Northern Nigeria, particularly Muslim northern Nigeria, has become by far the most dangerous place to live in Nigeria— and one of the most dangerous places to live in the entire world. Terrorist bandits have almost literally taken over the region.

Terrorists habitually waylay and burn passengers alive, kidnap Islamiyya and conventional school pupils, murder imams and worshipers in mosques, slaughter innocents in their sleep and incinerate their homes, vandalize and burn harvested crops and farms, and constitute a source of permanent terror. 

The carnage and terror are unabating. They are spreading out to previously sedate parts of the region. Niger State, which used to be insulated from communal upheavals, is now becoming the new epicenter of terrorist banditry. 

This is clearly the most precarious moment in northern Nigeria’s history. But amid the growing precarity of life in the region, a federal government dominated by northern Muslims at best only pays lip service to security.

Yet there are only muffled, barely audible voices of outrage from everyday northerners. Sure, there are now a few timid, emergency northern social critics who rail against the Buhari regime’s outrageous incompetence and cruel unconcern, but there are no mass protests in the streets and no consistently violent maledictions against Buhari in mosques—like there would have been if the president were a Christian. 

Most people in the region initially wanted to conceal the hurt they were nursing because they cared more about the image of Buhari than they cared about their own lives. Although much of northern Nigeria had been drenched in oceans of blood since at least 2017, even as late as February 2020 many people in the region still lived in denial.

Those of us who called out the ineptitude and insouciance of the Buhari regime were smeared, cursed, and ostracized. The emir of my hometown called an emirate council meeting specifically to request me to stop criticizing Buhari. Several people from my place often reached out to me to tell me mosques invoked on me a kind of Islamic imprecation called “al-Qunut.” It’s a special supplication for Allah to destroy someone or something.

My mother would cry on the phone and request me to leave the Buhari regime because she feared that the al-Qunut prayers that brain-dead, low-IQ, Buhari-worshipping morons were invoking against me would destroy me. I ignored her.

I recall a particularly intriguing phone call I received from someone in New Bussa in Niger State in December 2019. New Bussa used to be my local government headquarters until it was ceded to Niger State in the early 1990s. The caller told me all mosques in Kwara and Niger Borgu, my natal region, had been insistently calling forth Allah’s wrath on me through al-Qunut prayers for opposing the Buhari regime and that I should prepare for an incalculable calamity to befall me in the coming months.

I laughed him out of my phone and told him if the imams’ al-Qunut were any good, they should use it to repair the terrible roads in Borgu and cause the governments in Kwara and Niger states to consider them legitimate parts of their states. At the time, the insecurity that had consumed the rest of the North hadn’t come there.

In early February 2020, almost exactly two months after the random caller from New Bussa told me the combined might of the al-Qunut invocations of Borgu mosques in Niger and Kwara states would visit an irrecoverable catastrophe on me unless I stopped criticizing Buhari, the Chief Imam of New Bussa, Malam Habibu, was kidnapped, along with 19 others. One person was murdered. Again, in early September 2021, the Dodo of Wawa in Borgu Local Government Area of Niger State was kidnapped.

Of course, these are just unfortunate coincidences. But many of my friends whom I’d told about the call from a New Bussa caller in 2019 reached out to say the al-Qunut against me boomeranged and that it was because of the spiritual fortification I received from my late father who was also an Islamic cleric. That’s superstitious bunkum. 

As I pointed out in a previous column, life is too complex to always be amenable to deliberate, predetermined designs. There are coincidences, happenstances, misfortunes, serendipities, flukes, etc. that don’t require planning, that aren't, and need not be, the consequences of machinations or metaphysical forces.

I’m narrating this anecdote just to illustrate the ridiculous extremes much of the Muslim North is prepared to go to conceal Buhari’s doggone incompetence and suffer in silence. Had a southerner or a Christian been president while the North is passing through its current existential throes, Nigeria would have probably collapsed from the weight of righteous anger that would emanate forcefully from us.

Nonetheless, what I have described about Muslim northern Nigeria isn’t unique to it. There is an indwelling human predilection for invidious selectivity in expressions of outrage. We are wired to perceive and interpret reality in ways that reinforce and soothe our predetermined prejudices.

