No Blueprint for the North: Revisiting Naja’atu Muhammad’s Warning as 2027 Approaches

In January 2023, a woman who had spent weeks inside the innermost campaign structure of a man seeking Nigeria’s presidency went on national television and said something that should have ended his candidacy on the spot. She said he told her, plainly, that he had no blueprint for tackling insecurity in the North, because having one would mean stepping on too many toes, and toes like that get you killed. She then asked a question about the Vice Presidential candidate that nobody in power has ever fully answered. Three years later, with 2027 approaching and the North still burying its dead, her warning deserves a second look, this time against what has actually been confirmed.

Some interviews age quietly into irrelevance. Others age into prophecy. Hajiya Naja’atu Muhammad’s January 2023 appearance on Arise Television’s Morning Show belongs, uncomfortably, in the second category. She was, at the time, the recently resigned Director-General of the Civil Society Organisation directorate of the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council, a woman who had been inside the room, who had travelled with the candidate, who had, by her own account, been personally courted for the role. When she quit weeks before the February 2023 election and went public, the APC dismissed her as bitter, incompetent, and looking for a new political home. Team Tinubu called her a mole. A ThisDay opinion column accused her of telling deliberate lies for personal advancement. None of that dismissal, however, has made the specific, quotable claims she put on the record simply disappear. This article revisits what she said, names clearly what remains her allegation rather than established fact, and updates the record with what has actually been verified in the years since, because ahead of 2027, the questions she raised about insecurity in the North have not gone anywhere. They have, if anything, gotten louder.

Naja’atu Muhammad and the Blueprint Confession That Should Have Changed Everything

Whatever one makes of the messenger, the underlying question she raised is not something that requires taking her word for it. It requires looking at the record. As we have documented extensively in our coverage of insecurity in Nigeria, the years since that January 2023 interview have produced an unbroken chain of mass abductions, bandit attacks, and rural displacement concentrated overwhelmingly in northern states. If a comprehensive northern security blueprint existed and was being executed, it has not yet produced a northern Nigeria where citizens travel, farm, or send children to school without calculating the odds of survival first. The absence of results does not prove Naja’atu’s specific quote is accurate. It does mean the question her quote raises, whether the administration ever had a coherent northern security strategy at all, remains fair, current, and unanswered on its own merits.

Kabiru Sokoto, Kashim Shettima, and a Serious Allegation That Deserves Serious Handling

The most explosive portion of Naja’atu’s 2023 interview was her characterisation of Vice President Kashim Shettima. She said, in the same appearance: “You cannot take someone that is actually senile and another person that has been associated on several occasions with funding terrorism. Where is Kashim Shettima? We should not forget, Kabiru Sokoto was one of the most wanted terrorists and he was found and arrested in his house.” She went further at a separate campaign stop, explicitly stating Shettima was a sponsor of terrorism. It is essential to be precise here: this is Naja’atu Muhammad’s allegation, stated as her own characterisation and opinion, not a finding by any court, tribunal, or investigative body. A ThisDay opinion column published days later directly rejected the claim, describing it as libellous and asserting she “knew she was telling lies” when she made the connection. Shettima has never been charged with any terrorism-related offence in connection with this matter.

What is independently documented, separate from Naja’atu’s characterisation, is a specific historical fact about Kabiru Sokoto himself. He is the convicted mastermind of the December 25, 2011 bombing of St Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla, Niger State, which killed at least 37 worshippers. According to reporting by TheCable and confirmed on Shettima’s own Wikipedia biography, Sokoto was initially arrested at the Borno governor’s lodge in Asokoro, Abuja, in January 2012, during Shettima’s tenure as Borno State governor, before escaping police custody and being re-arrested a month later in Taraba State. Being found at an official government lodge does not, on its own, establish complicity by the lodge’s occupant, and no legal process has ever concluded that it did. But the historical fact of the arrest location is verifiable and is the specific detail Naja’atu was referencing when she posed her rhetorical question.

Insecurity in the North and the Resource Question Naja’atu Muhammad Refused to Let Go

Beyond the personal allegations, Naja’atu made a structural argument in the same interview that deserves separate, sober consideration on its own terms. She argued that terrorism and banditry in northern Nigeria function as a multi-billion dollar enterprise, tied directly to illegal mining and resource extraction in conflict-affected zones. Her specific claims, as recorded by Legit.ng: that the North-East sits atop strategic mineral deposits including what she described as blue diamond reserves, that oil in the Chad Basin is being illegally exploited amid the insecurity, and that Zamfara State’s gold deposits, which she claimed exceed Ghana’s, are being illegally mined and traded through Dubai. She alleged this happens with the connivance of “the governor, the people in power in connivance with foreign machinery.”

