POWER ROTATION IS NOT AN ATTACK ON THE NORTH — IT IS A REBELLION AGAINST FULANI HEGEMONY

POWER ROTATION IS NOT AN ATTACK ON THE NORTH — IT IS A REBELLION AGAINST FULANI HEGEMONY

Barr. John Apollos Maton
28th January 2026

THE PANIC OF AN IMMIGRANTS DYING INVASION AGENDA OF NIGERIA

Mohammed Bello Doka’s essay is not a warning; it is a confession. It is the sound of the Immigrant Fulani political order realising, perhaps for the first time, that its grip on Nigeria is no longer guaranteed by habit, fear, or inherited dominance. Beneath the florid language about unity, danger, and northern survival lies a far more uncomfortable tr the finarrow Fulani-dominated elite, long accustomed to speaking as if it were synonymous with “the North,” is recoiling at the possibility that the Constitution may finally stop indulging its entitlement. What Doka frames as an existential threat to a region is, in reality, an existential threat to a colonial “masters” attempt at monopolising power they had no business being close to.

The essay labours desperately to present power rotation as an act of hostility, a plot, even a declaration of war. Yet this hysteria collapses the moment one asks a simple question: how can fairness feel like persecution unless injustice has been the norm? For decades, Nigeria’s presidency has been treated by a particular bloc as a revolving inheritance—sometimes temporarily loaned out, but always expected to return home. Now that the rules of the game are being discussed openly, not whispered in smoke-filled rooms, the beneficiaries of opacity are crying foul. Not because democracy is under threat, but because democracy is finally intruding.

THE FRAUD OF “THE NORTH” AS A POLITICAL ALIBI

One of the most dishonest manoeuvres in Doka’s essay is the lazy invocation of “the North” as a single, wounded body. This rhetorical sleight of hand has long been the most effective shield of Fulani political dominance. By collapsing dozens of ethnicities, histories, and political interests into a single abstraction, a tiny elite has successfully hidden behind millions of people it has never meaningfully represented.

The Middle Belt knows this fraud intimately. So do minority communities scattered across the so-called core North, whose lives, lands, and political futures have routinely been negotiated away in the name of an Arewa consensus that exists only at the top. To speak of “fencing the North out of power” is therefore not merely misleading; it is obscene. Which North is being fenced out? The farmers displaced and killed? The communities living under permanent insecurity? Or the aristocracy that has monopolised state power while outsourcing suffering to everyone else?

Power rotation does not marginalise the North. It fractures a lie—the lie that Fulani political interests are identical to northern interests. That fracture is what terrifies Doka and those he speaks for.

THE AUDACITY TO LECTURE NIGERIA ON THE CONSTITUTION

There is something almost breathtaking in the audacity with which this political bloc now lectures Nigeria about constitutional danger. These are the same voices that never found constitutional fault with lopsided security appointments, never objected when federal power was exercised with naked regional bias, never protested when national resources were allocated with quiet hostility toward disfavoured regions. The Constitution was never fragile then. Unity was never endangered then.

But suddenly, when the idea emerges that power rotation might be formalised—made resistant to manipulation, betrayal, and backroom revisionism—the Constitution becomes sacred, brittle, and endangered. This is not constitutional concern. It is constitutional opportunism. The law is only holy when it protects dominance; it becomes tyranny the moment it threatens it.

What Doka truly fears is not rigidity but predictability. An informal system can be bent, bullied, or broken by those with leverage. A constitutional one cannot. And for a political culture that has thrived on ambiguity, enforceable fairness feels like strangulation.

POWER ROTATION AS AN ANTIDOTE TO FEUDAL POLITICS

For all its handwringing, the essay never seriously engages with why power rotation exists in the first place. Nigeria did not stumble into zoning and rotation because elites were bored. It did so because unchecked dominance nearly tore the country apart. Rotation was not charity; it was a survival mechanism—a way to prevent any one bloc from converting demographic weight into permanent ownership of the state.

What is now being proposed is not radical. It is corrective. It recognises that voluntary agreements are only as strong as the goodwill of those who benefit most from breaking them. And history has shown, repeatedly, that when power becomes available to be seized, not shared, it will be seized.

That is why the resistance is so loud. Power rotation, anchored in law, threatens to end the era where one group can lose an election today and quietly reclaim the presidency tomorrow through elite bargaining. It threatens a politics built on entitlement rather than persuasion.

THE MIDDLE BELT: THE UNSPOKEN CASUALTY OF AREWA POLITICS

Perhaps the most revealing silence in Doka’s essay is its near-total erasure of the Middle Belt as a political entity with its own agency. This omission is not accidental. Acknowledging the Middle Belt would require admitting that “northern unity” has often been a euphemism for Fulani supremacy.

For decades, the Middle Belt has been Nigeria’s sacrificial zone—politically useful enough to count, but never important enough to lead. Its blood has lubricated the machinery of unity. Its land has been treated as negotiable. Its political aspirations have been dismissed as inconvenient. Power rotation threatens this arrangement by making invisibility impossible.

