Kaduna | Sept. 11, 2026
Opinion By Adetayo Lawal
From Southern Zaria to Southern Kaduna
From Katab to Kataf to ‘Katastrophe’
Complicity of the Colonial British in the Troubles of a Region
The exchange between the Defence Minister, General Christopher Musa, and Bello El-Rufai, son of the former governor, has produced more heat than light.
A Defence Minister, Christopher Gwabin Musa (Rtd.), OFR, from Zangon Kataf, said what Southern Kaduna has whispered for years.
“El-Rufai did a lot of terrible things in Kaduna State. He divided the state into two. In that, if you are from the south, you cannot go to the north to live,” General Musa said.
He accused the former governor of “deliberately planning the killing of people in Southern Kaduna” and of openly admitting he paid bandits.
The former governor’s household responded with demands for evidence and accusations of politics.
Bashir El-Rufai, another of the former governor’s sons, had once tweeted that:
“Southern Kaduna residents will keep seeing shege (trouble) if they continue to attack indigenous Fulani herdsmen.”
He later deleted it and apologized.
Between them lies a graveyard of unanswered questions.
This is not a dispute between two men.
It is an older conflict, about land, belonging, and power.
About who is a citizen and who is a subject.
That name, that appellation, “Southern Kaduna,” unsettles certain people because it is a declaration.
For decades, the region was called Southern Zaria, an appendage, a subservient area of the Zazzau Emirate, administered as conquered territory, denied self-definition.
The name change was not cosmetic.
It was a rejection of conquest.
That is the wound.
That is why Musa’s comments provoked fury.
Musa did not create Southern Kaduna’s anger.
He did not invent its memories.
He did not manufacture the graves.
He said aloud what many have been saying for years.
The same people who told Southern Kaduna to be silent now demand evidence.
Fine.
Let us talk about evidence.
Open the security records.
Open the expenditure records.
Open the prosecution records.
Let independent Nigerians see everything.
If El-Rufai was unfairly accused, the evidence will clear him.
If Musa exaggerated, it will expose him.
If Southern Kaduna’s grievances are legitimate, it will validate them.
But to be honest with ourselves, the wounds did not begin with El-Rufai.
They began with a colonial system that treated Southern Kaduna as conquered subjects and handed their administration to Hausa-Fulani proxies.
This is the story of a name, a people, and a refusal to forget.
The British did not rule Southern Kaduna.
They outsourced it entirely.
The peoples of the region were classified as “uncivilized pagans” and placed under the Zazzau Emirate.
District administration became wholly Hausa.
The Atyap were excluded from governance, subjected to alien courts, forced labor, and the seizure of their farmlands for Hausa immigrants.
This was not an accident.
It was a system.
Indirect rule elevated one group and codified the inferiority of another.
The Atyap petitioned in 1933.
In 1946.
In 1953.
They were ignored.
Their first District Head was appointed only in 1967, over half a century after the amalgamation.
By then, the hierarchy was entrenched.
The hosts had become subjects in their own land.
The Hausa did not conquer Zangon Kataf.
They were granted land.
Historical evidence from both host and settler communities shows that Zangon Kataf was “a mere trading settlement granted to the Hausas by the Atyap.”
A chief was appointed for the Hausa living in the town, who collected tribute and passed it to the Sarkin Kauru.
The relationship was cordial, hosts and guests, terms agreed, obligations on both sides.
Then the Hausa allied with Zazzau and demanded control of the trade routes.
The Atyap withdrew their protection and sacked the settlement in 1780.
That was the beginning of the destruction we are witnessing today.
The town stood empty for years.
That is not the behavior of settlers.
That is the behavior of sovereign hosts enforcing a broken agreement.
The Zangon Kataf crisis began over a market.
The Atyap-majority local government moved the market from the old site.
Hausa traders resisted.
On 6 February 1992, armed Atyap attacked those who resisted.
The Cudjoe Commission recorded de^ths on both sides.
In May, a second attack left 662 houses burned and more de^d.
Zamani Lekwot was a retired Major General.
He fought in the civil war.
He had governed Rivers State.
He had served this country.
Now he sat in a dock in Zangon Kataf, accused of m^rder.
The President had already decided.
Babangida came to Zangon Kataf on 26 May 1992.
He wept.
Then he spoke: all those arrested would be declared guilty until they were proven innocent.
The head of state had pronounced sentence before the trial began.
They arrested 62 Atyap elites.
Chiefs.
Civil servants.
Retired servicemen.
Intellectuals.
Senior pastors.
Not one major Hausa personality was among them.
Lekwot would later say:
“No Hausa/Fulani man, who started it all, was arrested.”
The trial was a procession of procedural abuses.
The Attorney General applied a nolle prosequi, they were discharged but not acquitted.
Then the tribunal chairman ordered them re-arrested.
Eighteen fresh charges were added while the nolle prosequi was still in place.
On 3 December 1992, Decree No. 55 barred any appeal.
Lekwot’s lawyers withdrew in protest.
The tribunal chairman refused to allow a new defense team.
Only Aso Rock could grant it, he said.
