by Mohammed Bello Doka
24 June, 2026
The righteous anger that trails the recent comments by Martins Vincent Otse, known widely as VeryDarkMan, from the North is as predictable as it is instructive. In a video that has since gone viral, the social media provocateur alleged that Hausa-speaking communities have been conditioned to live and die in abject poverty, that they are responsible for the nation's security challenges, and he posed the inflammatory question, "What is a Hausa man good for in Nigeria?" The North has erupted in condemnation, with Arewa groups and individuals calling for his arrest, accusing him of hate speech, and demanding retribution. But while the North fumes, the majority of the South watches, many nodding in silent agreement, for what VDM has said aloud is the unvarnished, de facto belief of a significant swath of Southern Nigeria. They may not say it in public, but they think it in private. The condemnation from the North only reinforces their conviction that the North is defensive because it is guilty.
VDM is an opposition voice to President Bola Tinubu, but the views he expresses on the North cut across party lines in the South. This is not a partisan attack; it is a regional indictment. From the halls of academia to the chambers of power, Southern voices have, in various forms, articulated the same thesis. Festus Adedayo, PhD in a widely circulated article for TheCable, argued that the North's insecurity is self-inflicted, a tragedy rooted in the historical legacies of the Sokoto Caliphate and the Almajiri system. He posited that "Northerners are dying mostly at the hands of their own sons," a sentiment that directly echoes VDM's allegations. The Afenifere, the pan-Yoruba socio-political group, has explicitly stated that the "failure of northern governments and leaders to rein in bandits in their midst is creating problems for the people in the South." Ayo Fayose, the former governor of Ekiti State, has claimed that the current crisis stems from the "damage done by" the Muhammadu Buhari administration, while simultaneously acknowledging that insecurity is being used as "blackmail" against the current President. Senate President Godswill Akpabio has famously claimed that insecurity is a political tool that will "stop within two weeks after the election," a statement that reduces the mass abduction and murder of Northerners to a political game. Even President Bola Tinubu himself has framed the crisis in personal terms, declaring that "my enemies want to use insecurity to get rid of me." This is the Southern consensus: the North is the source of the problem, and any attempt to suggest otherwise is a political conspiracy.
But this consensus leads to a profound and uncomfortable paradox. Almost all the states where insecurity is most severe in the North—Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Kebbi, Borno, Yobe—are governed by the All Progressives Congress, the same party that controls the federal government. The President, a Southerner, says his enemies are using insecurity to get rid of him. Does anyone in the North have the sense to fill in the blank? If the President is from the South, and his enemies are from the North, then who is using insecurity against whom? This is the position of a man who was widely quoted as saying he does not believe in "One Nigeria," a man who, after the kidnapping of 44 students in his Yoruba homeland, mobilized the entire defense architecture to that region but has shown scant concern for the daily massacres in Katsina, Zamfara, Kebbi, Niger, and Borno. The message is clear: insecurity in the South is a national emergency; insecurity in the North is just a Northern problem.
Yet, in return for this neglect, what do the current Northern political elite do? Beginning with the governors of the very states bleeding the most, they queue up to pledge their loyalty to the President and promises to deliver their votes in 2027. Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State has declared that President Tinubu has done more for the North than any leader in history and that there is no opposition in Kaduna against him. Governor Babagana Zulum of Borno State has promised, "Insha Allah, the people of Borno State will vote for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for a second term." Governor Inuwa Yahaya, the Chairman of the Northern States Governors Forum, has stated that the North will back Tinubu in 2027 in recognition of the administration's delivery on key electoral promises. Abdullahi Ganduje, the former APC National Chairman, has confidently declared that "northern voters will support President Bola Tinubu in 2027." They praise roads and light rails while their children are herded into forests like cattle and they themselves termed enemies trying to get rid of the same man they worshiped. They count the percentage of votes they will deliver while over twenty million children are out of school in the North, the highest maternal mortality rate in the country ravages the region, and over forty percent of the population lives below the poverty line. These governors, along with their senators, are the clueless elite who treat the North as a herd of cattle to be moved in a particular direction.
