Northern States Governors’ Forum Chairman Muhammadu Inuwa Yahaya has issued a public rebuke to regional leaders at a gathering of Northern traditional rulers in Dutse, Jigawa State, declaring that the North had exhausted its tolerance for meetings, communiqués, and resolutions that were never implemented while insecurity deepened, poverty spread, and millions of young people remained available for recruitment by criminal and terrorist networks.
Inuwa Yahaya, who delivered a keynote at the Northern Traditional Rulers Council meeting attended by governors, monarchs, security chiefs, and federal government officials, said approximately 86 million people in Northern Nigeria were living in multidimensional poverty and that the region contained the overwhelming majority of Nigeria’s out-of-school children, creating the structural conditions that extremist recruiters had exploited to devastating effect. He said banditry, insurgency, communal violence, and farmer-herder conflict had not emerged from nowhere but from decades of neglect of the human development investments that gave young people alternatives to violence.
He called for coordinated reforms across state police creation, education and skills development, job creation, agricultural revitalization, and security agency support, saying no single intervention would be sufficient and that the crisis required the kind of sustained, multi-track response that only genuinely committed leadership could sustain. He paid condolences to Katsina State over the death of retired Major-General Rabe Abubakar in bandit captivity, describing the loss as proof that insecurity had ceased to discriminate by rank, influence, or achievement.
Sultan of Sokoto Muhammad Saad Abubakar praised the governors’ attendance as a signal of seriousness and called on citizens to support leaders at every level while urging collective introspection about the policy choices and institutional failures that had brought the region to its current position.
