The Meeting That Changes Nothing
In May 2025, the governors of all 19 northern states gathered with members of the Northern Traditional Rulers’ Council. The agenda was clear: rising insecurity, mass kidnappings, banditry, and the collapse of safety in rural communities across the region.
The meeting ended with what such meetings always end with a consensus on the need for “unity, urgency, and accountability.
Then everyone went home.
The bandits were still in the forests. The kidnap victims were still in captivity. The villages were still burning. And the emirs, who had sat in that room with the authority of centuries behind them, returned to their palaces.
This is the story of what those palaces once meant and what they have become.
What the Emirs Were Built to Do
To understand the failure, you must first understand the promise.
The Sokoto Caliphate, established by Usman dan Fodio in 1804, was one of the largest and most sophisticated empires in African history. At its peak, it stretched from present-day northern Nigeria into Niger, Cameroon, and Chad a federation of emirates bound by Islamic law, Islamic scholarship, and a system of governance that emphasised justice, education, and accountability.
The emirs were not ceremonial figures. They were administrators, judges, and protectors. Each emirate was governed by an emir who was accountable to the Sultan of Sokoto, and who in turn was accountable to his people. The Alkali courts administered justice. District heads managed communities. Village heads reported upward through a chain of authority that was designed, at its core, to ensure that no community was left without governance.
This system produced results. By the early 19th century, Kano was one of the wealthiest cities in West Africa. Sokoto was a centre of Islamic scholarship that attracted students from across the continent. The legal system, based on Sharia, provided dispute resolution, property rights, and protection for ordinary people in ways that formal colonial and post-colonial institutions have never managed to replicate.
The foundation of the emirate system was not tradition alone. It was function.
What the British Left Behind
In 1903, British colonial forces captured Sokoto. The last Sultan who resisted Muhammad Attahiru I was killed at the Battle of Burmi. The Caliphate’s political independence was finished.
The British, however, made a calculation. Rather than dismantle the emirate structure, they would govern through it — a system Lord Lugard called “indirect rule.” The emirs would remain in place, retaining their titles and their palaces, while the actual power shifted to the colonial administration.
This decision preserved the outward form of the emirate system while hollowing out its substance. The emirs were no longer accountable to their people through an Islamic system of governance. They were accountable to a British provincial commissioner. They kept the ceremonies. They lost the power to act.
Many scholars have argued that this colonial arrangement which stripped emirs of genuine authority while preserving their symbolic prestige is the root of the crisis that followed. An institution designed to govern became an institution designed to display governance.
When Nigeria became independent in 1960, the constitution reduced the powers of traditional rulers further. The Local Government Reforms of 1976 stripped emirs of most of their administrative and judicial functions. They became what one researcher described as figures engaged in the “brokering of relevance negotiating between their symbolic status and their actual powerlessness.
What remained was the palace, the turban, and the title. What did not remain was the capacity to act.
The Crisis That Grew in Their Silence
While the emirs presided over ceremonies, Northern Nigeria was becoming one of the most dangerous places on earth.
Boko Haram and ISWAP attacks were responsible for 66 percent of all violent deaths in Nigeria in 2024. By October 2025, over 2.2 million people were displaced in the Northeast, more than 650,000 in the Northwest, and nearly 601,700 in the North Central region.
According to SBM Intelligence, Nigerians paid at least 2.57 billion naira in ransoms between July 2024 and June 2025, while abductors demanded as much as 48 billion naira. During this period, nearly 5,000 people were kidnapped and over 760 were killed.
In November 2025 alone, at least 402 people mostly schoolchildren were kidnapped across four northern states, surpassing the 2014 Chibok abduction in scale.
These are not distant statistics. These are farmers who cannot reach their fields. Mothers who send children to school and wait all day, not knowing if they will return. Communities that have abandoned entire villages because the state in any form cannot protect them.
The President knows. The 19 northern governors know. The National Assembly knows. The traditional rulers, the emirs, the chiefs, the religious leaders, the scholars Everybody knows. But Everybody expects Somebody to act.
The Chieftaincy Title for a Bandit
In 2022, the Emir of Birnin Yandoto in Zamfara State conferred a chieftaincy title on Ado-Alero a banditry kingpin on the grounds that the kingpin had played a role in a local peace process between the emirate and the bandits terrorising the community.
This single act captured everything that has gone wrong.
An emir, faced with a choice between standing with his people against those who terrorise them and negotiating a private peace by legitimising the terroriser, chose negotiation. He chose it because he had no other tool. His institution has been emptied of the capacity to enforce, to prosecute, or to protect. All he could do was confer.
Research has documented that traditional rulers are poorly engaged in the fight against insecurity in Nigeria, and the reasons are rooted in the battle of supremacy between traditional rulers and their political counterparts, rather than collaboration.
The result is an institution that is present everywhere and effective nowhere visible in every community, absent from every crisis.
The Paralysis of Diffusion
There is a concept in psychology called the diffusion of responsibility. It describes what happens when many people witness a problem and each one assumes someone else will act. The more people who are present, the less likely any single person is to intervene.
Northern Nigeria’s governance crisis is a perfect demonstration of this principle at an institutional scale.
The President expects the governors to act. The governors expect the President to do something. The National Assembly expects the executive to take charge. The traditional rulers expect the politicians to solve the problem. The federal government expects the state governments to secure their territories. The state governments expect the federal government to deploy the military. Everybody is waiting for Somebody else to move first.
