There is no politician in Nigeria today who has turned a state that many barely noticed on the national map into a daily trending topic like Prof. Ali Isa Pantami. The cleric turned politician has done what no billboard could do for Gombe; he has made it fascinating, controversial and irresistible to the algorithm.
On Facebook, TikTok, X and WhatsApp, Pantami has become content itself. One minute he is a symbol of moral rebirth, the next he is a subject of ruthless scrutiny. That duality is what gives him what media scholars McCombs and Shaw call agenda-setting power; the media may not tell people what to think, but Pantami tells them what to think about.
What makes this moment intriguing is not just Pantami, but the ecosystem he has inadvertently created. He has split the northern influencer economy into two hostile camps of like and dislike, two digital armies that fight with a brute, malicious intensity that has little to do with governance and everything to do with identity.
And the paradox is stark. The loudest warriors in this war are not even from Gombe. Aminu J-Town, a fierce proponent of Dr. Jamilu Gwamna, the APC consensus candidate, and Ayatullahi Tage, an unapologetic defender of Pantami, are both non-indigenes who have discovered that Gombe is now a large, profitable market for engagement.
Uses and Gratifications theory explains this perfectly; influencers are not merely reporting politics, they are using Gombe to satisfy their own needs for virality, relevance and monetization. Citizen journalists who once prayed behind the Mallam now connect emotionally to the ballot in Gombe as if they have just discovered the state for the first time, and clerics who post online have found in Pantami a perfect material to trigger the algorithm and stretch their audience far and wide.
The sheer emotional pull of Pantami became undeniable during the rescheduled PDP primary. Wherever he appeared, crowds swarmed him. So the landslide that followed did not surprise many who had been watching online. The story of how we got there, however, captures the toxicity of the moment.
Pantami had first emerged as PDP governorship candidate for 2027 on May 26, 2026 through a voice affirmation. Two other aspirants who had been screened and cleared, Usman Aliyu Garry and Khamisu Ahmed Mailantarki, went to court to challenge their exclusion. On September 24, 2026, Justice Amina Aliyu Mohammed of the Federal High Court sitting in Gombe nullified that primary, holding that it failed to comply with the PDP constitution and the Electoral Act, and ordered the party to conduct a fresh primary within thirty days. Crucially, the court rejected the prayer to disqualify Pantami from the PDP on grounds that he was still an APC member.
This was the legal resolution of a rupture that began in May, when the Gombe APC leadership announced Jamilu Isyaku Gwamna as its consensus candidate for 2027. Pantami rejected the process as a coronation rather than consensus, arguing that cleared aspirants never consented in writing, and subsequently withdrew from the APC race citing violations of the Electoral Act. He then defected to the PDP.
The rerun was fixed for Tuesday, September 29, 2026 across 114 wards in 11 local government areas, with three aspirants cleared. The exercise was declared peaceful and the result, announced by Hon. Johnbull Shekarau, chairman of the electoral committee from the PDP National Headquarters, was emphatic; Prof. Isa Ali Pantami polled 2,054 votes, about eighty percent of the total, Khamisu Mailantarki 389 and Usman Garry 112 out of 2,555 accredited delegates. With that, Pantami reclaimed the ticket, and in his acceptance speech called on his rivals to join him.
Yet the legal and electoral drama is only one layer. The second layer is how quickly the conflict escaped party structures and became what Henry Jenkins calls participatory culture turned into a borderless battlefield. Evidence for this came as early as August when the Gombe Network of Civil Society Organisations, GONET, warned that hostile political activity on social media was generating personal insults, character assassination, cyberbullying and dangerous incitement among supporters of the major candidates. GONET specifically linked the escalation to the controversy surrounding Hausa singer Dauda Kahutu Rarara’s attack song against Pantami. That warning matters because it was not a partisan complaint; it was a civil society alarm that Gombe should not bleed because of politics.
