He may fashion himself a smooth operator, but Senator Ahmed Aliyu Wadada’s biggest problem is that he appears fundamentally incapable of seeing Nasarawa State as anything other than a political chessboard. It is a fatal flaw in a candidate, because governance is not politics. Governance is the hard, unglamorous work of dealing with reality as it is, not as it suits your campaign narrative. And when your campaign narrative requires you to look at a state facing an existential challenge and describe it as fine, you have already discredited yourself.
Senator Wadada did just that recently. In an attempt to impugn his closest rival for the governorship ticket during a media interview, he declared that Nasarawa State is “one of the least affected” when it comes to insecurity. It is a false claim that is an insult to every family that has buried a relative, fled a community, or watched their home burn in the state.
The facts are not hidden nor contested. They are documented by humanitarian agencies, confirmed by security analysts, and most damningly, acknowledged by the Nasarawa State government itself. The state legislature warned late last year that the safety of citizens can no longer be guaranteed, calling urgently on the governor to act on what lawmakers described as an escalating wave of violence hitting both urban and rural communities.
Thousands of residents from communities including Aso, Mararaba, Masaka, Gida Ogiri, Akyawa Baka, and Odeni Gida have fled on foot following repeated armed bandit attacks, with homes set ablaze and entire communities emptied
In early April of this year alone, 11 people were killed and over 50 houses razed in a single attack in Nasarawa Local Government Area. There are currently over 23,000 formally tracked internally displaced persons in the state, with five active IDP camps, the largest in Ugya, Toto LGA.
Rotimi Amaechi, watching footage from Nasarawa recently, said: “I watched yesterday in Nasarawa, people were running away from their community like a civil war.” Security analysts have further flagged the state for a surge in illegal mining that is now directly funding armed groups, with Nasarawa’s lithium deposits creating a new layer of conflict economy driving violence in rural communities. International security assessments have documented banditry networks actively expanding into Nasarawa from the northwest, with the state explicitly named as part of a widening insecurity corridor across the North-Central.
This is what “one of the least affected” looks like, according to Senator Wadada.
One wonders what Wadada would say to the families in Akyawa who buried their dead in April. Or the residents of Odeni Gida who walked out of their community on foot with whatever they could carry. Or the farmers in Toto who cannot return to their land. For a man seeking to be the chief security officer of Nasarawa State, there is no charitable interpretation of the statement he made. Either he does not know, which means he is unprepared. Or he knows and said it anyway, which is worse.
Then there is the matter of how he conducted himself during that same media outing. Having made a claim that cannot survive contact with basic facts, Wadada turned on the two reporters interviewing him with open aggression, his tone veering into hostility toward journalists who were simply asking questions. It was unnecessary and revealing. Composure under pressure is not a soft skill in governance. It is a core requirement. A governor who loses his temper at a reporter is the same person who will make reckless decisions when the pressure is real and hard choices cannot be deferred. The interview was a small stage, and Wadada could not hold himself together on it.
What has emerged is the portrait of a man who is a perpetual politician, fluent only in the language of desperate ambition, but sorely unprepared for the weight of governance.
- Awal Nurain, a public affairs analyst writes from Lafia