The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Celebrating peace amidst threatening war

    Celebrating peace amidst threatening war

    Trying times are moments for a nation’s intellectuals to show their mettle. Nigeria is in one of those times now with respect to insecurity, and our intellectuals are proving their worth. For example, from 24 to 28 November, 2025, the Society for Peace Studies and Practice (SPSP) held its 19th International Annual Conference at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Oyo State. The conference theme was “Economic Challenges and the Tasks of Building Sustainable Peace in a Globalised World,” and the conference consisted of the society’s General Assembly and the Investiture of Fellows.

    Mr. Nathaniel M. Awuapila is the President of the society and Dr.  Olanrewaju L. Yusuf is the Secretary-General.  Professor Suleiman Elias Bogoro, the former Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), is the Chair of the Board of Trustees, whilst Ambassador Fatima Sa’ad Abubakar is the Acting Chair of the Board of Fellows. Moreover, Professor Isaac Albert was the Host of the conference, and Professor K.O. Adebowale, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, was the Chief Host. Dr. Ozonnia Ojielo (United Nations Resident Coordinator in Rwanda) and General Christopher G. Musa, Rtd. (Former Chief of Defence Staff) were the Keynote Speakers.

    SPSP, which has as its motto “Peace to Humanity,” is a renowned professional body committed to advancing peace, conflict resolution, and security studies in Nigeria and far beyond. The society was born out of the increasing occurrence of violent conflicts, ethnic tensions, and security challenges in Nigeria and the need for research-driven interventions by and collaboration among stakeholders. Since its inception in the Peace and Conflict Studies Programme at the University of Ibadan around 2000, the society has played a pivotal role in advancing peace research, fostering academic and practical interventions, and building capacity among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in and outside Nigeria.

    In celebration of the remarkable contributions of a selection of distinguished personalities to peace studies and practice, SPSP has awarded them the 2025 fellowships of the society. They include Chief Bisi Akande, former Governor of Osun State and former interim National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and current Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council of the University of Ibadan; CG Kemi Nanna Nnadap, the Controller-General of Nigerian Immigration Services; General Christopher G. Musa, Rtd.; Dr. Abiodun Essiet, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Community Engagement; Professor Olayinka Ramota Karim, Vice-Chancellor, Fountain University, Osogbo; and Professor Akinkunmi Adegbola Alao, former Director of the Institute of Cultural Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife; among other personages.

    With respect to the absence of peace in some parts of Nigeria at the moment, language has played a crucial role. Some Nigerians had invited the United States to intervene in the country to stop ‘genocide’ against Christians. To this request, United States President Donald Trump had condemned Nigeria and pledged to invade the country in an operation that would be “vicious, fast and sweet” to save “our cherished Christians.”

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    This raised the question, “What is genocide?” Answers to this question are as varied as the different interest groups in the country. A related question is “Is there genocide against Christians in Nigeria?” The answers to this question are as varied as the ones to the preceding question. One person who has been most viciously attacked on the basis of his perspective on the ‘Christian Genocide’ question is Governor Hyacinth Alia of Benue State who is a Catholic priest.

    In a 19 November, 2025 Punch newspapers video, in response to those questioning his credentials as a priest for saying that there was no genocide in Benue State, Governor Alia said: “I am a Reverend Father. So, being in government does not take that away from me. I am still a Reverend Father. I came in as a governor as a Reverend Father, I am working with the fear of God and the compassion of Christianity and humanity, and at the end of the day, I am still going back to the Church as a Reverend Father and a good Christian.”

    Governor Alia then elucidated: “In my state of Benue, we don’t have any religious, any ethnic, any racial, any national or state genocide. We don’t have that. Do we have a number of insecurities in the state? Yes, we do. But it is not a genocide. Someone would need to … check the United Nations definitions for this. Have we lost a number of people? Yes. We have, at different stages. I am giving you a background of the challenges we’ve had many years ago; talking about the agro-pastoralists, the herders, and then we’re talking about the agro-farmers, typical farmers. … But that does not fit into the parameters of a genocide. So, for those who seek to politicise everything, there is no genocide in Benue State.”

    Moreover, in a 19 November, 2025 report by Falmata Daniel in Premium Times, titled “No religious genocide in Benue – Governor Alia,” the Governor was reported to have said: “So, it’s on the record that I had an interface with the American ambassador to let him know that … in Nigeria, particularly in Benue State, there is no genocide, unless it’s my description, and the United Nations description of a genocide [that] does not fit within the parameters.”

    One of the most acerbic attacks on Governor Alia is in a 20 November, 2025 report by Agbemu James, in Idoma Voice newspaper, titled “Genocide: ‘shut up’ – Fr Kelvin Ugwu tears Gov Alia apart for betraying Benue people.” In it, Fr Kelvin Ugwu was reported to have said, to his audience: “Benue’s governor, and all the politicians for that matter, can speak all the grammar they want, call it genocide or ungenocide… At the end of the day, it is still you who will be left to bury your dead. The government and politicians will always try to water everything down so that this initial garagara around insecurity will fade and the international community will become confused on what really is the issue. It is every man to himself. Nobody is coming to help you. Don’t ‘let bygones be bygones’ when you can simply buygun before you get gunned.”

    According to a 23 November, 2025 Punch report, the governor made the following clarification: “The situation is multi-sectoral. Don’t reduce it to religion. Both Muslims and Christians have been killed. Benue is the most populous Christian state in the North. So, naturally, there are unspoken expectations, but let us not politicise people’s pain.” He further noted: “The crisis began as farmer–herder conflicts before escalating into full-blown banditry and terrorism. Several people from different faith backgrounds have suffered losses. So, attempts to frame the killings as religiously motivated are misleading and harmful.”

    Explaining the way in which such wrongful framing could be harmful, Governor Alia was reported in the 21 November, 2025 issue of Idoma Voice to have said about the insecurity which really arose from criminality, land-use disputes, and targeted attacks: “It is important to emphasize that the killings should not be defined or framed purely along religious lines. Misdiagnosing the nature of the crisis may hinder the multi-sectoral solutions already being implemented.”

    One of the problems that have often been seen as bedeviling Nigeria is lack of elite consensus. Amazingly, President Trump’s threat to levy religious war on Nigeria seems to have resulted in a measure of elite consensus with respect to vehemently opposing an American invasion of the country. The disparate range of Nigerians who have opposed such an action include Femi Falana (SAN), Omoyele Sowore (the 2023 presidential candidate of the African Action Congress), Seun Okinbaloye of Channels Television, Dele Farotimi (a regular critic of President Tinubu), Senator Jimoh Ibrahim, Senator Shehu Sani, and Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka. 

    Some Nigerians in the Diaspora have also been remarkable in their explanation of the true situation in Nigeria and their recommendation of caution by concerned foreign entities.  One such patriotic Nigerian is Ms. Oge Onubogu, Director & Senior Fellow, Africa Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies. She submitted as follows at the 28 September, 2022 US Commission on International Religious Freedom  hearing on Nigeria: “Nigeria’s overlapping conflicts, including the insurgencies from the north, secessionist agitations in the south, and inter-communal violence, have killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands. … In Nigeria, religion intersects and interacts with ethnic identity, region, social class, and profession. Nigeria’s protracted violent conflicts between farmers and herders is an example of this complex intersection.”

    Moreover, at the 20 November, 2025 US congressional hearing on the redesignation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC), she submitted: “It is important to understand the nature of the violence in Nigeria – and its causes, which extend beyond the religious or ethnic overtones that appear to motivate that animosity. … [A] narrow narrative that reduces Nigeria’s current security situation to a single story of widespread persecution and mass slaughter of Christians, misses other important considerations and oversimplifies the complexity of violence and inter-faith relations in the country.”

    Ms. Onubogu further notes with respect to Nigeria’s CPC redesignation: “On one hand, Nigerians, Christian groups in particular, welcome the current international spotlight, viewing it as an overdue opportunity to pressure the Nigerian government into taking decisive action against violence. At the same time, many Nigerians of all faiths, including Christians, worry that President Trump’s rhetoric – especially the threat of unilateral military action against the country – will be counterproductive and draw attention away from the specific problem of pervasive insecurity across the country, by inflaming existing political tensions and divisions.”