This is, again, her characterisation and allegation rather than an independently adjudicated finding, and readers should treat the specific claims about individual governors’ involvement as unproven. But the broader link between illegal mining, conflict financing, and Zamfara’s documented gold reserves is not a fringe theory unique to Naja’atu. Multiple security analysts and international reporting have separately documented the connection between artisanal gold mining in Zamfara and the financing of armed groups operating in the region, a pattern that international observers have flagged for years as one of the underappreciated economic engines sustaining rural insecurity in Nigeria’s North-West. Whether specific named officials are complicit remains a matter for investigation and due process, not settled fact. But the resource-conflict link itself, as a general phenomenon rather than an accusation against any one person, is a legitimate and under-examined dimension of why insecurity in the North has proven so durable despite years of military deployment.

Insecurity in the North Kept Naja’atu Muhammad Talking Long After the Election Ended

Naja’atu Muhammad did not simply fire one dramatic interview and disappear from public life. In a September 2025 appearance on the Political Advantage Platform podcast, more than two years after the disputed election, she returned to the same underlying concern, describing Tinubu’s governance style as regionalist and stating plainly: “When security is in tatters, how can a country survive? The rise of banditry, insurgency, and ethnic clashes across Nigeria reflected not just a failure of policy but a lack of political will.” She explicitly clarified in that appearance that her criticisms stem from concerns about governance and national unity rather than personal animosity, a notable point given how thoroughly her earlier claims had been framed by opponents as a bitter defector’s revenge. This consistency across nearly three years, delivered through a different platform, to a different interviewer, without the immediate context of a contested election, is worth weighing when assessing whether her underlying concern about northern security governance was ever really about one man’s ego, as her critics insisted, or about a policy vacuum she genuinely believed she had witnessed firsthand.

Why Insecurity in the North Demands Answers Before 2027, Not After

Strip away the personalities, and Naja’atu Muhammad’s 2023 warning reduces to three critical questions that remain entirely unresolved as Nigeria heads toward another election. First: did the current administration ever possess a coherent, actionable blueprint for northern security, and if the answer is genuinely no, why does the region continue to receive campaign visits and summit pledges rather than a published, measurable strategy? Second: when convicted terrorists like Kabiru Sokoto are found sheltering in official government compounds, as the historical record independently confirms happened in 2012, what formal, transparent process exists to establish exactly how that access was obtained, beyond relying on partisan interviews years after the fact to raise the question at all? Third: if illegal mineral extraction genuinely fuels a portion of the conflict economy in the North-West and North-East, as multiple independent analysts beyond Naja’atu have separately suggested, why has no comprehensive, publicly reported federal investigation traced the full supply chain from pit to buyer?

None of these questions require accepting Naja’atu Muhammad’s specific characterisations of any individual as proven fact. As we have argued in our broader examination of accountability gaps at the highest levels of Nigerian government, the pattern that matters most is not any single allegation but the consistent absence of a transparent process capable of definitively confirming or clearing serious claims once they are made. Nigeria cannot build durable security policy on television interviews, however dramatic, from either side. It can only build it on published strategy, independent investigation, and consequences that follow evidence rather than headlines. At Narrivon, we believe the Nigeria of our dreams requires citizens who do right, think right, act right, and refuse to let a three-year-old, still-unresolved warning quietly fade before the next election cycle repeats the same pattern. The North is still burying its people. The blueprint, if one now exists, has not yet been shown to the citizens who are dying while they wait for it.

Sources and Further Reading:
Don’t forget top terrorist was found in Shettima’s house, Tinubu’s ex-campaign DG warns (Legit.ng, January 29, 2023) • I’ve heard Tinubu say Southwest Nigeria sleeps when he sleeps, Naja’atu (SaharaReporters, January 2023) • Tinubu told me he has no blueprint for North, Naja’atu (Tribune Online) • Naja’atu alleges Tinubu’s tag team mate Shettima sponsors terrorists (TheNiche, January 2023) • Naja’atu contradicted herself on Shettima (ThisDay, February 2023) • 12 years after Madalla bombing conviction, court gives Kabiru Sokoto 21 days (SaharaReporters, September 2026) • Convicted terrorist Kabiru Sokoto asks appeal court to quash sentence (Naija News, May 2026) • Naja’atu Muhammad: Tinubu is a regionalist, I have nothing personal against him (Daily Trust, September 2025)