I wrote a rejoinder to Mohammed Bello Doka’s piece, Tinubu in Saudi: When a President Chooses Content Creation over Competence, and I opened by saying mine is not the kind of writing that expects clapping from the crowd.
Emotionally charged interventions can win likes, they can trend for a day, but they do not always win truth, and they rarely survive scrutiny.
The twist came after. Some who read my rejoinder felt I was being sympathetic, that I was emotionally defending wasteful spending on a religious trip with a large entourage. I need to be clearer. I never defended the Umrah itself. I never said the President was right to travel or wrong to travel.
I responded to the arguments Doka raised, one by one. What I said, and what I still say, is that it amounts to double standard and selective outrage to single out the President, create a narrative of negligence and anti-North sentiment because he performed a religious ritual while insecurity, banditry and kidnapping ravage the North, when the same northern leaders who preside over worse insecurity are guiltier of the same practice, sponsoring hundreds to the same holy lands, a practice we have all supported or tolerated.
Some reply that one wrong does not justify another. That is true in logic textbooks. What is true in Nigerian politics is more interesting. The hypocrisy is not that we are using one wrong to excuse another, it is that the practice is not even considered wrong in the first place when it is done by our own governor, our own local government chairman, our own state pilgrims board.
It only becomes wrong when we need a villain. We invent a new standard to indict the villain, and after him we go back to sleep and treat it as normal. This is what psychologists call motivated reasoning, what Timur Kuran calls preference falsification, and what Chimamanda Adichie once called the danger of a single story, we judge the same act differently depending on who does it.
So let me support my argument with evidence, not because I am a Muslim protecting religion, but to show we have been living with this culture even in our local governments, and it is not limited to one group or section.
In Nigeria, Hajj, Umrah and Jerusalem pilgrimage are not private acts of worship. They are budgeted as state government activities. Almost every state maintains a Muslim Pilgrims Welfare Board and a Christian Pilgrims Welfare Board with offices, staff, buses and annual subventions. This is what scholars of Nigerian federalism like Ladipo Adamolekun describe as the bureaucratization of religion, and what Max Weber would call the routinization of faith into public finance.
A Punch investigation in 2024 found that the Federal Government and fourteen states alone spent N105 billion on Hajj pilgrimage in one year. The states named were Kebbi, Plateau, Kano, Katsina, Lagos, Borno, Nasarawa, Zamfara, Ogun, Sokoto, Kwara, Kogi, Jigawa and Bauchi.
In three years to 2024, the Federal Government and twenty-one states spent N120 billion on combined Muslim and Christian pilgrimages, while the Universal Basic Education Commission reported that most of those same states could not access counterpart funding for schools, failing to draw N1.4 billion in 2020, N2.8 billion in 2021, N14.4 billion in 2022 and N36.1 billion in 2023.
Consider the specifics. Kebbi, consistently ranked among the eight poorest states by the National Bureau of Statistics with over seventy percent poverty rate, subsidized one million naira each for three thousand three hundred and thirty-four pilgrims in 2024 and in November 2025 took a ten billion naira loan to secure an extra one thousand three hundred seats for 2026 Hajj, even though each pilgrim still pays N7.69 million.
Kano, in October 2026, announced twenty-seven million naira cash plus Umrah slots for winners of the 41st National Qur’anic Recitation Competition, and had earlier pledged five hundred thousand naira subsidy per pilgrim. Lagos, the richest state, announced eight point five million naira for 2026 Hajj and five point seven million naira for Ramadan Umrah packages, and gifts of one hundred and eighty to two hundred Riyals per pilgrim.
Sokoto gifted one thousand Riyals, about four hundred and fifty thousand naira, to each of three thousand two hundred pilgrims, about one point four billion naira in gifts. Niger State disbursed three point zero two billion naira for Hajj pilgrims in 2024 and simultaneously revived Christian pilgrimage sponsorship. Kwara spent four hundred and fifty-six million naira on travel allowance alone for its 2024 contingent.
Ebonyi spent five hundred and fifty-one million naira for only thirty-three individuals, about sixteen point seven million naira per person. And this excludes the Saudi Government itself, which under the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Guests Programme sponsors twenty Nigerians every year for Umrah with all expenses paid.
The Christian side is a mirror. Bauchi State Governor Bala Mohammed sponsored three hundred and fifty-five Christians to Israel for the 2025 pilgrimage and was described by the National Christian Pilgrims Commission as the most Christian pilgrimage-friendly governor in the North-East.
Plateau Governor Caleb Mutfwang sponsored one thousand one hundred Christians for 2025/2026 to Israel and Jordan after sponsoring eight hundred and eighty in 2024 and winning the Commission’s award for highest sponsorship.
Imo Governor Hope Uzodinma sponsored one thousand Christians for the 2025 Easter pilgrimage flagged off by President Tinubu in Owerri and in the same breath authorized two point one billion naira to send three hundred and fifteen Muslims to Saudi Arabia. Kaduna resumed Christian pilgrimage in February 2026 after an eleven-year hiatus with fifty pilgrims sponsored under Governor Uba Sani.
Historically, Senate President Godswill Akpabio as Governor of Akwa Ibom claimed he sponsored five thousand eight hundred Muslims to Mecca and over ten thousand Christians to Rome and Jerusalem.
Going with entourage is almost standard practice. President Tinubu’s trip to Mecca for Umrah in October 2026 with a media team posting daily videos came after Atiku Abubakar and the ADC challenged the sincerity of the trip and demanded proof. So, we should not be demanding for proofs and still be calling such as priotising content creation. It amounts to double standard, inconsistency and hypocrisy.
Hope Uzodinma physically led one thousand pilgrims to Israel in 2025 and prayed for the state. Nasir Idris of Kebbi, Bala Mohammed of Bauchi, Uba Sani of Kaduna and Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau all attend farewell ceremonies, sometimes accompany batches, and delegate deputies like Alhaji Murtala Sule Garo of Kano to represent them at Umrah reward events.
This pattern is what Daily Trust once called the pilgrimage bazaar, the transformation of an individual act of faith into taxpayer-funded political theatre, with over one hundred and fifty to two hundred billion naira estimated to have been spent by Federal and State governments in 2025 alone.
That is why my argument about double standard matters. Kebbi, one of the poorest states, spends billions on Hajj. Plateau and Bauchi, among the poorest in North-Central, spend billions on Jerusalem. Lagos, the richest, runs an official Umrah package.
This shows it is not only Tinubu, it is a nationwide culture, an institutional habit that economists like Mancur Olson would call a distributional coalition, where religious boards survive by distributing pilgrimage patronage.
My point is not that one wrong justifies another. My point is that outrage must be universal to be moral. If sponsoring or traveling for Umrah or Jerusalem is wasteful, let it be wasteful for chairmen, governors and presidents alike, for Mecca and for Jerusalem alike. Until then, singling out one man while clapping for others is not accountability, it is selection, and selection is the oldest trick of Nigerian politics.
bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com
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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
