A Letter to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR
By Umar Kawule Darazo
Dear Mr. President,
Bauchi State is facing a land crisis that has now become a security crisis.
The allegations before the public are grave. More than 350,000 hectares of community land are alleged to have been affected across Bauchi State, with over 150,000 hectares allegedly linked, directly or indirectly, to the governor, members of his family or close political associates.
This is not merely a land administration issue. It is about insecurity, culture, justice, public trust and the survival of ancestral ways of life.
The Land Use Act vests land in the governor, but only as trustee for the people. It does not give any governor licence to convert communal lands, grazing reserves and forest reserves into private estates for family members, political allies, companies or proxies.
If these allegations are established, this would not be development. It would be power without restraint – the politics of “because I can, and because no one has checked me, I will.”
These lands are not empty spaces. They are ancestral lands. They carry memory, identity, livelihood and pride. They are where generations have grazed cattle, farmed, traded, married, buried their dead and passed down traditions with dignity.
No society should casually extinguish traditions that have survived for centuries merely to satisfy the modern curse of unchecked greed, speculation and political entitlement.
History is full of warnings. Native communities in America lost ancestral lands in the name of modernisation. Scotland’s Highland Clearances uprooted communities for commercial sheep farming. In Africa, pastoral communities such as the Maasai have faced repeated displacement. Across Asia, including India, rural and tribal communities have been pushed aside for mining, dams and commercial projects.
The lesson is clear: when powerful interests treat ancestral lands and ancestral ways of life as expendable, they do not merely move people from one place to another; they destroy memory, culture, identity and dignity. They replace belonging with alienation, stability with grievance, and heritage with speculation.
Bauchi must not be allowed to follow that path.
Mr. President, at the heart of the insecurity issue may not be ideology alone. It may also be economics. A man displaced from land he understands, a herder denied the grazing routes he has known all his life, a farmer pushed from ancestral soil, or a rural family cut off from its only reliable source of income may begin to see no future within the law.
When people lose land, they lose more than property. They lose certainty. They lose livelihood. They lose dignity. They lose the stable, secure income earned from a centuries-old way of life. They lose the freedom they inherited.
That is how grievance is born. That is how hopelessness deepens. That is how banditry finds recruits.
The petition specifically cites the Udubo Grazing Reserve in Gamawa Local Government Area, where 10,000 hectares were allegedly allocated to Tiamin Rice Limited despite the reserve’s historical status and use by pastoral communities. It also alleges other allocations across several local government areas to companies, associates, family members and politically exposed persons, with some lands allegedly used as collateral for agricultural loans.
This is the nexus: take grazing lands, displace farming communities, destroy rural livelihoods, and insecurity will follow. If communal lands are handed to the powerful without due process, consultation or compensation, Bauchi is not solving insecurity. It is manufacturing it.
It is even more troubling that the Bauchi State Government is alleged to have invoked your administration’s agricultural and irrigation agenda as cover for some of these allocations. Your food security programme should not be used as a shield for dispossession. Agricultural investment must create opportunity, not resentment. It must feed communities, not erase them.
Mr. President, we the people of Bauchi see a rich and bright future under your leadership – a future without insecurity, anchored by sound executive leadership at the gubernatorial level.
We believe Bauchi can prosper while still upholding the centuries-old ways of life and freedoms we carry with pride. We can modernise. We can educate and empower our youths. We can provide accessible healthcare. We can become an agricultural and solid mineral powerhouse for Nigeria and the world.
But we must do so with full respect for our traditions, our heritage and our way of life, standing on the shoulders of those who came before us.
We therefore respectfully urge you to order an independent investigation into these allegations. The inquiry should determine whether due process was followed, whether communities were consulted and compensated, whether environmental and social impact assessments were conducted, whether politically exposed persons benefited improperly, and whether any federal programme was misrepresented.
The governor holds land in trust for the people. He does not hold it for himself.
Bauchi’s rural communities should not be forced to surrender their heritage to unchecked power. Development must improve lives, not erase them. Agricultural investment must create jobs, not dispossession.
Mr. President, this is a clarion call.
Bauchi is not yet Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Niger, Benue, Plateau or Borno – states repeatedly identified in open-source security reporting as epicentres of killings, kidnappings, banditry, insurgency and farmer-herder violence. But Bauchi is no longer insulated. Recent attacks, security deployments and rising fear in communities such as Alkaleri point to a dangerous trajectory that must be confronted now.
The warning signs are visible. The link between land dispossession, rural despair and rising banditry is too serious to ignore. If action is delayed, Bauchi’s land question may harden into a deeper security emergency.
Mr. President, this is the time to act – before Bauchi becomes another tragic chapter in Northern Nigeria’s expanding insecurity crisis.
