There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a civil servants’ home when the month ends and the salary does not come. It is not the silence of peace but of anxiety, the kind that makes a father avoid his children’s eyes when they ask about school fees or a mother pretend not to hear when the landlord knocks. In Adamawa State, between 2015 and 2019, that silence became a familiar ghost in thousands of households.
Ask any civil servant who lived through Senator Jibrilla Bindow’s tenure as governor, and beneath the political correctness, beneath the ethnic and regional loyalties that often cloud Nigerian political discourse, you will find a memory that refuses to fade; the memory of walking into a bank and being told, politely but firmly, that your salary was no longer considered reliable collateral. The memory of commercial banks, institutions that had for decades extended loans and overdrafts to government workers, suddenly closing their doors because they could no longer trust that Adamawa State would pay its workers at month’s end.
This is not folklore. This is recent history. And as the 2027 governorship race begins to take shape, with whispers and not-so-quiet campaigns suggesting Bindow should return to Dougirei Government House, it becomes necessary to ask a question that sentiment often obscures: What does it mean to lead when your workers cannot feed their families?
Politics in Nigeria thrives on short memory. It banks on the assumption that hunger today will make people forget yesterday’s starvation. It relies on ethnic arithmetic, regional balancing, and the seductive language of “he is our son” to paper over the cracks of actual governance failure. But there are some failures that leave scars too deep for political makeup to cover. Salary irregularity is one of them.
During Bindow’s administration, Adamawa became one of the poster children of Nigeria’s state-level fiscal crisis. The collapse in oil prices that began in 2014 exposed the fragility of states that had grown fat and lazy on federal allocations, and Adamawa was among the most vulnerable. According to the Nigeria Labour Congress, by 2018, the state was juggling salary arrears that stretched across multiple months, with some workers going three to four months without pay. The wage bill, which hovered above two billion naira monthly, consistently outstripped the state’s internally generated revenue, which struggled to reach even 500 million naira in good months, according to BudgIT Nigeria’s fiscal transparency reports.
But here is the political question that cuts deeper than spreadsheets: while other states facing similar revenue challenges sought creative solutions, restructured their finances, negotiated bailouts with fiscal discipline attached, or at the very least communicated transparently with their workers, Adamawa under Bindow appeared to stumble from one salary crisis to another without a coherent strategy. The result was not just financial—it was psychological. Civil servants, the backbone of any functional state, began to lose faith not just in their governor but in the entire system.
When commercial banks began withdrawing loan facilities from civil servants, it was not a political statement. It was a business decision rooted in cold mathematics. Banks operate on predictability. They extend credit based on the assumption that borrowers will have a steady income stream to service their debts. When that assumption collapses, when salaries become a maybe-this-month-maybe-not affair, banks do what banks do: they protect their balance sheets. Civil servants became toxic assets, not because of anything they did, but because of what their government failed to do.
The human cost of this cannot be quantified in economic reports alone. Families that had budgeted for school fees suddenly had to withdraw their children mid-term. Small businesses that depended on the purchasing power of civil servants—the tailors, the food vendors, the transport operators—watched their customer base evaporate. Landlords, themselves often struggling, began evicting tenants who could not pay rent. The social fabric of communities across Yola, Mubi, Ganye, Numan, and other parts of Adamawa began to fray.
When Governor Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri took office in May 2019, the task before him was not just political—it was existential. He inherited a demoralized workforce, a skeptical banking sector, and a populace exhausted by broken promises. The fact that within his first year in office, salary payments became more consistent is not a matter of propaganda; it is a verifiable shift confirmed by the state chapter of the Nigeria Labour Congress and by the simple testimony of workers who can now access loans again, plan for their children’s education again, and breathe a little easier at month’s end.
This is not to say that Fintiri’s administration is without flaws. Governance is a continuous test, and no government passes every exam. Inflation remains high, the cost of living continues to squeeze ordinary Nigerians, and Adamawa, like the rest of the country, still grapples with infrastructure deficits, security challenges, and the need for more robust revenue generation. But on the specific question of salary payment consistency and the restoration of civil servants’ dignity and financial access, the contrast between the Bindow years and the Fintiri years is not subtle. It is stark.
Yet, as 2027 approaches, there are voices—some genuine, some strategic—calling for Bindow’s return. Some argue that he was a victim of circumstances beyond his control, that the national economic downturn would have crippled any governor. There is some truth to this. The 2015 to 2019 period was brutal for state governments across Nigeria. According to the World Bank’s Nigeria Development Update from 2017, at least 27 states struggled with salary payments during that window. But this is where political analysis must separate context from competence. Yes, the times were hard. But how a leader responds to hard times is the very definition of leadership. Some governors negotiated bailouts and imposed fiscal discipline. Others sought partnerships with development agencies to cushion their workers. Some simply communicated honestly with their people about the challenges and the plans to address them. Adamawa under Bindow did not distinguish itself in any of these areas.
This is the inconvenient truth that political nostalgia tries to bury. In Nigerian politics, we often confuse motion with progress, noise with substance, and longevity with competence. A politician who has been around for decades is not necessarily a good leader; he may simply be good at surviving. And survival, in Nigerian politics, often means mastering the art of ethnic mobilization, godfatherism, and the distribution of patronage—not the hard, unglamorous work of building systems, managing budgets, and ensuring that teachers, nurses, and clerks can collect their salaries and go home with dignity.
The argument that Bindow deserves another chance because he has “learned from his mistakes” is one that Nigerians have heard before, in different states, at different times. It is the same logic that recycles failed leaders across the country, that keeps the same faces in power for decades, that treats governance like an apprenticeship where the people are guinea pigs for political experiments. But governance is not a rehearsal. Real families suffer real consequences when governments fail.
Public opinion in Adamawa is not monolithic, of course. There are those, particularly within Bindow’s political base and ethnic constituency, who believe he was unfairly judged and that he deserves another opportunity. Politics in Nigeria is deeply personal, deeply communal, and often deeply emotional. But the question is whether those emotions should override the empirical record. Should the desire to see “our son” in power again outweigh the memory of months without salary? Should regional pride trump the lived experience of financial humiliation?
The danger in politics is not just bad leadership; it is the willingness of people to forget bad leadership because of tribalism, sentimentality, or the false promise that “this time will be different.” Progress, as the saying goes, is not just about movement—it is about direction. A state that moves ten steps forward under one administration, only to take twenty steps backward under another, has not progressed. It has regressed. And the people pay the price.
Adamawa’s 2027 gubernatorial election will not be decided by newspaper articles or political analysis. It will be decided in the hearts and minds of voters, many of whom will cast their ballots based on ethnic affinity, party loyalty, or the last-minute distribution of rice and cash. That is the reality of Nigerian democracy. But for those civil servants who remember the day the banks turned them away, for those families who watched their children’s dreams deferred because salaries did not come, for those who lived through the uncertainty and indignity of the Bindow years, the choice is not complicated. It is a choice between memory and amnesia, between accountability and sentiment, between leaders who deliver and leaders who simply endure.
The question Adamawa must answer in 2027 is not whether Senator Bindow is a bad man. By most accounts, he is not. The question is whether he is the right man to lead a state that is still rebuilding its fiscal credibility, still trying to restore hope to a workforce that was once abandoned. The question is whether nostalgia is a good enough reason to risk going back to the days when even the banks did not believe in Adamawa’s future.
As one civil servant in Yola put it, speaking quietly but firmly, “We have seen both worlds. We know what it feels like when government works and when it doesn’t. Some people want us to forget. But we remember. And memory, in the end, is the only protection we have against making the same mistake twice.”
