Gumi’s Federation Of Bandits

Blood, blood everywhere, and all that a perpetual controversialist sees is another opportunity to campaign for the assailant!

Let somebody tell Sheikh Abubakar Gumi to stop insulting the sensibilities of those who refuse to accept banditry as a way of life and the deodorisation of crime as the divine right of some self-appointed mediators in the shape of voluminously-turbanned mullahs.

The people of Nigeria refuse to accept that any set of outlaws should be permitted to prosper from their crimes while the rest of us are glorified hostages living at the whims of the plunderers.

 Citizen Sani

Nothing can excuse the recent incineration of one Citizen Sani, except to say that such gruesome incidents have become commonplace, but we refuse to accept them as ‘normal’. Mallam Muhammadu Sani was a responsible husband of two wives and father of six children. He lived with his family in Gidan Taba village in the Maradun Local Government Area of Zamfara State. He was a trusted member of his community’s vigilante group.

On the day the bandits came calling, at about 10 p.m., Sani was holed up with his two wives and their six children, as well as his younger brother’s wife and their three children. When he refused to open the door as ordered by the bandits, they set his room on fire, killing all but one of the terror-stricken victims. His younger brother’s wife was the sole escapee.

A security expert, Dr Kabiru Adamu, gave an insight into the gory incident: “What happened in Gidan Taba was a targeted retaliation against a vigilante who stood up to bandits, and it ended with 12 members of his family killed,” he said, warning that such attacks were aimed at discouraging community resistance and weakening local defence structures.

While the cream of the socio-political elite have openly condemned banditry and associated brigandage in the North, a section of the clerical leadership continues to use the threat of violence as a bargaining chip. “Pay ransom and do whatever else the bandits want, otherwise you will never have peace.” That appears to be the summary of Gumi’s constant message to the nation over the years.

 Amnesty?

Between February 4 and 5, 2021, following meetings with armed groups in Zamfara State alongside Governor Bello Matawalle, Sheikh Gumi urged the Federal Government to grant amnesty to bandits.

On February 14, 2021, he advocated legal protection so bandits would “not be chased with the law” or taken to court, suggesting that the government instead build schools and hospitals for them in exchange for disarmament.

On February 19, 2021, after visiting bandit camps in Niger State following the Kagara school abduction, Gumi called on the Federal Government to grant “blanket amnesty” to bandits willing to embrace peace.

On March 5, 2022, Gumi publicly argued that bandits deserved pardon and economic rehabilitation, just as the Federal Government had done for Niger Delta militants.

Emboldened by the fact that the government seemed to have adopted a policy of deliberately ignoring most of his tendentious pronouncements, on May 5, 2021, he urged the Presidency to release money from the Central Bank to pay ransom demands to secure the release of students of Greenfield University kidnapped by bandits.

On June 21, 2021, he advocated offering employment opportunities to bandits, predicting that military bombardment would fail.

On September 11, 2021, he urged the Federal Government to establish a dedicated Ministry of Nomadic Affairs to address the welfare, grievances, and integration of pastoralists and armed herders.

He followed up on the above on November 9, 2021, with a statement asserting that the reason for bandits’ continued rampage in the North was that previous peace agreements had failed to provide the outlaws with land and “enough money”.

Between May and July 2026, Gumi argued that 17 years of military engagement had failed to stop banditry and therefore urged the government to grant formal amnesty, resettle bandits out of forests, and enrol their children in school.

Terror Apologist

Gumi is Nigeria’s number one terrorist apologist. No wonder the Saudi authorities denied him entry into their country to perform the 2025 Hajj. Rather than call on the political elite and elected officials of the North to deliver programmes that will elevate the living standards of the people, he is virtually telling local authorities not to bother and that the Federal Government only needs to throw open the vaults of the Central Bank to satiate the Naira lust of the bandits.

Those who were sucked in by Gumi’s campaign rued their gullibility in horrific outcomes. On June 7, 2026, about 50 elders from the Magamin Diddi community in Magami/Faru Ward, Maradun Local Government Area of Zamfara State, reportedly embarked on a reconciliation mission to meet a notorious bandit leader identified as Jammo.

The elders were begging to access their farmlands ahead of the impending rainy season. However, about 39 members of the delegation were abducted after the bandit leader arrived at the venue with armed members of his gang. Eleven elders were released, perhaps because they were perceived not to have kidnap value.

Recently, Gumi waxed sanctimonious, saying soft-power dialogue, specifically religious education, is the key to resolving the banditry crisis in Nigeria. On the surface, that looks like a religious and moral campaign until one dissects the logic undergirding it.

Fundamental to the whole issue is the question of what constitutes a crime. If the bandits and other terrorists depopulating the northern states are cast in the mould of freedom fighters—like the Niger Delta militants fighting against the environmental despoliation of their land while the rest of Nigeria lived large on their oil—then we should decriminalise murder, robbery, hostage-taking and other such crimes.

We cannot be running two countries and pretending to run one. North-West banditry is an illicit commercial enterprise driven by ransom kidnapping, cattle rustling, illegal mining, and extortion. I wonder how Gumi pretends not to know that rewarding profit-seeking syndicates with state stipends is tantamount to abdicating the powers of the state to outlaws.

 What To Do

Rather than listen to Gumi, I’d advise the governors of the northern states to try a simple, time-tested solution to the problem of banditry and its associated recruitment reservoir of almajiri street urchins: start a compulsory mass education programme in every state with skill acquisition centres in every local government and watch the people prosper. This should be executed side by side with the Federal Government’s scorched-earth policy on terror. There is only one way to deal with evil: stamp it out; do not romance it.

In this testy political season, with its own universe of challenges, Gumi’s resort to justifying criminality with a twisted ideology disguised as religion does not fool anybody. This entity, of which we are all justifiably proud, will continue to be known as the Federal Republic of Nigeria, not a bloody federation of bandits.