Global-hukumindonesia.id, Nigeria - Mohammed Bello Doka's indictment of Kashim Shettima's UNGA 81 performance is not merely a critique of one speech. It is a diagnosis of a government that has lost the capacity to act on principle because it has surrendered its independence to fear. And that diagnosis should trouble no region of this country more than the North.
For it is the North that has, time and again, provided the electoral weight that carries governments into power—governments that then govern from Lagos and Abuja boardrooms while Northern constituencies absorb the consequences of policies made to satisfy foreign courts, foreign creditors, and foreign anxieties rather than Nigerian citizens. Doka's article names the symptom: a president fighting to keep records sealed in an American courtroom, and a Vice President reduced to reciting macroeconomic indicators rather than defending Sudanese women being raped, Palestinian children being starved, or Nigerians crushed by the human cost of subsidy removal. But the disease is older and structural—a political class in Abuja that has learned to survive by performing loyalty to external power centers rather than building the internal legitimacy that comes from actually serving its people.
If the APC Returns: A Continuation, Not a Correction
Should the APC be permitted to return to power in the coming general election, Nigeria will not simply repeat 2023–2027. It will entrench a template: governance as risk management for the ruling family, foreign policy as hostage diplomacy, and domestic policy as a sedative administered through subsidy math and investor reassurance rather than any serious reckoning with insecurity in the Northeast, banditry in the Northwest, or the economic devastation across the Middle Belt. A second APC term, under this trajectory, would not be four more years of the status quo—it would be the status quo made permanent, its dysfunctions calcified into the operating system of the state. The North, whose sons and daughters have borne the heaviest human cost of insecurity and economic contraction, cannot afford to be the electoral engine for its own continued marginalization.
The Case for Donald Duke: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
This is why a serious, strategic conversation about a Donald Duke-led government under the PRP deserves the North's full and sober attention—not as sentimental alternative politics, but as a calculated repositioning of Nigeria's governance class.
Duke's public record and platform have consistently emphasized a few structural departures from the current order:
- Restructuring and true federalism— a long-standing Duke position that resource control, state policing, and devolved fiscal authority should replace the current over-centralized model that breeds both Abuja's imperial drift and the regional resentments that follow it. For the North, this is not a threat; it is an opportunity to finally control security architecture and development priorities at the state and regional level rather than waiting on a distant center.
- A technocratic, competence-first cabinet philosophy — Duke has repeatedly positioned himself as a builder rather than a permanent campaigner, pointing to his Cross River tenure's tourism and infrastructure record as evidence of execution over rhetoric.
- An independent foreign policy posture — precisely the antidote to the Shettima paralysis Doka describes. A leader untangled from personal legal exposure in foreign jurisdictions is a leader free to speak on Palestine, on Sudan, on the Sahel, on the dignity of the African diaspora, without calculating what a subpoena in Washington might cost him.
- Economic diversification away from oil dependency, a theme Duke has championed since his gubernatorial years, directly relevant to a North seeking new revenue architecture beyond federal allocation.
The Strategic Logic for Northern Galvanization
The North's historical role as kingmaker has too often produced kings who forget the North once crowned. A Duke candidacy offers something different: a leader from outside the entrenched APC-PDP axis, unencumbered by the compromises that produced the current paralysis, whose platform of restructuring directly serves Northern demands for greater regional control, and whose independence from foreign legal entanglement restores the very sovereignty of voice that Doka mourns.
This is not a call for sentimental defection. It is a call for strategic recalculation. The North has the numbers. It has, historically, decided the direction of Nigerian government. The question Doka leaves hanging—"what will Nigerians do about it?"—has a answer available to the North specifically: stop lending your weight to a system that dances naked on the world stage, and instead lend it to an idea whose time has genuinely come.
A nation that has forgotten how to stand needs new legs, not new excuses. The North can provide them. (*)
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