Opinion

On chieftaincy, rumor, and the desperate national scramble to reclaim
security

By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

THE headline travelled fast: Governor Mohammed Umaru Bago of Niger State
had sacked every Fulani district head — the Ardos — in his state and replaced
them with indigenous Nupe chiefs, ending, as one outlet put it, centuries of
Fulani domination. It is the kind of story that confirms what a great many
Nigerians already believe, or badly want to believe, about power, ethnicity,
and who has quietly run out of patience with whom, and it is also, on the
evidence, not quite what happened. Nigerian fact-checkers who reviewed
Bago’s actual Hausa-language remarks found something more modest and,
honestly, more interesting: an appeal rather than a decree. Daily Trust’s
translation and review of the speech shows the governor asking Fulani
community leaders to identify criminals sheltering among them, urging
herders and farmers toward peaceful coexistence, pressing vigilantes to
behave responsibly, and warning clerics against preaching division, with no
blanket dismissal of Ardos ever announced. A separate fact-check by
247Ureports reached Government House in Minna directly and was told no
such wholesale policy existed. And yet a competing thread of reporting,
including from a U.S.-based Christian advocacy outlet, insists Bago did strip
the Sarkin Fulani and the Ardos of their autonomous traditional-ruler status,
folding it into the same week’s unrelated shake-up of monarchs in Enugu
State as evidence that governors everywhere are now reclaiming security
control from chieftaincy structures that have simply stopped protecting
anyone.

Both things can be true at once, and that, more than the chieftaincy stools
themselves, is the real story here. A governor made ambiguous, securitydriven remarks touching Fulani leadership; a fragment of that speech was
pushed by a Yoruba-nationalist outlet into a maximalist end-of-Fulanidomination frame; a persecution-focused Western advocacy group folded it
into its own narrative of Christians under siege; and Nigeria’s fact-checking apparatus spent the following days trying, with only partial success, to drag
the story back down to earth. That a rumor of Fulani dispossession could
travel this far, this fast, and find this much willing belief is the actual news,
not the personnel file of any single Ardo in Minna. The myth of One North is
not cracking because of what Bago did. It is cracking because of how eagerly
an entire country wanted to believe he did it, and how plausible the story
sounded even to people who should have known better.

To understand why this particular rumor landed so hard, you have to go back
to 1804, to Usman dan Fodio’s jihad against the Hausa city-states, and to the
Sokoto Caliphate that jihad produced: a Fulani-led political and religious
order that absorbed Hausa populations, the Nupe of what is now Niger State,
and a great many other peoples across what is today northern Nigeria under
emirate rule. Hausa and Fulani intermarried, shared Islam, shared Hausa as a lingua franca, and over two centuries wove a genuinely deep cultural fusion,
so much so that Hausa-Fulani became close to a single ethnonym in ordinary
usage, and for good reason. British colonial indirect rule then did something
the Caliphate itself had never fully achieved: it froze this Fulani-descended
emirate structure into permanent administrative law, governing the north
through emirs and their district heads rather than around them.
Independence did not dismantle this; the Northern People’s Congress and the
One North project built by Sir Ahmadu Bello simply built on top of it,
mobilizing an enormous and genuinely diverse coalition of Hausa, Fulani,
Kanuri, Nupe, Tiv, Berom, Igala, Idoma, Jukun, and dozens of smaller
nationalities behind a leadership class disproportionately drawn from the
Hausa-Fulani emirate core.
One North was never a lie exactly. It described a real coalition that delivered
real political power for over a century, and it still shapes how the current
governor of Niger State, himself born to a Nupe family in Minna, inherited a
state government that, until recently, still ran on emirate-descended Ardo
appointments even in a state whose historic core is Nupe rather than HausaFulani. But the coalition was always more alliance than identity, a political
myth in the strict sense: a story a bloc tells about itself to keep behaving as
one thing, papering over the fact that a Nupe farmer in Bida, a Berom
Christian in Jos, and a Fulani cattle-owner from Sokoto experienced the North as three very different places with three very different relationships to power
and to one another. What has changed in the last four or five years is not that
this underlying diversity suddenly appeared. It was always there. What has
changed is that the cost of pretending it wasn’t there has become unbearable,
for reasons that go well beyond any one governor’s chieftaincy reshuffle and
well beyond the North itself.
The Middle Belt reckoning came first and runs deepest. For decades,
Christian and traditionalist minorities across Plateau, Benue, southern
Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Taraba have described themselves as internal
colonies of the Hausa-Fulani north, indigenes governed as though they were
settlers in their own homeland, their farmland claimed against grazing rights
inherited from emirate-era land law. The 2023 Mangu massacre in Plateau
State, in which Fulani herders killed well over a hundred people by most
credible counts, and years of comparable farmer-herder violence in Benue,
have hardened this from a grievance into a settled political fact. What
analysts increasingly flag is the striking asymmetry in how the same essential
violence gets narrated nationally: Vanguard has noted that Nigerian media
routinely tell one story about banditry in Zamfara and Katsina and an entirely
different, more explicitly ethnicized story when the identical violence hits
Plateau or Benue, even where a long history of Fulani-Tiv and Fulani-Berom
cooperation, going back to accounts as old as Akiga Sai’s history of the Tiv,
complicates any tidy narrative of ancient enmity.

