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Sani Rebukes El-Rufai: Poverty, Not Firepower, Fuels Banditry

Kaduna State Governor, Uba Sani, has taken issue with his predecessor, Nasir El-Rufai, warning that insecurity in the North cannot be reduced to a military solution.

Speaking in Kaduna on Saturday during the presentation of Where I Stand, a book by the late Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gumi, the governor said those who insist that firearms alone can end banditry are “playing politics with people’s lives.”

El-Rufai had in a recent television interview dismissed what he called a “misguided non-kinetic approach” to insecurity. He accused the Office of the National Security Adviser of encouraging ransom payments and insisted that the only solution was to “wipe out” bandits through military force.

“My position has always been that the only repentant bandit is a dead one. Let’s wipe them out, bomb them, reduce them to nothing. And then the five percent that still want to be rehabilitated can be rehabilitated,” El-Rufai had declared.

But Governor Sani countered that the roots of insecurity run deeper, citing poverty, unemployment, and the neglect of rural communities as the true drivers of banditry.

“Insecurity can’t be resolved solely through the use of firearms. Whoever makes such a claim is only playing politics. We must fear God and stop deceiving the people because that approach will not work,” Sani said.