The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Nigeria’s digital plague

    Nigeria’s digital plague

    The ‘hustle’ is neither gross nor cruel when the commodity is the whore ─ or video vixen, if you like. Profit is neither sinful nor inhumane when the exploited is an underage child presented as a piece of flesh.

    Free enterprise is fair game when creatives defy religious and tribal strictures to commercialise genitalia for your viewing pleasure. The new pornography is democratic and interestingly daring. 

    Consider, for instance, the curious case of a Nigerian skit-making duo─mother and her son─who have become popular among high school children.

    Just recently, a widowed neighbour sought my attention, urging me to counsel her grandsons and “set them straight.” She had stumbled on the 12 and 13-year-olds, respectively, while they watched videos of the Nigerian mother and her teenage son dry-humping each other.

    The mother, presumably in her late thirties or early forties, is seen frolicking with her son in a sexually suggestive way in a series of videos. The woman, evidently driven by her taboo sex fetish, has produced a series of videos in which she is playfully groped, smooched and dry-humped directly on the butts by her teenage son.

    The boy, apparently in his early teens, goes after his scantily clad mother as she performs house chores or reclines in bed, hops on her back and dry-humps her buttocks with feverish gusto. This takes place in a series of skits in which the mother parades in a flimsy wrapper or shorts.

    And as is often the case with purveyors of decadent media fare, they have gotten more daring. A more recent video shows the mother bathing with her son, naked, in the bathroom. The boy is seen sponging her back with delight. Predictably, her timeline gets flooded, as you read, with the commentary of viewers egging them on, some applauding their closeness, some pleading desperately for a video in which the mother eventually has sex with her son.

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    Apparently, the ‘hustle’ is neither abominable nor gross when the Nigerian mother molests her adolescent son, subjecting herself to playful, intense smooching─anything to generate online engagement, while sating netizens’ unconcealed and hidden sex fetishes.

    Forget the mother-son duo; there are more daring skit-makers masquerading as “content creators” in Nigeria’s virtual space. Just this morning, a skit-making couple posted a video of themselves. In the clip, the male’s head is buried between the naked thighs of his female partner. A few seconds afterwards, he lifts his head to show his mouth and nose dripping with milk-like fluid suggestive of female ejaculation.

    And you must have encountered perhaps more daring videos of married couples self-identifying as “content creators” even while producing soft porn. The new porn arena features the participation of the Nigerian family men and women, boys and girls, grannies, wives and husbands.

    The rise of sexually suggestive video skits in Nigeria is linked to content commodification, digital sexual objectification, and the pursuit of viral popularity on social media platforms. This trend is the new pandemic, corrupting youths and clashing with traditional mores.

    Porn is the new plague across Africa, as evidenced in the number of lewd content produced by Africans and broadcast on Facebook, Tiktok to mention a few. There is a current viral narrative of a Zimbabwean girl who flashes her bare genitals before the camera to the viewing pleasure of her numerous fans on Facebook.

    The newfound erotica, fondly dubbed “soft work,” is a vast virtual graveyard where morality has gone to die. Nigerian “content creators” personify more than a mere change in taste or a rebellion against prudishness. They constitute a civilisational signal flare, showing how moral imagination is being commercially repurposed, to the detriment of personhood.

    In Nigeria and much of Africa, the human body is constantly remodelled as a punchline. Sexual humiliation is rebranded as humour, and intimacy, once a modest human affair, is commercialised. The public sphere has been turned into a decadent peep show all in the name of skit-making, satire, and digital entrepreneurship. This did not begin with the internet. The internet simply removed the gatekeepers.

    Skit-making now revolves around simulated sexual acts, voyeurism, and the theatrical violation of boundaries. Couples perform intimacy for clicks and families appear as ensembles in productions that blur the line between play and exposure. Privacy is monetised and defended as hustle; even children are sometimes used as props and participants in skits that should never require their presence.

    It’d be lazy to simply describe this as moral decay and move on. Decay implies passivity, as though something simply rotted on its own. What is happening here is more deliberate. It is a new economy of attention that feeds on shock, rewards extremity, and punishes restraint. It is capitalism stripped of shame, mining the intimate zones of the human body for a profit.

    Pornography has always been political. Not because it shows sex, but because it shows power. Andrea Dworkin once argued that porn is not about pleasure but possession—about reducing the human being to an object that can be consumed without consequence.

    That argument may sound old-fashioned to a generation raised on filters and fast data. But its relevance has only deepened in an era that dresses filth as empowerment. Women are told that they are choosing visibility and matching their male peers in relevance. Youths are told they are choosing “survival” through “ingenuity.”

    Yet, choice without morality belies freedom; it accentuates drift. This drift had gotten so bad as far back as 2023, when a Nigerian teenage girl made a sordid show of riding a cucumber─cowgirl style in her mother’s kitchen till she orgasmed. Afterwards, she waved the cucumber thick with her milky discharge in front of the camera, before sauntering off.

    One of the most uncomfortable truths in this moment is that many women and girls are not merely victims in this economy but also its drivers, anchors, and beneficiaries. This fact is often avoided for fear of appearing judgmental. But avoiding it only infantilises women and strips them of moral agency. Participation in one’s own commodification does not erase the harm; it intensifies it.

    The themes that dominate most skits are telling: simulated rape, voyeurism, incest, adultery, and transactional sex. Power games are played for laughs as violence softens into farce. What has shifted is not merely who plays the villain but the thrill of playing one. Transgression is now marketed as equality and progress.

    This is why the argument that “youths are just being creative with the tools available to them” is unjustifiable. Creativity is not value-neutral. Every creative act intones an ethic or vice, whether acknowledged or not. The same mentality that justifies digital smut as survival justifies drug trafficking, cybercrime, ritual violence, and other predatory economies as means to preferred ends.

    The internet, in this sense, is not the cause but the amplifier; a glittering façade, like the casinos and brothels of older empires, promising escape while numbing society to its cost.

    A 2025 study by Raymond Asuquo of Nasarawa State University, Evaluation of Social Media Skits and Emerging Behaviours among Youths in Nigeria, examined widely shared skits across major platforms and found a clear pattern: sexually explicit content and risky portrayals are increasingly normalised, driven largely by the quest for monetisation and online visibility. The study warns that such content reshapes youth behaviour, blurs ethical boundaries, and raises urgent questions about responsibility, regulation, and cultural survival. Creativity, the research notes, has become entangled with harm.

