…Lawmakers are now first victims of criminals’ attack, terrorists are targeting our families
*‘Mr. President already declared a national emergency on the security situation’
*‘National Assembly plans to hold a-3-day summit with recommendations that will be implemented, Senate will undertake oversight discussions, visits to all the security institutions in the country’
*‘Economic growth at variance with rural and urban unemployment, population explosion’
*‘The daughter of a friend of mine, a member of the House of Representatives, heavily pregnant was ambushed recently. Bandits killed her husband and kidnapped her. She is still in the hands of the bandits as we speak’
*“If I meet President Donald Trump in the Oval Office inside The White House, I’d tell him to stop listening to gossip, lies about Nigeria. I will assure him that Nigeria is not as bad, and Nigerians are not as bad, as some people are painting it. Nigeria is the dam holding the entire West African sub-region together. Once the dam in Nigeria is broken, the entire West and Central African regions are gone”–ABDULLAHI
HE IS A MAN who arrived in Nigerian politics carrying the weight and rigor of a scholar. Senator Yahaya Abubakar Abdullahi, CON, born December 10, 1950, in Argungu, in present-day Kebbi State, is one of the most intellectually distinguished figures in the Nigerian Senate today.
Senator Abdullahi is a trained rural sociologist, a university teacher who spent decades shaping agricultural policy research, a former Senate Majority Leader of the 9th National Assembly, a third-term senator, and now, at the most critical juncture in Nigeria’s recent history, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on National Security and Intelligence.
His early education began at Dankoji Primary School, Argungu, from 1959 to 1964, before he proceeded to Nagarta College, Sokoto, where he completed his secondary education in 1969. He entered the School of Basic Studies at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, in 1970, earned a Bachelor of Science in Social Sciences, and subsequently pursued doctoral studies, obtaining a PhD in Rural Sociology from the same institution in 1983. He also holds a Certificate of Development Oriented Research in Agriculture from ICRA, Wageningen, The Netherlands, obtained in 1985, bringing genuine international academic exposure to his already formidable profile.
His academic career at ABU Zaria spanned from 1974 to 1990, during which he rose from Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Child Health, University of Lagos, through Graduate Assistant, Assistant Research Fellow, Research Fellow, Senior Research Fellow, to Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow by October 1990. He served as Head of Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, ABU Zaria, from 1987 to 1990, supervising countless masters and doctorate programmes. He taught Rural Sociology, Agricultural Institutions, Extension, Rural Community Institutions, and Economic Development at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and undertook rural development research independently, jointly, and as a member of multi-disciplinary teams both within and outside Nigeria.
His entry into the Nigerian Civil Service added another dimension to an already formidable career. He served as Honourable Commissioner for Agriculture and Natural Resources in both Sokoto and Kebbi States, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs from October 2008 to December 2010, before his full transition into elective politics.
In the 2015 elections, he contested and won the Kebbi North Senatorial seat on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC). He was re-elected on February 23, 2019, polling 170,624 votes against his closest opponent’s 66,815 votes. On June 3, 2019, he was announced as Senate Majority Leader of the 9th National Assembly, succeeding Ahmad Lawan in that role and serving as one of the most stabilising forces in the upper chamber. In June 2022, he briefly defected to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to contest his seat, before returning to the APC fold in May 2025. He is now a three-term senator, the sole representative of Kebbi North in the National Assembly and was inducted into the first-ever Most Valuable Parliamentarian (MVP) Hall of Fame in May 2023. In October 2022, President Muhammadu Buhari conferred on him the national honour of Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON).
In December 2025, Senate President Godswill Akpabio named him Chairman of the Senate Committee on National Security and Intelligence, replacing Senator Umar Buba who was removed for what the Senate leadership described as inadequate oversight amid rising national insecurity. The appointment placed Senator Abdullahi at the very centre of Nigeria’s legislative response to one of its most dangerous security crises.
