One of the biggest scams confronting Borno State today is the industrial scale land racketeering scheme. This crisis is no accident. It is a carefully engineered fraud overseen by none other than the heartless and corrupt Governor of Borno State, Prof. Babagana Umara Zulum and his handpicked accomplice, Engr. Adam Bukar Bababe the Executive Secretary of the Borno Geographic Information Service (BOGIS).
Just seven months ago, Governor Zulum renewed Bababe’s tenure despite his well-documented history of fraud. Together, the duo have capitalized on the massive demand for land in Maiduguri, seizing plots from the poor and reallocating them to cronies, political allies, and family members. The racket is nothing more than a network of sweetheart deals, enriching the powerful while leaving ordinary citizens dispossessed.
But why was Bababe chosen for this role? The answer lies in his past. In 2015, Bababe was convicted by Justice Charity Mamza of the Borno High Court for fraud, after being found guilty of stealing funds through misrepresentations to the Central Bank of Nigeria while serving at the Lake Chad Research Institute.
Bababe himself has long operated as a local tyrant. In April 2025, he orchestrated the detention of Sultan Usman, a social media activist, after Usman criticized the government’s poor handling of the devastating flood crisis in the state.
Yet when Zulum became governor in 2019, he and the state’s Attorney General intervened to rescue Bababe from the consequences of his past fraudulent crimes, hiding behind the claim that his conviction was overturned on appeal. Almost immediately afterward, Bababe was rewarded with the powerful position of Executive Secretary of BOGIS.
Since then, land fraud in Borno has reached unprecedented levels of scale and brazenness. What we see today is not governance, it is state enabled plunder, a machinery deliberately designed to rob the powerless and reward the corrupt in Borno State.
