Pantami and Sani Isah Kano: Two Mirrors of Gombe

Pantami and Sani Isah Kano: Two Mirrors of Gombe

By Bagudu Mohammed

Between Malam Isa Ali Pantami and Malam Sani Isah Kano, a fascinating, almost theatrical debate is unfolding, and it was triggered by one man. The man at the centre is Professor Ali Isa Pantami, the PDP governorship flag bearer for Gombe State and former Minister of Digital Economy under President Muhammadu Buhari.

In a video that has refused to die on social media, Pantami is heard painting a stark picture of his home state, saying that abject poverty has sunk so deep in Gombe that many cannot afford a loaf of bread, and he anchors this claim on the National Bureau of Statistics’ Multidimensional Poverty Index.

This controversy is still very fresh, raw and restless. It is not yet sitting comfortably on the pages of mainstream newspapers. It is breathing and bleeding on Facebook Hausa pages, in charged TikTok Lives, on WhatsApp voice notes and YouTube thumbnails with screaming captions. Yet what is verifiable so far tells a story that is far bigger than bread.

What Pantami actually said was at his PDP governorship affirmation and in a follow-up interview with Leadership Newspaper. In the English press, his words were captured as a cold statistic. He declared that Gombe is the third poorest state in Nigeria with a poverty index of around 74.5 percent, and by implication, its people are living in abject poverty. In another interview, he updated the figure to reflect the 2022 National Multidimensional Poverty Index, stating that the NBS ranked Gombe as the third poorest state in the country with 86.2 percent of its people living in abject poverty.

But it was the Hausa illustration that turned data into drama. In that circulating audio clip, he said, “Mutanen Gombe da yawa talauci ya yi yawa har ba za su iya sayen burodi ba”. Meaning, many people in Gombe are so battered by poverty they cannot afford to buy a loaf of bread. That single line was clipped, subtitled, remixed and it went viral. His larger campaign argument was that poverty, disunity and the long neglect of human capital are the three cancers eating Gombe, and that it is time to shift the state’s obsession from flyovers and concrete to people.

Then came the counter-fire, delivered with the blunt, unfiltered energy that has made Malam Sani Isah Kano a household voice on Arewa social media. The Kano-based Islamic cleric, famous for his fiery political commentaries, reacted swiftly in a clip that was posted on Arewa Blogs Update Facebook and titled on YouTube as “Yanzu-Yanzu: Bayan Bawa Prof Pantami Takara A PDP Saurari Zazzafan Martanin Sheikh Sani Isah Kano.”

In that intervention, Sani accused Pantami of “wulakanta mutanen Gombe,” of insulting and degrading the very people he seeks to lead. He dismissed the bread analogy as pure siyasa, a political stunt divorced from reality, insisting that Gombe people are resilient, hardworking farmers and traders who have never been defined by begging for bread. He raised a piercing political question: why would a man who served for eight years as a powerful minister under the APC suddenly discover poverty only now that he carries the PDP flag? He demanded that Pantami withdraw the statement and apologize to the people of Gombe.

What followed was a digital civil war that sociologists would instantly recognize through the lens of Framing Theory. As Erving Goffman argued and as Robert Entman later sharpened, political actors do not just present facts, they frame reality to define what should be seen. Pantami framed Gombe through deprivation. Sani Isah Kano framed it through dignity. Around them, the comment sections became a battlefield.

Supporters of Pantami stood firmly on numbers. They quoted the NBS correctly: Gombe is indeed third after Sokoto with 90.5 percent and Bayelsa with 88.5 percent, with 86.2 percent MPI poor, with an intensity score of 0.380, the fifth highest in the country, meaning the poor are not just many but they are deprived in multiple overlapping ways at once. They cited how Arewa youth groups crowdfunded N50 million for his nomination form because, they claim, he gave their peers federal jobs in NCC, NITDA, Galaxy Backbone and NIMC. The hashtag #PantamiForGombe trended on X, with many arguing that Gombe needs a professor of the digital economy, not another concrete politician.