In this interactive chat with the Editorial Board of Naija Standard Newspaper Inc USA, Senator Yahaya Abubakar Abdullahi speaks with measured, unflinching clarity on the state of national security, the state police initiative, the prospects of a free and fair election in 2027, his legacy for Kebbi North, philosophy of life, what he would say to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and his candid message to millions of Nigerians in the diaspora as REPORTED BY FAVOUR BOLUWATIFE PHILIP/SOUTH WEST CORRESPONDENT, NIGERIA/Naija Standard Newspaper Inc USA
*NAIJA STANDARD: Distinguished Senator, it is nice to be with you here in the National Assembly. You are the Chairman of the Senate Committee on National Security and Intelligence. You have had so many portfolios and different committees, and you have been so outstanding. As the Chairman of National Security and Intelligence, what are some of the outstanding bills you have put in place to ensure that Nigeria remains secure?
*SENATOR ABDULLAHI: On the question of bills: we are faced with a very serious national security crisis in the country. The President has moved on and declared a national emergency on the security situation. So, in terms of what the National Assembly has done, the National Assembly has been in this since 2015.
I know what has happened regarding security. Apart from motions, visitations, oversight visits, and all these other issues and recommendations, we even went to the point, in the 9th Senate when I was the leader of the Senate, of convening a security conference, where we invited all the relevant people to examine what the problem is. Is this a question of bandits? Is it a problem of national security architecture? Or is there something that has deteriorated and led to all these issues?
We interacted with all the people who have any responsibility for security: from the judiciary right down to the commanders of the military, to the police, to various security formations. There is nobody that we did not interact with. When we came up with the report which we presented to the Senate, we toyed with sitting down to work out a suggested new security architecture and the kind of relationships that we would like to see between different security institutions.
Somehow, it is quite difficult to suggest and implement changes, particularly when you are in the legislature and not in the executive arm of government. And even in the executive arm of government, a lot of these issues are known, but sometimes the institutional rivalry and the support institutions can also fail. So, this 10th Senate has already come up with a security conference. We did zonal interactions on security issues in each of the geopolitical zones in the country, and we have reports that we presented to the Senate. Now, we want to have a summit very soon. There will be a national security summit where the issues and the results of the interactions that happened at the zonal levels are going to be discussed, and all the people involved in the security institutions in the country are going to sit down, discuss, and present papers.
We scheduled it to be a summit of about three days. We hope that this time around the recommendations that come out of it will be implemented. But the major issue, really, is not the question of talking points now. Almost all the acts have to do with security, the motions, the resolutions, there are no resolutions or motions that the National Assembly has not taken on the issue of security. But we are still bedeviled with the challenges, and things are getting worse. So, as far as we are concerned, we are trying to do what we think we can.
In fact, very soon, the moment the Senate comes back from its short recess, we will undertake oversight discussions and visits to all the security institutions that are under our oversight responsibilities. We will undertake those ones, maybe mid-July before we go for the long vacation. We have written letters to all the relevant security institutions. We want to know what they are doing, what is happening, and what the challenges are.
We have been trying. But I tell you, the situation in terms of security in this country is not anything that one would want to see. Things are getting from bad to worse. And it appears that we have not really come up with a full understanding and appreciation of the major forces that are driving this process. Of course, we know there are a lot of social and economic challenges. The issue of economy, a lot of rural and urban unemployment, population explosion which economic growth has not matched. There are challenges in the economic sphere, challenges in the social sphere. There are resource conflicts, people fighting over natural resources, and the population is crowding out the economic endowments of the nation.
We want to know exactly what the challenges are, and who is doing what, and what is really getting us out of this. How do we get out of these challenges? What are the forces that are driving insecurity in this country? People talk about ethnicity, but if it is just ethnicity, people fighting themselves as ethnic groups in competition for resources, it is sheer criminality. If it is competition for resources, how do we address it? These are the major issues. But there must be some institutional alignment. The National Assembly and the executive must work together. The executives should listen more to the National Assembly because our members are the ones representing every single geographical space in this country. The members of the National Assembly are the ones who represent the ordinary people who are bearing the brunt of the insecurity and the challenges it poses.
Therefore, I feel the executive and government should listen to what we are saying, because we know more about what is happening on the ground than some of the people who are advising the President, whether in security or whatever. So, whenever we come, I hope they will sit down and listen to us. We hope after this conference, we will have a seat at the table when they come up with security policies. Not just throwing out the recommendations as if they do not matter. We are the first victims. Before the bandits and criminals reach them, they reach us. Therefore, we know what is happening on the ground.