    Mr. J. Japheth Omojuwa also stood up for the country at the 2025 Halifax International Security Forum, held from 21 to 23 November in Nova Scotia, Canada. There, United States Senator Kevin Kramer of North Dakota said: “I think the Christians in Nigeria today are probably feeling pretty good about Donald Trump’s position.” To this cheeky remark, Mr. Omojuwa responded: “Senator, … I’m a Christian from Nigeria. … I do not feel good about Donald Trump. … Is there a way that powerful countries can help less powerful countries … without [leaving] them worse off? … [T]here’s a correlation between the point Donald Trump spoke about Nigeria’s challenges and the escalation of terrorism. … Is there a way to decently help Nigeria without making things worse and without disrespecting Nigerian Christians and Muslims?”  

    Reflecting on the whole debate about war and peace in Nigeria today, one cannot but remember the propaganda slogans in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The manipulative, contradictory slogans are “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” It is noteworthy that, as our people say, “Ogun ò dà bí iyán; ogun ò dà bí èko” (‘War is not as delicious as pounded yam; war is not as delicious as cornmeal.’)

  • For President Tinubu to win the insecurity war

    For President Tinubu to win the insecurity war

    As long as sponsors of insecurity remain unmasked, shamed and made to have their day in our courts, so long will the powerful factors motivating them, be they religion or money, continue to consume them, and for so long will insecurity remain with us no matter the number of military emergencies declared by the President.

    Even his most virulent political enemy will concede that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is smart, redoubtable, and never afraid to take tough political decisions not minding whose ox is gored, as long as he believes they are in the best interest of the country.

    Unlike his immediate predecessor, President Muhammadu Buhari, he is never shackled, nor burdened with primordial or ethnic considerations in doing so.

    These are all the factors he will now have to fall back on if he truly wants to fight, and win the  resurgent insecurity war in the country.

    In this, he must be guided by history and remember that Nigerian governments have many times claimed to have tamed insecurity, citing for instance, how many Local Government Areas Boko Haram was claimed to have been expelled from in Borno state.

    He must also know that this is probably  going to be the toughest fight of his entire administration because it is going to be against some of the most powerful people in the country.

    Also, another election is approaching, and though he might have been kept in the dark, being non – Fulani,   when, in 2014/ 2015, then intending Presidential candidate of the APC, Muhammadu Buhari, was rumoured to have convoked a  meeting of some top Fulanis to plan how to oust President Goodluck Jonathan from office in order to retrieve  ‘their British inheritance – Nigeria’, and put it smack  back in Fulani hands. He must have since learnt about that as WhatsApp never forgets.

    And I dare say that despite the current deluge of decampments into the APC,  who says the same design may not be in the works against him now because we are dealing here with a  people whose major concern, always, is Fulani expansionism.

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    Or why the sudden, astronomical rise in security breaches?

    And what can be worse than three mass kidnappings, still counting, within days in Kebbi, Kwara and Niger states, as a result of which the Federal Government had to order the immediate shutdown of as many as 47 Federal Unity Colleges across the country, just as a slew of Northern states shut down literally all their schools?

    There isn’t the slightest  doubt some Fulanis believe it is time they conquer the rest of Nigeria which they arrogantly claim the British handed over to them at independence.

    Or haven’t they been out of power  for two very long years, plus!

    Below is part of the translation of a pamphlet allegedly written in Arabic and distributed in selected Mosques in Northern Nigeria by   FUNAM as far back as November 6, 2019 from which I have had cause to quote severally in the past:

    “This is the time to act. This is the time for second Holy War. We started in 1804. The British stopped us. We must regain the territories lost. It is against Islam to rotate power with infidels. Forget about election that will only lead to sharing of power”.

    “We must take the enemies in the West, Central and the North by surprise. That is the plot.

    Disperse and occupy their homes, forests, streets, schools, markets and act as spies. Our attacks on the infidels must be total and overwhelming. We must begin by instilling fear in them, weaken their resolve through kidnaps, brutal rapes, making it difficult for them to farm and subdue them before the war etc”.

    Which of these have Fulanis not shamelessly done or are currently doing all over the country?

    That was in 2019, but till date, not a single member of FUNAM has been invited for questioning by the Almighty Nigerian  security.

    All the above are, however, only minor parts of what is a much bigger challenge President Tinubu will have to frontally confront if he hopes to successfully deal with an insecurity conundrum that has convulsed Nigeria for over 15 years.

    And this is: “Who is really paying for Nigeria’s bloodbath?

    We talk endlessly about “terrorists”, “Fulani herdsmen”, “bandits” – as if they are ghosts who appear from thin air, armed to the teeth, fuelled, fed and endlessly re-supplied by magic.

    They are not ghosts.

    They are funded.

    And the sponsors are not barefoot militants in the bush – they are people in suits, kaftans and uniforms; sitting in air-conditioned offices in Abuja, Lagos, Kaduna, Dubai and beyond”.

    Chima Nnadi – Oforgu, quoted above, in a special report on terrorism and banditry in Nigeria, wrote at length on all these issues.

    Let us now dive into that seminal report from which we shall be quoting at some length.

    Wrote Chima – Oforgu:

    “In 2022, the Nigerian government quietly admitted that 96 terrorism financiers had been identified by the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) as backing Boko Haram and ISWAP.

    These were not rumours. They were based on financial intelligence – bank records, transfers, suspicious transaction reports – shared with law-enforcement agencies for prosecution”.

    “Yet till today, Nigerians do not have a public, detailed list of: who these 96 people and entities are,what political or business networks they belong to.

    What has become of the cases?

    So when government officials and foreign partners repeat the cliché: “We will go after the sponsors,” understand this: they already know many of them. The problem is not lack of intelligence. It is lack of political will”.

    Fortunately, nobody can any longer doubt that President Tinubu has political will the manner in which he removed  fuel subsidy and unified the foreign exchange market.

    To successfully fight terrorism in Nigeria, which has now been worsened by what Senator Adam Oshiomhole disclosed on the Senate  floor about those funding the bandits  guiding illegal mining operations, the President must be prepared to do much more.

    He must expose the names, shame and get tried, the following saboteurs, as detailed by Chima Oforgu in the article: “Terror financiers in government, Terror collaborators in the military; Terror enablers in the security agencies; Terror protectors in political parties

    Terror profiteers in the procurement system as well as the powerful individuals allegedly involved in illegal mining.

    Without the slightest doubt, the military emergency declared by the President is of great significance and will help the war on insecurity greatly.

    The significance of the emergency could, however, be greatly undermined if these powerful sponsors of Terror are left untouched, just like President Buhari and his Attorney – General, Abubakar Malami, left untried, the Nigerians who were named by the UAE, and recommended for trial.

    I say this because, as Oforgu wrote:”Here is the final warning:

    If Nigeria does not name the sponsors today, Nigeria will collapse under the terror they created tomorrow. And when that day comes, neither the rich nor the powerful will escape the consequences.

    The time for pretence is over”.

  • Language activism (I)

    Language activism (I)

    Mankind has travelled a long and tortuous road to arrive at this current point of incontestable global dominance. The oldest fossil which has been identified as being definitely human was discovered in East Africa in 1974. Irreverently named Lucy, she lived some 3.2 million years ago, still physically and genetically different from any human being alive today but already distinct from the most advanced of our cousins, the apes. Studies on the fossil suggested that Lucy, who was hardly a metre tall, died as a result of  a fall from a tall tree on which she had, as usual, sought refuge from the routine predation from one of the large cats with which she shared her immediate neighbourhood. In other words, she was just one of the creatures investing a space from which she could extract some subsistence for one more day of a truly precarious existence. It was an existence that was devoid of any form of comfort or promise. Each day dawned and was lived through as best as it was possible. No tomorrows existed in that arid and murderously competitive environment but Lucy and her humanoid companions desperately clung to life to which no other purpose other than survival could be attached. Man evolved over the next three million years until Homo sapiens arrived on the scene to create a brave new world in which some foggy sense could be made of human existence. That human species has grown to colonise every inch of geographic space outside the stubbornly unconquerable space of the Antarctic. And has become the most decisive force on earth both for evil and for good. Man has become the ruthless apex predator to whom all other knees must bow. The result of a recent experiment shows that the most dangerous sound in the jungle is not the dreadful roar of a lion on the hunt or a tiger on the lookout for what to devour but the sound of human voices in conservation. All animals who heard that sound fled precipitously from it. On reflection, that is the most sensible course of action under those circumstances.