Those against him framed his rhetoric as de-marketing, as emotional blackmail, as an insult to Gombe pride. Some stakeholders in both PDP and APC WhatsApp groups whispered that he was weaponizing poverty. Others resurrected old ideological controversies to question his moral authority to seek the governorship.

One of the most devastating interventions came from Abu-Ubaida Ibrahim Kuna, whose long, forensic piece titled “When Political Rhetoric Collides With The Facts” has become the intellectual anchor of the anti-Pantami camp. He asked a question that still echoes: how does Pantami claim that ordinary Gombe residents cannot afford bread when someone widely regarded as one of the principal political architects of the Pantamiyya movement is associated with Amal Bakery, a bakery that has been thriving in Gombe from 2020 to date, right through the tenure of the present administration?

Kuna added: ” If a businessman invested N250 million in a bread factory and allegedly failed and fled to a neighbouring state because Gombe people could not buy bread, where are the receipts? When was it established, how long did it operate, what was its capacity, when did it close, and what hard evidence proves that the closure was caused by lack of purchasing power and not by cost of flour, sugar, logistics, power, or managerial miscalculation? Kuna draws a crucial distinction that economists have long made: there is a world of difference between saying bread has become expensive due to national inflation and saying Gombe people cannot afford bread. The first is an economic fact; the second is a sweeping indictment of an entire population.”

This is where theory rescues us from noise. What is playing out is a classic case of what Ted Gurr called Relative Deprivation and what Amartya Sen immortalized in his Capability Approach. Sen taught us that poverty is not just low income but capability deprivation, the inability to live a life one has reason to value. Alkire and Foster, whose method powers the NBS Multidimensional Poverty Index, insist that true poverty must be measured across health, education, living standards, work and security, not just whether a man can buy bread today.

But Agenda-Setting Theory, as propounded by McCombs and Shaw, warns us that the media does not tell us what to think, but what to think about. Pantami set the agenda around deprivation; Sani Isah Kano reset it around dignity. And here lies the tragedy of exaggeration that Walter Lippmann warned about a century ago. Pantami had justification and evidence, yet his reality check cannot make his conclusion absolute. To suggest that businesses are failing because no one can buy bread is to ignore the thriving bakeries that dot Gombe metropolis, including the very one linked to his own circle. His failure to acknowledge exceptions, to balance the portrait with the duality of Gombe’s reality, made him vulnerable. He painted a picture so bleak that reality itself could contradict it with a single loaf.

I wrote earlier while responding to this debate that we must simply say things the way they are without exaggeration, because once you exaggerate you become vulnerable and you lose objectivity. I recalled my article with the title ” Why Wike is fighting everyone?” with a deliberate question mark, and I carefully took care of it inside the article because it is impossible for a man to fight everyone. Someone could simply emerge and say he has been with Wike for ten years and has never fought him, even if only to rubbish the article, and the whole argument collapses despite having justification that he has indeed fought many people. Exaggeration robs you of credibility.

And so we arrive at the heart of this intriguing drama. Both Malam Ali Isa Pantami and Malam Sani Isah Kano are only half right, and that half-truth is what makes this debate so thrilling and so Nigerian. One focuses exclusively on the Gombe indigene who cannot afford bread under this brutal economic hardship, and in doing so he unfairly erases the many who, through sheer grit, still buy bread, sell bread, and build bakeries that thrive. He generalizes the pain of the disadvantaged to cover everyone.

The other focuses exclusively on the proud, hustling Gombe indigene who still buys bread despite the hardship, and in doing so he deliberately, unfairly or otherwise, pretends the damning statistics Pantami quoted do not matter, does not interrogate whether they are right or wrong, and treats poverty as a matter of pride rather than policy. In the end, we are watching a classic case of the kettle calling the pot black, two passionate men holding up two different mirrors to the same state, each refusing to see what the other’s mirror is showing.

Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com