The North Shekarau Claims to Speak For Does Not Exist

By Hassan Husaini, mni

Senator Ibrahim Shekarau, former governor of Kano State, recently declared that the entire North is solidly behind President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s re-election in 2027. He made this declaration under the banner of a group called “Arewa for Asiwaju” (A4A), flanked by other former governors and political associates from the All Progressives Congress. The question that immediately arises is simple: which North is Shekarau speaking for?

It cannot be the North of the farmer in Zamfara who has not accessed his farmland for two consecutive planting seasons because armed bandits have made the roads and fields unsafe. It cannot be the North of the mother in Borno whose child is among the 5.5 million people in the northeast whom the World Food Programme cannot reach with lifesaving food assistance. It cannot be the North of the trader in Mubi paying N1,850 per litre for petrol while customers can barely afford to buy. And it certainly cannot be the North of the young man in Katsina or Sokoto who watches his community bury victims of attacks the federal government has not been able to prevent, let alone prosecute.

The North Shekarau speaks for is the North of the APC. It is a North defined by political office, by access to power, by networks of former governors and serving senators who have gathered under the A4A umbrella to mobilize votes for a president whose administration has presided over the most severe humanitarian crisis in northern Nigeria in a decade. It is a North of convention halls in Abuja, of press conferences, of secretariat commissioning ceremonies attended by vice presidents and party chairmen. It is not the North that exists outside the perimeter of those events.

Shekarau and his colleagues have every right to form a political campaign group and support whomever they choose. But they do not have the right to claim that their political preferences represent the collective will of a region of nearly 100 million people, many of whom are struggling to survive the consequences of the very policies their group exists to promote. When Shekarau says the North is “solidly behind” Tinubu, he is not describing a political reality. He is attempting to manufacture one, using the authority of his former office to create the impression of northern consensus where none exists.

The data does not support his claim. The World Food Programme reports that 36.3 million Nigerians are acutely food insecure, with the crisis concentrated in Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, Katsina, Sokoto, and Zamfara. In the northeast alone, 6.2 million people are food insecure, but WFP can only reach 740,000, leaving 5.5 million without lifesaving assistance. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network projects Crisis-level food insecurity across much of northern Nigeria through January 2027, driven by conflict, high fuel costs, and eroded household purchasing power.

The security situation is no better. Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 documents 2,938 abductions in the Northwest between July 2024 and June 2025—over 60 percent of all reported incidents nationwide. Zamfara alone recorded 1,203 abductions. In the Northeast, Boko Haram factions resumed deadly attacks, killing at least 57 people in Borno in May and 60 more in September. The Nigerian authorities have failed to arrest or prosecute those responsible. The North Shekarau describes as solidly behind this administration is a North where communities bury their dead without justice.

Shekarau’s group has compiled a catalogue of infrastructure projects to counter claims of neglect. Roads and bridges and gas pipelines are not nothing. But they are not food in the stomach of a child in Sokoto. They are not safety for the farmer in Katsina who cannot harvest his crops. They are not the accountability the families of the 52 people killed in Plateau State in April 2025 still await. When the basic conditions of survival are deteriorating for millions, a list of construction projects is not a rebuttal. It is a distraction.

The A4A group’s composition reveals the problem. Its leadership is drawn overwhelmingly from former governors and political officeholders who governed northern states in the past and now seek to shape the region’s political future. The group claims representation from all three northern zones, with deputy coordinators for the Northwest, Northeast, and North-Central. But representation on a letterhead is not representation of the people. Shekarau, Badaru, Lalong, Shema, Bello, Namdas—these are not community organizers who emerged from the grassroots. They are political veterans who have spent decades navigating the corridors of power. Their claim to speak for the North rests entirely on authority they once held in office, not on any current mandate from the people they claim to represent.

The political arithmetic Shekarau and his colleagues are attempting to impose is also not as settled as they would have the public believe. Dr. Umar Ardo, convener of the League of Northern Democrats, has predicted Tinubu may secure less than 10 percent of northern votes in a free and fair election. This is a partisan prediction, dismissed by pro-Tinubu groups. But the very fact that such a prediction is being made—and taken seriously enough to require rebuttal—demonstrates the North is not the monolith Shekarau describes. If the entire North were solidly behind the president, there would be no need for a group like A4A. The group’s purpose is not to celebrate an existing consensus but to create one. Its existence is an admission the consensus does not yet exist.

There is a deeper issue than political strategy. When northern leaders who have held high office gather to pledge votes for a sitting president, they are not speaking truth to power. They are speaking power to the people, telling northerners what they should think and how they should vote while ignoring what they are experiencing. The role of a former governor who claims to represent the North should be to tell the president what the North is going through, not to tell the North what the president is doing for them. Shekarau and his colleagues have reversed that relationship. They have become messengers of the federal government to the region, rather than representatives of the region to the federal government.

This is a familiar pattern in Nigerian politics. Former governors and political heavyweights convert their followings into bargaining chips for access to the center. They offer the votes of their people in exchange for influence, contracts, and the continuation of their own relevance. The people themselves are abstractions in this calculus—voters to be mobilized, statistics to be cited, a region to be claimed. The suffering of that region is an inconvenience to be managed with press releases and catalogues of achievements, not a reality to be confronted with honesty and urgency.

Shekarau and his associates are not unique in this. They are part of a political class that has learned to survive by attaching itself to whoever holds power, regardless of what that power does to the people. But they should be named for what they are: political opportunists whose primary loyalty is not to the North, not to their constituents, and not to the truth, but to their own continued relevance in a system that rewards loyalty over accountability. In a sane political environment, leaders who preside over or endorse policies that produce mass hunger, insecurity, and destitution would face consequences at the ballot box. In Nigeria, they are instead rewarded with campaign platforms and secretariat commissioning ceremonies.

The North Shekarau speaks for is a convenient fiction. It is a North of political elites who have decided their interests and the president’s interests are aligned. It is a North that exists in press statements and speeches delivered at party headquarters. It is not the North that is hungry, that is unsafe, that is waiting for government to do the job it was elected to do. That North cannot be summoned into existence by a press conference. And it should not be spoken for by those who have no intention of listening to it.