heaviest penalty for refusing to participate in governance is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself. But what happens when you participate enthusiastically, deliver a decisive victory, and still find yourself ruled as if you were an adversary? That is the question seething across the nineteen northern states today—and it is a question that will shape the 2027 general elections more than any campaign promise or party slogan.
Let us begin with arithmetic, because arithmetic has no political party.
In the 2023 presidential election, the numbers tell a story that the North cannot afford to forget. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu secured 2,652,824 votes from the North-West geopolitical zone alone. That is more votes than he obtained from his home zone, the South-West, where he polled 2,542,979. Tinubu received 30 percent of his entire national vote—nearly one-third—from the North-West. He took a whopping half a million votes in Kano State, where he did not even come first. He won Jigawa and Zamfara outright. Across the seven North-Western states, he defeated Atiku Abubakar—a Fulani man from northern extraction—by a margin of approximately 455,000 votes.
These are not the votes of a region that was dragged reluctantly behind a winner. These are the votes of a region that made a deliberate, strategic decision to trust a Southern candidate over its own sons.
But trust, as Niccolò Machiavelli understood, is always conditional. Machiavelli taught us that political loyalty is not about personal bonds but about utility—people remain loyal only as long as it benefits them. When the benefits stop flowing, loyalty stops being an obligation and becomes a memory.
So let me ask plainly: what has the North received in return for 2.6 million votes?
The answer, on current evidence, is less than inspiring.
Security: The North Burns While the Administration Looks Away
The first and most sacred duty of any government is the protection of life and property. On this score, the Tinubu administration's report card is not merely poor—it is a disgrace that northern mothers burying their children have every right to call an abomination.
According to Nextier's 2026 security outlook, Nigeria recorded 599 banditry incidents in 2025, resulting in 2,742 casualties. This represents a 134 percent increase in attacks and a 74 percent rise in deaths compared to 2024.
When President Tinubu visited victims of a massacre in Jos on April 2, he gave his word that such violence would not recur. "This experience will not repeat itself," he assured grieving families. Within 72 hours, another attack occurred in Benue State, claiming over a dozen lives.
The Arewa Consultative Forum has declared that the security situation in the North has reached a "state of war." The Arewa Dignity Advancement Initiative has warned that northern Nigeria is facing a "perilous combination of economic exploitation, agricultural decline, rising insecurity, social dislocation, and deliberate marginalisation."
Where is the urgency? Where is the commander-in-chief who promised to treat insecurity as a wartime threat? When northern villages are sacked, when children are kidnapped for ransom that impoverished families cannot pay, when farmers cannot reach their fields—these are not management issues. These are existential threats to the North's survival.
Economic Hardship: The Poverty of Promises
If security tells one story, the economy tells an even grimmer one.
Plan International Nigeria's State of the Nigerian Youth Report 2025 found that 80 million young Nigerians—53 percent of the youth population—are unemployed. Each year, 1.7 million graduates enter the labour market to find nothing. Over 1,500 schools have been shut in the past two years due to insecurity, leaving one million children out of school.
The same report found that 40.1 percent of Nigerians, over 82.9 million people, live in poverty.
These are national figures, but the North bears a disproportionate share of this misery. The World Food Programme estimates that 6 million people in northern Nigeria are expected to experience acute or worse food insecurity in 2026. In Borno State alone, 15,000 people risk catastrophic food insecurity—the highest level under the global standard used to measure hunger.
The administration will point to inflation data. Food inflation fell to 8.89 percent in January 2026, its lowest level in over 14 years. Headline inflation has moderated from its peak.
But what comfort are statistics to a mother in Zamfara who cannot afford groundnuts? What solace is a percentage point to a farmer in Katsina whose harvest was burned by bandits? Inflation moderating from astronomical to merely horrible is not a victory—it is a confession of how low the bar has sunk.
Infrastructure: The North's Neglect in Concrete Terms
The administration's defenders will cite ongoing projects. There is the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano highway reconstruction, the Kaduna Western Bypass revived after 22 years of abandonment, the Kano-Maradi railway linking northern states with Niger Republic, the Sokoto-Badagry Super Highway.
These are not nothing. But when the Chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum, Alhaji Bashir M. Dalhatu, testifies that "not a single strategic road has been completed or maintained in the North in the past 20 years," we must pay attention.