    And that is as bad as the story gets.

  • To mend, not tear apart

    To mend, not tear apart

    Nothing about 2026 feels incidental. Nigeria does not step into it so much as it drifts here, bearing the weight of a previous year that refused to end quietly.

    The country arrives with receipts folded into its pocket—grievances, catastrophes, breakthroughs and aspirations—each rustling to fate’s torrid leash.

    This is not a threshold crossed cleanly. It is a season entered with the gait of a people who have learned to listen for danger and opportunity at the same time.

    Politics hums beneath ordinary speech, turning casual conversations into coded rehearsals. Every movement of Nigerians and the state seems angled toward a reckoning that lies a year ahead.

    The 2027 elections have leaked into the present, colouring legislation and inspiring alliances. Some of these have been accentuated as “betrayal” by supporters of Rabiu Kwankwanso, who label his longtime ally and Kano Governor Abba Yusuf’s switch from the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). But Camp Yusuf claims political self-preservation.

    Lest we forget Rivers Governor Sim Fubara’s frantic lunge for survival by dumping the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to hoist the APC flag in the State House. Fubara joined APC, not out of love or ideological sympathy, but with the hope of quashing threats from his estranged political godfather and FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and a State Assembly bent on impeaching him.

    Forget politicians seeking self-preservation; our survival as a nation is critically tied to this year, 2026. But do Nigerians sense this instinctively? A republic can feel when it is being tested, after all.

    This is the year when institutions reveal their efficiency depths, perhaps. Habits, hardened over decades, will surface under pressure. The reflex to litigate politics, manage dissent instead of listening to it, and celebrate reforms faster than outcomes can mature, will meet a citizenry whose patience has thinned into hostile scrutiny.

    On hostile scrutiny, the jury perpetually decides against the run of political and social realities. Thus, the inclination of large segments of the populace to imagine the worst about Nigeria despite undeniable flashes of progress across crucial sectors.

    Amid palpable tension, the ruling party, APC, enters the year psyched with ambition yet plagued by unease. Size, in Nigerian politics, has never guaranteed coherence. It breeds factions, competing centres of gravity, and rival interpretations of loyalty. Party congresses loom, and with them the familiar permutations: parallel meetings, disputed delegates, and consensus discovered after dissent has been buried. Courts, once again, will be invited to settle quarrels that party execs and ideology fail to resolve.

    Opposition politics moves differently, less encumbered by incumbency yet equally haunted by fragmentation. Economic pressure has given opposition language an edge it lacked in easier years. Inflation, transport costs, and food prices no longer sound like abstract failures. The impact is felt in kitchens and registers at bus stops and fuel stations.

    Whether opposition figures cohere into a credible alternative matters less, for now, than the fact that competition itself has grown volatile. The certainty of outcomes has thinned as opposition politics, once strategised and choreographed, now improvises with guerrilla tactics.

    Inside the National Assembly, re-election anxiety influences behaviour as legislators listen more closely to party structures than to public mood. Oversight softens, and controversial bills travel faster than persuasion ever could. The logic is simple: survival first, principle later.

    This atmosphere makes law itself feel provisional. Nowhere is this clearer than in the arguments surrounding taxation. The tax reform laws have exposed a deeper crisis than statutory interpretation. Civil society question process as lawmakers dispute texts. The Presidency distances itself even as the chair of the tax reform committee offers clarification. Each political actor attempts to project authority, yet the real issue lies elsewhere.

    Trust becomes scarce in the Nigerian clime, especially when citizens suspect that laws can shape-shift between passage and publication. Taxation ultimately thrives on belief; thus, compliance may congeal to resentment and even sabotage, if distrust persists. This is the terrain 2026 inherits.

    Through it all, the economy splays into the year bearing bruises. Subsidy removal, currency volatility, and inflation have morphed from economic shocks to social conditions. Small businesses have collapsed and those that haven’t remain locked in an intense struggle against doomsday contingence. As households learn resilience, the government’s mantra of hope remains disciplined and insistent. Nigerians would rather “hope” translates to relief.

    The proposed 2026 federal budget stands at roughly N58.18 trillion, ambitious in scale yet constricted by obligation. Debt servicing alone consumes N15.52 trillion, and the deficit is projected at about 4.28 per cent of GDP. Nigeria’s public debt, reported at N152.4 trillion by mid-2025, shadows every promise made at the podium.

    A vast federal budget, heavy debt service obligations, and a persistent deficit sketch a portrait of ambition under constraint. Public debt figures require governments at all levels to demonstrate that borrowing translates into tangible improvement. As the pressures of reform travel downward, impacting citizens already stretched thin, anger will not stem solely from hardship.

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    Nigerians have endured difficulty before; what stings is asymmetry. Sacrifice preached downward the economic totem pole, while insulation persists above. Calls for citizenry endurance must be matched by ruling class restraint. Evidence of transparent accounting and governance will matter more than rhetoric.

    Yet, cynicism persists through an unrelenting stream of discontent in the civic sphere. Social commentary is rife with the narratives of doomsayers: politicians, activists, and frustrated elites lustful for power or its fruits. These voices rage with venom, amid insecurity, spewing defeatism and prophesying Nigeria’s inevitable collapse. Behind their calls for change, subsists self-interest; the bitter taste of being left out of the corridors of influence. They are neither patriots nor prophets, but casualties of their unfulfilled desires. And the youth, in their vulnerability, have become their prey.

    Any youth that emulates them will simply burden himself with disillusionment and perpetual cynicism until he can ill afford the luxury of dreaming. It’s about time Nigerians dumped cynicism and embraced enduring optimism. The love of country, though seemingly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, resonates louder than the critic’s flamethrower words.

    The Good Nigerian does not look for scapegoats. He does not sneer from the sidelines, unwilling to engage unless conditions are perfect. He understands that patriotism is not in the cynical condemnation of everything but in the conscious, deliberate acts of sacrifice that improve the polity one gesture at a time.

    Imagine the speed with which fuel stations increased the pump price of petrol from N735 – N750 per litre to N839 – N850 per litre; how nice it would be if they could rapidly effect price cuts when fuel price plummets.

