In Sympathy With Fallen, Forgotten Compatriots Of Borno, Zamfara – By Emeka Alex Duru

Two disturbing publications by two seasoned media minds, provoked this outing. One was a piece by Dr Emman Usman Shehu, a concerned son of Adamawa and Abuja-based writer, activist and educator, in which he wrote an open letter to the Vice President, Kashim Shettima, on his visit to Zamfara.  The letter was written before Shettima’s visit on Tuesday, March 24. But it situated the tour for what it was –sheer mockery of a people that had been abandoned and forgotten only to be remembered because of anticipated political gains.

The other write-up was by Shu’aibu Usman Leman, Columnist with leading Online portal, TheNiche and immediate past National Secretary, Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ), in which he analysed the Monday, March 16, 2026,  bombings that shattered the relative peace in Maiduguri, Borno State capital and left the city in tears and blood.

For introduction, Usman Shehu and Usman Leman are senior colleagues. We all met in the defunct Post Express Newspapers, Lagos. Shehu was in the Editorial Board, while Leman edited the Weekend title of the Paper, with me as his Deputy. The two are committed Christians with respect and accommodation for adherents of other faith. I have come to know and relate with both for close to 30 years and can confirm that they are measured in dispositions and not given to frivolities. When therefore, they wrote on issues of crippling security challenges in the country and the obvious lethargy of the leadership class in tackling the menace, their informed opinions deserve attention.

Borno and Zamfara are metaphors of Nigeria’s leadership failure. The profile of insecurity in both states, is piteous and frightening.  Due to the regularity of killings and bloodletting in both states, they have become cemetery of sort. In the Maiduguri, the bombers detonated explosives almost simultaneously at the city’s popular Monday Market, the Post Office Flyover area, and the security post at the entrance of the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital. At least 23 people were killed and more than 100 others injured.

The incident followed same pattern of recent coordinated actions by Boko Haram and ISWAP on military formations in Konduga, Marte, Jakana and Mainok and other parts of the state, which left many civilians and military personnel dead. Similar situation had occurred in December 2025, when an explosion ripped through a mosque in Maiduguri, killing at least five people and wounding dozens of worshippers.

Same ugly story replicated in Zamfara, where, barely two weeks ago, precisely on March 14, gunmen stormed a gold mining site near Arafa village in Maru Local Government Area, abducting five foreign nationals from Burkina Faso in broad daylight. The victims are yet to be recovered. Earlier in the year, attacks in Anka claimed dozens of lives estimated at over 50 with women and children abducted. There are other instances of uncertainties in the state.

While the people lived with their pains, they did not matter to the Nigerian authorities. Their travails were apparently seen as their fate, or as it is lazily explained here, an act of God. And many died, in the homes, their farms or on their way to the forests where their abductors led them, cast by the roadside or dumped in shallow graves, without the honour of decent burial. All that the government did in such situation was to release hackneyed statement containing the usual empty vow that the killers would not go unpunished. But nothing, of course, happened, after. The dead are gone, while the abducted are forgotten. And the country moves on.  

It was against this disturbing backdrop that the Vice President Senator Kashim Shettima, on Tuesday, March 24, visited Zamfara State to formally receive the governor, Dauda Lawal, and his supporters into the All Progressives Congress (APC). Deputy Senate President, Barau Jibrin; National Chairman of the party, Professor Nentawe Yilwatda; National Secretary, Senator Ajibola Basiru, were also on the trip. In his address, the Vice President, while acknowledging that Zamfara is contending with serious security challenges, claimed that the defection of the governor would help in the abatement of banditry and insurgency in the North-West state. How else can the traumatized citizens of Zamfara be further mocked?

Now, this is a state that has been in the grip of blood-sucking marauders that have left the citizens and residents uprooted and displaced. All the time that Zamfara has been bleeding, no top rank government official remembered it or showed up. When it was thought that the visit of the Vice President would usher in rays of hope on the government coming to their rescue, it turned out that what mattered to the APC and presidency was the envisaged political capital the defection of the governor from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the ruling APC, would yield to President Bola Tinubu’s consuming second term ambition in 2027.

You can then understand the weighty message by Usman Shehu to Shettima that on his visit to Zamfara, though Red Carpets would be rolled out in Gusau; flags would wave; speeches would proclaim party unity and political triumph, the true red that defines Zamfara today is not partisan bunting; “It is the blood that soaks the soil of Maru, Tsafe, Anka, Maradun (my ancestral home), countless communities and hamlets where bandits—armed, audacious, and seemingly untouchable—continue to dictate the terms of existence”.

Shehu’s cry that the deepest wound is not merely the violence itself but the selectivity of Abuja’s attention, strikes deeply. It touches on betrayal and the insensitivity of the current leadership in the land. In troubling situations as Zamfara, Niger, Kwara, Borno, Benue and Plateau, you would expect the President, his Deputy or any other high government officials to solely visit and empathise with the wounded and bereaved Nigerians. That is what leadership should be – feeling the pains of the people and attending to them. But not the Tinubu-Shettima combo that does not bother at anything that may not readily add to the actualisation of its 2027 second term.

That is why the Maiduguri bombings, despite the volume of carnage and destruction, may just end with the front page mentions in leading media houses, without specific actions by the government. In terms of empathy and human resource management, the Tinubu presidency is the worst in Nigeria’s 65 years of nationhood. The Maiduguri attack is unfortunate, especially coming at a time many had thought that the regime of insecurity in Borno had been significantly degraded. It however indicates failure of intelligence and sophistication on the side of the military and the government. The ease of the attacks in many parts of the country underscores the point that terrorism is still potent in the country and requires more proactive efforts to contain it. But would the government take note and act accordingly? That is the question.

We sympathise with the wounded and the bereaved families in Borno, Zamfara, Niger, Plateau, Benue, as well as the displaced citizens all over the country. May the good Lord grant the souls of the fallen compatriots, eternal rest.

Emeka Alex Duru, PhD, is the Editor, TheNiche Newspapers, Lagos