Consider this: out of ₦1.013 trillion allocated to roads in 2025, only ₦24 billion went to the North-East. A May 2025 Ministry of Works allocation showed ₦1.394 trillion to the South-West, compared to ₦105 billion for the North-West and ₦30 billion for the North-East.
How does a region that delivered 30 percent of a president's votes end up receiving 2 percent of road infrastructure funding? That is not a statistical anomaly. That is a policy choice dressed in budgetary language.
The Rising Northern Revolt
The most damning evidence of northern alienation comes not from opposition politicians but from within the president's own party.
In Zamfara State, Kabiru Marafa—former coordinator of President Tinubu's campaign in the state—resigned from the APC alongside his entire political structure across all 147 wards. His accusation was searing: "sustained injustice, mistrust, marginalisation and deliberate neglect of Zamfara State and its people." His supporters pointed out that Zamfara accounted for 1,203 of the 4,722 kidnappings nationwide in 2024, yet federal relief had bypassed them.
In Jigawa State, 289 APC members defected to the PDP. Across the North, the cracks are widening.
Nasir El-Rufai, former Kaduna State governor, has warned repeatedly that Tinubu risks suffering the same fate as Goodluck Jonathan in 2015. "Less than two years into the tenure, we are witnesses to how the relationship between the North and President Bola Tinubu, or rather his administration, is quickly deteriorating," El-Rufai wrote. He added: "May I remind some persons that more than the performance or lack thereof of President Jonathan, it was his attitude, and that of people around him, towards the North that ultimately brought him down."
Senator Ali Ndume has drawn the same parallel, warning that growing discontent could cost Tinubu a second term—just as it cost Jonathan.
These are not opposition saboteurs. These are northern voices from within the APC structure.
The Philosopher's Verdict
The Stoic philosopher Seneca once wrote that ingratitude is not merely a personal failing but a political poison. A ruler who receives benefits and offers nothing in return does not merely insult his benefactors—he annihilates the very foundation of political trust. The North extended its trust in 2023. That trust was a loan, not a gift. And loans, when not repaid, have consequences.
Lord Acton's famous maxim about power corrupting might need an amendment: it is not power alone that corrupts, but power received without gratitude. When a president obtains 30 percent of his votes from one region and then treats that region as an afterthought, he is not merely practising bad politics. He is laying the groundwork for his own destruction.
The 2027 Reckoning
What, then, does the North do with this knowledge?
The path forward requires clarity, not sentiment. The North must cease being the dependable voting bloc that is taken for granted and become the discerning electorate that must be earned. President Tinubu will seek re-election in 2027. He will likely campaign on the same themes, offer the same assurances, and expect the same northern loyalty.
But loyalty is not feudal obligation. In a democracy, a vote is not a gift—it is a contract.
The North has 2027 to ask, and to demand answers to, the following questions:
One: What measurable improvement in security for the average northern family has occurred since 2023? Not what speeches have been delivered, not what committees have been formed—what actual lives have been saved, what villages have been reclaimed, what roads have become safe to travel?
Two: Beyond ministerial appointments and political tokenism, what has the Tinubu administration done to address the 80 million unemployed Nigerian youths—the vast majority of whom reside north of the Niger-Benue confluence?
Three: Why does the federal budget for roads allocate 1.39 trillion naira to the South-West and only 30 billion naira to the North-East? Is there a constitutional provision I have missed that establishes regions of first-class and second-class citizenship?
Four: If the North's agricultural sector is the nation's food basket, why has it received less than 5 percent of the national budget in two years, far below the 25 percent recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization?
Five: When northern leaders within the president's own party are resigning with accusations of neglect, is the problem northern impatience or presidential indifference?
Conclusion: The North Will Not Be Silent
The Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that government has no foundation other than public opinion. When public opinion turns, governments fall—not because armies march against them, but because the people withdraw their consent.
The North is not withdrawing its consent yet. But northern patience is not infinite. It is not a renewable resource to be extracted without replenishment. Every day that insecurity persists, every month that hunger deepens, every budget cycle that funnels resources away from the North while extracting northern votes, the reservoir of consent diminishes.
Plato warned that the punishment for refusing to participate in governance is to be ruled by inferiors. The North did not refuse. The North participated. The North delivered. And now the North asks—not with anger, though anger would be justified—but with the cold arithmetic of electoral accountability: What have you given us in return?
2027 is coming. The North will remember.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
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