Aso Rock did not.
Lekwot was sentenced to death by h^nging, “without fair hearing.”
When the case reached the Supreme Court, it was struck out, because Aso Rock refused to release the judgment record.
The African Commission on Human Rights later nullified the convictions.
But the wound did not close.
In August 2020, twenty-eight years after the trial, seventeen years after El-Rufai became governor, the Supreme Council for Shari’ah in Nigeria called for Lekwot and the others to be e^ecuted.
Their Secretary, AbdurRahman Hassan, said:
“We want those pardoned in 1992 during Zango-Kataf crisis, after being condemned to death, to be executed now, because that is the only way peace will return to the area.”
He added that the pardon “opened the floodgate of violence, mayhems, upheavals and total breakdown of law and order in that axis, which is ravaging the area till today, because some people felt they are above the law.”
Lekwot’s response was:
“My life is in God’s hands, not detractors.”
The message had been sent: in Zangon Kataf, the Atyap were the accused.
The Hausa were the victims.
The state was the prosecutor.
This was not justice.
It was the proxy order wearing a judge’s robe.
El-Rufai did not invent the division.
He inherited it and entrenched it.
In the first three months of 2023 alone, 214 people were k^lled and 746 kid^apped in Kaduna, according to the Kaduna State Government’s own figures.
Independent trackers have recorded thousands of civilian de^ths and abd^ctions across Southern Kaduna LGAs.
Behind every number:
a life, a family, a community.
El-Rufai’s own words convict him.
In 2012:
“Anyone, soldier or not, that kills the Fulani, takes a loan repayable one day no matter how long it takes.”
In 2025, on Channels Television, he was asked about Southern Kaduna.
His answer:
“There are people in Southern Kaduna who feel entitled to behave in a certain way, and we didn’t take it; I dealt with them. I dealt with them just as I dealt with El-Zakyzaky people who thought that they could do anything they want and get away with it, we dealt with them. El-Zakyzaky people are Muslims like me, but I didn’t take any nonsense from them.”
The same language he used for the Shiites, a group violently suppressed under his watch.
If “dealt with” meant leth^l force there, it meant leth^l force here.
The ticket was the message.
In 2019, El-Rufai chose a fellow Muslim as his running mate, breaking the long tradition of a Muslim-Christian ticket.
He called it his “most daring decision” and claimed he was “taking religion off the table.”
But the choice of a Muslim from Southern Kaduna’s minority, rather than a Christian from its majority, told the region exactly what it was worth.
SOKAPU called it a deliberate attempt to “despise Southern Kaduna and tell them that their votes amount to nothing.”
The results confirmed it.
El-Rufai lost every Christian-dominated local government in the South.
He lost the deputy’s own local government, Sanga.
A traditional ruler, the Agom Adara, was abducted and k^lled.
The Chief of Kurama was detained without trial until he was dying.
Perpetrators walked free.
The DSS refused to clear El-Rufai on security grounds.
That refusal marked the beginning of his problems with the current administration of Bọla Ahmed Tinubu.
The family demands evidence.
But the lawyer’s letter does not ask for a trial.
It asks for a retraction, an apology, and N10 billion as compensation for injury to his reputation and the distress and inconvenience occasioned.
The letter describes Musa’s allegations as portraying El-Rufai as “a criminal, a murd^rer, a sponsor of banditry, and a person of the most base and depraved character.”
This is not a man seeking exoneration.
This is a man seeking silence.
If the record is clean, why demand money instead of a hearing?
This is not governance.
This is the old proxy logic, wearing a governor’s robe.
The Agom Adara was not a hashtag.
He was a man, abducted and murd^red in a state with a functioning security apparatus.
The Chief of Kurama was not a statistic.
He was a ruler, jailed for opposing armed settlers, released only to die.
Zangon Kataf was not a curfew.
It was a community, confined for over two months while attackers exploited the empty streets.
Approximately 120 lives lost.
Twenty-two k^lled over three days in July 2020, despite the curfew, despite the security presence.
These are memories.
No outrage can erase them.
This is not about revenge.
It is about citizenship.
Not ethnic hatred.
Equal rights.
Not political persecution.
Accountability.
Not another cycle of violence.
Security.
A government that protects every citizen regardless of ethnicity, religion, or geography.
The name “Southern Kaduna” is not a secessionist slogan.
It is a demand for dignity, the right to exist on one’s own terms, to be a citizen rather than a subject.
The Middle Belt Forum has called for an independent investigation into the k^llings, including the Agom Adara’s murder.
That is the minimum.
Open the books.
Open the security records.
Open the expenditure records.
Open the prosecution files.
Let independent Nigerians see everything.
If El-Rufai was unfairly accused, the evidence will clear him.
If Musa exaggerated, it will expose him.
If Southern Kaduna’s grievances are legitimate, it will validate them.
The name changed.
The people endured.
And they refuse to forget.
That is not a crime.
That is citizenship.
“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned…’ – Emperor Haile Selassie
#ZangonKataf #SouthernKaduna #ElRufai #ChristopherMusa #Accountability #ColonialLegacy
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