    Mankind is the preeminent species on earth but not because of her stark physical characteristics. Put the biggest, strongest man next to a lion if you want to test this statement. Human dominance is certainly not physical. It is mental. It proceeds from his brain. Mankind is capable of thought from which comes the strategic planning which makes it possible for him to solve all problems collectively. What makes man truly awesome however is his ability to pool his thoughts with any number of other men through his ability to communicate. That is the basis of our much vaunted exceptionalism. The dinosaurs which ruled the earth for 150 million years before the sun set on them on one cataclysmic autumn evening fifty million years ago ruled the global environment through their sheer bulk which was augmented with a little brain. They were therefore not able to craft their environment to their will. With our species, the reverse is the truth and we not only have massive brains, we can enhance the effectiveness of those brains through the process of hooking up any number of brains through the power of language. Each person anywhere can communicate with his neighbour through the medium of speech using mutually intelligible languages of which there are now just over 7,000, with more than 400 of them spoken in Nigeria, one of the most linguistically diverse spaces on earth. Each of those languages spoken on earth represents some geographical and cultural niche, none more precious nor more important than the other. You cannot or definitely should not try to separate me from my Yoruba language because by doing so you are depriving me of my cultural heritage. Not only that, my failure to pass this heritage on to my children is a tragedy and reeks of criminal negligence. If you are Yoruba and wilfully refuse to pass on that language to your children, you are guilty of some form of cultural homicide and stand condemned. I use Yoruuba as an example here for the simple reason that I am Yoruba. You can substitute whatever is your mother tongue at this point.

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    Language is of such importance to any human being that we all come to the world with the genetic endowment of language adaptability. Noam Chomsky, the globally acclaimed grandfather of modern linguistics has postulated that every child born anywhere in the world has come with his brain wired to appreciate the grammar, that is, the structure of every language spoken on earth. It is not difficult to imagine that there are many opponents of this theory if only because it puts every language on the same pedestal, a situation which is anathema to those who seek comfort in the superiority of one language over all others. Some have also argued that nature and nurture are responsible for language development and Chomsky has not acknowledged the role of nurture in this process. You can think about that.

    I am inclined to support Chomsky in this matter, not because he needs my puny support but because I encountered a version of this theory from my grandmother long before I was made aware of the existence of Professor Chomsky or his theory. My grandmother came calling when my first son was born. Although she had been dandling babies; her children, grandchildren and great grand children on her knees for more than seven decades, she was still as excited about this one as she was with all the others that came before him. As she fondled him, she spoke directly to him, welcoming him to the world in her Ilara-Mokin (Ondo State) dialect. Some wag present on that occasion pointed out to the old lady that the baby could not possibly have any understanding of that language. Fortified by the weight of her age, my grandmother explained that all babies came to the world with the capacity to understand every language. They are however only able to speak the language or languages spoken to them in their infancy. In other words, children are able to speak all languages spoken to them but lose that ability by the time they are entering puberty.

    As far as I was concerned, this theory was proved to me shortly after my grandmother exposed me to it. A friend of mine, a fellow Ijesa married an Ibo lady shortly afterwards. I mention his Ijesa antecedents because we Ijesas are rather prone to marrying across tribal and other lines (Shout out to my in-laws in Akwa Ibom) but that is not the point of this story. The point here is that this Ibo bride arrived with the ability to speak Yoruba with the fluency of a native Yoruba speaker. When I asked her which part of Yorubaland she grew up in, she assured me that she had not lived in any part of Yorubaland before her marriage. Seeing my bewilderment, she explained that she was born and bred in the North. There, she lived in close proximity with Yorubas from whom she picked up their language. They were all taught in Hausa in their primary school as well and she was as fluent in that language as she was in Yoruba and Ibo which she spoke at home. She also spoke English of course so, she had four languages in her locker without having made any effort to learn any of them. No further proof needed to support my granny’s theory which is of course related also to Chomsky. The fundamental importance of language to human development is shown by this one observation but I am sure that there are many others that can be called upon. Our brains are wired to understand every language we encounter before the age of ten or thereabouts. After that age, that window of opportunity is closed and those who wish to reopen it have to do so through the use of considerable effort, which most people are loath to do.

  • Abductions revive Atiku’s opportunistic politics

    Abductions revive Atiku’s opportunistic politics

    Despite a pending case instituted by the Nafiu Bala-led faction of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in the Federal High Court, Abuja, former vice president Atiku Abubakar has finally registered with the party in his ward in Adamawa State after pussyfooting for a little over four months. The registration caught reporters napping. In July when the former vice president and his men orchestrated the official takeover of the ADC, and former senate president David Mark and ex-Osun State governor Rauf Aregbesola were appointed interim party chairman and interim national secretary respectively, it was expected that Alhaji Atiku would follow hard on their heels by consummating his registration. For inexplicable reasons, it took more than four months before he finally crossed the Rubicon. His months of dithering reflected the tentativeness of his politics and the opportunism of his ambition. Characteristically uncommitted to anything save his ambition, or to ideology or to political party, or to persons or principles, he has always had an eye on the main chance.

    Months before the July ADC takeover, he had assembled a flotilla for the unique purpose of finding a platform with which to make his final bid for the Nigerian presidency in 2027. The flotilla comprised sundry politicians grieving over their displacement in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), men and women anxious to see Alhaji Atiku announce his membership of the party in consonance with his huge financial commitments. Instead, he balked. Some suggested it was because the party was rent in two by discord over who was the legitimate chairman of the party, especially seeing how controversially the previous chairman Ralph Nwosu hastily relinquished office. Others suggested that though he resigned his membership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on July 14, 2025, the former vice president was at sixes and sevens over whether to finally commit himself to the ADC into which he had led most of his lieutenants. Gen. Mark coaxed him; Mr Argbesola entreated him; the talkative and vengeful Nasir el-Rufai tugged at his flowing robes; and the vast assemblage of journeymen looking for political relevance raised a din – all of them to have him lead the charge, not remotely or virtually, but from the front, physically, even if sluggishly.

    The 2027 party primaries are just months away. When by early November Alhaji Atiku was still vacillating, many members of the ADC, particularly those bewitched by his uncompromising talk, were beginning to panic. They wanted a political war in 2027, and were eager to draw their swords; but they were sobered by the enormity of the task ahead and chastened by what needs to be done to secure victory. Vacillations, they reasoned, would not deliver the main prize. But the more the former vice president was entreated, the more detached he became, until of course early last week when he dropped the other shoe. The party leadership may be flummoxed by their leader’s reluctance to take risks and are vexed by his seeming indifference to the dangers his tentativeness exposed them to, but the party rank and file are now openly animated. Alhaji Atiku had kept a tight grip on the funds needed to vivify a party long used to being hijacked and ravaged by ambitious politicians; now, they seem assured that at last, the spending would begin in earnest.

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    As unflattering as Alhaji Atiku’s political style is, and regardless of the many contradictions in which his presidential ambition over the decades had weltered, he is at bottom a cautious man and spender. He waited long enough to see that the PDP had become irredeemable; waited still to see that the ADC was unlikely to unravel over its disputed chairmanship and leadership fights; and also waited until the last two weeks when a spate of terrorist killings and abductions began ruffling the feathers of the ruling party. He was indeed still prepared to wait even further to gauge the right moment when he would feel and see the Achilles heel of the administration. But suddenly, buoyed by the terrorist abductions in Kebbi and Niger States as well as the startled incomprehensibilities of the APC administration in responding to the siege being woven around the country, Alhaji Atiku has found his voice and seemed to gain political weight. Finally, he senses that the APC can be beaten. Though he sometimes rails against the administration’s economic policies, he knows at bottom that the APC is not doing badly at all in reviving and, even more encouragingly, resetting the Nigerian economy. Using economic issues as a campaign tool, he suspects, will not resonate. It has to be insecurity. And in the last two weeks, a carefully choreographed wave of abductions and merciless butchering has triggered a jaunty response from the ADC and Alhaji Atiku. Forgetting that he is of the Fulani stock accused of being the main inspirators of insecurity in Nigeria, a charge also levelled at former president Muhammadu Buhari for being the chief originator of insecurity, Alhaji Atiku appears emboldened to claim he has the magic wand to cure the insecurity cancer. Few are likely to believe him.

