The Middle Belt Forum’s 17 August 2026 statement on the Federal Government’s cattle-ranching policy is troubling not because concerns about land acquisition, consultation, compensation or security are illegitimate, but because it frames them within a doctrine of ethnic territorial ownership. At its core is a claim that must be rejected: that parts of Nigeria belong exclusively to particular ethnic groups and that other Nigerians may be treated as outsiders regardless of citizenship or constitutional rights. This is inconsistent with the Constitution and with the region’s complex history. It seems to have been a page extracted right out of a Stone Age Manuscript!  2. The portrayal of Adamawa, Taraba and parts of Plateau State as exclusively indigenous Middle Belt territory from which Fulani people are historical outsiders is a historical and political revisionism. The Fulani are not strangers to these areas any more than other ethnic groups. In Adamawa and Taraba in par...

================================================================================              URGENT MEDICAL APPEAL FOR MY FORMER DRIVER ================================================================================ Dear Friends, Associates, and Philanthropists, I am writing to seek your urgent support for Suleiman Abubakar, who served loyally as my personal driver from 2005 until recently, when severe vision loss forced his disengagement. Suleiman is 40 years old, a husband to Rukayya, and the sole provider for their six (6) young children. • Abubakar Suleiman (patient) • Referral  📋 The Medical Situation He has been diagnosed with advanced Glaucoma and issued an urgent referral from Modibbo Adama University Teaching Hospital, Yola to the National Eye Center, Kaduna for specialized testing and potential surgery to prevent total, permanent blindness. 💰 Financial Estimate Medical Bills (Tests, Surgery, Drugs): ₦1,550,000...

In May, 2013, I wrote an article titled “*Co-Relation Between Democracy, Poverty and Insurgency in Nigeria*” which central essence was to argue that Nigeria’s persistent insurgencies and insecurity are fundamentally rooted in the failure of democratic governance to deliver social justice, equitable distribution of economic wealth and credible political participation, rather than being driven solely by religion, region or ethnicity. I explained that lasting national security could only be achieved through inclusive economic development, reduction of poverty and inequality, and genuine democratic reforms that restore public trust in government.  2. Between 2013 when I wrote that article and now, the insecurity and violence have metastasized across the country proportionate to the increase in leadership failures over the years at all levels of government. The present discourse, therefore, is an epilogue to that article. In other words, it is a treatise on the nexus between...

Official documents exclusively obtained by Saturday PUNCH have cast fresh doubt on the Presidency’s insistence that the controversial Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council never existed. The documents reveal that the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation received, acknowledged and acted on correspondence submitted in the council’s name months before the Presidency publicly disowned it. Specifically, the SGF’s office formally processed and forwarded a request by the council’s self-styled Director-General, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi, seeking office accommodation from recovered Federal Government properties through the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. The correspondence, dated November 21, 2024, was signed by the Permanent Secretary, General Services Office, Nnamdi Maurice Mbaeri, on behalf of the SGF. Attached to it was Adeyemi’s November 7, 2024, request for office accommodation for the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council....

To My Fellow Compatriots, There is a growing, dangerous consensus among cynics that the economic engine of Northern Nigeria is permanently broken. We hear it in boardrooms, read it in defeatist opinion pieces, and see it in the eyes of those who have written the region off as a perpetual welfare state, a region capable only of consuming wealth rather than generating it. I write this letter to directly challenge that narrative. The belief that the North cannot bounce back to become a global host for industrial raw materials is not just wrong, it is blind to the vast, unmonetized realities on the ground. Our current economic stagnation is not a failure of capacity, it is a failure of architecture and leadership.  For decades, we have operated a passive supply-chain model, bearing the highest logistical risks while yielding the lowest margins by exporting raw commodities out of our region. The path to our industrial rebirth lies in flipping this dynamic entirely, restricti...

After two decades of identifying, analysing and proffering practicable solutions to the myriads of problems of this region, I am beginning to wonder, are we ever going to succeed as a people in terms of meaningful development? That may sound pessimistic, but it is a reality we are living on a daily basis. I am also beginning to conclude we are the worst kind of people living in today's world. Forgive my conclusion and follow my reasoning. Our singular and most destructive attitude is recently portrayed in Dan Bello's startling revelations about how former Governor of Zamfara state, AbdulAziz Yari cornered 1.7 trillion of the state's money into personal accounts. Lest we forget, Zamfara, for over a decade had been the epicenter of insecurity in the Northwest region. Yet, instead of outcry and outrage by our people to demand just an investigation and transparency over the allegation, it appears Dan Bello was somehow forced to delete the video from his page and la...

Confronting the Distortions of Our Shared History By Mohammed Sa'ad Abubakar Editor-in-Chief, Northern Nigeria Perspective Magazine Five years ago, writing in these same pages at the height of our national security crisis, an elder of the North, Sa'adu Abubakar Gambe, looked back at his youth as a student in Lagos in 1966. He warned the youth drumming the beats of war to seek the "path of honour and civilization" if Nigeria must separate. Unlike the anonymous internet fabrications falsely attributed to Southeastern professors today, Gambe’s 2021 reflections did not seek to demonize an entire tribe or weaponize falsehoods about the past. Instead, his writing carried the heavy, sorrowful dignity of a man who saw the innocence of his 1966 school days shattered by tribal politics. If our elders, who actually witnessed the trauma of 1966, can speak with such measured sobriety, we the younger generation of Northern writers have no excuse to peddle reckless, unve...