RE: “APC, HANNATU MUSAWA: THE QUEEN AMINA MOMENT THE NORTH HAS BEEN WAITING FOR” BY MOHAMMED BELLO DOKA

By Barr. John Apollos Maton

Friday January 30 2026.

A NECESSARY DISCLAIMER THE AUTHOR CONVENIENTLY IGNORES

Let us begin by stripping away the lazy assumption that any criticism of this article must automatically translate into support for Bola Ahmed Tinubu or the APC. That binary thinking is precisely the intellectual laziness that has crippled Nigerian political discourse for decades. One can reject Tinubu’s politics, question APC’s moral standing, and still acknowledge when a structural shift—however self-interested—breaks a long-standing pattern of Fulani political Colonialism and Foreign Occupation. Nuance is not betrayal; it is maturity.

For over twenty years, Nigerian governance has followed an unmistakable pattern: the consolidation of real power—security, intelligence, coercive institutions—within an extremely narrow immigrant-Fulani-dominated elite circle. Presidents came and went, parties rebranded, slogans changed, yet the same surnames, networks, and foreign imperialist Fulani interests retained control over the levers that matter most in a fragile, multi-ethnic state. This was not accidental. It was systematic, deliberate, and defended with genocide, intimidation and silence.

It is very obvious Tinubu did not dismantle this structure out of moral clarity or national empathy. However, for the first time in over two decades, that structure has been disrupted. Fulani dominance no longer occupies an untouchable position within the top five most consequential state offices. That single fact alone explains the panic masquerading as principle in the article under review. When privilege is normalized, its loss feels like oppression.

To refuse to acknowledge this shift—simply because Tinubu remains deeply flawed—is to engage in bad faith. Political analysis is not a loyalty test. The refusal of the author to confront this reality reveals the true agenda of the piece: not justice, not balance, but the preservation of an illegal Fulani hierarchy and imperialist domination that many Nigerians have buried loved ones under. The furtherance of the Fulani "Arewa" agenda in a country that is not their own, the audacious demands of an immigrant population who have no issue carrying out unchallenged Genocide against the Native Indigenous Ethnic People and groups, is the reality Hannatu Musawa, this author by this article, and all their supporters are passionately defending.

THE MYTH OF A “QUEEN AMINA MOMENT”

Invoking Queen Amina of Zazzau to describe Hannatu Musawa’s intervention is not poetic license—it is historical vandalism. Queen Amina represents indigenous authority, territorial defense, and sovereign expansion at a time when power was earned through courage and responsibility to one’s people. Her legacy is rooted in protection, not misplaced immigrant entitlement; sacrifice, not lobbying for illegal colonial inherited advantage.

Musawa’s intervention does not challenge power—it defends the foreign occupation and subjugation of native Nigerians by the Fulani who are not native to Nigeria. She is not confronting a tyrannical system that excludes her people; she is protesting a rare moment when  long-dominant Fulani elite faces recalibration and political extinction. To equate resistance against marginalization with resistance against the loss of dominance of the Fulani is to flatten history into propaganda. Queen Amina fought to establish power; Musawa speaks to illegally retain it in a country not their own.

More troubling is how gender symbolism is weaponized to sanitize the argument. The fact that “it took a woman to speak,” as the article dramatically asserts, is irrelevant when the substance of that speech reinforces decades of exclusion and silence around mass suffering. Gender does not automatically confer moral clarity. A woman defending injustice does not become righteous by virtue of her sex.

This mythologizing is designed to emotionally disarm readers, to replace scrutiny with sentiment. But Nigerians are no longer in the mood for symbolism divorced from consequence. Courage is not measured by who speaks, but by what they defend—and here, what is being defended is a status quo soaked in blood and denial.