    But it hardly matters. The former vice president is probably the most accomplished exponent of political opportunism. He has seen enormous possibilities in the choreographed terrorist attacks and abductions across some northern states, not to talk of the intensification of other attacks in states torn between suing for peace or fighting it out. He will deploy the ensuing public anger and helplessness to drive his campaign and position himself, despite his old age, as the deus ex machina Nigeria desperately needs. That mentality – of seizing the opportunity of lawlessness to make political profit – is rife among a section of the political class. It is illogical, but it is rife. Former Kaduna governor Nasir el-Rufai also once enthused, as governor, that being Fulani, he was in a position to stop the killings pervading the southern part of the state. However, all he did throughout his governorship was to pay the killers and, by his reckless statements and prejudiced disposition, stoked the fire of more killings in the state. Should Alhaji Atiku become president as he hopes, he cannot do better than President Buhari or Mallam el-Rufai. He will make stupendous promises, but he would be chary of drawing too much blood from his kinsmen. If his kinsmen saw the Buhari presidency as licence to deliver carnage, and found plausible excuses to justify and bask in the bloodletting, it would not be different under Alhaji Atiku. He has not shown himself a principled and ideological politician, and had in his past campaigns urged Muslims and the political North to be discriminating in their voting.

    No one believes that the killings and abductions are happenstances. Some, however, say they are enacted to thumb the nose at the United States which had threatened to bomb the perpetrators of Christian genocide to smithereens. This view is sheer nonsense. While baiting the US may seem foolhardy, perpetrators of killings and abductions, though they are in many instances Fulani, know that executing a military campaign by air or on foot in Nigeria is indeed hard to carry out with precision. Most Nigerians think the intensity of the terrorist attacks, particularly in the Northwest, was designed to produce both a political message and a political advantage. Alhaji Atiku is unbothered by whatever anyone thinks or whatever justifications are adduced for the rampage. All he sees is an administration discomfited by the events of the day, and an advantage for him and his beleaguered party to soldier on. Whether he can sustain the advantage beyond a few months remains to be seen. Though chafing under the table, the administration should count itself fortunate to have to contend with the recrudescing terrorist attacks about six months before the primaries and more than a year before the elections. If they cannot find a way to neutralise the political effect of insecurity as a factor in the campaigns, then they have themselves to blame.

    The attacks and abductions have clearly made the ADC and its leaders both hopeful and exuberant, a sort of profiting from an opponent’s misery. This is politically legitimate. But there is also increasing realisation that cells of terrorist attackers lurking in the forests in many southern states, their agenda speculated to be either land grabbing or the establishment of a religious caliphate inspired by ISIS ideology, is a disincentive to vote Atiku. Those speculations stand more chance of dooming the Atiku campaign than energising it as he anticipates. Mallam el-Rufai is characteristically more upbeat than even Alhaji Atiku. He swears that with the ADC’s newfound zeal and the muddle in which the APC has found itself, Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna would be swept away in 2027. His fixation is predictably with Kaduna where his reputation had been bludgeoned by former supporters who encountered and embraced the inspiringly urbane style of the governor and marveled that governance could be so easy and entrancing. The ADC national secretary, Rauf Aregbesola, has not met with such good fortune. His reputation is in tatters and his politics generally uncouth and unappealing. He zeroes in on Osun; but as regicidal as that state is, they do not have the reputation of being calculating and nostalgic. To them, Mr Aregbesola is history, and in Osun, they forget history, especially when it traumatises them.

    If the ruling party manages to turn the corner in respect of insecurity, the lull the ADC experienced for months when their dithery leader, the former vice president, agonised over whether to commit himself lock, stock, and barrel to the fringe party, will return to haunt them. But having been inattentive to and mystified and mortified by the country’s economic recovery, Alhaji Atiku will do everything in his power to prevent the APC from getting a reprieve. The abductions chaos has now gifted the great opportunist a chance to indulge his pastime of profiting from other people’s misery; he will nurture that anomaly for as long as he can manage. Given the brittleness of his politics, his unsteady gait in withstanding headwinds, and the way he plays ducks and drakes with the love and support of his followers, it is hard seeing him weather the storm when the political hurricane against his ambition reaches Category 5.

  • Trump auctioning Ukraine?

    Trump auctioning Ukraine?

    US President Donald Trump is neither a fan of history nor a deep thinker, but he has been very lucky. It is, therefore, not surprising that he tried to foist a 28-point peace plan on Ukraine in order to bring the Russo-Ukrainian war begun in February 2022 to an end. Largely drafted by the Russian official, Kirill Dmitriev, and containing provisions such as imposing a limit on Ukraine’s armed forces (to some 600,000), preventing the invaded country from joining NATO or allowing NATO forces on its soil, and Russia keeping the entire Donbas region, the deal virtually rewarded Russian invasion. As expected, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave cautious approval to the plan. But against the strident opposition from Ukraine and European Union countries, with President Volodymyr Zelensky poignantly suggesting that the deal was a Hobson’s choice that left Ukraine with the awkward option of keeping the friendship and partnership of the US or keeping its dignity, the deal has been considerably edited and watered down to 22 points to the chagrin of Russia.

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    Probably the only advantage for Ukraine in the original 28-point deal is a security guarantee by the United Kingdom, some European countries, Canada, Turkey, and implausibly Russia itself. The controversial deal, sold by US negotiator Steve Witkof as a US deal when he knew it was a Russian deal, reminds the world of the June 1919 Treaty of Versailles which not only inaccurately cast Germany as the loser in World War I but also subjected it to burdensome reparations. The Treaty of Versailles presaged the grand 1938 Munich appeasement that failed to prevent World War II. Now, another appeasement, probably worse than the World War I stalemate and the Munich Agreement, is in the offing. It remains to be seen whether Mr Trump’s shortsighted appeasement will not in turn produce a worse debacle in the years ahead, even after the guns have long fallen silent in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

  • Security emergency needs structure

    Security emergency needs structure

    President Bola Tinubu’s declaration of a nationwide security emergency last week requires comprehensive follow-ups to be effective. The declaration followed a string of school and church attacks and abductions that once again exposed Nigeria to global ridicule. The continuing attacks, intensified in the past few weeks, indicate a mockery of Nigeria’s security paradigm and a scorning of American threats by President Donald Trump to attack terrorists and sponsors of terrorism on Nigerian soil. There is, however, also a growing suspicion that the synchronisation of the attacks is far more indicative of politics than anything else, whether they be scorning foreign threats or mocking governmental inertia. Whatever the reasons for the attacks, President Tinubu’s declaration is a step closer to fully taking on the evil coterie that has waged a relentless war on the country. The government may not have quite appreciated the declaration of war by terrorists on the country, but gradually, the whole picture appears to be getting clearer. The country is at war, even if the phrase seems harsh and apocalyptic.

    Last week, during a Christmas carol and praise festival in Jos, Plateau State, former president Olusegun Obasanjo strongly suggested the cessation of any negotiation or accommodation with terrorists. But in the view of the government there are actually extenuating circumstances that permit negotiations, especially in light of the permanent presence of hostages at terrorists’ lairs nationwide. Overall, President Tinubu’s security emergency declaration seems to acknowledge that public patience appears to be wearing thin. Indeed, Nigerian leaders know at the back of their minds that the country is just a few moments away from catastrophe. How they manage the next few months will, therefore, define the success of the administration itself and the future of the country.

    Read Also: Tinubu reaffirms security, unity, community resilience as core priorities

    If the security emergency declaration is to have teeth, the administration will have to go beyond mere declarations. It must put a structure in place, and forge a template and anchor staff to manage the emergency. It must not take for granted that the security agencies know what to do. The government has mandated the recruitment of extra personnel for the task, including 20,000 men for the police, and an indeterminate number for the army. In addition to explicating the ranching issue in line with the Livestock ministry mandate, the president’s statement also tasked the Department of State Service (DSS) with clearing the forests, in league with Forest Guards, of all terrorists. These are sensible but reactive measures that could give muscle to the anti-terrorism fight, though it is not clear why the government thinks the DSS should carry out an assignment the military has struggled with.