What makes their subservience even more galling is the contrast with VDM's facts. Poverty figures in the North are staggering, with over forty percent of the population living below the poverty line. The number of deaths and abductions is a daily horror, with the Northwest alone recording 425 incidents and 2,938 victims in just one year. A staggering 2.2 trillion naira has been paid in ransom in 2025;alone, with over eighty percent of that figure coming from the North. The North-West has overtaken the Niger Delta as the epicenter of the kidnapping-for-ransom economy, with Zamfara, Kaduna, and Katsina as the worst-hit states. Borno State alone saw the payment of N766 million in a single case. This is the price of the North's suffering, and yet its leaders are silent.
Consider this uncomfortable question. If the Hausa-Fulani majority Muslim North is home to the richest black man in the world, Aliko Dangote, the second richest man in Nigeria, Abdulsamad Rabiu, and others too many to mention, and if the same North has ruled Nigeria for over four decades, what has that business and political structure done to move the North out of poverty? Where are the industries? Where are the schools? Where are the hospitals? The wealth of these men is staggering, yet the North remains the poorest region in the country. Do these men even pay zakat, the Islamic obligation of charity that is supposed to uplift the poor? If they paid zakat as prescribed, would the North be that poor, that desperate? The resulting insults from the likes of VDM are not aimed at Dangote or Bua; they are aimed at the poor masses who bear the brunt of this collective failure. And the irony is that the richest Northerners, Dangote, Bua, and others, are busy investing their billions in the South and the so-called Middle Belt, building refineries, factories, and shopping malls in Lagos and Abuja, while their own homeland festers in poverty and neglect. This is the true structure of exploitation, a structure where the wealthy elite extract resources from the North and reinvest them elsewhere, leaving the masses to drown in destitution.
But the hypocrisy of the Northern elite is exposed when their own interests are threatened. When President Tinubu proposed the tax reform bills, which threatened their earnings and the fiscal structure that favors the North, the same governors and senators who now sing his praises suddenly found their voices. They teamed up to fight the president, using their legislative and political muscle to defend what they perceive as their region's economic advantage. This is the true nature of the Northern political elite. They are not loyal to the President out of conviction or because he has saved their people; they are loyal because they have been bought, because they have been co-opted, and because they have been given a seat at the table where the spoils of the North are divided. They are the ones who have built the "structure" VDM speaks of, a structure that traps the ordinary Northerner in perpetual poverty and silence. The middle class is docile, the scholars are complicit, and the youth have become social media influencers dancing on TikTok while the government budgets billions for media campaigns and hands them crumbs. In Nigeria today, no region is more keen, more advertising, and more marketing of Tinubu 2027 than the same North.
The North has a choice. It can unite collectively and rescue itself from the abyss, or it can allow itself to drown together. It can walk together as brothers or perish together as fools. Whether as Hausa, Fulani, as Izala, Darika, or whatever, the people of the North must recognize that the divisions among them exist only in their own imagination. To the Southerner, you are one monolithic bunch of beggars and terrorists. The Southerner does not distinguish between Hausa and Fulani, between farmer and herder, between Sufi and Salafi. To them, you are all the same. So the Hausa can take their unenviable position of beggars, and the Fulani can take their assigned role as terrorists, and together you can drown. If God forbid we allow that to happen, then no one should waste their tears on us, for the North would have deserved it. The current political structure in the North cannot lead us anywhere except to damnation. It is a structure built on extraction, on subservience, and on the deliberate impoverishment of the masses for the enrichment of a few. It is a structure that has taught us that our lives are worth less than a politician's ambition.
A new political order is the only viable option. A divided Nigeria is the only option that will lead us out of this quagmire. So long as there is a federal purse to be shared, the Northern governors will not stop begging. They will continue to trade their people's blood for allocation and contracts. They will continue to pledge their votes to any President who gives them a seat at the table. They will continue to sing the praises of the man who neglects them, because that is the price of their comfort. The paradox of One Nigeria is that it is a unity preached by the very people who profit from its division. The North must wake up. It must realize that its salvation lies not in delivering votes to a Southern president who does not care about it, but in confronting its own internal demons and building a new order from the ashes of this failed federation. Until that day comes, the blood will continue to flow, the kidnappings will continue to occur, and the silence of its elite will continue to be a death sentence for its people. Something must kill a man. In Nigeria, something always does. But the North must decide whether it will be a victim of its own complacency or the architect of its own redemption.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
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