Rarara’s intervention on July 31, when he released a song praising Jamilu Gwamna while accusing Pantami of drug use, is a textbook case of how a state contest became a northern social media ecosystem war. Premium Times reported how the song circulated on Facebook, X, TikTok, WhatsApp and YouTube and triggered a debate that drew in politicians, religious leaders, lawyers and ordinary users far beyond Gombe. This is where Tajfel and Turner’s Social Identity Theory becomes useful; supporters no longer defend policies, they defend the honour of their in-group. Criticism of a candidate is interpreted as an attack on the community itself.
That in-group logic is most visible among clerics. After Rarara’s song, Islamic scholars like Alkali Zaria publicly condemned the personal attack on Pantami, arguing that political rivalry should not justify insults against religious scholars. At the same time, clerics from the opposite direction entered the fray. The dispute between Pantami and Kano-based cleric Sheikh Sani Isah Kano over Pantami’s comment that many Gombe indigenes cannot afford bread became a second front. Sani accused Pantami of portraying Gombe people negatively, and the exchange exploded across platforms.
Add to this the Christian dimension, where the Arewa Christian Sisters Prayer Forum labeled Pantami an extremist scholar who only remembered Christians were not infidels because he needed their votes. What started as APC versus PDP morphed into Izala versus Tijjaniyya, Muslim versus Christian, north versus north.
The war has not been one-sided. Gwamna’s camp has equally complained of coordinated online smear campaigns, including fake news that he had been arrested by the EFCC. His campaign petitioned the Inspector-General of Police and sought a cybercrime investigation, even requesting INTERPOL involvement on grounds that some actors might be outside Nigeria. A Gombe Chief Magistrate’s Court granted bail to Suleiman Dawawu and two others accused of publishing those claims on Facebook. This mutual victimhood shows that both camps experience what researchers call networked harassment, where misinformation is weaponized for political effect.
Perhaps the most telling illustration of how political loyalty has acquired the emotional character of fandom is the Moofy case. The Facebook singer and influencer initially supported Pantami and was met with gendered shaming; she posted a screenshot of a Jamilu supporter calling her Karuwar Pantami, Pantami’s prostitute, noting it was the second time she was called a prostitute for her political choice, that she had never even met Pantami, and that she would end her involvement in Gombe politics and pursue legal action for defamation.
Weeks later, the same Hausa outlet Labarai24 announced she had abandoned Pantami’s movement and embraced Jamilu Gwamna’s, after once promising one million votes for Pantami. She was immediately branded a betrayer by both sides. This is precisely where politics ceases to be rational choice and becomes what scholars call affective polarization; defection is treated as moral betrayal.
There is another curious framing that deserves theoretical attention. Supporters of Governor Inuwa Yahaya have anchored their support for Gwamna on continuity, arguing that the government has transformed Gombe with infrastructure and streetlights, so his candidate deserves to win as a matter of right. It is an argument rooted in inheritance logic that political science calls performance transfer fallacy. It is like saying because a father got an A in an exam, the child should automatically inherit the grade. It ignores that it is not Inuwa Yahaya contesting but Jamilu Gwamna, and that continuity does not automatically translate to competence.
For Pantami, the foundation of support is even more complex. As Karl Marx noted, religion is the opium of the masses, and Pantami’s massive following is undeniably rooted in his background as a revered cleric. Yet that same religious identity has become his greatest vulnerability. Every political move, every comment on whether Gombe people can afford bread, every prayer, every interaction with non-Muslims is scrutinized through a religious lens that demands absolute moral consistency.
Max Weber warned about this charismatic trap; the prophet who enters the palace ceases to be seen as a prophet and begins to be judged as a politician, and no politician, especially a cleric, can survive that judgment with reputation intact. The cleric is expected to be an idol of righteousness, so any moderation or inclusivity required by politics is easily read as disappointment or compromise.
This is why Pantami’s Gombe remains such good material for content. It has forced many Nigerians to notice the good performance of the incumbent governor, Inuwa Yahaya,, bringing to light developments that were previously hidden.
Pantami has turned a quiet state into a national stage where influencers, clerics, singers, civil society, and citizens who will never vote in Gombe become the loudest actors in an election whose consequences they will not bear. It is thrilling, entertaining, toxic and deeply human all at once, a perfect mirror of how Nigerian politics now lives not in polling units, but in comment sections.
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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
