HISTORY does not repeat itself in a vacuum; it echoes the structural cowardice of institutions that refuse to hold power to account. In a functional constitutional republic, the sacred social contract between the governed and the governor rests upon a singular, non-negotiable premise: the absolute monopoly of legitimate state force in service of public security and civic protection.
When a chief executive entrusted with an oath of office shatters that premise, rationalizes armed criminality, and promotes intellectual regression, the state faces an existential crisis.
Bauchi State Governor Bala Mohammed has consistently functioned as an epicenter of this subversion. His public utterances are not merely unfortunate gaffes or isolated slips of the tongue; they are calculated, ideological blueprints that weaponize identity, romanticize terror, and institutionalize state decay.
From defending the proliferation of unauthorized assault rifles among non-indigenous pastoralists to advocating for regressive educational paradigms while the rest of the world accelerates toward technological singularity, his trajectory exposes a dangerous political calculus: governing through fear, division, and the quiet subjugation of local populations.
To examine Mohammed’s political record is to confront the uncomfortable, bleeding intersections of insecurity, historical revisionism, and systemic educational sabotage in Northern Nigeria. A public official who rationalizes the militarization of stateless actors and disparages the foundational necessity of modern schooling forfeits any moral or legal right to executive authority.
In February 2021, when Bauchi State Governor Bala Mohammed stood before the glare of national television and declared that transnational Fulani pastoralists possessed “no option” other than to bear illegal AK-47 rifles for self-defense, the Nigerian state blinked. That singular moment of capitulation laid bare the rot at the core of the nation’s security architecture.
A public official sworn to uphold the constitution openly rationalized the militarization of non-indigenous, stateless actors whose violent footprint across the agrarian belts had already left thousands dead, communities displaced, and national food security shattered. Yet, the security apparatus looked away.
The narrative peddled by Mohammed—that pastoralists are driven to bear sophisticated military-grade weaponry solely by the threat of cattle rustling—is a dangerous inversion of reality. It deliberately ignores the fundamental asymmetry of the conflict.
Pastoralists crossing international borders from the broader Sahelian region into Nigeria operate outside domestic civic controls. Granting them moral or political cover to carry assault rifles transforms local grazing disputes into asymmetrical warfare. While the governor lamented the loss of cattle, he glossed over the massive loss of human lives, raped women, burned villages, and pillaged farmlands belonging to indigenous host communities who possess no military protection.
By framing armed criminality as an inevitable consequence of systemic neglect rather than a direct assault on the sovereignty of the republic, Mohammed legitimized non-state violence. To normalize assault weapons in the hands of non-state actors is to invite the very collapse of civil order. The fact that an individual who effectively serves as an apologist for armed elements continues to occupy a seat of executive authority remains a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s weak accountability frameworks.
To understand the current socio-political paralysis of Northern Nigeria, one must confront the uncomfortable historical truths that the political elite desperately seek to sanitize. Nigerian history is replete with the mechanics of conquest—notably the 19th-century jihadist incursions that supplanted indigenous Hausa monarchs with emirs under the banner of puritanical expansion.
When modern political actors attempt to blend these historical revisionisms with contemporary transhumance narratives, they are executing a familiar playbook: asserting demographic and territorial dominance under the guise of religious and ancestral rights.
Mohammed frequently wraps his rhetoric in the mantle of constitutional provisions, citing freedom of movement and residence under the Nigerian Constitution to justify unrestricted pastoral access to any forest or land across the federation. However, this interpretation is legally disingenuous and deliberately selective.
Under the Land Use Act, state governors hold land in trust for the people of their respective states. The unilateral declaration that “no one owns the forests” is a direct assault on sub-national governance and property rights. By routinely condemning southern and central governors—such as the former Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom—for enacting anti-open grazing laws, Mohammed sought to impose a feudal model of land use that privileges nomadic pastoralism over settled agricultural production.