Notice that anytime the terrorist bandits inflict the kind of macabre horrors they are inflicting on Muslim northern Nigeria on Christian northern Nigeria, it usually generates more mass indignation. But Tiv-Jukun sanguinary conflicts or Jukun-Kuteb bloodletting which are more frequent than you know, barely make the headlines. 

And, although the terrorist bandits have murdered more Muslims than Christians (they now even murder their victims while they are praying in mosques), any attacks on Christians are immediately invoked as a “jihad” to exterminate Christians. 

A US-based Christian rights activist (who fancies himself as a “human” rights activist) and who feeds conservative Christian groups in America with the misleading information that the terrorist bandits in northern Nigeria are an anti-Christian Muslim militia ticked me off the other day when he sent his factually malnourished pro-Christian propaganda to me on WhatsApp.

As I told him, a group that murders more Muslims than it murders Christians can't be said to be specifically anti-Christian. It's simply anti-human. More Muslims have been murdered in mosques than Christians have been murdered in churches by the terrorist bandits. An Islamic, anti-Christian terror group would spare Muslims and target only Christians.

 In fact, a kidnapped Maiduguri-based, Kaduna-bound Muslim journalist -Abdulkareem Haruna who asked the bandits to allow him to pray was denied the opportunity. “I had to offer the morning prayers from my heart,” he wrote in the Premium Times of January 1, 2020. “Islam allows its faithful to pray that way in such a situation.

I never expected the criminals who spent the night playing music off their phones, smoking cigarettes, and marijuana to think about praying in the morning.” To call these kinds of nihilistic beasts an anti-Christian Jihadi squad is to be disingenuous. 

The opposite would have been true, of course: had the bandits terrorizing Muslim northern Nigeria been Christians or even southerners, Muslim northerners wouldn’t have been the sitting ducks that they are now. Instead of impotently mouthing “Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un” and “Allah ya isa,” they would have organized and fought back.

Psychologists who study cognitive biases point out that our default positions as humans is to support our kind, to selectively expose ourselves & perceive, even retain, only those points of views & perspectives that reinforce our prejudices. It’s often an unconscious process. So, it takes nothing to be prejudiced. It’s effortless. What isn’t effortless is the capacity for conscious distancing, for dispassionate reflection, for self-criticism.

It takes self-reflexivity and self-awareness to rise superior to the default impulses that so readily and so easily crowd and becloud our minds in moments of emotional tension. Very few are capable of this, and that’s why some people question the practical utility of the idea of deliberative democracy the idea of govt by rational conversation.

For a recent example, read the cacophony of infantile rants that came from Yoruba nationalists/Pentecostal Christian zealots when I called out the systemic oppression of Yoruba Muslims in their land. Many of these commentators imagine themselves to be “progressive,” are perpetually obsessed with pointing out what is wrong with the North, but a simple pointing out of the speck in their eyes, which should have provided an opportunity for introspection and self-critique, inspired insane fits of apoplexy. 

Since then, no week goes by without video clips of the harassment and sometimes physical assault of Hijab-wearing Yoruba Muslim women, which the main stream media in the Southwest conveniently ignores. For example, a video circulated of a Professor Lawal Ajibade, said to be the dean of the Faculty of Nursing at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH) in Ogbomoso, physically and forcefully removing the hijab of a married Muslim woman. That’s physical assault.

Similar videos, including one where Muslim school students were forced to attend a Reinhard Bonnke conversion session in Ibadan, have trended in Yoruba Muslim social media and covered by such online news sites as Sahara Reporters and Legit.ng. But none of the triggered columnists who hyperventilated about Yorubaland being a matchless Nirvana of religious harmony said a word.

So, it isn’t only northern Muslims who are hypocrites. Most people are. But it is easier to accuse others of selective outrage &double standards than to recognize it in ourselves. Those of us who are critical of our people and of ourselves aren’t self-hating; we are only self-reflexive. The world would be an infinitely better place if we can all question our taken-for-granted assumptions and acknowledge our cognitive frailties. 

https://www.farooqkperogi.com/2021/12/why-north-bleeds-and-people-sleep.html?m=1
Lalasticlala Seun

Any protest in the North will be seen as an insurrection against Buhari-led Hardworking government. I as a concerned citizen urges Buhari to quench any uprising because they could be trying to overthrow him.