    Nigeria’s problem is not entirely shortcoming in governance but the absence of goodwill among the citizenry. The political elite did not fall from outer space or descend from the heavens; they are products of Nigerian homes, schools, worship houses and neighbourhoods. If we demand better leadership, we must, first, become better citizens.

    More Nigerians could learn to emulate perhaps the Hausa tricycle driver who, in March 2025, scrawled on his tricycle: Ramadan Discount: From N200 to N100 per Drop. He did this while prices of fuel and food staples skyrocketed.

    This year, and onward, Nigeria needs more men and women who’d rather give than take; who would rather mend than tear apart; who would rather chart the path to a brighter tomorrow than wail in the darkness and curse the times from a soapbox.

  • He simplified being human

    He simplified being human

    Faith is sorely weaponised in Nigeria. One person’s “God” is another person’s “Satan.” One temple’s saint is another temple’s sinner.  Between rival altars rots the skeletons of neighbours who once shared water, markets, and laughter.

    Faith is a boundary stone in Nigeria; and sometimes, a password or a warning. It decides who gets mourned honorably and who deserves the dishonour of a mass grave. It decides which deaths are explained away as destiny and which are weaponised as proof of divine favour. In this bruised moral landscape, religion thrives on maleficence; what should soothe becomes a tool of persecution.

    Thus it was startling, almost disorienting, to read amid the haze of Islamophobia and religious extremism perpetuated by Nigerian Christians and Muslims, the reportage of a Nigerian who rebelled.

    On June 23, 2018, Abdullahi Abubakar, Chief Imam of Akwatti Mosque in Nghar community, Plateau State, opened his masjid and his home to about 270 Christians fleeing death as well as Muslims fleeing reprisal attacks. Long-running communal violence between Berom and Fulani groups in the State had flared again, and more than 80 people were killed as suspected Fulani militias carried out midday attacks on 10 Berom villages in Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of the State.

    Abubakar, then 86, sheltered the refugees, knowing fully that to harbour them in that moment was to sign his own death warrant. Yet, he defied the militia prowling his premises, desperate to kill. He resisted the terrorists.

    Let us be precise with language. They were ethnic terrorists, not Muslim terrorists. No verse in the Qur’an or Islamic jurisprudence licenses the murder of Christians or sanctifies the killing of innocents. The same moral courtesy Christians routinely extend to themselves must be extended here. When a Christian mob lynched and burned Pastor Dio Idon of ECWA in Southern Kaduna recently over allegations of witchcraft, Christians across Nigeria insisted those murderers were “not real Christians.” Likewise, when Deborah Yakubu was lynched and burned for alleged blasphemy, Muslims reserved the same moral latitude to say “Deborah’s murderers are not real Muslims.”

    Consistency is the minimum requirement of morality, and on that count, Imam Abubakar exerted himself admirably. Senior journalist and writer Sam Omatseye, who later interviewed Abubakar, captures the simplicity of the man’s courage stressing that, “In a region where Christians and Muslims have been reported to be at daggers-drawn, where the so-called herdsmen and farmers only met in blood puddles, this Imam bucked the narrative. He dared to disdain his personal safety for others and valorised human life without prejudice to religion.”

    Because of him, hundreds of Nigerian men, women and children were saved, notes Omatseye. “We are all children of God. Both faiths want peace,” Abubakar explained his actions with a simplicity that mocked our sophisticated cruelties.

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    To understand the significance of Abubakar’s act, one must understand the ecology of hatred in which it occurred. Plateau is a landscape where grievances are inherited and weaponised across generations. The Berom, who are mainly Christian farmers, and the Fulani, who are largely Muslim pastoralists, have a history of violent conflict in the State, rooted primarily in land disputes and the contentious classification of residents as “indigenes” or “settlers.” Tensions worsened significantly after a federal political appointment in September 2001 triggered violence that killed about 1,000 people and displaced thousands. Since then, cycles of attack and reprisal have continued, often sparked by rumours.

    In such a place, neutrality is tantamount to betrayal and to save “the other” is to offend one’s own. Abubakar’s action, deservedly drew global attention. In 2019, the United States honoured him with the International Religious Freedom Award. He also received Nigeria’s national honour of Member of the Order of the Niger (MON) from former President Muhammadu Buhari.

    He died on Friday, January 16, two weeks after his 92nd birthday.

    Imam Abubakar, no doubt, belonged to a different moral generation, one raised on a culture that measured faith not by how loudly it announced itself, but by how gently it treated the vulnerable. His Deen wasn’t performative. It was Qur’anic in the deepest sense: “Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity” (Quran 5:32).

    The Qur’an insists that there is no compulsion in religion. It commands believers to speak kindly to people, to stand firmly for justice even against themselves, and to recognise human dignity as God-given, not sect-granted. That lineage of thought lived through Imam Abubakar.

    So too does Christianity, at its moral core, insist that love of neighbour is inseparable from love of God. The problem has never been scripture. It has always been selection. And Imam Abubakar selected humaneness. In doing so, he exposed the poverty of our religious theatrics.

    Omatseye intones with a rare moral precision that in Abubakar: “The Christian fanatic zealot will see remorse, the Muslim fanatic will find a new path, the atheist will coddle human pathos. He was a man with true evangelical zeal. A puritan of love and peace. A partisan of harmony, not sects.”

    In death, Abubakar outlives our pretensions and embarrasses our noise. While others milk tragedy for relevance, he refused even the spotlight that found him. Little wonder he had no social media accounts. He didn’t save Christians to project himself as a saint or perform theological gymnastics. Thus, when the world applauded, he went back to being human.

    Contrast this with our age of clout-chasing righteousness. Even now, established and closet bigots are laundering their reputations with Abubakar’s name, accessorising themselves with virtues alien to their conduct. It is a cheap and soulless spiral.

    In Imam Abubakar, Nigeria lost a rare gem, ultimately because he established a truth too inconvenient for ideologues: that we were human before we became religious. Humanity is the first covenant and any faith that violates it is counterfeit. Abubakar lived this reality. And that wasn’t a small feat.