    But something is missing. An ad hoc team is needed, and it must be tasked with coordinating all the measures to stanch the flow of blood and curb abductions on a scale that must be seen as significant. The president must, therefore, task the service chiefs to draw up a plan, suggest a structure and composition, and list the desired objectives, including timelines. The security emergency declaration gives the impression that the administration and indeed the country have the luxury of time. They don’t. The terrorists are relentless and aggressive, and their sponsors, whether political (and invariably theocratic campaigners) or mining barons or even land grabbers, are determined to push through their sanguinary agenda as they gloat in accompaniment. These powerful non-state actors will do their worst to sustain the bloodshed. The genie they conjured and let out of the bottle more than 10 years ago will not let itself be put back into the bottle.

    As indicated in the main piece above, if the terrorists are not significantly degraded or even destroyed before the primaries some six months away, it could menace the country’s political calendar. More crucially, if the terrorism and abductions problem persist into the campaigns, not to say into the elections, the ruling party must prepare their minds for disaster. But for that disaster to be obviated, the administration must step on toes, face the problem more squarely than it has done in the estimation of the public, and decapitate the monster, not scorch it. Nigeria has been called many names, including ‘shithole’ and ‘disgrace country’. If the epithets are to prove undeserved, then the administration must see the current attacks and abduction challenges as threats to be confronted frontally and defeated with flourish for future generations to reference in their essays.

  • The wages of terrorism

    The wages of terrorism

    It is good that finally, the slow wheels of justice in the country crawled to its destination in Nnamdi Kanu’s case

    Unless two things happen, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, the separatist leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), will spend the rest of his life in prison, following his conviction on terrorism-related charges by the Federal High Court, Abuja, on Thursday, November 20. One, Kanu may be off the hook if President Bola Tinubu decides to exercise his prerogative of mercy powers and, two, if the convict appeals the judgment and finds favour in the eyes of the appellate court.

    Justice James Omotosho who delivered the judgment said that prosecutors had proved beyond reasonable doubts that Kanu’s orders and broadcasts incited deadly attacks on security forces and citizens in the southeast. Not only businesses but the entire south east region was usually paralysed whenever Kanu issued sit-at-home orders to the people in the region, banning businesses, schooling and other activities.

    Kanu, who was arraigned on a seven-count charge, was convicted on all. The least of the sentence for the offences was imprisonment for five years without an option of fine for count seven, whilst the maximum punishment for terrorism was death penalty. However, Justice Omotosho noted that death sentence was becoming anachronistic; he also considered the allocutus made on Kanu’s behalf to hand him the life sentence despite the prosecutor’s plea that he be handed the stiffest punishment of death by hanging till he be pronounced dead. A fair deal, if you ask me; considering the havoc Kanu and his goons had caused not only to security agencies but also his people who defied his sit-at-home orders in his heyday.

    According to Justice Omotosho, “The court finds that the defendant, Nnamdi Kanu, is an international terrorist and must be treated accordingly.” He added that “His intention was quite clear as he believed in violence. These threats of violence were nothing but terrorist acts.”

    It is significant that Kanu was cantankerous for the better part of the trial. Indeed, on the day of judgment, this cantankerousness reached a crescendo as he lambasted Justice Omotosho who he said did not know the law. The 58-year-old secessionist leader who had earlier dismissed his legal team and represented himself during the trial, had to be ejected from the court for “unruly” behaviour. “Which law states that you can charge me on an unwritten law? Show me,” Kanu said before he was removed from the court. “Omotosho, where is the law? Any judgment declared in this court is complete rubbish”, he said.

    Kanu was first arrested in 2015, and taken into custody in October of the same year, and slammed with multiple charges, including treasonable felony. He was granted bail 18 months later from where he disappeared, or jumped bail, as it were, before he was reportedly arrested in Kenya in controversial circumstances in 2021.

    IPOB, like some other Igbo separatist movements sought to revive the short-lived state of Biafra, which seceded from Nigeria in 1967. The secession sparked a three-year civil war that lasted from 1967 to 1970, and which claimed the lives of about three million people. But, after Biafra troops surrendered to the federal troops in 1970, the then General Yakubu Gowon military regime came up with a policy to reintegrate the Eastern Region back into the country under its three ‘Rs’ of  Reconciliation, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction.

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    Somehow, years after, some people in the eastern region still felt the country was not fair to them and had formed several secessionist movements to protest against what they see as political and economic marginalisation. In the course of doing that, some of them have had to rally indigenes of the region in the diaspora to donate to the agitation for independence, including training militia in the region’s forests.

    It is unfortunate that IPOB that was formed in 2012 as a peaceful movement later metamorphosed and launched an armed wing in south-eastern Nigeria in 2020, ostensibly to defend the Igbo ethnic group.

    We have had other Igbo separatist groups like the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), which was founded by Ralph Uwazuruike in 1999. But he adopted the principle of nonviolence as propagated by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., as the philosophy of the struggle. Naturally, he was detained several times and charged with treason in Nigerian courts.

    Of course we also had the Simon Ekpa wing of IPOB that broke away from its parent body and was led by Ekpa, who was only in September jailed for terrorism against Nigeria, in faraway Finland. Between the two factions of IPOB, the geopolitical risk consultancy SBM Intelligence, had claimed that as many as ”700 deaths have been linked to separatist militants since 2021, including a May 2024 incident where five soldiers and six others were killed in an ambush in Abia State. During the conflict, military personnel have also been implicated in multiple cases of human rights abuses.” 

    Even the court that sentenced Kanu said that the prosecution proved that about 175 security personnel lost their lives; 134 police stations were destroyed and nine offices of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) were burnt on the orders of Kanu in his broadcasts. This was apparently why the court said Kanu should forfeit the transmitter used for his broadcasts to the Federal Government.

    These are not all. The court also found Kanu culpable of incitement in the destruction of government properties in Lagos during the EndSARS protest in 2020, as well as that Kanu had called upon his listeners or supporters to attack the British High Commission in Nigeria.

    All of these made Justice Omotosho to conclude that ”His action was aimed at causing anarchy, which will in turn lead to the breakdown of law and order. His evil intention was to wreak havoc on the people of Nigeria. Were all these actions for self-determination? The answer is No”, Justice Omotosho concluded.

    It is instructive that it is not only the Igbo in the southeastern part of the country that are crying of marginalisation. Several other parts of the country also have one grievance or the other against the Nigerian state, including the south-south region where the country’s golden eggs are being laid. Other parts of the country had also suffered one form of marginalisation or the other at one time or the other.

    Even at that, it is not that people cannot agitate for ethnic or whatever freedom. But there are constitutionally laid-down processes for doing this, as Justice Omotosho noted while delivering his judgment. ”Agitations for self-determination can only pass through the constitutional amendment through the National Assembly”, the judge said. But Kanu’s model deviated from this norm to embrace violence, illegal broadcasts, incitement, intimidation, threats and actual commission of crimes, including murder, to promote whatever cause he believed he was promoting.

    In actual fact, both Kanu and Ekpa committed virtually the same crime. While Kanu committed his own crime within, Ekpa was throwing violence across the seas to Nigeria from abroad. Ekpa activated the Biafra Government In Exile (BGIE) in 2022, and in 2023 declared himself leader of the government. The Federal Government protested to the Finnish authorities which initially seemed not keen on arresting him (a thing some people initially attributed to his being a Finnish citizen of Nigerian origin). Indeed, at a point, the Nigerian government called for his extradition, so he could come and face justice at home. In March, 2024, the Nigerian Army declared him and 96 others wanted for terrorism, violent extremism and secessionist threats.

    He was eventually arrested in Finland, in 2023. Ekpa’s trial which ran from May 30, 2025, to June 25, 2025, consisted of only 12 days of hearings as the verdict which sentenced him to six years in prison was delivered on September 1, 2025.