God bless them Arewas
God bless Fulani Janjaweeed
4+4
Aboki Kawaii

"...Northern Nigeria, particularly Muslim northern Nigeria, has become by far the most dangerous place to live in Nigeria & one of the most dangerous places to live in the entire world. Terrorist bandits have almost literally taken over the region.

The carnage and terror are unabating. They are spreading out to previously sedate parts of the region. This is clearly the most precarious moment in northern Nigeria’s history. But amid the growing precarity of life in the region, a federal government dominated by northern Muslims at best only pays lip service to security.

Most people in the region initially wanted to conceal the hurt they were nursing because they cared more about the image of Buhari than they cared about their own lives. Although much of northern Nigeria had been drenched in oceans of blood since at least 2017, even as late as February 2020 many people in the region still lived in denial.

Yet there are only muffled, barely audible voices of outrage from everyday northerners. Sure, there are now a few timid, emergency northern social critics who rail against the Buhari regime’s outrageous incompetence and cruel unconcern.

But there are no mass protests in the streets and no consistently violent maledictions against Buhari in mosques like there would have been if the president were a Christian. North is passing through its current existential throes, Nigeria would have probably collapsed from the weight of righteous anger that would emanate forcefully from us... "

Nope! Their problem is #EndSARS, IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, Sunday Igboho, fear of regime change etc.They will rather never want to speak out or call out for govt to be accountable to its constitutional responsibility because of parochial or religious sentiments.

They simply love and condone the ills of poor governance befalling the region because of the "it is our syndrome".The north prefer power to remain in the region irrespective of the many ills plaguing it @ present.

Imagine all the shouting about 2023 emanating from that side.Fighting for a helpless god while leaving their own fight for good governance to an uncertain fate.

"..There suddenly seems to be an epiphany in the region that Buhari is an inept, uncaring fraud who scammed the people into attributing to him qualities he never possessed & would never possess in a million life times.Nevertheless, this epiphany is hypocritical and self-centered. Evidence of Buhari’s inattentiveness to and blithe unconcern with the suffering of everyday people has always been there....

It took the concatenation of widespread kidnapping in all parts of the northwest and the unremitting intensification of bloodletting in Zamfara for erstwhile worshipers of Buhari to admit that he is a crass, cold, heartless prig. To express outrage only when we are personally affected by injustice bespeaks a defective moral conscience.

When other parts of the nation were drowning in rivers of blood and Buhari, as is his wont, turned the other way, many of the people who are excoriating him for his cold detachment from the insecurity in the northwest were his fiercest defenders against critics.

To express outrage only when we are personally affected by injustice bespeaks a defective moral conscience. When other parts of the nation were drowning in rivers of blood and Buhari, as is his wont, turned the other way, many of the people who are excoriating him for his cold detachment from the insecurity in the northwest were his fiercest defenders against critics.

That is why some people can’t help but exult in perverse satisfaction that the enablers & defenders of Buhari’s incompetence and heartlessness are today the victims of the presidential vices they defended, excused, and justified. https://www.farooqkperogi.com/2020/02/insecurity-will-only-expand-and-fester.html?m=1

J

coming. make I shower first

These nigggass ain't dying fast enough for me.

Sighted

Less than 10 comments by this time...?

Where are the Nigeria advisers from the west?

Where is Omekalives, Helinues, Tvbosstrever, NGpatroit, Godons1....

I guess they are all over the place searching for Udele1, to give them more fake news from the SE.

A MAN of GOD once told me in confidence years ago that the north will be visited by karma soon for the deaths of over 3million they instigated , SEEMS HIS PREDICTION IS RIGHT.

They are quiet because in Nigeria politics is about keeping your side in power.

A lot of people kept quiet in the South east in 2012 during the protests against removal of fuel subsidy then because their side was in power. Despite them suffering too.

