Suchet Baba, a Kaduna-born writer, painter, and cultural entrepreneur has picked the important challenge of narrating the Northern Nigeria’s experience. Telling its own stories through art, literature, and creative expression, to her, is authentic and vital to preserving the region’s cultural identity and challenging long-held stereotypes.

Founder and festival director of “Arts and Vibes”, her work is geared toward forward as well as magnifying the unheard of voices. She’s equally determined to set up the stage which props young creators across Northern Nigeria to tell their reality both from their perspectives and on their own terms.

According to her, the region’s stories are often overlooked, misrepresented, or filtered through external perspectives, making it essential for Northern artists and storytellers to take ownership of their narratives.

Driven by a commitment to reframe perceptions of Northern Nigeria, she uses contemporary art and storytelling to document, preserve, and reshape cultural identities while encouraging young people to explore creative expression beyond traditional and ethnographic boundaries.

“Arts and Vibes”, created in Kaduna in 2021 has asserted itself a creative platform for artists, writers, and young people to collaborate, share ideas, and showcase their talents. With sheer hardwork over the years, it is proving itself as a cultural movement for dialogue and artistic innovation within the region.

Her literary work has also gained recognition, with features in publications such as Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, Afritondo, and Punocracy, where she explores themes of identity, memory, culture, and belonging. She has been longlisted for the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 Alinea Prize in Nonfiction and the 2018 Okada Books Campus Writing Challenge.

Baba is also a visual artist, apart from writing, with exhibitions including Young, Fresh n New by Wunika Mukan Gallery in 2026 and The Artists Commune in 2025.

Her speaking engagements and appearances or presence on media platforms such as Microsoft Afriweek, Channels Television, TVC News, Premium Times, Leadership Newspaper, Pulse Nigeria, and Voices of Nigeria, define her advocacy role for serious investment in Northern Nigeria’s creative ecosystem.

By: Aondoakaa Tersugh Daniel

Ahead of 2027, the Peoples Democratic Party occupies a serious strategic position in Benue, anchored by the emergence of Chief Michael Kaase Aondoakaa as its gubernatorial flag bearer. That much is considerable. But the declaration of a running mate without proper consultation, without recourse to the electoral history of the zone, and without regard for the arithmetic of bloc politics within Zone C reduces what could have been a formidable campaign to a cosmetic exercise in political dressing. Aondoakaa has not launched a campaign. He has launched a rehearsal for defeat.

The pattern is not new. It has played out before, and it has always ended the same way. In 2003, two major opposition parties contesting against incumbent Governor George Akume pitched their running mates within the Old Otukpo bloc of Benue South, while Akume retained his deputy from the Old Oju bloc. The stakeholders of the UNPP would later collapse their party structure in support of the ANPP, yet Unongo of the ANPP still lost to Akume. The consolidation of opposition forces meant nothing because the foundational error of running mate selection had already been made. For the records, Unongo’s running mate was Philip Daniel Agbondien.

In 2011, Prof. Steve Ugbah picked Alhaji Usman Abubakar, widely known as the Young Alhaji, as his running mate in the governorship race. Yet, Young Alhaji’s popularity in Otukpo couldn’t deliver. Prof. Ugbah lost that race.

In 2019, Barr. Emmanuel Jime picked Dr. Sam Ode as his running mate. Ode hails from Old Otukpo. At the time of that contest, the incumbent deputy governor, Engr Benson Abuonu equally hailed from Old Otukpo. That ticket failed.

The elections of 2003, 2011, and 2019 were fierce electioneering years in which incumbents were seriously challenged. All three opposition tickets carried real political capital. None survived the weight of a miscalculated running mate choice. Aondoakaa now finds himself in the same fight, challenging an incumbent, and he has reached into the same cabinet of failure for his formula. One would have expected that strategic ambition would produce strategic alliance. It has not. A deliberate thinker preparing to govern a state does not repeat the exact configuration that has ended in defeat across three separate electoral cycles within the same zone.

The most fitting choice, by every measure of the current power equation in Benue South, was from the Old Oju bloc. The reasoning is not sentiment. It is arithmetic. The Idoma bloc presently holds the Senate, the deputy speakership and the deputy governorship. Old Oju, by contrast, has no stake in the current power sharing arrangement across the zone. That is not a minor recipe for grievance. It is a political vacuum waiting to be filled by any candidate with the sense to see it.

Beyond the question of equity, there is the question of voting population. Many analysts overestimate Otukpo’s raw electoral advantage by conflating geographical size with actual turnout capacity. As it is in Makurdi, where settler populations and non-indigene residents constitute a substantial portion of the population without translating into corresponding votes for indigene candidates, so too must the voting population of Otukpo be disaggregated carefully. A very significant portion of the real electoral weight in that terrain belongs to the Igede people of Old Oju, whose votes are not automatic and are not captive to sentiment.

Aondoakaa’s decision to pick a running mate from Old Otukpo, a bloc with no significant political capital to deploy in this contest, is not merely a tactical misstep. It is the first clear sign that his campaign does not understand the zone it intends to govern. Anyone who is willing to forfeit the entire bloc votes of Old Oju and walk the same road that destroyed the aspirations of Unongo, Ugbah and Jime will arrive at the same destination those roads have always led to. History in Benue South does not punish repetition lightly. It completes the full circle, and the circle always closes at total defeat.