This is why the proposal provokes such fury. It does not merely rebalance North and South; it destabilises internal northern hierarchies. It asks an unthinkable question: what if the North is not owned by one group?

POVERTY, INSECURITY, AND THE WEAPONIZATION OF SUFFERING

One of the most cynical moves in Mohammed Bello Doka’s essay is the sudden discovery of northern suffering—as if poverty, hunger, and insecurity were newly arrived guests rather than the long-term products of the very political order he now seeks to preserve. The invocation of these crises is not an appeal for justice; it is a shield. Northern misery is being deployed as emotional blackmail, a way to silence debate and guilt the rest of the country into accepting perpetual dominance by those who have demonstrably failed the people they claim to defend.

This is the unspoken contradiction at the heart of the argument: if the Fulani-led Arewa political establishment has held disproportionate power for decades, then the catastrophic state of the North is not evidence of why it must continue ruling—it is evidence of why it should not. You cannot preside over systemic collapse and then demand eternal leadership as compensation for the damage. That is not responsibility. That is ransom politics.

The truth is brutal and unavoidable. Insecurity and Genocide of Christians and Indigenes of Nigeria did not metastasise because power rotated away from it. Poverty did not deepen because the presidency occasionally moved southward. These disasters flourished under Fulani purported northern-dominated governments that prioritised control over reform, patronage over development, and ideological rigidity over human security. To now insist that the same elite must retain unfettered access to power to “protect” the region is not logic—it is audacity.

THE QUIET ASSUMPTION OF FULANI OWNERSHIP OF NIGERIA

Running beneath Doka’s outrage is an assumption so deeply ingrained that it is rarely spoken aloud: that certain people who are immigrants believe they possess a natural claim to rule Nigeria, and that any attempt to formalise limits on that claim is an act of aggression. This is why the very idea of constitutional power rotation feels offensive to its loudest critics. It challenges a worldview in which leadership is inherited through history, identity, and conquest rather than earned through consent.

This mindset explains the astonishing nerve with which some voices now attempt to dictate what should or should not be in the Nigerian Constitution—as if the document were a courtesy extended by benevolent rulers rather than a collective agreement among equals. When power feels ancestral, law feels intrusive. When dominance feels normal, fairness feels hostile.

The resistance to rotation is therefore not ideological; it is psychological. It is the panic that sets in when a political class realises it may soon have to compete on the same terms as everyone else.

2027 AND THE FEAR OF ELECTORAL REALITY

Strip away the noise, and the timing tells the story. The fury over power rotation is not about principle; it is about 2027. It is about arithmetic. It is about the growing awareness that demographic weight alone no longer guarantees victory, especially in a country battered by economic pain, youth anger, and collapsing trust in institutions.

A unified North once functioned as an electoral sledgehammer. But unity imposed from above fractures when hardship deepens below. Alliances weaken. Loyalty thins. And suddenly, the presidency no longer looks inevitable—it looks contestable. That is when rules begin to matter. That is when elites rush to lock in advantage before the ground shifts completely beneath their feet.

Doka’s essay is saturated with this fear. It is the fear of a future in which first, the Fulani lose all control and relevance, then the Middle Belt groups stand alone, and the true North, especially it’s Indigenes and natives is no longer commanded but persuaded, no longer rallied through identity alone but forced to answer hard questions about governance, inclusion, and performance.

THE MIDDLE BELT WILL NO LONGER DISAPPEAR QUIETLY

What truly makes power rotation dangerous to the Arewa political project is that it refuses to keep the Middle Belt invisible. It disrupts decades of political ventriloquism in which Fulani elites spoke for communities whose interests they routinely ignored or betrayed. It insists that internal colonialism within the North must end, not be endlessly postponed for the sake of elite comfort.

The Middle Belt’s demand for relevance is not extremism. It is not rebellion. It is the most basic democratic instinct: the refusal to be ruled forever by people who neither understand nor prioritise your survival. Every attack on power rotation is, at its core, an attempt to maintain this internal hierarchy—to keep some Nigerians permanently represented and others permanently spoken for.

That era is ending, and the resistance to it is loud precisely because it has been so long delayed.

THIS IS NOT PERSECUTION — IT IS ACCOUNTABILITY

The language of victimhood saturating the anti-rotation argument is revealing. Those who have enjoyed structural advantage for generations now describe the prospect of limits as persecution. Those who wrote the rules suddenly resent the idea that the rules might be written down.

But accountability always feels like oppression to those unaccustomed to it.
Power rotation does not ban anyone from contesting. It does not exile any region from relevance. It simply says this: no group gets to treat Nigeria as a permanent holding. No elite gets to convert historical dominance into constitutional entitlement.

That principle should be uncontroversial in a republic. The fact that it is controversial tells us how far Nigeria still has to go.