Likewise in most parts of the North ( Abuja excepted) , the Endsars protest never got of the ground. Despite them suffering too.

Many Nairalanders post the way they do on the political pages because for them politics and democracy isn't about development and programmes , it is about my side or their side controlling the sharing and the goodies. Once my side is in control , nothing else matters.

That's why Northerners are keeping quiet. They could go on a protest as they should but there is the risk their side would lose. And then where would they be?

That's why I hate Nigerian politics and parties. But the alternative, dictatorship is something I hate 1 billion times more, so, best tolerate.

We the Southerners are simply obeying the Bible according to 1 Thessalonians 4:11 And to make it your ambition to lead a perfect life; you must work with your own hands just as we told you.

So, Fulani is killing Hausa, e no concern Yorubas or Igbos or Ijaws

A bold and accurate write up. All sides do the same. Northerners will tolerate Buhari's ineptitude becasue the is their son. Lagosians will tolerate Tinubu's corrutpion because he is their son. Igbos tolerate Kanu's extremisim becasue he is their son. All this shows is that the black man is incapable of high level thinking. It is no wonder no black african nation is deveoped. Our thinking can't go beyond our tribe. We need to be recolonised for another 100 years to have sense knocked into our heads.

Very true. Nigerians were tigers during Jonathan regime but became lame ducks in the face of brutal killings during buhari regime. Bandits are simply FULANI terrorist criminals who gets rewarded for carrying out crimes against nothern christains and Muslims who are gradually waking up and subtly slipping away from Fulani hegemony grip. This was the original intent until their handlers saw the business part of the agenda and went haywire. If you recall, banditary started with FULANI terrorist killing hausa farmers but today the organizers of these evil Fulani are making much money from it

Monsters they made. Kikikikikiki

kulu ma sayakun sayakun
Quod erit, erit.

Professor of falsehood and bigotry, when is exposure and education going to purge you from your political and religion biasness?

Your previous article in trying to stir up relious fight among people of SW has fully exposed you as a mischievous writer whose aim is to use his articles to form opinion that would set SW on fire so your PDP would take advantage of. Your idea of setting a flame of discord in SW in order to weaken their political strength ahead of 2023 election which you want your party PDP to win is obvious to intelligent minds.

Again, your religious bigotry is so stinking that it rub off all your intellectual predigre and has reduced you to a paid agent who only write for money.

Yes, you are good writer, but the contents of your stories are filled with junks. You are just nothing but a decorated coffin with rotten flesh. Shame on you

SirBlack999:
These nigggass ain't dying fast enough for me.

I swear!
Foolish set of animals we are sharing corn tree with

bjdon:
A bold and accurate write up. All sides do the same. Northerners will tolerate Buhari's ineptitude becasue the is their son. Lagosians will tolerate Tinubu's corrutpion because he is their son. Igbos tolerate Kanu's extremisim becasue he is their son. All this shows is that the black man is incapable of high level thinking. It is no wonder no black african nation is deveoped. Our thinking can't go beyond our tribe. We need to be recolonised for another 100 years to have sense knocked into our heads.

You are already been recolonized by fulani. But don't expect others to remain docile like you.

The moniker Backbencher summarized it all. My own question is:

What can be done, so the north doesn't take down the other regions with it in the end?

Some of you are laughing now, unfortunately when they are done over there, they will turn eyes to the other regions, heck, it's already happening.

The Kperogyi gave his story sensational title but emphasised majorly on religion sentiments of Nigerians, you would think it's error but it is a deliberate manouvering at hibernating people's mind

Ttalk:
The Kperogyi gave his story sensational title but emphasised majorly on religion sentiments of Nigerians, you would think it's error but it is a deliberate manouvering at hibernating people's mind

APC man, all this yarns you dey blow, fact remains security is bad in the North and it is a shame that your beloved party APC is doing nothing about it.

When Farooq was blasting GEJ, you guys were happy. Now he is blasting your beloved bubu and you are here to cry.

APC man, get your party to lead us well . That's what you were voted for.

Thought they wanted to Lord it over others that is why the voted the disaster making life difficult for them northern? ......They ain't see anything yet.

Ok