by Mohammed Bello Doka
5 July, 2026.
Why is it that everyone trying to instigate the Hausa and Fulani is only encouraging them to carry weapons and fight against each other? Why are these external voices so eager to see brothers turn their barrels upon one another, yet utterly silent when it comes to arming the same people against the bandits who pillage their villages, the informers who betray their movements, and the bad leaders across party lines who have looted the North for decades? This is the question that every son and daughter of the North must ask themselves before they allow their emotions to be hijacked by a campaign of division so transparent that even the blind can see its architects.
Let us state it plainly: the Hausa and Fulani are not two distinct warring factions. They are intertwined by blood, by faith, by geography, and by centuries of shared destiny. The Fulani herdsman and the Hausa farmer are not enemies by nature; they are neighbors whose ancestors traded goods, exchanged daughters in marriage, and fought side by side against foreign invaders. Today, however, a sinister symphony of social media influencers, southern commentators, and political opportunists have turned the digital space into a battlefield of ethnic animosity. They post doctored videos, amplify isolated incidents, and frame every cattle rustling incident as an ethnic war, every farmer-herder clash as a genocidal plot. And the Hausa and Fulani, God bless them, are falling for it like sheep led to the slaughter.
Let us take a step back and examine the genesis of this monster called banditry. It began as cattle rustling, a crime that predates the current crisis and one that has historically victimized the Fulani pastoralist more than any other group. The Fulani, whose entire livelihood depends on their herds, have suffered the loss of their cattle to rustlers for generations. These rustlers would strike at dawn, drive away hundreds of cows, and leave families destitute overnight. The Hausa farmer, on the other hand, would wake up to find his crops destroyed by stray cattle, his granaries looted, and his children terrified. Both were victims, but instead of uniting against the rustlers, they were slowly turned against each other by cunning forces that understood the power of ethnic polarization.
Over time, cattle rustling transmogrified into the full-blown banditry we see today. The rustlers acquired automatic weapons, expanded their operations to include kidnapping for ransom, and began terrorizing entire communities regardless of ethnicity. Today, bandits do not ask whether their victim is Hausa or Fulani before they pull the trigger. They do not spare a Fulani herder because he shares their language, nor do they spare a Hausa trader because his ancestors once traded with theirs. The bullet does not discriminate, and neither should the North. The enemy is not the Fulani youth with his cattle; the enemy is not the Hausa farmer with his hoe. The enemy is banditry itself, and the enemy is the bad governance that has allowed banditry to flourish for so long.
Why are southern voices, Igbo and Yoruba influencers, and their co-travelers at the forefront of this campaign of division against the Hausa-Fulani? Ask yourself this question and answer it honestly. Go through every divisive post on X, Facebook, and WhatsApp that calls for Hausa-Fulani confrontation. Scrutinize the handles, the names, the locations. You will discover, with startling clarity, that the overwhelming majority of these agitators are not from Kano, not from Sokoto, not from Maiduguri, not from Katsina. They are based in Lagos, in Aba, in Port Harcourt, in London, in New York. They are southerners who have never stepped foot in a Fulani settlement, who have never broken bread with a Hausa farmer, yet they speak with the false authority of experts on Northern unity. They are paid agents, or they are ignorant pawns, or they are simply hateful souls who cannot stand to see the North united and strong.
The ancient Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, in his magnum opus Al-Muqaddimah, warned that a dynasty may find itself unable to survive when its people lose their sense of solidarity and group feeling. He called this asabiyyah, the social cohesion that binds a people together. The Hausa and Fulani share that solidarity, but it is under siege. Ibn Khaldun further observed that injustice and division are the fastest roads to ruin, for when a people turn against each other, the enemy finds an easy path to their throats. Are we not witnessing this prophecy unfold before our very eyes? The bandits do not care whether you are Hausa or Fulani. The informers who sell your coordinates to kidnappers do not differentiate between your dialects. The bad leaders who siphon billions meant for agricultural development and security equipment do not lose sleep over your ethnic squabbles. They all benefit from your division, and they all laugh at your foolishness.
Consider the theologian Al-Ghazali, who wrote in his Ihya Ulum al-Din that the greatest jihad is the jihad against one's own ignorance. The ignorance that plagues the Northern masses today is the belief that your neighbor, because he belongs to a different subgroup, is your enemy. Al-Ghazali also stated that those who incite hatred among brothers are worse than the infidel, for they destroy the house of faith from within. When an Igbo influencer tweets that the Fulani are out to conquer the Middle Belt, and a Hausa youth responds with a machete in hand, who has won? Certainly not the Hausa youth, certainly not the Fulani elder, certainly not the North. The winner is the bandit who now has two fewer opponents. The winner is the corrupt politician who now has a distracted electorate. The winner is the southerner who has successfully shifted the national conversation away from the failures of the Southern governors and onto the supposed savagery of the North.
