General Musa’s Accusations Demand High Standard of Evidence
By Solomon Dalung
General Musa has opened a Pandora’s box. Now, he must be prepared to open the file.
I have listened carefully to General Christopher Musa’s recent comments about former Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai, and I think Nigerians should resist the temptation to reduce this to another political quarrel between two prominent northerners.
There is something much more serious here.
Musa did not merely say that El-Rufai mishandled insecurity in Kaduna. He did not merely say that the former governor’s policies were divisive or that his administration failed to protect Southern Kaduna.
He made a much heavier allegation.
He said: “We can never be happy with somebody who deliberately planned for the killing of our people.”
And when the interviewer pressed him on the seriousness of the allegation, Musa doubled down. He said Nigerians should look at El-Rufai’s videos and speeches, claiming that the former governor had openly spoken about paying bandits and other things he did while in office.
That is not an ordinary political accusation.
It is an allegation of deliberate criminal intent.
And because the man making it is not an ordinary politician but Nigeria’s Minister of Defence and a former Chief of Defence Staff, his words carry an institutional weight that demands a correspondingly high standard of evidence.
So I have some questions.
But before those questions, we need to understand what Musa is talking about.
Kaduna did not begin burning in 2015
One of the easiest ways to distort history is to begin the story at the point that is most convenient to the argument.
Kaduna’s history of communal conflict did not begin with Nasir El-Rufai.
It predates him by decades.
Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, himself a Southern Kaduna-born four-star general, traced the history of the region’s crises through the early 1970s, the 1987 Kafanchan crisis, the 1992 Zangon Kataf crisis, the 2000 Sharia crisis and the 2011 post-election violence. He identified a complicated mixture of pastoral grazing, land and boundary disputes, drug abuse and the indigene-settler question among the causes.
Human Rights Watch likewise documented the major Kaduna outbreaks of 1987, 1992 and 2000, describing conflicts whose roots involved political and economic competition as well as religion and ethnicity.
In other words, Kaduna’s fault lines were already deep and bloody long before El-Rufai became governor in 2015.
So nobody should misunderstand the argument.
This does not absolve El-Rufai of responsibility for anything that happened between 2015 and 2023.
A governor must be judged by how he handles the problems he inherits.
But there is a world of difference between saying:
“El-Rufai governed Kaduna during a period of terrible violence and his policies or failures contributed to it,”
and saying:
“El-Rufai deliberately planned the killing of Southern Kaduna people.”
The first is a proposition that can be investigated through governance records.
The second requires evidence of intent.
This is precisely why the Agwai Committee matters
When El-Rufai became governor in 2015, he did something that is now being strangely forgotten.
He appointed Gen. Martin Luther Agwai to investigate the Southern Kaduna crisis.
And who was Agwai?
He was not an outsider parachuted into Kaduna.
He was born in Kagoro, Southern Kaduna, and rose through the Nigerian Army to become Chief of Army Staff and later Chief of Defence Staff.
The committee’s work is therefore extraordinarily relevant to today’s argument.
The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue’s contemporaneous roadmap, produced with reference to the Agwai peace process, described the more recent violence as having roots in the legacy of the 2011 post-election violence, but also in longer-running pastoralist-farmer conflicts and the indigene-settler dichotomy.
That is important.
The committee did not arrive at the conclusion that Southern Kaduna’s crisis was invented by El-Rufai.
It investigated a conflict with a history stretching far beyond his administration.
Agwai also recommended measures including dialogue, peace-building and reconciliation, with the establishment of a permanent Peace and Reconciliation Commission among the ideas advanced.
And this brings us to perhaps the most misunderstood part of this entire controversy.
The money El-Rufai said he paid
El-Rufai publicly acknowledged in 2016 that his government had paid compensation to some Fulani.
There is no point pretending otherwise.
But listen carefully to what he actually said.
According to his contemporary account, the Agwai Committee had traced the roots of much of the recent violence to the aftermath of the 2011 post-election violence and distinguished among settled, semi-settled and transhumant Fulani.
