Northern clerics under the banner of the Concerned Northern Inter-Faith Clergy for Peace have accused two former governors of laying the groundwork for the persistent banditry ravaging Nigeria’s North-West, urging President Bola Tinubu to order their immediate arrest and prosecution.
Addressing a press conference in Abuja on Friday, the inter-faith group—comprising imams, pastors, bishops and other religious leaders—said actions allegedly taken by the former governors created the conditions that allowed armed criminal gangs to flourish in the region.
Led by Bishop Sunday Bawa, the clerics referenced a widely circulated video released earlier this month by notorious bandit kingpin Bello Turji. In the video, Turji accused former governors of Zamfara and Sokoto states of confiscating and selling grazing reserves meant for herders, as well as arming vigilante groups known as Yan Banga, whom he claimed attacked and killed Fulani communities.
According to Turji, those actions ignited ethnic tensions and cycles of reprisal violence that later escalated into widespread kidnappings, massacres and cattle rustling.
“Even though Turji is a confessed terrorist, we cannot simply ignore the substance of his claims,” the clerics said in a statement jointly signed by Imam Sheikh Yusuf Sarki, Bishop Pius Dauda and 10 other faith leaders.
The group argued that the allegations point to deeper issues of land dispossession and armed vigilantism, which enabled criminal networks to mutate into what they described as “the monsters now terrorising the North-West.”
They also expressed solidarity with families of banditry victims who have petitioned President Tinubu for an investigation, describing him as their “last hope” after years of unfruitful appeals to local authorities.
Bawa painted a grim picture of the human toll, calling banditry an “unfolding genocide.” The clerics cited figures showing that more than 13,485 people were killed by bandit attacks between 2010 and May 2023, with at least 2,266 deaths recorded in the first half of 2025 alone—already exceeding the total for the whole of 2024.
They further referenced reports by Amnesty International and the National Human Rights Commission documenting thousands more kidnapped, injured or displaced, alongside economic losses running into trillions of naira due to disrupted farming, trade and ransom payments.
The statement dismissed responses from the accused former governors as “empty echoes,” noting their insistence that banditry was insignificant when they left office in 2007 and their questioning of the timing of the accusations.
“Time heals no guilt,” the clerics countered, warning that denial only deepens suspicion and entrenches impunity.
In a Yuletide appeal to the President, the inter-faith body urged Tinubu to “immediately direct the arrest and prosecution” of the two ex-governors over the alleged actions that helped seed the crisis. They also called for a transparent, independent investigation potentially with international oversight—alongside broader measures to address root causes such as poverty, land disputes and social exclusion.