    It is easy to preach tolerance behind microphones and security details. It is another thing entirely to shelter about 300 neighbours while a blood thirsty militia stalk your door. Too many contemporary faithful parade themselves as God’s gift to a broken world while ploughing its peace with gospels of carnage. They have perfected a theology that can explain any corpse away, provided it belongs to the wrong kind of believer. It is about time we defanged religion in Nigeria, not by banishing faith, but by stripping it of its license to kill.

    Yet, we must understand that the merchants of hate want us to live in fear of one another. We must appreciate why a villager who watched his family butchered by men chanting “Allahu Akbar” may never see goodness in Islam again. And why another who lost loved ones to Christian militias chanting “self-help” and “Glory!” may define every cross as threat. Trauma rewrites theology and hate-mongering preachers exploit pain, pawing it into permanent hostility.

    Abubakar was a rebuke to every such agent of hate. He proved that the most radical act in a season of slaughter may be to open a door.

    To remember him is to submit ourselves to his unimpeachable humanity. To decide, in the moments that will test us, when rumours thicken and fear knocks, between the easier creed of hate or the harder discipline of humanity.

    •Abubakar chose, and hundreds lived. The rest is commentary.

  • Rage therapy

    Rage therapy

    Apeople can grow weary of hope without knowing it. They begin to speak carelessly of fire and joke with the lexicon of extinction. They summon ruin as if it were a cleansing rain and call it banter.

    Somewhere between disappointment and rage, the tongue learns to flirt with death. And a nation, like the human body, begins to rehearse its own burial long before the blunt spade touches earth.

    Nigeria is doing this as you read. We have got the funeral habit. Some have called it disillusionment. But all I see is a civilisational failure; animal instinct overtaking everything human.

    Long before borders are breached and institutions collapse, ethics get rotten. Nigeria will not fall because our enemies are strong, it will fall because we desire our own unmaking. Too many citizens ignorantly suppose that implosion will give them relief. Like it did in Nepal? Or Bangladesh perhaps.

    History is pitiless on this point. When a people start invoking violence against themselves deploying death as a casual metaphor;  when civil war is romanticised with the bravado of anarchists who have never smelled a mass grave, external predators take note. Empires have always listened for this sound—the clang of an unlatched door.

    International law has become worthless as nuclear-armed states now act less like guardians of order and more like impatient gods, striking first and justifying later. “Might is right” gets validated with news features and hashtags.

    The United States, in particular, has demonstrated, through rhetoric and precedent, that it reserves the right to interpret reality however it pleases, and to act unilaterally when it suits its interests.

    Last year, the American President Donald Trump threatened to invade Nigeria ‘guns-a-blazing’ to protect Christians from genocide. Of course, he made good his threat though in coordination with local authorities. That incident revealed how easily Nigeria could be fabricated as a moral emergency requiring foreign “intervention.”

    Whether managed diplomatically or not, the undertone is unmistakable: Nigeria’s ability to prevent external force depends less on sovereignty than on the goodwill of those with superior firepower. Had cooperation been refused, who doubts that the bombs would still have fallen?

    This is the New World Order; one in which any nuclear-armed nation can storm an African country on the flimsiest pretext. Leaderships can be deposed and presidents abducted and prosecuted abroad like common criminals. Borders can be redrawn under threat of violence, all in the name of “security,” “humanitarian intervention,” or some other sanctified lie.

    Nigeria is not immune. No African country is. Imagine, for a moment, what Nigerians casually threaten themselves with when they speak longingly of collapse: terrorism escalating beyond containment and major cities falling under siege as the courts and constitution become irrelevant.

    Imagine if the anarchists have their day: neighbours will hack each other to death as rage forges prejudices into weapons. At breaking point, the corrupt leaders over whom many bicker and fight, online and offline, will not remain to share the consequences. They will flee to safe houses abroad. They will not queue for refugee status in Chad, Ghana or Niger. That will be the fate of over 200 million Nigerians.

    We shall remain the negligible indices in a state of war. Guns will seek out our lost boys and carnage will school them faster than any classroom ever could. People who once shared fences, marriages, and jokes will hunt each other to death. Old friendships will split like overripe fruit as many learn to think with the machete and speak with bullets.

    Nigerians will hound and hack to death, people with whom they used to be next door neighbours, in-laws and “best friends  simply because they are Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani. Women will pay first. They always do. Rape will become a tool of terror and domination. Many will watch their mothers and wives, daughters and sisters become “comfort women” and voiceless courtesans to, at least, four or five soldiers or revolutionaries at a go.

     And when they are delivered of pregnancies that no man will take charge of, we shall name the poor, ‘regrettable’ fruits of their shame: Okwuoeimose (War is ugly), Okwoeinata (Not to be told), Okwoba (Red is the colour of war), Enitaiyeko (The one whom the world rejects), Enitan (Child of intrigue); Aiyeteminimowa (I have come to live my own life); Ogunbayoje (War has destroyed our joy) and so on. An entire generation will learn grief before it learns to walk.

    Millions of citizens will be reduced to mere statistics, blurred news footage and “developing situations.” Nigerians will embody the kind of suffering that must be hidden until it becomes too grotesque to ignore. Reason will evaporate and morality will be repurposed as a weapon. Every atrocity will be justified in the name of God, patriotism, tribe, or profit.

    Streets will rot with bodies and human innards will litter our sidewalks like discarded orange peels. Our journalists and poets will be hunted for showing the world the septic underbelly of our rage. Plantations will become mass graves and aid will arrive too late – only after the right images have been captured and the foreign weapons contractors have made profit.

    Through the sadism of it all, we shall accomplish the separation we love to talk about. The Igbo may have Biafra; the Hausa may have their Emirate; the Yoruba, Oodua Republic; and the South-south, Niger-Delta Republic. Every tribe shall have its nirvana; yet, in those hazarded homelands, the same old brutes will rule and the same greed will scorch the fertile soil. Violence does not cure itself by changing flags.

    This is how nations die. Rwanda taught the world this in 1994, when nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in a hundred days. Later, the horror was repackaged into award-winning films like Hotel Rwanda (2004), viewed safely in distant cinemas. The carnage became narrative and the trauma nourished art.

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    If Nigeria implodes, there will be big budget movies. The same powers that nudged, armed, or watched will fly in actors and film crews. Oscars will be won and performative tears will be shed on the stage. Our dead will be immortalised by people who goaded them into mass graves – all for a profit.