    This was a remarkable difference from that of Kanu that lasted a whole 10 years (2015-2025). Granted that the wheel of justice travels at a snail’s speed in Nigeria, Kanu made his spectacularly so.   Apart from jumping bail, he has had cause to use delay tactic to prolong his trial. He had cause to reject at least three justices from sitting on his matter, citing either bias or lack of jurisdiction. Justice Omotosho who eventually decided the case was the fourth judge to sit on it. He too might have been put off by Kanu’s unruly behaviour even in the face of the court, but for his patience. All kinds of excuses that would not be tolerated in courts elsewhere were tolerated in the matter. So, Kanu is the architect of his own fortune as he even at a point fired his entire defence team and decided to defend himself.  However, despite its slow pace, and Kanu’s grandstanding, it is gratifying that a court of competent jurisdiction eventually found him guilty and sentenced him accordingly. If Ekpa could be convicted in Finland, why should Kanu’s case be different? This is why it is surprising that some people are wondering why Kanu should be convicted. Why did they not raise eyebrows when Ekpa was convicted? Is it because Kanu was tried in Nigeria?

    It would seem to me that Obi Aguocha, a member of the House of Representatives representing the Ikwuano/Umuahia North/Umuahia South Federal Constituency of Abia State, who delivered the allocutus on behalf of Kanu at the court shortly before Justice Omotosho delivered his judgment in the case of the Federal Government of Nigeria vs. Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, loved the accused more than the accused loves himself, given the sober manner he delivered the allocutus.  “My lord, I am the direct representative of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu. That is why you see me here almost every time, showing presence and solidarity with him.”  Aguocha explained that he and Kanu attended primary and secondary school together, noting that despite being Kanu’s senior, he felt a personal responsibility to speak for him, especially in his capacity as a federal lawmaker.

    But Kanu and his co-travellers should have seen what eventually befell him coming. It could not have been otherwise, given the gravity of the charges levelled against him. Neither terrorism nor treasonable felony is a minor crime.

    I know Kanu has his admirers as he indeed received royal treatment in his heyday; with some prominent Igbo personalities paying homage to him. The fact of the matter is that the law is the law. It is no respecter of anybody.

    It is good we have finally had a closure to the matter, unless Kanu appeals the judgment. If he does and the judgment is reversed, fine. Otherwise, it is President Tinubu we should all look up to for prerogative of mercy. Given Kanu’s recalcitrance, the latter option seems more like it.

  • Language activism

    Language activism

    My language epiphany occurred in the summer of 1986. I had just spent a sabbatical year in Sweden and was on my way back home when I made a short detour to Manchester to present the work I had been doing in Sweden at a gathering of microbiologists from all over the world. After my presentation, one of my listeners hung around until after every other person had left. He then came up to me and congratulated me on a brilliant presentation. I accepted his congratulations graciously because I thought he wanted to discuss various aspects of my presentation with me. But he soon disabused my mind of that notion when he told me how much he admired the quality of my command of the English language. I was still wondering about how best I should respond to him when he went on to ask me if I had a language of my own. After all, for all my understanding of the language, I was obviously not English. I immediately decided that this was a gratuitous insult to which I needed to respond robustly.

    ‘Of course!’ I replied with considerable heat, much more heat than my interlocutor could have expected. I went on to tell him that although I had spoken English virtually all my life, my mother tongue was Yoruba, spoken by millions of people in Nigeria and other parts of the Yoruba Diaspora in other parts of West Africa and the New World. I was in suit and tie and had a tag which identified me as coming from Sweden and maybe should have condoned his inquisitiveness but I really was not in charitable mode, so I quickly dismissed him. Looking back now, I realise that I should have thanked him because he set me on the path of Yoruba language activism, a path which I have found to be vastly rewarding.

    The follow-up to the above encounter happened three years later. I was back in Sweden for another work stint in Uppsala University and had run into a colleague from Ife, who was also on a research visit to Sweden, in the street. After a brief conversation, I invited him to my lab, an invitation which he accepted. When he showed up at my lab a few days later, I made him realise that our conversation throughout the period of his visit to the lab was to be Yoruba. Not only that, it was to be Yoruba which was not under any circumstances to be laced with English words. I wanted my Swedish colleagues to appreciate the fact that I had a language of my own and that language was definitely not English. My coup was stunningly successful. After the departure of my guest, everyone expressed an opinion about my language which they all agreed sounded musical to them. At a departmental party later on, they all wanted me to sing a song or two in Yoruba. I went further to treat them to a meal of rice and fish stew, just as I would have, had they visited me at home in Nigeria. Although it made their noses stream and faces flushed, they assured me that they had found the food delicious. Through these activities, I had brought a small slice of Nigeria (Yoruba) culture to the lab and taught them a much appreciated lesson in cultural studies.

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    On my next visit to Europe, I decided to dress in such a way that advertised the fact that I was coming straight from a part of Africa where buba and sokoto were part of the culture. I did not want to be identified as an exile in Europe. When I got back home from that trip, I decided to do away with European attire completely and took to wearing my buba and sokoto on practically all occasions. However, my full conversion to language activism did not come until much later and it came on home soil, right here in Nigeria, in Owerri.

    On that day, I was in Owerri on the invitation of Peter Umez, to the launch of his first volume of poetry. He had sent the manuscript of the book to me when he had finished writing it, with the request that I edited it and so, by the time the book was published I was recognised as having made a useful contribution to the writing of the book hence the invitation to the launch. I was of course warmly received and placed on the high table with other dignitaries which included the Eze of the poet’s village as well as the Vice Chancellor of Federal University of Technology (FUTO).

    After the introductions had been made, I was told that kola was to be presented and as everyone knew, the only language that kola understood was Igbo and so they were sorry that I could not follow the ritual since I did not understand the language. I was amused by this because being Ijesa, the kola that was to be used, quite probably was grown in my backyard. After all, it was not for nothing that Ijesas are described as coming from the land of the kola nut. I watched as the kola nut was presented and plotted my revenge for my exclusion.

    Shortly after the kola was presented, I was invited to make a speech as I knew I would be. I got up, looked up at all the faces present and then, quite deliberately broke into Yoruba. The first response was consternation but this was almost replaced with applause, loud and prolonged. My hosts received my Yoruba words with appreciation, as if I had honoured them by linguistically taking them back home with me. What I found out after my speech, which I had to more or less repeat in English, was that a significant minority of those present in that hall spoke Yoruba, some of them fluently! The Eze with whom I had spoken a few words before the speech welcomed me back to my seat in perfect Yoruba and told me that not only had he spent some time in Lagos but that he was an Ife alumnus, another attribute that we shared. I had become doubly welcome to what was described as a home away from home on the wings of those Yoruba words with which I had addressed my hosts.

    There is still a reverse side to this language story. I was on the train to Stockholm from Uppsala one surprisingly sunny day when I heard one of my fellow travellers speaking English. There should not have been anything strange about this since most Swedes spoke English, or perhaps I should say, they spoke a form of English which had a thick underlay of their native tongue. It was okay as a form of communication but it was very strange to my ears which is why those ears were pricked up by the sound of a voice speaking English as it should be spoken. After a few months of hearing English in Swedish mouths, the words coming out of his mouth were music to my starved ears. I was immediately drawn to him and as soon as we exchanged the first words, we bonded instantly and were transported into a new world of our own making, a world from which all the Swedes around us were ruthlessly excluded. Such is the power of language. The language of inclusion in this case was English but every other language spoken anywhere in the world is similarly imbued with the same power.

    Language is a fundamental human property, so powerful that without it, we would definitely not be human. It is not for nothing that our scientific name is Homo sapiens (Wise man). Our wisdom which has allowed us to conquer the world is based on our ability to compliment each other’s thoughts. Because of our ability to communicate through the use of words, we have been able to connect all our brains together to process a whole lot of data, to put it in the simplest terms possible, without the power of speech, the last of us would have perished in some miserable hole in the ground many thousands of years ago. This is not a fanciful statement because our closely related cousins, the Neanderthals suffered this gruesome fate about 40,000 years ago.

  • Time to tell ourselves the truth

    Time to tell ourselves the truth

    Of Nigeria’s 65 years of independence, leaders of Northern extraction have controlled the Federal government for approximately 40 to 41 years.

    Nigeria gained independence from Britain on October 1, 1960. This means  that leaders from the North have held the primary executive power for over four decades out of Nigeria’s 65-year history as a sovereign nation.

