GENERAL GOWON YOU HAVE BECOME A STRANGER TO THE PEOPLE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO SPEAK FOR
GENERAL GOWON YOU HAVE BECOME A STRANGER TO THE PEOPLE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO SPEAK FOR
Sunday, 15th March, 2026
When General Yakubu Gowon walked out of Aso Rock Presidential Villa on Saturday the 14th of March 2026, stood before waiting journalists and opened his mouth, what came out was not wisdom, not counsel, not the voice of an elder statesman who carries the weight of a bleeding Middle Belt on his chest, what came out was flattery so hollow it echoed. He told the journalists that President Tinubu is “doing the best he can all round,” that there is “no particular area” needing improvement, and that the security situation is being handled “the best he can.” That was the full content of his message to a nation where communities are being wiped out weekly, where people are being murdered in their sleep, where farmlands have become graveyards and homes have been seized by armed invaders. That is what General Gowon, the longest-serving military head of state this country has ever produced, decided to offer after a private meeting with the President.
This is a man who was born in Plateau State, who comes from the very soil of the Middle Belt, whose people are among those currently being harvested by Fulani jihadists armed with weapons more sophisticated than anything the Nigerian Army deploys in the average theatre operation. As this article is being written, the people of Turan in Kwande Local Government Area and the people of Apa in Benue State are living through an active extermination campaign. These are not security incidents in the distant abstract, these are General Gowon’s own people in the most geographically direct sense. They are being killed, displaced, and replaced in their own ancestral lands with the kind of impunity that only thrives when the highest levels of government either enable it or look away from it. And the man who is most respected, most senior, and most historically connected to that zone walked out of Aso Rock and told journalists there is nothing in particular that needs to improve.
The question that must be asked with full force is this: what exactly was the purpose of that visit? The honest answer is already in the public domain. Just one day before Gowon appeared at the Villa, a prominent Tinubu loyalist from Bauchi had publicly called on Gowon, former Presidents Obasanjo, IBB, Abdulsalami Abubakar, and General TY Danjuma to rally behind President Tinubu in what was framed as a “peace initiative.” Gowon was the only one who showed up the very next day. That alone tells you everything about the nature of the visit; it was not pastoral, it was not advisory, it was not driven by the urgency of Middle Belt deaths. It was political theatre, performed at the request of those who needed an elder statesman’s face to legitimise a presidency that is struggling to answer serious questions about its security performance ahead of 2027.
Read Also: The Fanuel Factor In Gashaka, Kurmi, Sardauna Federal…
And the people of the Middle Belt are now asking, with full justification, why General Gowon is the only one who cares enough to perform. Obasanjo did not go. IBB did not go. Abdulsalami did not go. TY Danjuma, who has himself spoken more bluntly about the genocidal patterns in the Middle Belt than almost any public figure in Nigeria, did not go. But Gowon went, sat down, said nothing of substance to the President, or if he did say something meaningful behind closed doors, deliberately hid it from the public that is dying and then repeated the presidency’s own press lines back to the journalists waiting outside. That is not elder statesmanship. That is a man who has made himself persona non grata to the people he once led and still claims to represent in spirit.
There is a specific issue General Gowon could not have been unaware of before stepping into that Villa, and his silence on it after emerging is damning beyond argument. The National Security Adviser, Malam Nuhu Ribadu, told Nigerians plainly and publicly that the bandits, the militias, the same armed groups killing civilians across the Middle Belt and Northwest, cannot be killed or arrested and prosecuted because they are “brothers.” That statement has never been formally withdrawn, never been corrected, and never been repudiated by the presidency. No section of the Nigerian Constitution grants immunity to murderers on the basis of ethnic or blood relation. None. And yet the man advising the President on national security has built a public doctrine around that idea, and it has functioned as cover for the continued absence of any decisive military action against groups that are not hiding, not underground, not invisible to satellites or aerial surveillance, and whose locations are known to every community they have besieged for years.
The people being killed are Tiv, Idoma, Berom, Afizere, Anaguta, Irigwe, Igede, Hausa, Mwaghavul, Ngas, Tarok, Ipapun, Gbangi, Egon, Nupe, Koro, Bassa, Kamuku, Gade, Baruba, Adara, Jaba, Goemai, and more, they are not Fulani killing Fulani, which would at least make Ribadu’s “brothers” argument internally coherent by some perverse logic. These are communities of entirely different ethnic and religious identities being attacked by armed Fulani militia groups, and the NSA has told the country they cannot be treated as criminal combatants because of a fraternal relationship that does not exist between the killer and the killed. General Gowon had an obligation, as a man who comes from this zone and who walked freely into the seat of presidential power, to rebuke that statement on behalf of the people it has endangered. He did not do it. He came out and said the President is doing his best.
There is also the matter of Pastor Ezekiel Dachomo, a man who buries his people repeatedly because the state has failed to protect them, and who has spoken truth about what is happening to those people with the courage that apparently escapes elder statesmen. A former federal Senator, Senator Shehu Sani, has led a campaign suggesting that this pastor has crossed a dangerous line because of his public statements. The same Senator Sani who has never found these words of condemnation for terrorist groups that openly record themselves committing atrocities in the name of religious obligation, groups that state clearly in their own videos that they are acting in obedience to divine instruction when they kill soldiers, rape pregnant women, murder old men, and abduct school children. A man who weeps over a grieving pastor’s words but finds nothing dangerous in the videos of men celebrating mass murder has no moral standing in this conversation, and the silence of elder statesmen like Gowon in the face of that inversion of justice is a failure that the Middle Belt will not forget.
General Gowon, your existence as a public voice means nothing to the people of the Middle Belt if the only thing you can say after meeting the President is that he is doing his best. “Best” is a word that requires evidence. The evidence on the ground in Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Kwara, Southern Kaduna, Zamfara, and Kogi says something different. The graves say something different. The displaced persons camps say something different. The seized farms and occupied homesteads say something different. A nation does not need elder statesmen who travel to the presidential palace to validate the comfort of power. It needs men and women of historical weight who are willing to speak the difficult truth to power’s face, even when they are the only ones in the room doing so. That is what you failed to do.
And in failing to do it, you made yourself, not a bridge between suffering people and a distracted presidency, but an instrument of the silence that is killing them.
Celphas Iyorhen
A Concerned Citizen from the Middle-Belt