    This is the obscenity Nigerians flirt with when they summon destruction in anger. The ingredients for implosion are already abundant: ethnic bigotry, religious absolutism, greed dressed as grievance, and a reflexive “us versus them” mentality.

    Nigerians are skilled at inventing enemies, especially when disappointment needs a face. Elections, football matches, private quarrels—everything becomes a battlefield of blame and identity. The literate and semi-literate alike now traffic in incitement, mistaking virality for truth and cruelty for courage.

    They imagine they will be spared when Nigeria burns to a rubble. They forget that the matchstick is indifferent to which house it burns. Those who inflame will be consumed and those who cheer will choke on fumes. There is no safe corner in a country on fire.

    Our differences must be resolved through dialogue. Not the selective kind that flatters tribe, but the hard memory of what war actually does to ordinary bodies. Then we must learn restraint; the discipline to refuse dehumanising language even when angry.

    Grievances must be pacified, not armed. Nigeria won’t thrive by toxic taunts or a resort to aggression. Violence begets death and destruction. To summon death upon our country is to invite strangers to nourish on its corpse.

  • To summon a siege

    To summon a siege

    Every civilisation has its myths of rescue. In ours, the rescuer arrives in the attire of the West, hawking human rights in one hand and carnage in the other. Empires never travel light. They arrive with doctrines and appetites, and an accounting logic that mortgages human lives against barrels of oil, shipping lanes, voting blocs, and dubious evangelism.

    Nigeria as other nations of Africa, is once again ripe for the picking in the so-called New World Order, not because we are weak in prospects or numbers, but because we are fragmented in will and allegiance. This renders us dangerously exposed in an era where might is always deemed right, international law is reduced to a ceremonial proviso, and the United Nations, a forum of toothless bulldogs.

    In such a clime, even the presumed Giant of Africa must tread with the exaggerated politeness of the vulnerable. Thus, Nigeria’s resort to frantic diplomacy while its citizenry – out of spite or despair – openly fantasise about foreign invasion as if it were a Netflix series with a happy ending.

    No doubt, terror stalks our forests as bandits and insurgents turn entire regions into cauldrons of grief. The carnage is real and fear isn’t imagined. What must be resisted is the childish leap from justified anger to suicidal longing. The idea that a global hegemon like the United States, would arrive in Nigeria as a neutral surgeon to excise evil and depart politely, intones naïveté.

    There has been much heated talk, some of it reckless, about foreign military capabilities, “coordinated efforts,” and what powerful allies could do if unleashed. Statements by American officials are quoted and misquoted, even as rumours inflate to certainties. Yet the language of “partnership and counterterrorism” must be heeded with caution, not with hysteria or worship. Coordination shouldn’t translate to colonisation by default as it is rarely charity. It is interest meeting interest, and the dominant party always writes the footnotes.

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    Alongside US “cooperation” to crush terrorists operating within Nigeria, the Nigerian military’s recent operations deserve support and scrutiny in equal measure. And sponsors of terror, whether they wear agbada, humanitarian badge or military camouflage, must be hunted with the same intensity as the foot soldiers they bankroll. Apologists must be exposed and prosecuted. This is the bare minimum of sovereignty.

    Yet, sovereignty is diminished, not strengthened, when citizens behave as though only outsiders can save them. The most dangerous sound Nigeria can experience is not the crack of a gunshot or the roar of a fighter jet, it is the applause and shrieks of approval by a people, who, weary of their own contradictions and tedious labour of self-repair, summon a siege upon themselves.

    When a nation embraces an external force as the decisive answer to its internal failures, it announces something fatal about itself: that it no longer trusts its own capacity for reform. For a former colony, this is the worst form of self-betrayal.

    The global context makes this even more perilous. We are living through a period of resurgent imperial siege. Great powers no longer bother to hide their appetites behind diplomatic or moral sermons. They pursue brazenly their “enlightened self-interest,” spheres of influence, and strategic resources. After the Americas, Africa remains one of the last great theatres where rival empires test their might.

    The United States’ historical posturing toward Latin America, shaped by doctrines that claimed to protect the hemisphere while subordinating it, is instructive. In early January 2026, U.S. forces invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to the United States to face criminal charges, after which President Donald Trump said the U.S. would “run” the country and take control of up to 50 million barrels of its oil for sale, for the benefit of Venezuelans and American interests.

    Trump has also revived his bid to seize Greenland, a strategic Danish territory in the Arctic, calling it vital to U.S. security and suggesting all options are on the table despite Danish and NATO objections to any annexation. From Chile to Guatemala, Brazil to the Caribbean, the logic was consistent: the sovereignty of smaller nations is negotiable when it conflicts with American priorities. To pretend that Nigeria is immune to similar calculations is to be delusional.

    The rise of alternative powers, particularly China, has complicated this old order. Both trade patterns and alliances have shifted. The BRICS bloc, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, represents one such counterweight. Nigeria must take this multi-polar reality seriously, not as a romantic rebellion against the West, but as a sober exercise in self-preservation. Alignment, whether with Western powers or emerging blocs, should never be devotional. It must be transactional, disciplined, and rooted in Nigeria’s long-term interests.

    What is unforgivable is the growing habit among some politically embittered Nigerians of openly calling for US invasion as a form of domestic revenge. This is especially reckless in an era when American politics, under a resurgent Donald Trump, has shown little patience for diplomatic niceties while glorifying dominance and reduction of nations to strategic assets.

    Nigeria’s resource wealth makes it an even more tempting target in a world hungry for energy and strategic advantage. Oil, gas, critical minerals, a massive consumer market, and a pivotal geographic position all make the country too important to ignore. That importance should serve as leverage, but only if Nigerians quit trading their sovereignty for spite and emboldening imperial actors who see Africa as unfinished business.

    Every offer of intelligence sharing or security cooperation, whether from Western or Middle Eastern allies, must be handled with extreme care. If poorly managed, it becomes a Trojan horse, entangling domestic security with foreign agendas that may cause instability.

    No country survives by hating itself loudly enough to attract a conqueror. Those who cheer hypothetical invasions should remember the ghosts of Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Libya, once a rich and functioning state, became an impoverished slave market and weapons depot. Iraq’s invasion unleashed sectarian demons that still stalk the region while Afghanistan cycled through decades of occupation and collapse.