    Throughout that period, Northerners ruled the region, whether as Sultan, Emir, Governor etc but, unfortunately, with no discernible positive developmental impact, whatever .

    As a result of this negativity, the following factors  combined to birth a virulent banditry and all kinds of terrorism, spearheaded by all kinds of murderous Islamic groups, which soon spread their violence to the southern extremities of the country:

    widespread poverty, unemployment,  competition over scarce resources, poor, almost non- existent education with more than 10 million -out – of – school children which, as a group, has become a super market for recruitment of would – be terrorists; poor governance and

    the weakening of state authority as well as poor law enforcement which have all further exacerbated the problem and allowed armed groups to operate with impunity in every corner of the region.

    Additionally, the North became literally ungovernable, especially given the large swathes of ungoverned spaces which terrorist groups, keen on spreading Sharia, use to maximum effect, daily killing in numbers.

    Terrorism was given such free rein, no arrests, no trial, that some sponsors of Boko Haram, fingered by the UAE, and recommended for trial in Nigeria, were  left completely untouched by the Muhamadu Buhari government.

    Back during the Buhari years, as a result of neither the Federal Government,  respective Northern states nor consequential leaders in the region doing anything meaningful to stanch the  unbelievable bloodletting, I saw all that was happening then as only a precussor of far  worse things in the future and I have been more than proven right.

    This, indeed, was the background to my article of 21 April, 2019 which now appears on pages 195 – 197 of my book ‘ Simply a Citizen Journalist’ (Amazon Link:   https://a.co/d/dXnfY77).

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    What particularly underpinned that  premonition was the attitude of President Muhammadu Buhari when he visited Benue State on March 12, 2018 in response to mass killings by  Fulani herdsmen which saw  no less than 70 people killed and mass buried in the state.

    He had visited only because of significant public criticism, including that from former President Olusegun Obasanjo and, even,  Ibrahim Babangida, both of who condemned his delayed and  indifferent response to the killings.

    And what did he, an ethnic Fulani, tell the grieving people of Benue?  “Live in peace and cooperate with your neighbours”, meaning those who had just killed them in numbers. Meanwhile, that was the  same man who, a few years earlier, led a Miyetti Allah delegation to the Oyo state governor to protest the killing of a few Fulani herdsmen.

    Titled: The North – Militancy, Bandits and The Rest of Us’, the referenced article reads as follows:

    “It is really a crunch time. This harvest of despair is the product of many years of servile bondage, repression, suppression, deliberate pauperization of the people and placing their destinies and lives at impossible angles. My late father used to warn the

    Northern elite. This is morning yet, the Somalization of the far North is fast becoming a reality” – Dr C.C. Nwagwu.

    Completely unknown to me that this newspaper would be running an interview it had with Anthony N. Z Sani, my friend, and Secretary- General of the Arewa Consultative

    Forum, in its edition of Sunday, 14 April 2019 in which, incidentally, my own article:’It is Crunch Time’ appeared, I had written to him as follows some three days earlier on Friday, 12 April, 2019: “Tony what’s the problem with the North? Please talk to me at some length.

    Why has the North become a killing field? Is it that human lives mean nothing up there?

    I am at a complete loss; so am raising these questions in my column this Sunday.

    I wrote further:

    Without a doubt feudalism, I guess, is the root of Northern problems. For far too long education was denied the children of the poor. Of course, you know that  religion and illiteracy are the two things invigorating Boko Haram.

    But who and who is funding BH and are our security agencies so helpless they can’t find them out all this while? Has it occurred to Northern leaders that the region is becoming

    a massive drain on the country?

    What is the exact cause of the problems in Zamfara? The million dollar question really, is: how do we exit these North- inspired problems?

    Please feel free to share this within your circle so that we can generate well distilled reactions.

    Never known to disappoint, Tony wrote back as follows: “Good morning and thank you for the concerns. I think there is a swarm of locust in the land and we do not seem to know the pests. Hence our inability to device the appropriate pesticides. I am happy some of you down there are also concerned. This is because Nigeria is a big river being fed by tributaries, and when one tributary is poisoned, the whole river is contaminated.

    When in 2011 there was post election problems and the hoodlums burnt down some traditional rulers’ houses, Prof Bolaji Akinyemi called, and warned about the consequences of destroying the only platform of effective control in the North. To him, it is not time to dismiss the vestiges of indirect rule. That is, he saw wisdom in indirect

    rule by the British. Then there was the problem of education whose slow pace of development in the North cannot be blamed entirely on the leadership all of who could not possibly be depicted as feckless. I told him to consider the time Western education started in the South and when it reached the North which is almost a century. There is also the factor of unbridled growth in population. I mentioned “unbridled growth in population” because, the rate is not commensurate with growth of the economy, hence

    the poverty that comes with unemployment. For instance, the population of Nigeria and Britain were at par at our independence but today Britain is 62M while Nigeria is

    about 180M. What rate of GDP can cope with such increase? Without a doubt, the challenges are far more overwhelming than the capacity of the leaders, considering the difference between the level of education at independence, and today, in the North. The difference is much. Somehow, I believe in what Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore once wrote that: order, justice, liberty, common decency, and prosperity, are never the natural order of things, but are attained through ceaseless hard work by the leaders, and the led, and that there is no country or society that is perfect. What matters when challenges arise is consciously directed effort to overcome them. I believe that President Buhari has what it takes to overcome our challenges.

    Terrorism is universal, and unfolding; and Nigeria has predisposing factors that encourage it. The sponsors of BH may not even be Nigerians. During one of our interactions with Alhaji Atiku Abubakar on the underlying factors of terrorism or insecurity, he traced BH to thugs used by Gov Kachalla and Senator Modu Sheriff. Whether he is right or not, one cannot say. When the minister of finance (read Defence) accused traditional rulers in Zamfara of complicity in banditry, I had my doubts. 

    Sani and I went on, and on, in a few  exchanges later, but then let’s cut to the chase and properly distil his full-throated piece in which he identified: lack of education, uncontrolled and unbridled population growth and poor governance.

    It is sad that poor governance continues till today as exemplified in the 10M plus out – of – school children who wander about as Alamjiris, whilst the governors live in opulence and go about in their free flowing

    babarigas, at best buying them okadas after which they are trucked down, in their hundreds, to every nook and cranny of the South, as Okada riders maiming themselves as well as their patrons. I am sure the governors see this as Youth Empowerment. May Allah forgive them.

    So, what has been the response of the Northern elite to the  factors so perspicaciously identified by the Secretary – General of the ACF which, this past week, weighed in on the increasing Somalisation of the region when it called on President Buhari to stop the killings? Northern political elite read politics into it when, before and after independence, Chief Obafemi Awolowo drew their attention to what trouble the North was breeding when it chose, deliberately, not to educate the children of the poor; when it looked askance at both the Western and Eastern regions putting massive investments into education.

    Today village chiefs, even some minor

    Emirs, are being chased out of their palaces in the North. And like Dr Nwagwu wrote in my intro, this, unfortunately, is only the beginning, as Somali, Sudan and Syria have shown.

    With regards to over population, what was the North’s take away when during the 2015 campaigns Mrs Patience Jonathan, poked fun at the North on account of its many children most of who are thrown into the streets from early age? Which one single governor made a move towards checking his state’s unproductive population growth? Or which cleric lent a hand in their tough preaching’s which governor El Rufai had to warn against? The North has many, if not most, of our highly regarded monarchs.

    What has any of them done to mitigate the factors that continue to undermine the North economically, and socially?

    Isn’t political, even traditional power, for a purpose?

    How exactly has the Northern traditional and religious elite – helped to positively impact the region? Or wasn’t it only this past week we heard that Zamfara monarchs are helping bandits with intelligence? Have they taken time to reflect on a future when the North begins to reap the whirlwind?   Finally, as we can infer from Sani’s statement, when will this Northern tributary stop  contaminating the big Nigerian river?

    When?

    A stitch in time can still save nine.