While demanding absolute accommodation for pastoralists in the South and Middle Belt, the political establishment in the North often weaponizes indigeneity laws against other Nigerian citizens. The attempt to paint unrestricted, armed migration as an inalienable constitutional right while ignoring the property rights, lives, and security of indigenous farmers whose ancestral lands are pillaged is the highest form of state-sponsored gaslighting.
If his early defense of militant pastoralism signaled a moral bankruptcy, his recent policy interventions in national education confirm a calculated strategy to keep Northern Nigeria intellectually disenfranchised.
A few days ago, while receiving a delegation of Saudi Arabian business leaders and representatives of Nigerian students studying in Saudi universities, Governor Mohammed escalated his rhetorical assault on progress. He called on the Federal Government to formally integrate Arabic and Quranic-based education into the national curriculum, explicitly dismissing traditional Western schooling as a mere “formality.”
In a deeply revealing personal anecdote, he remarked, “Today, Bala did not go to school but he became somebody,” reducing formal academic rigor, scientific inquiry, and institutional training to an unnecessary hurdle. This is not an innocent cultural reclamation; it is a profound regional tragedy. The architects of this backwardness—typified by political elites who routinely shuttle their own children to elite boarding schools and universities in Europe and North America—deliberately weaponize archaic, impoverished educational frameworks for the masses.
While global economies race toward artificial intelligence, space exploration, quantum computing, and advanced data-driven industrialization, advocating for an educational retreat into medieval frameworks ensures a permanent underclass. Progressive Islamic nations, including Saudi Arabia, have spent decades aggressively modernizing their educational systems, pouring billions into STEM fields, artificial intelligence, and cutting-edge technological research to liberate their populaces from oil dependency and poverty.
By contrast, political figures like Mohammed cling to regressive models precisely because an educated, critically thinking populace is the ultimate existential threat to a feudal political oligarchy. Uneducated, impoverished citizens are easily manipulated by political demagogues and religious weaponization during electoral cycles.
Northern Nigeria has contributed disproportionately to the Nigerian union in terms of raw human capital and demographic weight, yet the ledger of its contemporary political leadership reflects little more than tears, sorrow, blood, and systemic underdevelopment. The region’s vast youth population is currently being held hostage by a parasitic ruling class that feasts on the ruins of its own people.
The silence of local leadership, traditional institutions, and religious authorities in the face of such compounding governance failures points to a crisis far deeper than surface politics. When a leader can openly disparage formal education and rationalize armed terror without facing immediate impeachment, social ostracization, or legal prosecution, the civic fabric has frayed to its breaking point.
The depth of the crisis public commentators frequently ask why a populace suffering from acute poverty, insecurity, and institutional collapse does not violently expel such leaders from power. The answer lies in the total capture of the social architecture. Decades of systematic educational deprivation have created a populace heavily dependent on political patronage for basic survival.
The political and religious establishment often operates as an interconnected cartel, shielding compromised leaders to preserve collective privileges.
For the generations of Northern Gen-Z currently inheriting this desolate landscape, the mandate for survival requires an absolute ideological break from the past. The youth must recognize that the plague of feudal hypocrisy is the primary driver of their stagnation. Continuing to accept leaders who trade their future for political expediency is a death sentence.
A system that cannot protect its citizens from internal subversion is a failed enterprise; a society that tolerates leaders who romanticize terror and intellectual stagnation is complicit in its own undoing. Governor Bala Mohammed’s entire political trajectory—marked by toxic rhetoric, majoritarian posturing, and policies that subvert collective security and human capital development—demands an immediate, uncompromising independent probe.
He must be called to account before a competent tribunal of inquiry to explain how his public posturing has historically aligned with, emboldened, and excused the violent non-state actors bleeding the nation dry. A leader whose only enduring legacy is to govern over the graves, ruins, and intellectual starvation of his people forfeits any moral or legal right to habitation among civilized humans.
Nigeria cannot build a secure, prosperous, and technologically competitive future while harboring subversion at the highest levels of executive office. The time for political correctness is over; accountability must take its course.
Erasmus Ikhide contributed this piece via: ikhideluckyerasmus@gmail.com