PLAYING THE VICTIM AFTER OWNING THE SYSTEM

There is something deeply offensive about watching beneficiaries of entrenched power suddenly rehearse the language of victimhood. For decades, Northern Muslim—particularly Fulani—elites, foreigners to Nigeria, have not merely participated in governance; they have owned the architecture of state violence and protection. From military leadership to intelligence coordination, from internal security to border control, the pattern has been unmistakable.

During this period of their dominance, Nigeria witnessed some of its worst humanitarian catastrophes: entire villages erased, indigenous farmers displaced, Christian communities butchered, and Middle Belt populations treated as expendable buffers. Yet accountability was absent. Arrests were rare. Prosecutions were mythical. Official empathy was cosmetic at best.

Now, faced with even a partial dilution of that illegal foreign dominance, the same Fulani elite bloc frames itself as endangered. This is not marginalization—it is withdrawal symptoms from unchecked power. To call this moment “political fraud” is generous; it is closer to political gaslighting on a national scale.

Victimhood loses credibility when it is claimed without reckoning. Those who controlled the system when the killing fields expanded cannot rewrite themselves as endangered minorities the moment the system rebalances and equity is achieved. History remembers who held the keys while the fires burned.

THE MUSLIM–MUSLIM TICKET: A MORAL DISGRACE, NOT A PRINCIPLE

The article’s selective amnesia regarding the Muslim–Muslim ticket is perhaps its most damning flaw. In 2023, concerns about religious balance were mocked, dismissed, and ridiculed. Nigerians were told—in condescending tones—that competence trumped sentiment, that numbers mattered more than coexistence, and that fears of exclusion were emotional blackmail.

Yet this posture existed in a country already failing to protect Christian communities from mass violence. Entire dioceses were under siege. Priests were kidnapped or killed. Villages were razed. To insist on religious monopolization in such a climate was not neutral—it was provocative and cruel.

The author’s camp defended this arrangement aggressively. Balance was “noise.” Unity was “overrated.” Inclusion was “political correctness.” Now, with the possibility that power-sharing may not favor their bloc, religious identity is suddenly sacred again. This is not evolution; it is opportunism.

Principles do not change with convenience. Those who sanctified imbalance yesterday cannot credibly posture as defenders of fairness today. 

History will not be kind to this contradiction.

FULANI IMMIGRANT ELITES ARE NOT SYNONYMOUS WITH “THE NORTH”

One of the most dishonest maneuvers in the original article is the deliberate collapsing of Fulani political elites into “the North” as a monolithic victim. This rhetorical trick has been used for decades to shield a narrow class from scrutiny by wrapping it in regional sentiment. Criticism of Fulani dominance is immediately framed as hostility toward Northerners as a whole, even though millions of indigenous Middle-Belt and native Northern ethnic groups like the Hausa, have never benefited from this arrangement.

The Middle Belt, in particular, exposes this lie. Tiv, Berom, Jukun, Idoma, Bachama, Kataf, and dozens of other indigenous peoples are geographically Northern but politically marginalized. They have not controlled security institutions, they have not dictated national policy, and they have certainly not enjoyed protection from violence. Yet they are constantly told to share guilt—and silence—with elites who neither defend them nor represent them.

More disturbing is the unspoken reality that many of the most powerful Fulani political figures trace their identity not to indigenous Nigerian nationhood, but to a transnational pastoral network that predates modern borders. This does not automatically invalidate citizenship, but it does raise legitimate questions about whose interests are prioritized when state power consistently aligns with one mobile elite at the expense of rooted communities.

Conflating these foreign immigrant Fulani elites with “the North” is therefore not unity—it is erasure. It erases indigenous Middle-Beltans and Northerners who suffer genocide and violence. It erases internal diversity. And it erases the truth that opposition to Fulani dominance is often led by Northerners themselves who are tired of being sacrificed for an elite that claims to speaks in their name but bleeds them dry.

INDIGENOUS RIGHTS ARE NOT “IDENTITY POLITICS”

The article accuses critics of playing identity politics, as though demanding justice for indigenous peoples is some frivolous distraction from “real governance.” This framing is both cynical and dangerous. When people are killed because of who they are, where they live, and what land they occupy, identity is no longer a theoretical concept—it is a death sentence.