  • How Tinubu stepped back from global stage to lead Nigeria through its most intense security week

    How Tinubu stepped back from global stage to lead Nigeria through its most intense security week

    The past week will go down as one of the most troubling and emotionally draining moments for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration. Few weeks in recent national memory have carried such a heavy, unrelenting weight on a sitting government. What unfolded across Kebbi, Borno and Kwara states in the space of days was not just a string of violent incidents; it was a coordinated wave of terror that tore through the country, shook public confidence and rekindled deep fears that Nigeria may be witnessing a deliberate replay of the unsettling patterns last seen ahead of the 2015 general elections.

    From Monday morning’s shock in Maga, Kebbi State, when armed men stormed the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School, killing Vice Principal Hassan Yakubu Makuku and abducting 24 students, the nation was thrown into mourning. Hours later, even before the country could absorb that tragedy, confirmation came that ISWAP had executed Brigadier General Musa Uba, Commander of the 25 Task Force Brigade in Damboa. He was ambushed alongside two soldiers and two civilian task force personnel and later killed after a recorded interrogation that circulated online to inflame public trauma.

    Still grappling with those horrors, Nigerians were hit by yet another nightmare on Tuesday evening in Eruku, Kwara State. Terrorists attacked Christ Apostolic Church during a thanksgiving service, killing three worshippers and abducting 38 people, including the pastor. The incident was livestreamed, turning a sacred gathering into a global showcase of human terror and panic. The graphic scenes of worshippers running, screaming, crawling and being herded like cattle appeared to be crafted deliberately to feed the growing foreign narrative that Nigeria is experiencing “Christian genocide,” a narrative aggressively pushed in recent weeks by U.S. President Donald Trump.

    Read Also: Fresh posers as 315 confirmed abducted from Niger school

    Then, in the early hours of Friday, gunmen struck again, this time at St. Mary’s Catholic Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State, reportedly abducting 215 students and twelve members of staff. This was the third mass abduction in four days, executed with the same precision and messaging as Maga. By then, it had become undeniable that the nation was facing more than criminal opportunism; this was a coordinated barrage intended to destabilise public order, shake national confidence and trigger reactions beyond Nigeria’s borders.

    The timing of the attacks cannot be divorced from the international rhetoric surrounding Nigeria since Trump placed the country on his “Countries of Particular Concern” list and accused Nigeria of “Christian-targeted killings.” The Federal Government has since stated clearly that these pronouncements emboldened extremist groups who now see the international spotlight as an opportunity to advance their propaganda, gain sympathy from unsuspecting foreign audiences and ignite sectarian tension at home. Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator George Akume, went further to describe the claims as “inaccurate, dangerous and misrepresentative of Nigeria’s security realities,” stressing that both Boko Haram and ISWAP have historically attacked churches, mosques and public institutions without religious distinction.

    For many Nigerians, especially those who watched events unfold in 2014–2015, the pattern feels painfully familiar. Then, as now, the nation experienced a surge in mass abductions, bombings and targeted attacks on vulnerable communities. Those escalations fed into a psychological war that eroded public confidence and influenced political outcomes. Now, with the 2027 electoral atmosphere gradually approaching, the same playbook appears to be resurfacing, same tempo, same audacity, same strategic timing.

    However, this time the country is not led by a president who ignores patterns. Tinubu seems acutely aware of the script being dusted off and reused. Long before the week ended, he had already decided that business-as-usual was no longer an option. On Wednesday, he was scheduled to depart for Johannesburg for the G20 Summit and then proceed to Luanda for the AU-EU Summit. These were not minor meetings; they were important opportunities for Nigeria to strengthen partnerships and affirm its global relevance. But in a decisive move that instantly reshaped the week, Tinubu passed the trips off. Vice President Kashim Shettima jetted to Johannesburg on Friday to represent him at the Summit, ensuring Nigeria does not miss out on opportunities.

    The President chose to remain at home, not out of political caution, but because the times demanded a leader fully present at the helm. His decision sent an unmistakable message that Nigeria’s safety and stability come before global diplomacy. It also reinforced the impression that he is not a leader who grants terrorists the power to dictate national priorities. He immediately ordered the highest-ever national security alert level, called for accelerated operations across multiple states and directed all service chiefs to tighten intelligence around soft targets.

    On Wednesday, Vice President Kashim Shettima was deployed to Kebbi State to console families of the abducted girls and convey the President’s assurance that Nigeria stands with them. Standing before grieving parents, Shettima relayed Tinubu’s firm message: the government would use “every instrument of the state” to bring the girls home and bring the perpetrators to justice. It was an emotional moment, as he reminded the families that Kebbi’s pain is Nigeria’s pain, and that the government regards the incident not as a regional tragedy but as a national assault on conscience.

    Particularly significant was the President’s directive for the Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle, on Thursday to immediately relocate to Kebbi to coordinate rescue efforts. This marked a shift from routine official responses to proactive, on-ground leadership. Matawalle’s presence in the state signals high-level commitment and a readiness to treat the abduction as a national emergency requiring close oversight.

    Despite the enormous pressure, Tinubu did not suspend other matters of state. On Monday, he opened the 2025 All Nigerian Judges Conference where he warned the judiciary to guard its integrity. He also received Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, briefed him on Nigeria’s reform trajectory and exchanged views on youth development. Governance continued. The state did not freeze because terrorists staged a week of chaos. This ability to multitask in crisis, fighting fires while keeping the engine running, is the hallmark of a seasoned political hand who has survived storms before.

    What is clear is that Nigeria is dealing with enemies determined to manipulate international narratives, provoke religious fractures and create a climate of fear capable of disrupting national cohesion. The wave of attacks is not accidental. It is coordinated. It is strategic. And it is aimed squarely at destabilising an administration that has made significant gains in economic reforms, institutional reorganisation and regional diplomacy.

    Tinubu’s demeanour throughout the past week showed calm resolve. He looked the crisis in the eye, stepped away from global podiums and rolled up his sleeves to confront a threat that is as political as it is security-related. Those seeking to replicate the 2015 destabilisation environment may have assumed they would encounter a distracted, jet-setting president. Instead, they found one ready to return to the trenches, reorganise the state’s response architecture and lead from the front.

    The coming days and weeks will be decisive. Security agencies have intensified clearance operations across the forests of the Northwest and North-Central. Troops have been reinforced in Eruku and surrounding areas. Intelligence agencies are tracing the communication trails behind the coordinated attacks. The government is also countering the dangerous misinformation being pushed from outside the country, especially from political actors who appear invested in shaping a narrative of religious persecution in Nigeria.

    One thing is certain: while the enemies of peace may have hoped the week’s tragedies would paralyse leadership at the top, it had the opposite effect. Tinubu has shown that he recognises the familiar script, understands its underlying motives and is prepared for a more decisive counter-response than the nation saw in 2014–2015.

    Last week may have been one of the darkest in recent memory, but it also reminded Nigerians that the country now has a president who does not blink in the storm, does not abandon his post at the moment of crisis and will not allow foreign or domestic actors to weaponise tragedy for political manipulation.

    The nation is on high alert. Leadership is fully engaged. The enemies of Nigeria may have fired the first shots, but they will not write the final chapter.

    Even with the tense security atmosphere that defined the week, President Tinubu’s schedule reflected the balance he has tried to maintain between crisis management and the ceremonial, administrative and symbolic duties of the Presidency. On Sunday, he joined the people of Iwoland to celebrate the Oluwo of Iwo, Oba Abdulrasheed Akanbi, on the 10th anniversary of his coronation, praising the monarch’s progressive leadership and impact over the past decade. On Monday, he turned his attention to sports, urging the Super Eagles to recover quickly from their World Cup heartbreak and focus fully on the 2026 Africa Cup of Nations. He also celebrated Osun APC chieftain Munirudeen Oyebamiji at 60, describing him as a steady, reliable figure in governance and politics.

    By Tuesday, Tinubu mourned veteran journalist and Newswatch co-founder, Chief Dan Agbese, calling him a towering institution in Nigerian media. He also honoured Rep. Adegboyega Adefarati at 60 and approved fresh leadership changes in NEITI and NIWA to deepen accountability in strategic sectors. On Thursday, he celebrated former President Goodluck Jonathan at 68, mourned petrochemical pioneer Pa Olusanya Sotinrin, and lamented the death of Segun Awolowo. Rounding off the week, he hailed NSA Nuhu Ribadu at 65 and reaffirmed national unity at Chief Bode George’s 80th birthday. What a week indeed.