Let us also speak the uncomfortable truth about bad governance. The banditry that plagues the North today did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged from decades of neglect, from failed security policies, from the absence of rural development, from the weaponization of poverty, and from the complicity of leaders who found it convenient to blame ethnic tensions rather than confront the systemic failures that created this crisis. The same governors who now weep on television about banditry are the ones who have refused to invest in modern ranching, who have neglected the nomadic education of Fulani children, who have failed to provide adequate security infrastructure, and who have diverted billions meant for rural development into their personal accounts. They are the architects of this disaster, yet they escape scrutiny because they have successfully redirected your anger toward each other.
Here is a suggestion that will sting but must be spoken: Northern elites must stop funding these divisive social media campaigns indirectly through their silence. Every time a prominent Northern politician fails to condemn the hate speech targeting the Fulani or the Hausa, he is complicit. Every traditional ruler who sits idly while his subjects are fed lies by foreign agents is failing his ancestors. We demand that the Arewa Consultative Forum, the Jama'atu Nasril Islam, and the Christian Association of Nigeria in the North convene a joint emergency summit within the next thirty days, not to discuss politics, but to issue a unified fatwa and communiqué declaring that any Hausa or Fulani who takes up arms against the other is an enemy of the North. Let this declaration be broadcasted in every local language from Sokoto to Yola. Let it be shared on every platform. Let it be preached in every mosque and every church.
Furthermore, we call for the establishment of a Northern Fact-Checking Coalition, a volunteer army of youths trained to debunk divisive narratives within minutes of their release. When a southern influencer posts a video claiming that Fulani militias have burned a Hausa village, our coalition must respond with geolocation evidence, eyewitness accounts, and historical context before the fire of anger spreads. We have the technology, we have the brains, and we have the numbers. What we lack is the discipline to pause before reacting. The ancient scholar Ibn Taymiyyah said that the enemy is not the one who attacks you with weapons; the enemy is the one who attacks you with confusion, for confusion makes you attack your own brothers. This is the weapon of choice against the Hausa-Fulani today, and we are handing them victory on a silver platter.
Another practical step: the Northern Governors Forum must immediately allocate five percent of their security votes to community peace-building initiatives that specifically bring Hausa and Fulani elders together in monthly dialogue sessions. These are not empty talk shops; they are intelligence-gathering missions where early warnings of planned attacks are shared, where disputes over grazing routes are settled without bloodshed, and where the names of informers who sell out both communities to bandits are exposed and handed over to security agencies. The informers are the cancer, and they thrive on your division. They tell the bandits that the Fulani are coming to your forest, and they tell the Fulani that the Hausa farmers have poisoned the watering holes. Meanwhile, they collect their commissions and buy motorcycles to continue their trade.
Let us also address the political dimension. Why are bad leaders across party lines never named and shamed collectively? Why do we only hear calls for unity when elections approach, only to see the same leaders deploy ethnic card games to win votes? We urge the Hausa and Fulani masses to scrutinize every political candidate, not by their ethnic identity but by their track record on security and anti-corruption. If a Hausa governor has failed to secure his state, he must be voted out regardless of his lineage. If a Fulani senator has stolen funds meant for pastoralist development, he must be hounded out of office. The enemy is not the other tribe; the enemy is the political class that has weaponized tribalism to shield itself from accountability.
Ibn Rushd, the great Andalusian philosopher, argued that the virtuous city is built on justice, and justice requires that citizens see themselves as one body. He wrote that when the hand fights the foot, the entire body collapses. The Hausa and Fulani are the hand and foot of the North. Without the Fulani's cattle economy and the Hausa's agrarian backbone, the North would starve. Without the Hausa's mercantile networks and the Fulani's pastoral mobility, the region would stagnate. You need each other, not as reluctant allies but as inseparable kin. The southerner who cheers for your fight does so because he knows that a divided North cannot compete economically or politically. A divided North means Southern politicians will continue to dominate the oil revenues, continue to control the federal bureaucracy, continue to dictate the terms of national discourse.
To the Hausa youth reading this: ask yourself why the influencer urging you to attack Fulani settlements does not provide you with weapons to fight the bandits who kidnap your sisters. To the Fulani youth: ask yourself why the blogger calling for your elimination has no plan to help you retrieve your stolen cattle. The answer is simple: they do not care about you. They care about chaos. Chaos sells clicks, chaos attracts foreign funding, chaos distracts from the corruption that they themselves are enmeshed in. Do not be their fool. Do not be their cannon fodder. Be the North that your grandfathers dreamed of: united, prosperous, and feared by enemies.
We end with the words of the poet Al-Mutanabbi, who declared that the sword may cut the body, but the tongue cuts the soul. The tongues of division have cut the Northern soul deep enough. It is time to heal. It is time to recognize that the only enemy that benefits from your division is the enemy that does not wear a Hausa or Fulani face. That enemy is the bandit in the forest, the informer in the village, the bad leader in the government house, and the southern influencer in his air-conditioned studio. Rise against them, but rise together. For as the Arabs say, the hand of the collective is stronger than the hand of the individual. And as the Hausa say, sai bango ya tsage..... Let that be your mantra. Let that be your sword. Let that be your salvation.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
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