In the last six months or thereabout, it has become customary for Sheikh Ahmad Gumi and his sidekick, Professor Usman Yusuf, to periodically launch unprovoked attacks on the government of President Bola Tinubu. These attacks are often veiled as patriotic interventions in the affairs of the country. But in fact, a look at the statements that often accompany them will reveal the two men as seeking relevance within the national space at a time they would have been better off silent.

Even though they appear determined to show that they are patriots who seek but only the common good, they are far from convincing anyone that they are not mere ethnic chauvinists who cannot make up their minds on what they want for the self-created north they claim to speak for. They are no doubt smarting from the pain that a northerner, specifically, a Fulani is no longer the president. Their problem is as simple as that. Otherwise, they have continued to make clearly inciting and incendiary utterances that are meant to stir religious and ethnic strife while pretending to be selfless critics of the current administration

They look for every and any opportunity to attack the Bola Tinubu-led administration and have now seized upon the unfortunate incident of the bombing by the Nigerian Army that took place in Tudun Biri, a village in the Igabi Local Government Area of Kaduna State, on December 3. An unmanned drone that was meant to take out insurgents supposedly hiding among the civilian population of the village went down on the harmless villagers where nobody has been able to prove there were insurgents. The drones went into action on this gruesome night not once but twice, the second being the more devastating.

This was clearly an act of criminality that speaks to the incompetence and carelessness of some of our security operatives. Some of them have no regard for human, especially, civilian life. But this attack on Tudun Biri was also not deliberate – at least there is nothing to suggest that, except in the warped imagination of war mongers. There can’t be any reason to think along such a line. Not when the military hierarchy was quick to own up to it and have been very remorseful since the incident occurred. There is also nothing to be gained from such an attack was it planned to bring misery to the people of Igabi. At least 80 of them are said to have died in it, not counting those injured, many of them being members of the same nuclear or extended families, as should be expected in such a close-knit community.

These were people that were bombed in their own homes while on a procession meant to mark the birthday of Prophet Mohammed. The Eld-el-Malud festival, a latter-day Muslim celebration, had brought together the people of Tudun Biri in merriment with their kith and kin. The military in an apparent case of failed intelligence mistook the people celebrating for terrorists and proceeded to drop bombs on them. Any clear-eyed assessment of the situation cannot but lead to the conclusion that the attacks were launched in error. Which does not mitigate the pain of the needless loss of lives. How for God’s sake would any trained military turn their weapons on the very people they were employed to protect?

To restate the point, 80 is an awful lot of people to lose and to imagine that an individual or a group of individuals would sit down somewhere and order the destruction of a totally harmless group is beyond belief. Yet, that is what the likes of Sheikh Gumi and Professor Usman Yusuf would want the world to believe. It is the irresponsible theory they’ve been vending to the rest of the Nigerian public, particularly the captive audience of their hate-filled, sectarian rhetoric.

Sheikh Gumi will hear none of the explanations being offered by the Army as to how this incident occurred. It has to be a deliberate attack on the Muslim community of Igabi and the wider Muslim north. It is strange that this is all a trained soldier and religious leader like Gumi could say. Together with Prof. Yusuf whose false air of intelligence and intellectualism belies his rabid Fulani nationalism, Gumi has been engaged in the dark labour of stirring religious hate and regional intolerance.

These two men have been making the rounds of the media houses in an attempt to portray the government of President Bola Tinubu as not only incompetent but also biased against the interest of the Hausa-Fulani as against the Yoruba. They have been at this almost immediately after Tinubu was sworn into office in June, 2023. They seemed and have remained blind to the fact that most, if not all, they have been criticising about President Bola Tinubu have their origins in the Buhari administration in multiple folds. All they are interested in now, however, is to demonise the Tinubu administration on account of his being Yoruba as they would have done any other southerner. They are angry and disgusted that a Yoruba man succeeded a Fulani man as president.

They have continued, albeit without evidence, to portray Abuja under Tinubu as going out of its way to harm the interest of northern Nigeria. They started first with the number of appointments that Bola Tinubu has made and how many of these have gone to the Yoruba people as against northerners. They also worry about how many of the appointees are Muslims. One wonders where they were when Buhari sustained his free-wheeling nepotism for eight years non-stop.

For them now, northerners (read the Fulani) have been short-changed by Abuja under Tinubu. Both Gumi and Yusuf, who are fixated on the ‘body language’ of Tinubu, find it difficult to admit that the harsh consequences of the economic policies introduced by the Bola Tinubu administration have impacted Nigerians from all parts of the country. For them, northerners are the primary target of the policies. Nothing could be more unintelligent than this but it is a position that Gumi has been pushing on behalf of northerners in the last six months.

He is not bothered by the idea that whatever President Tinubu may be doing as far as the economy of this country is concerned today amounts to nothing but a fire-fighting measure to repair the damage already done by President Buhari’s eight-year rule. Both Sheikh Ahmad Gumi and Professor Usman Yusuf are adamant in their claim that the attack on the Igabi religious procession was deliberately done to kill the Muslim worshippers. Things are that stark for the two men. It is as if the President, using the army, set out on a mission to destroy northerners. What hateful non-logic is this?