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More surprising, and more recent, is the fraying of the core Hausa-Fulani
bond itself. As banditry has metastasized across Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto,
and Kebbi, mass kidnappings, village raids, cattle rustling, and now a
Fulfulde-speaking Islamic State franchise known as Lakurawa operating in
the open, ordinary Hausa communities have, for the first time in living
memory, begun publicly separating Hausa from Fulani in everyday speech.
Casualty figures compiled by The Soufan Center show that by the first half of
2025 alone, over 2,266 people had already been killed by bandits and
insurgents, more than the whole of the previous year, with mineral-rich
Zamfara, sitting on gold, copper, and lithium deposits, at the epicenter. The
European Union Agency for Asylum’s country-of-origin reporting confirms
that by early 2024, violence stemming from banditry had overtaken even the long-running Boko Haram and ISWAP insurgency as the country’s most
widespread security threat. Because so many bandit gangs speak Fulfulde or
self-identify as Fulani, whatever their actual relationship to settled Fulani
communities or to Fulani political elites, a perception has taken root among
Hausa villagers that Fulani identity itself now signals danger. This is, by most
serious accounts, an unfair collapsing of a vast and largely pastoral, largely
victimized population into its most violent fringe, but perception is doing real
political work regardless of its fairness, and it is eating at the very fusion that
One North was built on.

Above the villages, the northern political class has its own, separate fracture
running through it. The North delivered roughly sixty-three percent of Bola
Tinubu’s votes in 2023 under an APC ticket widely understood, in the old
zoning logic, as a temporary Yoruba south-west turn after eight years of a
northern Buhari presidency, a turn many northern power brokers expected to
be reciprocated and have not obviously felt was. Former Kaduna governor
Nasir El-Rufai, once a central figure in northern APC politics, has spent over a
month in detention this year, and his own northern peer group has met it with
conspicuous, telling silence rather than solidarity. He has since resurfaced in
the opposition coalition built around the African Democratic Congress
alongside Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, itself assembled with considerable
fanfare and then almost immediately fracturing along its own regional and
personal fault lines, with Obi and Kwankwaso quitting for a rival platform and
analysts now warning that a three- or even four-way opposition split could
hand Tinubu re-election almost by default, even as northern stakeholders
openly complain of marginalization within a presidency their own region
supplied the votes for. The old habit of northern elites closing ranks whenever
northern interest was invoked, regardless of party, regardless of personal
rivalry, is visibly weaker than it was five years ago, and the chieftaincy front
now opening in Niger and Enugu is best read as the local, village-level echo of
that same elite fracture rather than as a separate phenomenon.

And that fracture cannot be understood as a purely northern or purely ethnic
story, because it sits inside a far larger, country-wide desperation to reclaim
security by whatever local means are available, now that the centralized
federal architecture has visibly failed to provide it anywhere. The same north-south divide in how insecurity gets read has, for years, pushed the southwest
to build up Operation Amotekun as a regional security outfit running parallel
to a national police force it does not trust to protect Yoruba communities, has
kept a section of the southeast’s Igbo elite associated with IPOB and the
shadowy unknown gunmen phenomenon that has turned much of that region
into a low-grade warzone, has left the Niger Delta cycling through militancy
and amnesty programs decade after decade over oil theft and neglect, and
has kept the debate over creating true state police forces, rather than the
single, chronically underfunded, badly distributed federal force Nigeria has
relied on since independence, alive in the National Assembly year after year
without resolution. Seen against that backdrop, a Niger State governor
reaching for the levers actually within his grasp, whether that means a
pointed speech to Fulani leaders, a formal stripping of chieftaincy titles, or
simply the appearance of either, is not an aberration. It is the same desperate,
ad hoc, often ethnically coded scramble for security control that is now visible
in almost every geopolitical zone of the country, because the constitutional
promise of a national police force able to protect ordinary Nigerians has been
quietly abandoned in practice even where it survives on paper. Civil society
has noticed this too: the 2026 Northern Nigeria Peace Campaign, launched
this year across all nineteen northern states and the Federal Capital
Territory, exists specifically because banditry, kidnapping, and communal
clashes have disrupted livelihoods and weakened social cohesion badly
enough that community mobilization and traditional-institution engagement
are now being treated as emergency infrastructure rather than as optional
civic goodwill.