El-Rufai said his government reached out to some transhumant Fulani, including people outside Nigeria, and offered compensation for deaths and livestock lost in earlier violence, on the condition that reprisals stop. Some accepted the appeal without payment; some requested monetary compensation for cattle losses, and some were paid.
That is the documentary trail.
And Gen. Agwai himself subsequently intervened when the issue became controversial.
His position was unequivocal: if compensation was being paid because of the Southern Kaduna crisis, all aggrieved parties should be considered, not only herdsmen. He warned that compensating only one side would amount to partial implementation of the committee’s recommendations. In which other affected persons including churches and mosques that were destroyed got compensated amongst many others.
Now compare that record with Musa’s words:
“He told us he paid bandits.”
That demands clarification.
Who were the people El-Rufai allegedly paid?
Were they active bandits?
Were they criminal gangs?
Were they people who had participated in attacks?
Or were they Fulani who had lost cattle and family members during the 2011 violence and whom the Agwai peace process sought to compensate in exchange for ending reprisals?
These are not semantic differences.
They are radically different factual propositions.
If Musa is referring to a different payment, then he should identify it.
If he is referring to the compensation El-Rufai publicly acknowledged, then the public deserves to know why a documented compensation and reconciliation exercise is now being described as “paying bandits.”
Then another retired general enters the story
This is where things become even more interesting.
Maj.-Gen. Danjuma Ali-Keffi, who served as GOC 1 Division in 2021, has publicly challenged Musa to produce evidence.
And he did not merely defend El-Rufai politically.
He spoke from his experience as a senior military commander.
Ali-Keffi said El-Rufai never instructed him to stop military operations against criminal elements in Kaduna. He said the military conducted clearance operations and that the Kaduna government, through officials including Samuel Aruwan, provided intelligence to commanders. He specifically rejected the suggestion that El-Rufai prevented military action against criminals.
He also raised a question that cannot simply be brushed aside:
If a governor was deliberately enabling the killing of citizens while military operations were ongoing, where were the military and intelligence agencies?
That is a very serious question.
A governor does not command the Nigerian Army.
The military has its own operational chain of command.
And Ali-Keffi says Southern Kaduna was largely under the 3 Division/Operation Safe Haven structure rather than his own 1 Division.
Therefore, if Musa is alleging a deliberate state-sponsored killing campaign, the question cannot end with El-Rufai.
It necessarily raises questions about the security agencies that had operational responsibility.
And this brings me to General Musa himself
This is perhaps the question I find most difficult to ignore.
General Christopher Musa is himself from Zangon Kataf, Southern Kaduna. He was born in Sokoto but his official profile identifies his state of origin and LGA as Kaduna State/Zangon Kataf.
So nobody can dismiss his emotional connection to the region.
But he was also a professional soldier for more than three decades.
He was Theatre Commander of Operation Hadin Kai in 2021, later Commander of the Nigerian Army Infantry Corps and then Chief of Defence Staff from 2023 until 2025. He is now Minister of Defence.
This means another question becomes unavoidable:
If General Musa possessed credible evidence that a sitting governor was deliberately planning the killing of citizens, what did he do with that information when he was in uniform?
When did he first know?
Who did he report it to?
Was it contained in military intelligence?
Was it ever presented to the President?
Was it ever presented to the National Security Adviser?
Was it ever presented to the intelligence agencies?
Was there an investigation?
If he did report it and the authorities ignored it, then Nigerians deserve to know that too.
And if he did not report it, why not?
I am not suggesting that Musa necessarily possessed such evidence while in service.
I am saying that his present allegation is so serious that his professional history makes the question legitimate.
You cannot tell Nigerians in 2026 that a former governor deliberately planned the killing of citizens and then expect the public not to ask what the security establishment knew about it.
Then there is the Muslim-Muslim question
Some people may also wonder whether part of Musa’s objection concerns El-Rufai’s decision to run a Muslim-Muslim ticket in Kaduna.
