In January 2006, Nuhu Ribadu stood tall at the Ladi Kwali Hall podium, still riding high as the celebrated chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. His voice carried the moral weight of a man who truly believed Nigeria could be saved through the disciplined hand of the law. “Let us speak the truth,” he repeated. “Let us call a spade a spade.” The crowd at the Third Annual Trust Dialogue erupted in applause. Here was a public official who saw corruption not just as a moral failing but a structural disease, something corrosive that could eat through a nation’s foundation while elites bickered over symbols. “For your information,” he declared, “nothing will ever happen to this country.”
I interviewed Ribadu at least twice during those EFCC years, alongside my senior colleague, Hajiya Zainab Suleiman, then editor of Weekly Trust. What struck me wasn’t just his command of detail. Nigerian public life occasionally produces intelligent men, sometimes energetic ones. But someone with a restless, visible sincerity about the Nigerian project itself is rare. Ribadu spoke about corruption as if it were a personal insult.
Yet active media practice teaches that sincerity alone doesn’t exempt a public official from scrutiny. Ribadu himself spent years insisting that powerful people be judged by outcomes, not sentiment. He taught a generation of journalists, including me, the value of calling a spade a spade. Consistency demands applying that same principle to him.
Nearly two decades later, Ribadu serves as National Security Adviser to President Bola Tinubu. The northern media and political elite are asking: has the reformist energy of the EFCC years translated into a coherent security vision? Or has the man who once pursued the powerful become constrained by the political realities he once challenged?
Let me address a simplification in some discussions: the notion that the Trust newspaper group has adopted an unduly hostile posture toward Ribadu. Having served on its editorial board, I can attest the group doesn’t operate with a predetermined slant. Its culture, imperfect as all human institutions are, is to platform strong submissions regardless of whether they flatter or discomfort the establishment. There’s no singular house position on Ribadu. Instead, there’s a vigorous, deeply northern conversation about what he represents. And in the North, insecurity is never just a policy discussion. It’s personal. It’s existential.
The debate isn’t about Ribadu’s competence. Nobody can genuinely doubt that. It’s whether a northern Muslim serving under a southern president can redeem a security architecture that has failed northern communities for years. And if results remain uneven, is that due to individual capacity, politics, or the structure itself?
Early in Ribadu’s NSA tenure, starting mid-2023, several Trust publications leaned into a technocratic redeemer narrative. A widely circulated Daily Trust article by Yakubu Dati, titled “NSA Nuhu Ribadu: Silently Eclipsing Insecurity” from April 2024, praised his intelligence-led coordination, managerial instincts, and non-military perspective. The argument was straightforward: modern insecurity—banditry, kidnapping, terrorism financing, weapons trafficking—can’t be solved by brute force alone. It requires systems thinking, administrative discipline, intelligence coordination, and financial disruption. That framing created a buffer for Ribadu against critics who questioned his lack of military background. It borrowed moral credibility from his anti-corruption years and offered the North a psychologically important narrative: one of its own sons sat at the center of national security management, even under a southern presidency.
But hope is hard to sustain when people can’t safely reach their farms. By early 2025, the tone shifted. Persistent killings and abductions across parts of Benue, Oyo, and the North-West complicated claims of decisive progress. Columnists demanded clearer metrics: What had improved? Where were measurable structural reforms? How do you explain success to the villager who still sleeps with one ear open?
The appointment in May 2026 of retired Major General Adeyinka Famadewa as Special Adviser on Homeland Security added another layer. Some northern commentary saw it as evidence Ribadu had fallen out of favor. In an opinion piece published by Daily Trust in early June 2026, Iliyasu Gadu described it as “poetic irony”: a former anti-corruption crusader who positioned himself too politically as NSA now facing a perceived demotion. That interpretation is politically seductive but analytically weak. A more serious reading is that the Tinubu administration is expanding the security coordination architecture. Ribadu remains NSA with broad strategic authority. Famadewa’s role appears more operational and domestically focused. In complex systems, division of labor isn’t evidence of collapse—it’s often evidence the work has become too large for one office.
