According to a report by TheCable, on Tuesday December 9, 2025, controversial Islamic cleric Ahmad Gumi has characterized bandit groups terrorizing northern Nigeria as Fulani herdsmen engaged in an “existential war” over their traditional livelihoods and ancestral inheritance.
Speaking to the BBC in an interview published Tuesday, Gumi offered insights into the motivations driving the security crisis, emphasizing the deep cultural and economic ties bandits have to cattle rearing.
“They are fighting an existential war. Their life revolves around cattle… They’ll tell you, ‘This cow I inherited from my grandfather’. They are mostly Fulani herdsmen, not the Fulani town — we have to differentiate between the two,” the Kaduna-based scholar explained.
Gumi’s analysis highlights the distinction between rural pastoral communities and urban Fulani populations, suggesting that blanket characterizations obscure the crisis’s roots. His perspective positions the conflict as stemming from threats to traditional ways of life rather than purely criminal enterprise.
The cleric’s comments came amid renewed criticism of his controversial stance comparing the kidnapping of schoolchildren to the killing of soldiers. Gumi defended this position by asserting a moral hierarchy between different forms of violence.
“Killing is worse than kidnapping, but they are all evil. Not all evils are of the same power,” he stated, while acknowledging that both actions remain condemnable.
On addressing the security challenges, Gumi advocated for balanced approaches combining military strength with dialogue. “We need a robust army… but even the military is saying our role in this civil unrest, in this criminality, is 95 percent kinetic,” he said, quoting military assessments that acknowledge force alone cannot resolve the crisis.
“The rest is the government, the politics, and the locals. The military cannot do everything,” Gumi added, calling for comprehensive strategies involving political solutions and community engagement alongside security operations. View, More,
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