El-Rufai chose Hadiza Balarabe, a Muslim from Southern Kaduna, as his running mate in 2019 and retained her in 2023.
He described the decision as an attempt to take religion and ethnicity off the political table in a state he believed had become deeply “religionised and ethnicised.”
Whether one agrees with that decision is another matter.
But if Musa’s argument is that a Muslim-Muslim political arrangement is inherently divisive, then another question presents itself.
Musa is currently serving as Defence Minister under President Bola Tinubu, whose 2023 presidential ticket with Kashim Shettima was also Muslim-Muslim.
So the principle needs to be clearly defined.
If Muslim-Muslim tickets are inherently dangerous, why is the federal arrangement acceptable?
If they are not inherently dangerous, then Musa must explain what precisely El-Rufai did beyond the composition of his ticket that amounted to religious division.
That distinction is important.
And perhaps the most revealing part of Musa’s interview is what happened when he was asked about El-Rufai
The interviewer asked whether Southern Kaduna regarded El-Rufai as an enemy.
Musa said no.
He called him “misguided.”
That is significant.
Because even while making the extraordinary allegation that El-Rufai deliberately planned the killing of their people, Musa stopped short of describing him as an enemy.
He also framed his intervention as a Nigerian rather than an APC partisan and said anyone who uses religion, tribe or creed to divide the country should not be in government.
That is a political argument.
It may be a sincere one.
But it is also precisely why we need to separate Musa’s political judgment from his factual allegations.
I am not here to rehabilitate El-Rufai
There are plenty of things about Nasir El-Rufai’s eight years in Kaduna that deserve scrutiny.
His style of governance was often combative.
His demolitions generated enormous controversy.
His administration presided over years in which Southern Kaduna suffered terrible violence.
His government’s policies should be examined.
His decisions should be debated.
And if there is evidence that he knowingly facilitated criminal violence, he should answer for it.
But none of that gives anybody licence to collapse every criticism into the allegation that he deliberately planned the killing of Southern Kaduna people.
That is a criminal accusation.
It cannot be established merely by showing that killings occurred while he was governor.
It cannot be established merely by showing that he paid compensation.
It cannot be established merely by showing that he had political disagreements with Southern Kaduna leaders.
And it certainly cannot be established by rewriting Kaduna’s history as though its conflicts began when El-Rufai entered Government House.
Kaduna has a memory
That is what makes this whole episode so delicate.
Kaduna has been carrying these wounds for generations.
Kafanchan.
Zangon Kataf.
The Sharia crisis.
The 2002 violence.
The 2011 post-election bloodletting.
The subsequent farmer-herder and bandit conflicts.
There are commissions, judicial inquiries, white papers and peace agreements stretching across decades. Academic research has catalogued reports dating back to the 1980s and 1990s and continuing through the 2011 inquiry and the Agwai Committee of 2015.
This is not a crisis that one man invented.
And because Kaduna’s history is already so combustible, those who occupy positions of authority have an even greater responsibility to speak carefully.
So, General Musa, Nigerians are listening
If you have evidence that Nasir El-Rufai deliberately planned the killing of Southern Kaduna people, please produce it.
If you have evidence that he paid active bandits, identify them, identify the payments and tell Nigerians when, how and why they were made.
If you are referring to the compensation your former government publicly acknowledged paying to Fulani who lost cattle and loved ones in the 2011 violence, then explain why that should be called payment to bandits, especially when the very Gen. Agwai who investigated the crisis said compensation should be extended to all aggrieved parties.
And if you knew these things while serving in the military, Nigerians are entitled to ask what you did with the information.
This is not about protecting El-Rufai.
It is not about attacking Musa.
It is about something much more fundamental:
The truth.
Because a Defence Minister saying that a former governor deliberately planned the killing of citizens is too grave to become another social-media talking point.
If the allegation is true, Nigerians deserve justice.
If it is false, Nigerians deserve to know that too.
Kaduna has suffered enough from narratives built on selective memory.
What it needs now is the whole truth.
Solomon Dalung is a former minister of sports
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