So, we hope that by the time we finish this summit and by the time we look at what the security agencies are doing, there will be at least some measure of shared confidence. They should have confidence in the capacity of the National Assembly and the legislature in general to come up with patriotic solutions and approaches to resolving these issues. I do not think the people in the executive arm of government have a monopoly of wisdom in these areas. So, I think they should listen to us and take what we are telling them about this issue into confidence.
We know and we are the first victims of what is happening. And the criminals are now coming for the legislators. Just yesterday, a member of the House of Representatives who is a friend of mine, his daughter, who is pregnant, was ambushed. They killed her husband and kidnapped her. She is still in the hands of the bandits. They are targeting our families. Therefore, I think the people in the executive arm should listen to what we are saying. We are in this together with them. Therefore, there must be institutional cooperation at the level of government so that we can sit down and work out a system that is not only sustainable but that can bring us to at least an understanding of what the issues are and what the causes are, so that we can address this thing in a much more comprehensive way.
*NAIJA STANDARD: Do you think the recently passed state police bill, that was brought to the floor of the National Assembly and that other state governments want implemented right now, is going to help national security in Nigeria in both rural and urban areas?
*SENATOR ABDULLAHI: Well, the whole issue is not whether you create an institution but whether you have given the institution enough support, enough structure, and the capacity to be able to address some of these issues. You see, security is an issue that is multi-layered. Because of the way the security architecture in the country was handled before the 1960 coup, some of us were in secondary school at that time, there was this state concentration. At that time, local governments had police forces, there were provincial police forces, regional police forces and then national police forces. But somehow after the 1960 coup, all these were nationalized and they came under one authority. At that time, Nigeria was not up to a population of 50 million. Now we are hitting 250 million.
If you look at the number of policemen we have in the nation, we have just about 300,000 to less than 400,000 policemen. How can 400,000 policemen cover a population of 250 million? That is far, far, far below the United Nations recommended ratio.
So, what we are saying is that, yes, state police is going to be quite good, provided it is well managed and it is not utilized to hunt political opponents. If it is going to be used to secure the country and to ensure law and order, that is good. But once it is going to be misused to hunt political opponents, then state police do not stay. It becomes a vanguard for the local authority. It becomes a political servant.
The issue is not just creating the police, but giving them the structure, and a mission and vision, so that they know exactly what they are there for, and you have funded them exactly to undertake those functions. Once you divert them and use them for some other purposes, then it is going to be counterproductive. But we hope that the goodwill around the initiative of having state police will be sustained. We also must make sure that we give them the necessary support, operational independence, and the institutional capacity to be able to do the work that they are supposed to be doing.
*NAIJA STANDARD: As a senior ranking Senator in Nigeria in this 10th National Assembly, do you think that in national security, we can still witness a free and fair election in Nigeria?
*SENATOR ABDULLAHI: Well, a free and fair election has always been a hallmark of any democracy, and it is more or less a kind of an ideal. Even in the United States, you could see the opposition fighting. They are redistricting. The Republicans are trying to use race and residence in order to isolate certain groups of people and reduce the voting power of minorities in certain locations.
So, it is the ideal we should work for, but at least one thing we should work for is to ensure that there is effective representation of the population, and to also make sure that the institutions that are conducting the elections are given the kind of free hand they need, and those people who are to secure the conduct of the elections are also not compromised. Now, that depends a lot on the character of the political authorities, of those in power. We hope those in power will do all they can to prevent abuse, because if you are too powerful, you can order anybody or direct anybody to go and do the wrong thing.
But you have to have the moral authority to ensure that the right thing is done and that those who are to conduct the elections and those who are to provide security throughout the election are not misused to either intimidate the people or to usher in a kind of vote that does not represent the will of the people. So, a lot depends on the moral character of those in power. It is an ideal that we should work for, but I think we should pray that God will guide the hands and the minds of those who are in power so that they do not use that power to abuse the hallmark of democracy, which is a free and fair election. We hope that our leaders have the moral authority to insist on the right thing being done.
*NAIJA STANDARD: You have done fantastically for the good people of Kebbi North, from infrastructure to education, empowerment for women and youth. At the end of your tenure, what lasting legacy would you like to be remembered for?
*SENATOR ABDULLAHI: Well, for me, the most important thing that propelled me into politics was to make sure that you have good, moral, educated, and right-thinking people in leadership, because that is the key. If you do not have the right caliber of people with the fear of God in leadership positions, whatever infrastructure, whatever thing you put down there, you would have done nothing.
