When the State Kneels: The Cow, The Gun and The Cleric – Sheikh Gumi, Bello Matawalle and the Theatre of Appeasement Fueling Nigeria’s Collapse

By PAUL UTEBOR

There is a peculiar quality to the Nigerian tragedy, a specific texture to our national unravelling, where the horrific is often draped in the ridiculous. In the sun-scorched expanse of Northern Nigeria, where the earth has drunk too much innocent blood and the air hangs heavy with the grief of mothers, we are now being asked to witness a grotesque barter. The government, in a display of performative helplessness, proposes a trade: a cow for a gun. A beast of burden for an instrument of death. It would be comical if it were not so deeply fatal.

Minister of State for Defence Bello Matawalle, a man charged with the solemn duty of protecting the territorial integrity of the state, reportedly shocked Nigerians and the international community at large when, in the third week of November 2025, news broke that he is offering two cows to every bandit who surrenders an AK-47. This proposition is breathless in its lack of seriousness. It suggests that the Nigerian state has ceded its monopoly on violence and has reduced itself to a haggler in the marketplace of terror.

To offer livestock to men who have tasted the dark, intoxicating power of holding entire communities to ransom is not a policy, it is a capitulation. It is a lazy governance, a refusal to engage in the hard, gritty, dangerous work of eradication, and a symbol of the complicity of the state involvement in aiding these bloodthirsty demons. It assumes that the man who enters a dormitory to kidnap schoolgirls does so merely because he is hungry for beef. It ignores the terrifying truth that he does so because he can, because he has been emboldened by a state that treats his violence as a misunderstanding rather than a crime.

And then, there is Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, the self-assigned “Public Relations Officer of all bandits and killers in the country. One watches Sheikh Gumi with a sense of bewilderment that borders on nausea. He emerges from the forests, his clothes untouched by the chaos he claims to understand, carrying the demands of killers as though they were legitimate grievances of a trade union. He speaks of “peace deals” with an unsettling familiarity. He acts as the bridge, not between the state and its citizens, but between the state and its predators, like an anaesthetic preventing patients from reacting to a knife cut or a needle piercing the skin.

In any other functioning society, a man who knows the location of the enemy, who speaks their language, who advocates for their comfort, and who publicly sanitises their atrocities would be a subject of intense state interrogation. He would be answering questions in a windowless room about what he knows. Instead, in Nigeria, he is treated as a sage, a guest on prime-time television, allowed to chastise the military for being too harsh on men who burn children alive.

Why is Sheikh Gumi still walking free? Why is he allowed to act as the public relations officer for banditry? To allow him to continue advocating for these “peace deals” is to normalise the abnormal. It is to tell the victims, the displaced, the raped, and the orphaned that their suffering is negotiable, that their tormentors are merely misguided souls in need of a hearing.

We must discard the comforting lie that this violence is merely economic, a result of climate change or poverty that can be solved with a transaction. There is an ideology at play here, a jihadist ideology, against Christians, a separatist movement to eradicate Christians and break down institutions of government. While it may have started with resource control, it has mutated into a theology of dominion. These groups have been radicalised by the success of their own impunity. They have adopted a worldview that rejects the authority of the state. You cannot buy off a belief system with two cows. You cannot appease a thirst for power with a peace treaty that is not worth the paper it is written on.

History teaches us that appeasement only whets the appetite of the aggressor. When you pay a bandit, you do not turn him into a farmer; you merely finance his next recruitment drive.

What is required now is not the soft bigotry of “amnesty” or the bizarre economics of cattle-for-rifles. What is required is the assertion of the state’s might. The hideouts must be cleared, not visited for tea. The ideology must be dismantled, not codified in peace agreements.

The Nigerian government is behaving like a man who finds a snake in his child’s bed and decides to offer it a bowl of milk in the hopes that it will slither away. But the snake will not leave. It will drink the milk, it will grow fat, and eventually, it will strike.

Matawalle’s cows and Gumi’s sermons are not solutions. They are symptoms of a leadership that is too afraid to do its job. Evil exists, and it is not always hungry for food; sometimes, it is simply hungry for blood. Until we summon the courage to name it, to arrest its apologists, and to crush it in its hideouts, we are merely fattening the cows for the bandits’ next feast.