    Empires do not rebuild what they break. They move on. Nigeria must learn from the Afghan experience. In the wake of United States-led NATO’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan, Gaisu Yari, an Afghan refugee, now a grantee of the Open Society Foundation (OSF), recalled his flight from his homeland as his darkest hour. As the occupying forces commenced their hasty withdrawal, he had just four hours to pack up the life he had created in Afghanistan into one suitcase. In a pain-filled memoir, Yari revealed how he cried all through his perilous trip to the Kabul airport, reliving the agony of saying goodbye to his tearful mother on the roof of an old house.

    He eventually evacuated to Poland, landing with his family in a refugee camp with scarce food and resources. Every new dawn he spends abroad lacerates and leaves a thick welt on his psyche.

    Would Nigerians learn from the sad fate of the Yaris of the world? Despite initial patronage by dubious and bleeding-heart foreign press, Afghanistan has faded from global news headlines.

    Let us be guided by the Afghans’ experience. Nigerians must shun the lure of anarchy. We must avoid poisonous interventions from foreigners, whose major interest is to abolish our sovereignty, plunder our resources, and strip us bare to devious elements.

  • Against the tyranny of small minds

    Against the tyranny of small minds

    Something broke in the Nigerian psyche in 2025, and it was not a bridge, a budget, or an election promise. It was subtler and therefore more dangerous. I’d call it the ghastly coronation of small minds. Not the smallness of birth or circumstance, but the deliberate dwarfing of thought, empathy, and civic duty.

    The same year that paraded bandits in the forests and terrorists in the streets, also enthroned Lilliputian minds in the civic sphere: little men with loud mouths, brittle tempers, and a crippling addiction to discord.

    These men are scarcely defined by stature or age but by a meanness of spirit, like the religious and ethnic collective that desperately urged United States’ invasion of Nigeria over fictitious claims of a “Christian genocide.”

    Their minds are cramped rooms with low ceilings where no generous idea can stand upright. They speak in absolutes, breathe in grievances, and exhale venom. They are convinced that Nigeria exists to validate their moods, and when it does not, they declare war on reason itself. They are the termites of the civic house: rarely seen, endlessly gnawing, and often mistaken for harmless.

    Nigeria has always contended with visible enemies: herdsmen with machetes, kidnappers with guns, bandits with motorcycles, terrorists with flags, and coupists with manifestos. These are brutal afflictions, and their violence is immediate. Yet the greater danger in 2025 manifested in the invisible army of the petty, those who sabotage Nigeria with cynicism and bile. I speak of those who season our hopes with incessant bad faith. They are the ones who poison the well and then complain that the water tastes foul.

    This is a civilisational problem before it is a policy issue, as these characters wear different faces across ethnic, professional and religious divides. Ultimately, they share the same impulse: to reduce citizenship to a tribal, political or religious audition. Patriotism, in their lexicon, is obedience to their prejudice. If you do not mirror their anger or chant their slogans, you must be an enemy. They claim ownership of truth and revoke it from anyone who dares to think differently. In their warped republic, disagreement is treason, nuance is weakness, and restraint an unforgivable betrayal.

    Their bigotry is not always loud; sometimes it comes wrapped in sanctimony. They speak of nationhood through the smokescreen of ethnicity and religion, insisting that only their pain counts and only their fears are legitimate. They are unmoved by context and allergic to complexity. Every issue must bend to their bias or be broken. And when reality doesn’t comply, they curse it in bad faith.

    The same voice that cheers or excuses the daily slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza suddenly becomes hysterical over spurious claims of a Christian genocide in Nigeria. Children, nursing mothers, fathers, sons—entire families—can be murdered elsewhere, and he will gloat, rationalise, or wave it away as geopolitics. But if a rumour surfaces at home that flatters his religious anxieties, he will howl to the heavens in performative grief.

    I’d call him a moral speculator; trading in tragedy, he would not mourn deaths that defund his penchant for artifice. To him, empathy is a commodity to be spent only where it profits bias. Such a man is dangerous precisely because he presents himself as principled. He latches onto every movement wired to derail Nigeria’s fragile peace, not because he seeks justice, but because chaos flatters his resentments.

    He contributes enthusiastically to the poisoning of minds, offering wildly abrasive and juvenile takes on conflicts he barely understands. Duelling in ignorance and the arrogance of unearned wisdom, he mistakes noise for knowledge and cruelty for courage.

    Rather than enlighten, he inflames, amplifying discord while posing as a dispassionate truth-sayer. Yet truth neither trolls nor stalks dissenters across platforms like a hungry ghost. But this creature does. And in doing so, he becomes cancerous to the polity and the intimate lattices of life: family, neighbourhood, and the workplace. Wherever he goes, conversations curdle. Laughter stifles as people brace themselves for his next outburst.

    One such character’s wife once issued a weary plea after one of his juvenile outbursts in a public forum, begging forgiveness, she explained that her husband has the build of a grandfather but the emotional maturity of a three-year-old. Beneath her lighthearted joke was a diagnosis. “Age has visited my husband’s body, but growth has skipped his soul,” she inwardly railed.

    Yet the culprit persists. His takes are juvenile but abrasive, his certainty loud but thin. He prowls social media like a nocturnal animal, sniffing for disagreement, pouncing on nuance, and tearing at strangers to feel alive. If events or debates do not suit his bias, he comes out guns-a-blazing, lashing out at anyone who dares to think differently. He argues, never to persuade but to harm and conquer.

    His tragedy was domestic before it became public. At home, he is the toxic relative who notices the speck in every eye except his own. Declaring himself as the only voice of reason in a room full of fools, his truth is the only truth and the final word. Unsurprisingly, he is tolerated out of politeness and avoided out of self-preservation at home, in the neighbourhood and the workplace.

    For all his pretensions, he affects only a mood ring that changes colour with his interests. He gloats over recorded atrocities when they inconvenience his enemies, then performs the most tiresome form of virtue-signalling when tragedy aligns with his agenda. This does not make him brave or informed. It makes him morally hollow.

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    Like a hunter who dares not enter the wild to hunt big game because he is past his prime and lacks the courage to fail, he scurries instead to hunt tadpoles and sewer rats. He attacks the vulnerable, the thoughtful, the moderate—anyone he deems unlikely to fight back with equal savagery. His bravado thrives only where the risk is minimal. In this, his smallness is complete.