Those who argue that the choice confers some security advantage, given the background of the running mate, may have conveniently forgotten that Vice President Kashim Shettima declared at the outset of the Tinubu administration that the President would focus on development and economic matters while he himself would lead the charge against insecurity. The Nigerian public was invited to accept that division of labour. The state of security in Nigeria today is the most definitive verdict on that arrangement.

A question that should bother the engineers of this choice, and those who intend to vote come 2027, is this: in the event of an emergency, can this unknown running mate, who knows little or nothing about the Benue terrain, steer the affairs of the state effectively?

Aondoakaa has taken the first step to defeat, and the election has not yet begun.

By Celphas Iyorhen

Rotimi Amaechi made a sarcastic remark last week, suggesting that asking Nasir El-Rufai to produce his late parents’ bodies as bail surety would not have been entirely out of place. His political ally meant it as a complaint for excessive bail conditions. The rest of Nigeria should take it as a dark and fitting metaphor, because the man now crying foul behind courtroom walls is the same man who spent two decades making others weep at the ruins of their homes, the graves of their kings, and the unmarked holes where their missing loved ones vanished without trace.

Let us be precise about who Nasir El-Rufai is.
As FCT Minister under Obasanjo, El-Rufai earned the nickname “Mai Rusau,” meaning the demolisher, after presiding over one of the most brutal forced eviction campaigns in Nigerian urban history, displacing nearly one million Abuja residents between 2003 and 2007. When asked about it, he said he had “no apology.” That unapologetic arrogance was not a phase. It was a governing philosophy he carried everywhere he went.
A 2008 Senate Committee found that El-Rufai, as FCT Minister, had violated multiple court orders in demolishing properties in Abuja.

Among the casualties of Elrufai draconian rules was Gbagyi Villa, where 3,500 homes, 40 churches, and 16 schools were flattened in defiance of a court injunction, with eight people reportedly killed in a demolition exercise conducted 72 hours before his tenure ended. The Durbar Hotel was similarly bulldozed while litigation was still active in court. A Kaduna High Court later ruled that demolition illegal. The damage, as always with El-Rufai, was already done before justice could catch up.

In 2017, an Abuja High Court ordered his government to pay Audu Maikori, founder of Chocolate City, N40 million in damages for unlawful arrest and detention. El-Rufai refused. The Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment in 2020 and reduced the award to N10.5 million. El-Rufai refused again and pushed the matter to the Supreme Court, where it sits till today. This is the same man who now hopes on courts for protection.

The blood on his hands is not a figure of speech. In December 2015, hundreds of Shiite members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria were killed across three days in Zaria and reportedly buried in shallow graves at Mando, Kaduna, all under El-Rufai’s watch as governor. Charges were then filed against their imprisoned leader Sheikh El-Zakzaky even after three of his sons had already been killed in that same crackdown. Their leader spent years in detention. El-Rufai spent those same years governing freely.

Then there is the Agom Adara. In October 2018, the paramount ruler of the Adara people, HRH Dr. Maiwada Raphael Galadima, attended a government meeting in Kaduna and never returned home. His convoy was attacked on the way back. He was kidnapped and murdered despite a ransom payment. In the aftermath, El-Rufai ordered the arrest of nine Adara elders including traditional village heads, who were locked up for over 143 days without bail and without charge. The Attorney-General eventually confirmed there was no case against them. He destroyed their lives because he could.

There is also Abubakar Idris, known as Dadiyata, a lecturer and activist who was abducted from his Kaduna home on August 2, 2019. He has not been seen since. August 2026 will mark seven years of enforced disappearance. No arrest. No explanation. Just the silence that follows when a government decides a man must simply cease to exist.

Dr. Obadiah Mailafia, former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank and a fearless voice against the killing of Christians in southern Kaduna, was repeatedly summoned by the DSS with the complicity of governor Nasir El-Rufai, after he publicly alleged that a sitting northern governor was sponsoring terrorism. He cried openly that his life was in danger. He died in September 2021, in a detention’s hospital under the control of enemies. The circumstances of his death were never properly investigated.

As FCT Minister, El-Rufai also revoked the Abuja land of former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon, the man who held Nigeria together through civil war, a detail later confirmed by Bishop Kukah. A Christian elder statesman who bled for this country was treated like a squatter on his own property.

El-Rufai left Kaduna in May 2023 having decimated over 100 communities in Southern Kaduna, demolished thousands of homes, and stripped tens of thousands of workers of their livelihoods without due process, while journalists and activists fled into internal exile.

So no, the bail conditions are not excessive. They are a gentle introduction to accountability for a man who spent twenty years treating accountability as a burden meant for lesser people. The N100 million surety is the price of one demolished church. The court demanding proof that he will not flee is a small insult compared to every family he made flee their homes at gunpoint and at gunpoint alone.

Amaechi thinks he was joking. He was not. El-Rufai deserves every condition that court placed on him and more. The dead he left behind deserve that much company in this conversation.

Celphas Iyorhen
A Concerned Citizen from the Middle-Belt.