THE MYTH OF NORTHERN UNITY AND THE END OF POLITICAL BLACKMAIL OF THE FULANI AREWA AGENDA

“Northern Unity” has long been the most effective instrument of political coercion in Nigeria. It is not a cultural reality so much as a discipline mechanism, enforced from the top and paid for by those at the bottom. Whenever questions of fairness, representation, or accountability arise, unity is invoked not as a shared value but as a gag order. Disagree, and you are accused of betrayal. Demand inclusion, and you are told you are weakening the North. Insist on equity, and suddenly the sky is falling.

This is the context in which Doka’s essay must be read. It is not a plea for cohesion; it is an attempt to reassert control over a narrative that is slipping away. The outrage is not that the North is under threat, but that its internal contradictions are being exposed. Power rotation does not divide the North. It reveals how divided it has always been beneath the surface of enforced consensus just so the Fulani Immigrant Imperialism agenda continues to flourish.

Once that “consensus” begins to crack, Fulani Immigrant control will be broken, the old tricks stop working. Fear no longer mobilises. Guilt no longer silences. And that is why the reaction is so ferocious.

FROM REPRESENTATION TO POSSESSION

At the core of this resistance lies a deeply troubling idea: that the Fulani Immigrant Agenda not be challenged by Native Nigerians and that political leadership is not something to be negotiated in a democracy, but something to be retained like property. This is why any suggestion of limits is interpreted as theft. This is why constitutional reform is framed as ambush. This is why fairness is spoken of as aggression.

For too long, Nigeria has indulged a politics in which Fulani immigrants dominate the natives like imperialist monarchs while embezzling and mismanaging our resources, leaving certain elites who claw their way to political office and should be more aware and conscious of the need to protect the natives from these invaders turn to their bootlickers and behave not as representatives but as custodians of the Fulani agenda, as if the state were entrusted to them by history itself.

This mentality is incompatible with republican governance. It belongs to imperialist Fulani feudal orders, not modern nations.

Power rotation strikes at this mentality directly. It replaces possession with process. It says no one owns Nigeria, and no group gets permanent first refusal on leadership. That simple idea is what has provoked such theatrical panic.

THE FOREIGNNESS QUESTION NO ONE WANTS TO ADDRESS HONESTLY

There is an uncomfortable undercurrent in this debate that Doka circles but never confronts: the question of legitimacy and belonging. Not in the crude sense of citizenship, but in the political sense of not only who gets to define the nation’s direction, values, and constitutional future, but also why must an immigrant population not only be the cause of most of our problems, but assume they should rule over all the natives of the land they are immigrants to.

What rankles many Nigerians is not merely dominance, but the arrogance with which that dominance is exercised — the presumption that the Fulani an immigrant population and foreign political culture, rooted in a narrow historical experience, should permanently dictate the rules of a diverse federation they are not even part of. When communities who feel marginalised by this order are told they are “attacking the North” for demanding safeguards, the resentment deepens.

Power rotation is, in part, a response to this arrogance. It is a way of saying that Nigeria cannot be permanently steered by one worldview while others are told to adjust, endure, or disappear quietly.

WHY THE ARGUMENT FAILS — COMPLETELY

Doka’s argument collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. He warns of instability while defending the very imbalance and the immigrant Islamist Fulani that produced the instability. He invokes poverty while shielding those who have overseen it. He cries exclusion while opposing the only mechanism that would make inclusion unavoidable.

Most revealing of all, he demands trust while opposing accountability.

But trust is not a renewable resource. It erodes when promises are broken, when agreements are revised midstream, when power is treated as entitlement rather than responsibility. The call to constitutionalise power rotation emerges not from hatred, but from exhaustion — exhaustion with a politics that demands endless patience from everyone except those at the top.

THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE NEGOTIATED UNDER FULANI DURESS

Nigeria stands at a crossroads. It can continue to be governed by elite blackmail, where every attempt at reform is met with threats of instability, or it can mature into a republic where no group’s comfort is prioritised over collective fairness.

Power rotation is not a silver bullet. It will not solve poverty. It will not end insecurity overnight. But it will do something essential: it will remove the illusion that Fulani or any bloc can hold the nation hostage by virtue of history, numbers, or noise.

Those who oppose it so aggressively understand this. That is why they are shouting now, before the door closes completely.

FINAL WORD: THE PANIC IS THE POINT

The hysteria surrounding power rotation is not evidence that the idea is dangerous. It is evidence that it is effective. It threatens the Fulani Immigrant Agenda cloaked in Arewa political arrangement that has survived not because it works, but because it has never been properly challenged.

That challenge has now arrived.

Nigeria is not at war with the North. It is at war with the Fulani Imperialists who have a political culture that confuses dominance with destiny. Natives and Indigenes of Nigeria have had enough! The Middle Belt is no longer willing to be erased. Eastern and Southern Nigeria are no longer willing to be managed. And millions in the North itself are no longer willing to be ruled forever by Fulani, the same names, the same networks, and the same failures.

Power rotation is not the end of the North’s relevance. It is the end of unquestioned illegal Fulani political supremacy in a country they are foreigners of.

And that is why the resistance is so desperate.