    How, then, does Nigeria survive men like this? Not by silencing them—that would flatter their persecution fantasies—but by starving them of the attention they crave and confronting the culture that enables them. The first remedy is civic humility: the recognition that no single tribe, faith, or ideology owns the nation. Citizenship must be reclaimed as a shared burden, not a sectarian trophy. Nigerians must learn again to argue without annihilating one another, to disagree without demonising.

    The second remedy is moral consistency. Grief must not be selective. Justice must never be tribal. A life lost anywhere should trouble us everywhere. Until Nigerians reject convenient compassion and affect inward integrity, the petty will continue to masquerade as principled.

    Third, we must rehabilitate public conversation. Social media need not be a sewer. It can be a school, where voices with reach model restraint, context, and empathy. Families, too, must stop indulging the toxic relative. Silence brokers no peace when it enables harm. Sometimes, love demands correction.

    Finally, the Lilliputian mind must be challenged to grow, reading beyond echo chambers and listening without preparing to strike. Accepting that being wrong is not death. Nigeria’s survival depends not only on defeating armed enemies but on outgrowing emotional infants masquerading as patriots.

    Nigeria will endure, not because of the loud and the petty, but despite them. When enough of us grow tall in mind and spirit, the tyranny of small minds will collapse under the weight of its own insignificance.

  • From memory, not mimicry

    From memory, not mimicry

    It is sheer folly to watch a house burn while bickering over who should hold the bucket of water for quenching the fire. Such is the madness that has gripped Nigeria for decades; generations chanting placebo therapies prescribed by scheming colonists for the country’s behavioural cancer. The land is rich, but the minds are colonised.  The soil is fertile but poisoned by imported seeds of thought.

    Nigeria’s corruption, for instance, is not just a matter of flawed governance, but a crisis of ethics exacerbated by an inordinate lust for expedience. The 2023 National Bureau Statistics (NBS) corruption data reveal a worrisome trend: over 87 million bribes paid, amounting to over $1.26 billion, mostly money stolen by fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grannies, clergy, principals, and officials. How did we get here?

    We got here because Nigeria’s postcolonial elite, groomed in the mould of their colonisers, learned to loot with logic and a grin. They speak of “efficiency” and “modernisation” while defunding schools and pawning national resources to foreign interests. They are dangerous for their dexterity at dismemberment. It is not the devil that plagues Nigeria; it is a culture of systemic dysfunction rooted in the disintegration of social conscience.

    Nations do not emerge fully formed from constitutions or borderlines. They are shaped by the character of their citizenry. And the latter, in turn, are shaped by their most intimate institution: the family. The family is the receptacle in which the values of a nation are first kindled or corrupted. It is where character and social conscience are either nurtured or strangled in the cradle. The integrity of our public life, therefore, depends on the morality of our private lives.

    Family is key. From this sacred unit, a people’s sense of self, place, and purpose begins. If the family is compromised, then society itself becomes a ghost town of ethics: full of laws but lacking justice and compassion; rich in rhetoric, but bankrupt of vision. Societal growth, therefore, cannot be engineered solely by policies or economic indices. It must be cultivated through the slow, careful evolution of the human spirit. Through education, yes, but not the kind that alienates the learner from their origins.

    Francis Nyamnjoh, in his excavation of Africa’s epistemological crisis, recalls Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino with painful clarity. Ocol, the educated African elite, emerges as a walking corpse; a clearing agent for foreign ideologies and an enemy to his kin. His education does not liberate; it enslaves. It turns him against his wife, his people, and ultimately, himself.

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    This is the face of the Nigerian elite: fluent in multiple languages and philosophies but unable to communicate with their grandparents; draped in academic garlands but disconnected from indigenous wisdom; eloquent before foreign audiences but dismissive of local realities. They are, as p’Bitek lamented, hens that eat their own eggs.

    The fetishisation of colonial values of beauty and notions of African reality has entrenched a psychological war on the African self. It is no surprise, then, that many Nigerians continue to bleach their skin, speak with borrowed accents, and look to the West for validation. Modernity, as defined by the West, becomes the Nigerian holy grail. Young Nigerians are taught to despise our histories, distrust our systems of knowledge, and to measure success by how far they can flee from our roots. In so doing, they become, like Ocol, a walking corpse, alive to foreign endorsement, but dead to native truth.

    This crisis manifests across every sphere: from university syllabuses that erase indigenous knowledge systems to national policies crafted in donor-pleasing jargon. Even religious institutions, once cultural sanctuaries, have turned into imported franchises of guilt and prosperity.

    Apollos Nwauwa rightly posits that Western education produced a contradictory elite in West Africa; one that served as both an agent of colonisation and nationalism. But nationalism, in our case, did not mature into sovereignty of thought. Instead, it hardened into mimicry. We changed flags, not philosophies. We rewrote our constitutions but kept the same epistemic shackles. What we call modernisation has often been little more than domesticated colonisation—metacolonialism, as Hussein Bulhan rightly names it.

    This metacolonialism is no longer imposed with rifles and chains, but through curriculum, cinema, policy consultancy, and international development models. It creates a class of elites who worship at the altar of foreign approval; those who speak of development only in the metrics handed down by British colonialists. They are the Ocols of our generation, trained to quote statistics, but unable to feel the pulse of their people.

    Thus, while the skyscrapers rise and the GDP is celebrated, the Nigerian mind continues to rot. We build flyovers over potholes of the mind. We chase digital revolutions while ignoring the intellectual genocide that is the continued erasure of indigenous knowledge.

    It’s about time we reclaimed Nigerianness. We must start prioritising what we think of ourselves over what the West thinks of us. This recovery requires a radical revaluation of knowledge, a turning away from borrowed epistemologies toward what Nyamnjoh calls a reality larger than logic. We must reprioritise native philosophies over Western syllogisms.

    We must dismantle the myth that science, stripped of ethics, context, and community, is the only path to progress; we must pay attention to knowledge systems that value Nigerian reality over Western logic. This means listening to market women who manage micro-economies more efficiently than government programs. It means engaging hunters, herbalists, griots, and artisans—custodians of ecological wisdom, history, and sustainable living. It means revisiting the shrines of thought that colonialism labelled “backwards” and asking: what did we lose when we stopped kneeling there?

