Northern Nigeria is seething. But this anger isn’t merely about the relentless bloodshed staining its soil. It’s about being called out by a name it gave itself. The descendants of Shehu Usman dan Fodio, the 19th-century Islamic scholar who founded the Sokoto Caliphate, are losing their finest. Northerners are dying in droves, often at the hands of their own sons who now haunt the forests. The most heartbreaking recent loss is General Rabe Abubakar, murdered in captivity after being kidnapped with his wife near Katsina State.
Truth, as Dan Fodio himself believed, is the ultimate moral compass. In Yoruba culture, we say: “Òtítọ ọrọ korò, ṣùgbọn bí a bá gbé itọ́rẹ mì, a máa ṣe ara l’ore” (Truth is bitter, but if you swallow its acrid saliva, it soothes the body). Ignore the politicians queuing for survival; the elders’ wisdom stands unshaken.
Yes, Northern Nigeria is like a viper. In Yoruba folklore, the viper isn’t killed by an outsider but by its own offspring. The young tear out of the mother’s belly, killing her. The proverb says: “Ọmọ inú ọká níí ṣe ikú pa ọká” — it’s the viper’s children that bring its death. Today, the North is trapped in this tragedy. The violence consuming it comes not from strangers but from sons it nurtured, tolerated, or failed to restrain. Yet that’s not its deepest irritation. The North is less troubled by its missing finger than by the witnesses counting them aloud.
This “viper thesis” was on full display at a Kaduna press conference last week. Retired military officers, including Ambassador A. Mohammed Musawa and Brig.-Gen. Abdulkadir Abubakar, lashed out at Southern commentators. Their ire likely targets Nigerian Tribune columnist Lasisi Olagunju, who wrote: “Crime may have no ethnicity, but that doesn’t relieve us of the duty to identify the environment that breeds it. A desert doesn’t cease to be a desert because it contains a few oases.” No one can deny that insurgency and violent crimes originated from the North, and that its leaders pampered criminals with religion and region.
Brig.-Gen. Abubakar decried “selective outrage,” calling such narratives divisive. But his anger recalls the Yoruba tale of the giant pouched rat (Òkètè). The rat ignored early warnings, stepped into a trap, and waited too long to cry for help. By the time it shouted, the hunter was already there. The moral: speak up at the outset of danger, not when consequences strip away morality.
Enter Dr. Zainab Suleiman Buhari. In a viral letter to Northern elites, she delivered a bitter truth. A public health physician, she pilloried governors for spending billions on mass marriages while ignoring the “street kid factory” culture. “Terrorism doesn’t start with ideology,” she wrote. “It starts with hopelessness. Boko Haram, bandits, cults — they don’t recruit PhDs. They recruit boys who were ‘produced’ but never raised.”
This echoes Obafemi Awolowo’s warning six decades ago. He urged Northern leaders to embrace Western education, warning that failure would breed poverty and insecurity. “The children of the poor you fail to train will never let your children have peace,” he said. Today, that prophecy has caught up with us all.
The statistics are grim: in six months, Boko Haram, ISWAP, and bandits — sons of the North — have killed at least 5,272 people. Soldiers, Northerners and Southerners alike, are slaughtered like goats. Yet, rather than admit it left its soup plate unwashed, inviting green flies, Northern Nigeria plays the ostrich. The generals’ lament is the most pathetic hypocrisy. Where were they when Muhammadu Buhari’s weak leadership reduced insecurity to regional and religious calculations? How many publicly challenged his failures? Very few.
Consider Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a northern leader and special adviser to President Bola Tinubu. He recounts how his family paid ₦175 million ransom for his nephew’s 36-day captivity — while the Villa was helpless. If we had cried out when Buhari was patting terror on the back, today’s crisis might be tamed.
Yes, the generals are right: terrorism is no longer a Northern problem. It’s national. The viper’s brood has bitten us all. But as Professor Moyo Okediji’s invocation laments, “those elected to guard the house act like jẹkúrẹdí, ẹrán jè’lùbọ” — infirm guards. While Tinubu plays Nero to our burning Rome, the North should spare us the spectacle of buck-passing. A people cannot outsource responsibility for the monsters they nurtured.
Meanwhile, presidential media aide Daniel Bwala flew into Ibadan to deconstruct Governor Seyi Makinde, a 2027 nightmare for Aso Rock. He peddled myths of presidential impact, but met his match in broadcaster Isaac Brown. Bwala raised issues about reforms and local governance, but his hypocrisy was glaring. The same administration that made the rich richer and pushed the poor under has left fuel prices rudderless and deaths soaring. In 37 months, more Nigerians have died from deprivation and violence than during the 30-month Biafran Civil War.
Bwala failed. His ad hominem attacks don’t wash. Next time, send someone who knows how to pronounce tọọrọ (two and a half pennies).
And then Minister Mohammed Idris asked editors to strip terrorists from front pages in the name of “patriotism.” But national security isn’t about scrubbing embarrassing stories. It’s about securing peace, food, and safety. Keeping grim stories on front pages pressures leaders and alerts the vulnerable. Acceding to Idris’s request invites insurgents into every backyard, free to slaughter at whim.