Trust publications have also platformed counter-views. In his “Line of Sight” column for Daily Trust, also published in early June 2026, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim argued that reports of Ribadu’s demise are “greatly exaggerated” and that the NSA remains central to Tinubu’s thinking. The tendency to interpret every bureaucratic adjustment as palace intrigue says more about Nigeria’s hyper-political culture than Ribadu’s actual standing. Too much Nigerian political analysis resembles court gossip wearing a flowing babanriga.
Ribadu’s own public communication hasn’t always helped. His controversial remark describing bandits and terrorists in the North-West as “our brothers” became an avoidable public relations disaster. The context was dialogue and deradicalization. The reaction was understandable outrage. For families who had buried relatives or liquidated assets to pay ransom, the phrase sounded less like reconciliation and more like emotional carelessness. The truth is probably less dramatic than either supporters or critics admit. Ribadu was speaking in the loose, improvisational style common among Nigerian officials who underestimate how traumatized audiences receive language. In a more disciplined communications environment, that phrasing would never have survived internal review. The problem is larger than Ribadu: Nigerian officials often speak as though every audience is private and forgiving. Modern media environments are neither.
This is why, whenever I advise a senior official, I emphasize structured media training. What you say and how you say it matters as much as what you mean.
For the record, I’ve written about Ribadu before, and consistency demands acknowledging both praise and criticism. In my coverage of that 2006 Trust Dialogue published in Weekly Trust, I openly admired his passion and placed him within the pan-Nigerian reform tradition I instinctively gravitate toward. But I also criticized aspects of his presentation: Ribadu complained about pressures from extended family obligations but offered no solution. I further criticized the organizers, my employers at the time, for failing to provide basic refreshments. The principle was simple then and remains simple now: nobody is above scrutiny—not the reformer you admire, not the institution that signs your salary. Ironically, Trust itself helped cultivate that instinct in many of us.
Ribadu’s EFCC record was genuinely transformative. We may debate specific cases, but his stellar record is unassailable. His early NSA efforts showed visible promise in intelligence coordination and diplomatic engagement. Yet the persistence of mass kidnapping and the absence of transparent performance metrics remain legitimate grounds for continued questioning. To hold both truths simultaneously is not inconsistency. It’s the minimum requirement of serious commentary.
For the northern political elite and its media ecosystem, Ribadu carries a burden beyond ordinary bureaucratic expectation. He’s expected to deliver security to a region battered by years of banditry and abduction. He must do so within a federal structure that fragments policing authority and complicates military coordination. He must retain the confidence of a southern president without appearing detached from northern anxieties. That’s a heavy burden. It’s also the office he accepted, and he was aware of the implications from day one.
The deeper national question is whether Nigeria’s security conversation can rise above regional reflexes. Insecurity afflicts the South-East through separatist violence, the South-South through oil theft and militancy, and the South-West through its own rising kidnapping crisis. A nation-building perspective requires evaluating Ribadu not merely as a northern figure in a southern administration, but as a Nigerian official attempting to coordinate an extremely damaged system. On that measure, the verdict remains open. The architecture is still evolving. The metrics remain disputed. The political noise remains deafening. To pronounce definitive success or failure by mid-2026 is to mistake speculation for settled judgment.
To my mind, the Trust group’s coverage of Ribadu reflects, sometimes unevenly, the broader northern conversation about legitimacy, security, the limits of reform, and disappointment. It is neither uniformly sympathetic nor uniformly hostile. It is the record of a region that has suffered too much to accept easy reassurance and witnessed too many false dawns to invest blind faith in any single official.
I still remember the man who stood in Ladi Kwali Hall two decades ago and declared, with unmistakable conviction, that nothing would ever happen to this country. But sincerity alone is not strategy. Passion is not a metric. Hope, by itself, does not secure highways or return abducted children. Nuhu Ribadu once said we should speak the truth, and he deserves to be judged, as he then insisted others should be judged, by measurable outcomes rather than rhetorical energy. Until those outcomes become clearer and more consistent, the northern gaze—and indeed the national conversation—will remain attentive, skeptical, and appropriately demanding.
Crispin Oduobuk is a former acting editor of Weekly Trust. He writes from Abuja.