In this paralysis, the emir sits at the centre the institution most trusted by ordinary communities, most physically present in rural areas, most accessible to the population and does the least. Not because the individuals who hold these positions are without ability or compassion, but because the institution itself has been so thoroughly de-fanged over a century of colonial and post-colonial politics that it no longer has the mechanisms to act even when it wants to.
What Would Actually Change Things
The solution is not to romanticize the pre-colonial emirate system, which had its own forms of inequality and coercion. It is to acknowledge that an institution with deep community trust and grassroots reach is currently sitting idle while communities bleed, and ask what it would take to change that.
Researchers and policy analysts have proposed several concrete directions.
The first is legal reintegration. Traditional rulers need constitutional recognition of specific, defined roles in community security not vague “advisory” functions, but actual authority to mobilise community watch groups, report intelligence to security agencies, and serve as formal intermediaries between communities and the state. This requires legislation, not just statements at meetings.
The second is accountability without political capture. One reason emirs have been rendered ineffective is that their appointment and removal has become a political tool for governors. The dethronement of Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi of Kano in 2020 widely seen as political punishment for his public criticisms and the years of legal battles that followed illustrated how thoroughly the emirate system has become an instrument of political contestation rather than community governance. An emir who can be dethroned for speaking truth cannot be expected to speak truth.
The third is community intelligence systems. Banditry and insurgency thrive in information vacuums. Traditional rulers, with their networks of district heads, village heads, and ward heads, sit at the centre of the most extensive community intelligence network in Northern Nigeria. This network is currently informal, uncompensated, and disconnected from security agencies. Formalising it paying village heads for verified security intelligence, creating direct communication channels between district heads and security forces would cost a fraction of what Nigeria spends on military deployments that arrive after the attack has already happened.
The fourth is the most fundamental: investment in the communities themselves. High levels of poverty, joblessness, and inequality, combined with a weak state presence, have made participation in banditry an attractive option for some young men. The collapse of traditional agricultural livelihoods across the Northwest has eliminated legitimate income sources and made the returns from banditry an increasingly rational economic choice. No amount of traditional authority or military force permanently resolves a crisis that is, at its core, an economic one.
The Palace and the Village
There is a distance sometimes only a few kilometres between the emir’s palace and the village where the bandits came last month.
The palace has generators, security guards, and marble floors. The village has burned thatch, empty homes, and a community that has decided it is no longer safe to stay.
The emir knows about the village. The emir has received the delegations. The emir has issued the statements.
What the emir has not done what the institution of the emirate has not done in decades is protect the village. Not because protection was never its purpose. But because the capacity for protection was taken away, piece by piece, over a hundred years of being useful to whoever held political power in Abuja or the state capital.
Usman dan Fodio founded the Sokoto Caliphate because he saw rulers who had abandoned their obligation to the people they governed. He called it moral corruption. He said it was the responsibility of those with knowledge and authority to refuse to be complicit in that abandonment.
The question Northern Nigeria’s traditional rulers must now answer is the same one he asked over two hundred years ago: when the people are suffering, what is your obligation?
The silence so far has been its own answer.
Update: The Sultan Speaks And the Question Remains
This article was still being written when the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, addressed a gathering of governors and traditional rulers in Kaduna State. His message was direct: Northern Nigeria must unite to fight insecurity. He called on the Muslim community to support security forces, and urged mosques across the country to recite special prayers during times of crisis.
He also said something that deserves close reading. He stated that fighting insecurity is not the job of government and security forces alone the community must contribute.
This is true. But it raises the question this article has been asking.
The Sultan is the most influential traditional ruler in Northern Nigeria. He commands the loyalty of millions. His voice reaches communities that no governor, no general, and no federal policy can touch. When he speaks, people listen.
And what he asked them to do was pray.
Not to organise. Not to establish community intelligence networks. Not to demand that governments give traditional rulers the legal tools they need to protect their own people. Pray.
This is the pattern that has repeated itself for decades across Northern Nigeria. When children are kidnapped, the response is prayers. When villages burn, the response is prayers. When farmers abandon their land out of fear, the response is prayers. And when the prayers end, the bandits are still there.
Prayer does not map forest hideouts. Prayer does not intercept ransom payments. Prayer does not feed a displaced family in a camp in Zamfara. Prayer does not put a child back in school after his village has been emptied by fear.
What does these things is evidence-based governance. It is community intelligence systems that pay village heads for verified information. It is legislation that gives traditional rulers actual authority to act. It is investment in the economic conditions jobs, education, opportunity that make banditry a less rational choice for a young man with nothing.
The Humanist position is not that prayer is evil. It is that prayer, as a substitute for action, is a way of making peace with suffering that could be prevented. Every hour spent asking God to fix what humans broke is an hour not spent on the political, legislative, and economic work that would actually fix it.
Northern Nigeria does not have a spiritual problem. It has a governance problem, an economic problem, and an institutional problem. Each of these has known, evidence-based solutions. None of those solutions require divine intervention.
The Sultan’s voice is still there. The institution’s reach is still there. The community’s trust is still there.
What is missing is the will to replace faith in the unseen with investment in the visible — in the roads, the schools, the courts, the economic opportunities, and the legal frameworks that protect people not because God willed it, but because human beings decided it was their responsibility to each other.
That decision has been delayed long enough.