So, all we have been trying to do is to try to invite new people who are educated, who know what they are doing, and who have the moral opinions to come into politics since that is where the issues are. Going outside it and moralizing on things that do not really give you results is not the answer. We want good people to come into politics so that they can give it clearer guidance and give it the kind of moral tone that it needs to bring about development and prosperity to the people. If you allow politics to be crowded with people of questionable character, then you are also destroying society, because good leadership is what gives a good society. Bad leadership destroys everything that is worth preserving.
*NAIJA STANDARD: What are your philosophies of life?
*SENATOR ABDULLAHI: I am just an ordinary old teacher, an administrator. I was a university teacher. And then I joined politics, and I am due to retire very soon, I have reached the age of retirement. So, all we want is to add young, more experienced, and morally upright people to come into positions of authority so that the right thing is done, and get our people out of the really bad situation we are in. But the political recruitment process is one of the things that is very weak in this country, and we hope there will be changes for the betterment of the country and its people.
*NAIJA STANDARD: If you were invited by President Donald Trump to the White House, to the Oval Office, as Chairman of National Security and Intelligence, what are the things you would tell him concerning Nigeria?
*SENATOR ABDULLAHI: Well, the only thing that I will ask him, or what I will tell him, is that he should stop listening to people who do not mean well to the people of this country. A lot of the sources of information that he has about Nigeria, and the people who guide him, whether through members of Congress or otherwise, do not know this country. The kind of information that gets to the White House about the situation in this country is negative, it is alarming, and Nigeria is not as bad, and Nigerians are not as bad, as some people are painting it.
Like all this issue of Christian genocide, whoever is telling him that is telling lies. That is not what is happening in this country. What is happening in this country is a breakdown of law and order, and both Christians and Muslims are victims. Ordinary Christians and Muslims are victims. When people come and start attacking a market, they do not divide people into Christians and Muslims before they kill them. So, the issue is for him to seek the right kind of information about Nigeria, so that the United States can use its diplomatic and political weight to help the country out of its current crisis, not to muddy the waters.
These things that they are talking about show that the sources of information going to the White House about this country are from people who do not know Nigeria. And one thing that I think they should also be aware of is that Nigeria is the kind of dam that is holding the entire West African sub-region together. It is not like Sudan. You can have problems in Sudan, and Sudan will continue for years and whatever. But once the dam in Nigeria is broken, the entire West and Central African regions are gone. So, it is not a small thing to try to keep Nigeria together, because Nigeria being one is the security of the entire West and Central African sub-regions. Once Nigeria enters a serious existential crisis, forget about any development future for Africa.
*NAIJA STANDARD: Finally, there are millions of Nigerians in America, the UK, Europe and all over the world that are scared of coming home because of the bad news they are reading. What is your message to them?
*SENATOR ABDULLAHI: That is why we are talking about having good leadership in this country. Once good leadership is established, and proper efforts are made to bring this country back together, to restore some peace and security, to raise the quality and level of life, and to have institutions working, Nigerians will want to come back home. Nobody wants to come into a situation of chaos.
So, we must sit down and put our country on a development pedestal, keep the peace, allow institutions to work and work visibly, so that people can see that, yes, this country is now making progress. Then the good people we have in the Diaspora will want to come back. Look at what happened with China. A lot of the people moving from the United States and other places back to China are not communists. But because at least China has put its country on a pedestal whereby people now want to come and contribute. So let us put our own house in order. We have to put our own house in order so that we can attract our nationals from all over the world to be happy to be Nigerians and to come back with all the skills they have acquired to contribute.
But I would not want to say that people should just start coming to Nigeria now. That means some of them may get killed. You do not bring people into chaos. We are the people who have chosen to stay here, who know how to sit down and commit ourselves to salvaging our nation and to establishing a platform to attract our comrades and friends and nationals outside to also make their own contribution. So, it is our own responsibility, those who have chosen to stay here, to make sure that we build a better country that is attractive not just to Nigerians outside, but also to other Africans and to the wider human community.
But we have to do it first. We have to establish good governance, prepare our economy, build institutions, build infrastructure, and have the moral courage to allow those things to work and do what they are supposed to do, without unnecessary interference or selfish directives aimed at preserving power or just reaching a certain group of acquaintances and friends.
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