Why has all of this converged in roughly the last four to five years rather than
staying buried the way it did for decades? Part of the answer is that security
collapse changed the underlying incentive structure. When banditry,
kidnapping, and herder-farmer violence remained broadly containable, One
North solidarity cost elites very little and bought them a great deal: a reliable
voting bloc, a shared claim on federal power, a shield against being picked off
individually by a Lagos- or Abuja-centered political establishment. Once
insecurity became existential for ordinary people, once villagers were being
killed and ransomed in numbers no government could plausibly hide any
longer, the myth stopped protecting anyone at ground level even as it kept protecting elites, and that gap between elite comfort and mass exposure is
precisely what people are now angry about. Part of the answer is economic:
subsidy removal, currency float, and the resulting inflation since 2023 have
hit the North, already Nigeria’s poorest region by most welfare measures,
hardest of all, and a coalition of convenience frays fastest exactly when there is least to distribute, so that shared hardship, instead of producing shared
solidarity, has produced a scramble to find someone identifiable to blame.

Part of it is generational and informational: younger Hausa, Fulani, and Middle Belt Nigerians did not live through the Ahmadu Bello era and feel little inherited loyalty to a mythology that predates them, while social media rewards exactly the kind of vivid, ethnically legible story the Bago rumor
became, since Fulani domination ends travels in a way that governor makes
ambiguous security speech never will, which means the platforms themselves
now actively manufacture and accelerate ethnic fracture faster than any fact checker can correct it, as the losing race against the Niger State rumor demonstrates directly. And part of it, finally, is simple resource competition dressed in the vocabulary of identity: a great deal of what gets described in ethnic or religious terms is, underneath, a fight over land, cattle routes, and increasingly minerals, with Zamfara’s gold and lithium itself now a driver of the very banditry that gets read as a Fulani-versus-everyone-else conflict,
while decades of Sahelian desertification have pushed herding communities
steadily further south, intensifying contact and conflict with farming communities along an axis that predates any of today’s political rhetoric by generations.

It would be a mistake, having said all this, to close an essay about the unravelling of One North by uncritically repeating the very rumor that occasioned it. The most honest thing to say about the Niger State story is that its popularity is more diagnostic than its content. A Yoruba nationalist outlet
reported it as vindication. A U.S. Christian-persecution advocacy group folded it into its own frame. Nigeria’s fact-checkers spent days establishing
that the governor had, at most, delivered a pointed but non-binding appeal to
Fulani leaders. That a modest speech could be inflated within days into the
end of centuries of Fulani domination, and be widely believed, tells us the
underlying tectonic tension is real even where the specific triggering event is
exaggerated or partly invented, because rumors do not spread this efficiently through ground that has no cracks in it. It is worth resisting, too, the
flattening move the rumor itself performs, treating the Fulani as a single
actor capable of dominating or being dispossessed as a bloc. The pastoral
Fulani herder losing cattle to rustlers, the settled Fulani trader in Minna, the
Fulani emir turbaned under a state governor’s authority, and the armed
Fulfulde-speaking bandit in a Zamfara forest are, in any honest accounting,
four different relationships to power, not one, and much of the energy now
spent narrating a grand ethnic reversal would be better spent on the plain
fact that ordinary Fulani pastoralists are also disproportionately victims of
the same insecurity crisis, cattle rustling very much included, and rarely get
to be the subject of a viral headline about it.

One North was never a fiction invented from nothing. It described a real,
historically deep, and for a long time politically effective coalition built on the
Sokoto Caliphate’s legacy, colonial indirect rule, and a shared postindependence political project. What has changed is not the underlying diversity the myth always had to paper over, since that diversity, Middle Belt against emirate core, Hausa against Fulani, elite against villager, chief
against governor, was always there. What has changed is that insecurity,
economic collapse, elite rivalry, and a social-media ecosystem built to reward
the most inflammatory version of any story have together made the myth too
expensive to maintain and too easy to publicly abandon, at the exact moment
that every region of the country, north, southwest, southeast, and Niger Delta
alike, has been forced into its own desperate, improvised, often ethnically
coded reclamation of security because the centre could not hold it for them. A
governor’s ambiguous speech about Ardos in Minna became, within seventytwo hours, a referendum on centuries of Fulani rule, not because that is what
he said, but because enough people across the North and beyond it were
already primed to believe the coalition holding One North together was
already coming apart, and were already living, in a dozen different local forms
across the whole federation, the same search for protection that the rumor
promised Niger State had finally found. The chieftaincy stools may or may not
actually have changed hands in Niger State. The underlying story, of a mythic
unity that a great many Nigerians no longer feel obliged to perform, and of a
security guarantee that the Nigerian state itself has failed to keep, plainly has.