By Lasisi Olagunju

‘Truth Is Trouble’ is Professor Niyi Osundare’s latest book. What the poet laureate says in English, we say in another sense in Yoruba: Òótọ́ korò, truth is bitter. Then there is Ayékòótọ́, the name we give the parrot, the irrepressible bird that sees and tells. The name itself carries a verdict on the human condition: Ayé ko òótọ́, the world rejects the truth. Perhaps that is precisely why Osundare insists “truth is trouble.”

Two months ago, on July 13, 2026, when I wrote ‘Why Oriire was not Chibok’, a professor friend from the North fired me a hot warning: “Unfortunately, my Brother Lasisi, I must be frank with you; you are likely to lose some of your friends if you persist along this your one-man anti-North campaign.”

I replied Prof with a laugh, a smile and a rejection of the charge of being anti-anyone. “No sir. I am not anti-North. But I strongly feel that the leadership of the North must change and protect its traumatised people;” protect itself with truth, and in truth.

Prof ignored me and my unsolicited advice.

Last week, I went back to our exchange after reading a social media post by former Kaduna senator, Shehu Sani. The man sounded like he had joined my “anti-North” orchestra.

Stand with me in the rain, and I will stand by you in the sun. The village child who hopes to eat bread must first sow plantain in the life of the city. On X, Sani spoke of the North, the South and the 2027 elections. He summed it all up by backing the South, warning that if the North spurns rotation in 2027, the South will have no reason to respect it in 2031.

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Truth sometimes inflicts pain in the service of honesty. “I must be cruel only to be kind,” Shakespeare writes in Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV. Some truths sear like spears because they pierce wounds we have carefully covered. The truth of 2027 is very bitter for northern ambitions. I pray the North listens to one of its own.

If “Truth” is truly “trouble.” Shehu Sani may soon know as his senatorial election comes in February 2027.

The man told his North one more truth on Facebook two Tuesdays ago. “Banditry,” he said, “was triggered from the North by criminal gangs and spread to the rest part of the country.” He said “Boko terrorism started from the North and spread to the rest parts of the country, and our neighbouring countries got infected.”

Sani’s outburst was triggered by the far North’s pushback against Defence Minister and former Chief of Defence Staff, Christopher Musa. The minister had, in a television interview, said many controversial things about insecurity in the North, particularly in his native Southern Kaduna.

I copy and paste Sani’s full message here, unedited: “Banditry was triggered from the North by criminal gangs and spread to the rest part of the country. Boko terrorism started from the North and spread to the rest parts of the country, and our neighbouring countries got infected. The bandits and terrorists, many of whom are from our part of the country, have shed the blood of innocent people; they abducted children, raped women, extorted ransom, displaced millions and burned down the villages of our people. The orphans and widows generated by banditry and terrorism are now IDPs in our cities and refugees in our neighbouring countries.

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“Chad, Cameroun and Niger are still battling the cancer that emanated from our part of the country. We blamed GEJ, skipped and pampered Buhari and now blaming Tinubu for the infernos ours in office couldn’t automatically quench. We are asking for a miracle and magic we failed to perform.

“We don’t want to even hear that at a certain point in our tragic history, all the defence and security chiefs were from our part of the country; they met us with bandits and left us with more bandits. We are not angry with the bandits and terrorists. We are not angry with our own who failed to treat the cancer. Our anger is reserved for scapegoats and anyone other than our own.

“Fire is raging in our communities for close to two decades, but we don’t want leaders from our section of the country blamed or excoriated for complicity. If Christopher Musa had blamed GEJ and BAT for the killings, he would have been applauded. It is said that Musa failed as a defense chief, but all those revered as opposition messiahs were also once in office like Musa. The evidence is on the social media. We march over the graves of the victims of banditry and terrorism in the course and cause of defending the image of our leaders who failed them.

“We are patients who want our diseases to be treated and cured, but we don’t want to accept and read the lab results; we want to write our own lab reports.”

To me, the sting in the Shehu Sani love letter to his North is: “We blamed GEJ, skipped and pampered Buhari and now blaming Tinubu for the infernos ours in office couldn’t automatically quench. We are asking for a miracle and magic we failed to perform.”

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A friend who read the above passage with me said it should be pasted on the walls of every political meeting room in the North.

Sani is a Tinubu person. If what he wrote was meant to absolve the current president, he missed doing so. If that was his objective, he would not be different from those who blamed everybody but “skipped and pampered Buhari.” The constitutional duty to secure Nigeria is the president’s. A query on every Nigerian killed under his watch is a legitimate question addressed to his government. If you are invested with the chieftaincy beads of a kite, you must do justice to chicks and chickens. No president is entitled to plead inheritance of trouble forever. If the disease preceded your government, you were elected precisely because you promised to cure it. Tinubu, like others, must therefore answer for the security failures of his own time.

I hope I am safe hiding behind Shehu Sani to say all I have said. Lol.

Now, back to the North and the taste of truth: What doctor can save a patient who hates his/her lab result? A man arrives at the hospital with cancer but quarrels with the scan because he dislikes the image it produces. He changes doctors. He abuses the lab attendant. He accuses the radiologist of prejudice. Meanwhile, the tumour grows.

Northern Nigeria must not be tired of reading its own lab report. It must accept that no one, and no region, is healed by denying the disease eating their heart. It must ask why its vast territories became fertile soil for armies of angry, armed young men who enjoy the smell of blood. Above all, the North must stop treating every uncomfortable diagnosis as an attack on it and its privileges.