There is a lie that has been cultivated, watered, and harvested by the All Progressives Congress and its foot soldiers with the precision of a propaganda machine. It does not matter whether the person repeating it wears a professorial gown, a sheikh’s turban, a ministerial badge, or the stained vest of a motor park tout. It does not matter whether they are sober or drunk, educated or illiterate, privileged or struggling. They all speak with the same tongue, recite the same script, and deploy the same tired deflection. The lie is simple: the North was silent during Buhari. The North never criticised Buhari. Therefore, the North has no moral standing to criticise Tinubu. It is a lie so brazen, so historically illiterate, and so transparently self-serving that it deserves to be dismantled brick by brick, name by name, date by date.
This article is that demolition.
Let us begin with the most intimate circle, the one place where silence would have been most expected. On October 14, 2016, Aisha Buhari, the President’s own wife, sat before the BBC Hausa Service and declared that her husband’s government had been hijacked by a few individuals. She said the President did not know 45 out of the 50 people he had appointed . She threatened not to campaign for him in 2019 if things continued. This was not an opposition politician. This was the First Lady, speaking from the heart of Aso Rock, telling the world that the government was adrift. The APC’s response? Buhari laughed it off and said his wife belonged in the kitchen . But the words were already out, and they came from the North, from the President’s own home.
Move to the traditional and intellectual front. In February 2016, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Emir of Kano and former Governor of the Central Bank, spoke to the Financial Times and warned that Buhari’s foreign exchange policies were doomed to fail, that they would encourage corruption and rent-seeking, and that they risked overshadowing whatever gains had been made in security and anti-corruption . Sanusi did not whisper this in a private palace meeting. He said it on the record, to the international press, while Buhari was still basking in the honeymoon of his first year. The Emir of Kano, one of the most senior Islamic authorities in the North, publicly told the President his economic policy was wrong.
Then came the elders. In June 2020, Professor Ango Abdullahi, convener of the Northern Elders Forum, issued a statement that cut to the bone. He said the Buhari administration had woefully failed, that life had lost its value under his watch, and that the President had lost control over the protection of the people . The Presidency’s response was to call Abdullahi a general without troops, a paper tiger, an irritant . But the statement had been made, and it came from the North, from the same region the APC now claims was silent.
By December 2020, after the Zabarmari massacre, the Northern Elders Forum escalated. Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, the Forum’s Director of Publicity and Advocacy, declared that in a civilised nation, a leader who failed so spectacularly to provide security would resign . He said life had lost its value under Buhari. And then, in April 2022, the Forum went further, formally demanding Buhari’s immediate resignation because his leadership had proved spectacularly incapable of providing security for Nigerians . This was not a subtle critique. It was a direct, public call for a Northern President to step down, issued by a Northern body, in the heart of the North.
The religious class was not silent either. Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, the fiery Kaduna-based cleric, sat before Saturday PUNCH in July 2018 and said Buhari’s performance was worse than Jonathan’s. He said insecurity had worsened, that the economy was worse, that feeding and medical care were problems, and that the government was a total failure . When asked why he would criticise a fellow Muslim and a fellow Northerner, Gumi said the truth was more important than ethnicity or religion. He later told the same newspaper that Buhari believed he was Nigeria’s only saint, that his aides treated him like God, and that the deification of the President was wrong . Gumi was not an opposition hireling. He was a Northern Islamic scholar who chose to speak, and the APC’s supporters attacked him for it.
The political rebellion was equally loud. In July 2018, Buba Galadima, one of the architects of Buhari’s political rise, announced the formation of the Reformed APC, describing the party’s leadership as a charade and the government as a disappointment . By October 2018, he was telling anyone who would listen that Buhari’s greatest crime was his failure to secure lives, property, and put food on Nigerian tables, and he urged Nigerians to send him back to Daura . Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the former Kano governor and a towering Northern political figure, publicly regretted supporting Buhari, saying the change he voted for had brought only misery, hunger, killings, and unemployment . These were not southern critics. These were Northern political heavyweights who had helped build the APC and who broke ranks because they could no longer defend the indefensible.
And then there was Nasir El-Rufai. In September 2016, the Kaduna governor wrote a thirty-page memo to Buhari that was later leaked. In the bluntest terms, El-Rufai told the President that the APC administration had failed to manage expectations and had failed to deliver even mundane matters of governance outside of security and anti-corruption successes . He warned that the government was losing the confidence of its own supporters. This was not a rival party speaking. This was a governor elected on the APC platform, a member of Buhari’s own inner circle, telling him to his face that the government was failing. The memo became public in March 2017, and the North watched as one of its own told the truth.
The naira redesign confrontation of 2023 was the final, dramatic proof. In January 2023, Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano wrote to Buhari asking him to postpone his visit to the state because the people were suffering under the new currency policy and the state could not guarantee his safety . In February 2023, Governors El-Rufai of Kaduna, Yahaya Bello of Kogi, and Bello Matawalle of Zamfara took the Federal Government to the Supreme Court over the naira redesign, challenging the President’s own policy in the highest court in the land . These were not ordinary citizens. These were APC governors, Northern governors, serving officials of the same party as the President, dragging his administration to court and refusing to accept old notes as legal tender in defiance of his broadcast. If this is silence, then silence has a very loud voice.
The APC will hear all of this and still insist that the North was quiet. They will point to social media noise, to anonymous voices, to the general climate of fear that they themselves cultivated. But the record is clear. The record has names, dates, mediums, and direct quotations. Aisha Buhari spoke to the BBC. Sanusi spoke to the Financial Times. Ango Abdullahi issued statements through the Northern Elders Forum. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed called for resignation. Ahmad Gumi spoke to PUNCH. Buba Galadima formed a faction. Kwankwaso defected and repented publicly. El-Rufai wrote a memo. Ganduje wrote a letter. Three governors went to the Supreme Court.
And above all, remember this: Atiku Abubakar, a Northerner, a Fulani man from Adamawa, contested against Buhari in 2019 and again in 2023. He did not win, but he was not silent. The Northern political establishment was not monolithic. It was never silent. The claim that the North never criticised Buhari is not a historical observation. It is a weapon, forged to shield the current APC government from the same scrutiny that Buhari faced. It is a lie designed to make accountability look like ethnic betrayal. It is a deceit wrapped in ad hominem, deployed by people who have run out of answers and have decided to attack the questioners instead of the questions.
We challenge the APC to refute these facts. Not with insults. Not with ethnic baiting. Not with whataboutism. Refute the dates. Refute the quotations. Refute the Supreme Court filings. Refute the BBC interview, the Financial Times interview, the PUNCH interview, the Premium Times reports, the Guardian reports, the statements from the Northern Elders Forum. You cannot, because the record is sealed by your own party’s own officials, speaking in their own voices, at the time these events occurred.
Tinubu’s government is failing. Insecurity is rampant. Hunger is biting. The economy is bleeding. And the APC’s response is to tell the North to be quiet because it was quiet before. But the North was never quiet. The North spoke. The North criticised. The North challenged Buhari from the inside, from the palace, from the mosque, from the governor’s mansion, and from the Supreme Court. The lie that the North was silent is not just a historical error. It is a deliberate attempt to rewrite the past so that the present cannot be questioned.
We will not be silent. And neither, history shows, was the North.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via bellodoka82@gmail.com
Abuja Network News