In a 2015 interview, he boasted: “No politician has ever suffered the kind of calamities I went through in the country. I was arrested, detained and harassed about 38 times.”… In whipping up primitive ethnic sentiments over the reduction in food prices, however, he should tarry awhile to benefit from the counsel of this student of the university of life: Courage is to the brave what recklessness is to the foolish.
Alhaji Buba Galadima, an outspoken politician and self-confessed insider to many conspiracies, recently raised an alarm alleging that the current downward trend of food prices was a conspiracy by the Tinubu administration to impoverish the Northern part of Nigeria. Food prices are going down. Many ordinary Nigerians are happy with the development. But people like Galadima see it as an opportunity to sell another of his many fibs about the north/south dichotomy.
Many of our politicians would be nothing without the weaponisation of ethnicity and religion. No matter their levels of education, the only way many of them can attract any kind of following is when they set brother against brother, tribe against tribe, Imam against pastor. They think it’s all part of the game of politics, whereas it is the very lives of the people that are at stake. What makes Galadima’s allegation even more tragic is that he has all the education and career attainment to qualify as a beacon of the society but has chosen instead to spread darkness.
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A Building Engineering graduate of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Galadima has held many choice public offices in Nigeria. He hails from Gashua, the town in Yobe State made famous when the human rights lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, was incarcerated there. He worked with the Rivers State government in 1975 and has been a director of Ajaokuta Steel Company and director-general of NIMASA. He was the national youth leader of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) during the Second Republic and national financial secretary of the National Republican Convention (NRC) during the Third Republic.
More recently, he was the national secretary of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), which was founded in 2009 and merged, four years later, with the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), a faction of the PDP called the n-PDP, and a faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) to form the All Progressives Congress (APC). He is one of the nine signatories of that merger agreement.
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By all local standards, Alhaji Galadima has paid his dues in the political arena, even if the public is entitled to ask, what dues, or in aid of what?
Following the presidential election of April 2011, Galadima protested that the vote was rigged and that the CPC would not accept the results until a comprehensive audit had been conducted. INEC had announced that Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP won with 22,495,187 votes, while Muhammadu Buhari of the CPC had obtained just 12,214,853 votes. There were outbreaks of violence across Northern Nigeria after the election, leading to many deaths. Buhari and Galadima were accused of orchestrating the killings.
By 2017, Galadima had decamped to PDP and was appointed a spokesperson of the party. On 24 February, 2019, twenty-four hours after the presidential election was conducted, Galadima recklessly announced on his social media handles that the PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, had won the election, even as results were still being collated by the Independent National Electoral Commission. He was later arrested.
He accused President Tinubu of deliberately causing a sharp fall in food prices to undermine the economy of Northern Nigeria. He alleged that the policy is part of a broader strategy to weaken the North’s economic stability. He was visibly upset that Nigeria’s cost-of-living crisis recently eased for the first time since May 2023, offering an unexpected respite for households.
While Alhaji Galadima’s eloquence and doggedness are incontrovertible, his style is alarmist and reckless.
A survey of the Nigerian food market revealed that there has been a 40 per cent drop in food prices between December 2024 and March 2025. That ought to be cheering news!
What kind of politics is this Galadima brand that expects me to start protesting against the government when food prices are going down? Imagine if the government had not taken timely measures to ensure adequate food supply for the Ramadan season! Is there something else, unknown to the rest of us, that is propelling Galadima, the perpetual ‘insider’?
“The government has started massive food importation, and this will make the economy of the North, which depends on agriculture, to dwindle as many won’t be able to farm to gain any meaningful profit”, said Galadima, who is also a farmer. Perhaps what he expects is that since the wave of banditry sweeping through many parts of the country has negatively affected food production, the government should just fold its arms and we should all engage in dry fasting until Galadima harvests his crops next season.
He accused President Tinubu of deliberately causing a sharp fall in food prices to undermine the economy of Northern Nigeria. He alleged that the policy is part of a broader strategy to weaken the North’s economic stability. He was visibly upset that Nigeria’s cost-of-living crisis recently eased for the first time since May 2023, offering an unexpected respite for households.
His claim elicited mixed reactions from Nigerians, many of who accused him of being part of the cabal profiting from the misery of the poor in Nigeria. One social media respondent, Amina Adamu, pointedly accused him of being a hoarder and a shylock merchant.
“Surely, there is a sign that he has hidden food, and by the grace of God, you will see, you will lose more than that”, said Amina. “If the poor will get better, Alhamdulilah! May God break those who play hide and seek.”
Nigerians, who have watched helplessly over the years as big political camels passed effortlessly through the eye of the needle, swore that Galadima was too big to be forced to pay his debts and that the court’s judgement ceding his company and other assets to AMCON was government’s way of reminding him that he wasn’t as squeaky clean as he wanted the world to be and that his soft underbelly was not unreachable.
There are those who continue to make the academic argument that opening the borders to food imports will discourage local production. However, the answer to the current spate of banditry which has badly affected food production is the complete routing of these criminals. Until that is done, Nigerians have to be fed.
In their bid to fully decode the complex persona of this intriguing politician, many Nigerians have zeroed in on his business activities. They draw attention to Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/1136/2019 at the Federal High Court sitting in Abuja in which the court ordered AMCON to take over the assets of Bedko Nigeria Limited, one of Galadima’s companies. Bedko Nigeria Limited and Buba Galadima owed AMCON about N900 million. The order, which was granted to AMCON by Justice AI Chikere, also gave the government recovery agency the power to take over some properties belonging to the politician, including House No 15, Addis Ababa Crescent, Wuse Zone 4, Abuja, and house No 4, Bangui Street, Wuse 2, also in Abuja.
Nigerians, who have watched helplessly over the years as big political camels passed effortlessly through the eye of the needle, swore that Galadima was too big to be forced to pay his debts and that the court’s judgement ceding his company and other assets to AMCON was government’s way of reminding him that he wasn’t as squeaky clean as he wanted the world to be and that his soft underbelly was not unreachable.
Buba Galadima is a journalist’s delight any day and I hope Providence preserves him on this side of the divide for many more years. The fact that, in spite of his wide political experience, he has wrongly predicted the winner of Nigeria’s presidential election on at least three separate occasions should teach him to sip the waters of humility. He is one politician who can be said to possess a functional brain — which is more than can be said of many of his colleagues.
In a 2015 interview, he boasted: “No politician has ever suffered the kind of calamities I went through in the country. I was arrested, detained and harassed about 38 times.”
In whipping up primitive ethnic sentiments over the reduction in food prices, however, he should tarry awhile to benefit from the counsel of this student of the university of life: Courage is to the brave what recklessness is to the foolish.
Wole Olaoye is a Public Relations consultant and veteran journalist. He can be reached on [email protected], Twitter: @wole_olaoye; Instagram: woleola2021