For years, indigenous communities in the Middle Belt have faced systematic dispossession. Attacks follow a grim pattern: villages invaded, survivors displaced, land quietly occupied, and official narratives reduced to “communal clashes.” These are not spontaneous conflicts; they are sustained campaigns enabled by state inaction and selective enforcement of law.

Calling resistance to this reality “identity politics” is a luxury only available to those whose identities are protected by the state. For those whose existence invites violence, asserting indigeneity is not politics—it is survival. Silence, in this context, is not neutrality; it is collaboration.

A nation that cannot defend its indigenous populations has forfeited its moral legitimacy. Until the rights, safety, and dignity of native communities are secured, no lecture about unity, balance, or patience deserves to be taken seriously.

TINUBU DIDN’T GROW A CONSCIENCE—HE READ THE ROOM

Let us be brutally honest: Tinubu’s shift is not a moral awakening. It is a strategic recalibration driven by pressure, not principle. Nigerian politics does not reward empathy; it responds to consequences. The backlash against long-standing Fulani dominance has reached a point where ignoring it carries electoral and legitimacy costs.

Public anger is no longer confined to whispers or regional forums. It is loud, cross-ethnic, and increasingly coherent. Indigenous Nigerians—North and South—are questioning why one group monopolized power while insecurity spiraled out of control. Tinubu, a seasoned political survivor, understands when an old formula stops working.

This does not make him a reformer. It makes him responsive to reality. But even this begrudging adjustment terrifies those who benefited from the old order. Hence the frantic essays, the emotional appeals, and the sudden discovery of “fairness” when dominance is threatened.

What we are witnessing is not persecution—it is adaptation. And adaptation is long overdue.

COURAGE IS NOT DEFENDING A DYING ORDER

There is a deliberate attempt in the original article to redefine courage as the act of publicly defending an arrangement that has already overstayed its moral legitimacy. This is a cheap inversion of meaning. Courage is not standing athwart history screaming entitlement; it is standing against comfort, familiarity, and advantage when those things become unjust. What is being framed as bravery here is, in truth, fear of irrelevance.

Defending a system that concentrated power while violence metastasized across the country is not noble. It is evasive. It avoids the harder conversation about failure—failure of leadership, failure of protection, failure of accountability. It replaces introspection with melodrama and substitutes symbolism for substance.

Real courage would have been Northern Muslim elites speaking out when villages were emptied, when perpetrators roamed free, when victims were dismissed as collateral. Real courage would have been resignations, investigations, prosecutions, and reform. That silence, sustained for years, cannot now be redeemed by performative outrage over power-sharing calculations.

A dying order always dresses itself in the language of persecution. It calls any challenge “arrogance,” any reform “betrayal,” and any redistribution “revenge.” History is littered with such moments. They never end with the preservation of dominance—only with its exposure.

FINAL VERDICT

This article is not a warning; it is a panic memo. It is the sound an entrenched elite makes when it realizes that the rules it wrote may no longer protect it. By invoking history without accountability, identity without justice, and courage without sacrifice, the author reveals precisely how hollow the argument truly is.

Nigeria does not owe any group perpetual relevance. No ethnicity, religion, or elite network has a divine or historical claim to the commanding heights of the state. Power must justify itself through protection, fairness, and competence—and by those measures, the old arrangement stands indicted.

The indigenous peoples of Nigeria, especially those of the Middle Belt, are not asking for supremacy. They are asking to stop burying their dead in silence. They are asking for land that remains theirs, for lives that matter, and for a state that does not treat their suffering as background noise.

The future of Nigeria will not be negotiated through nostalgic essays or moral blackmail. It will be forged by those who understand that balance is not charity, justice is not sentiment, and silence in the face of slaughter is not neutrality.

That future is coming—whether its defenders like it or not.