    We must re-educate our educators, decolonise our curricula, and refuse the seduction of validation by foreign wile. A child who learns to love their name will not be ashamed of their accent. A nation that learns to love its essence will not need to bleach its soul.

    We must stop treating ordinary Nigerians as disposable extras in the theatre of governance. The people who truly challenge the status quo: those who resist the prescriptive gaze of foreign-funded NGOs and speak truth in idioms absent in Western textbooks, must be centred in the national discourse. It is from these everyday realists that a true renaissance will manifest.

    The media must also unshackle itself from the imperial narrative machine. Too long has it amplified the metacoloniser’s myth of a Messianic Europe, while muting narratives of African resistance, resilience, and rebirth. The press must recover its role as griot and conscience, not just a content factory.

    There is a future worth dreaming of: one where our development models are rooted in communal values; where schools teach both code and calculus alongside cosmology and craft; where governance is not about appeasing international donors, but serving the child hawking bananas on a dusty road in Madagali, Agbado-Ijaiye and Sankwala. Such a future demand that we stop waiting to be invited to someone else’s table and start building our own.

    It’s about time we dislodged the clearing officers and coronated Ocols using Nigerian institutions as pit latrines of foreign ideologies. Shall we instead cultivate a new generation of thinkers? Those who can walk between worlds without losing their way, who can marry tradition with transformation, while acknowledging that progress is not a synonym for alienation.

    Civilisations are rarely built with concrete and currency alone, but with narratives, rituals, and native wisdom. Nigeria’s rebirth will come from memory, not mimicry.

  • Cannibal economy

    Cannibal economy

    When Dangote Refinery reduced the price of petrol to N739 per litre, Nigeria did not erupt with relief. Instead, it went quiet. There was no buzz over fare reduction at the motor parks or recalibration of metres at the fuel stations; there was no easing of food prices in markets already booby-trapped with hardship. Life remained hard and unforgiving, as before.

    Yet everyone knows what would happen if Aliko Dangote increased fuel price. If petrol soars to N1,000 per litre tomorrow, Nigeria would instantly convulse. Before the news settles on the airwaves, prices would already be in flight. Transport fares would leap and traders would reprice goods on anticipation alone. Panic would spread and once again become the most valuable commodity in the Nigerian economy.

    This our reality. Nigeria’s truest fate is scarcely written in policy documents or election manifestos, but in the unguarded, bitty moments of our daily life. It manifests in the market stall, where commodity prices are maniacally jerked upwards, in the motor park where travel fares are randomly adjusted by insolent transporters, and in the landlords’ quorum where house-rents are arbitrarily increased without explanation or compassion.

    This is where Nigeria reveals itself, most honestly, as a living temperament. And what that temperament increasingly reveals is a country locked in an intimate, exhausting war with itself.

     There is persistent cry over hardship, but the citizenry, for all their lament cuddle their pain; they study it closely, acquire its rhythms, and subsequently reproduce it with frightening efficiency.

     Nigerians have trained themselves to respond more enthusiastically to bad news than to relief. So, when fuel prices rise by even the smallest margin, markets erupt with inflated prices. Every trader and artisan suddenly discover a reason to increase the price of his wares and services. From bread, tubers, onions, rice, water, to transport, plumbing, and rent, nothing is off limits to the bandit merchants. The logic is rarely interrogated; it is enough that a reason exists. They cite inflation as a slogan rather than a measurable reality.

    But when fuel prices fall, logic evaporates and memory falters. Everyone suddenly remembers old stock, high overheads, invisible costs. The same petrol price that justified yesterday’s increases becomes irrelevant today. What disappears in these moments is scarcely economic sense, but ethical restraint.

     We amplify disaster because it permits us  to overcharge, hoard, and excuse predation. Hardship gives moral cover. Progress, on the other hand, is treated with suspicion, as though it were temporary or undeserved. Good news is received quietly, if at all, and rarely allowed to alter behaviour.

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    This is not how rational economies function. It is how maimed societies behave. Such economic bad faith is less the flaw of a faceless system and more the machination of a bandit populace—ordinary Nigerians—who have learned that there is little social cost to exploiting relief when it appears.

    Somewhere along the way, we unclasped morality from pricing. We stopped asking whether an increase was fair, necessary, or humane. We asked only one question: Can I get away with it?

    That question has wrecked us. Today, a 45-minute flight from Lagos to Owerri can cost N400,000. A road journey on a commercial bus drains N80,000 from commuter pockets. House rents rise arbitrarily, detached from value and reason, and supermarkets owners change price tags with the casualness of a fickle weather.

    And yet, petrol prices are relatively steady. The forex market, while strained, is not in free fall. The sacred barometers—fuel and dollar—have stopped swinging wildly. So why are we still bleeding?

    Perhaps, because the real inflation is no longer monetary. It is moral.

     What remains, then, is intention. We have crossed from inflation into something grislier. Some would call it market behaviour; but I would call it predation. We are no longer merely reacting to hardship; we are deepening it.

    There is a particular irony in how easily we ask, why life is so hard and why nothing works. For a people who practice the very injustices they protest against, this is markedly cheap and delusive.

    It is within this moral context that the petrol price reduction by Dangote Refinery must be examined soberly, not romantically. Professor Wumi Iledare’s warning that Nigerians should not rejoice over the billionaire’s gift is neither hostility nor pessimism; it is caution from someone who understands that a nation’s market may plummet especially during its purported boom era.

    Relief without structure can be deceptive. A single dominant supplier, even one welcomed as a national saviour, can gradually stifle competition if regulation is weak and applause too loud and unquestioning. Today’s price cut can, without firm oversight, become tomorrow’s market control. Monopoly rarely announces itself as a threat. It often arrives as efficiency, convenience, and national pride.

    That is why the administration of President Bola Tinubu must resist the temptation to outsource reform to private intervention. An enabling environment shouldn’t thrive on cronyism, but on clear rules and oversight, transparent allocation, and fierce protection of competition.

    Yet, even the most robust regulatory framework will struggle in a society where ethical limits are breached. Thus, Nigeria will either perish or survive on the moral habits of its people. It all begins in the family, the first and most influential institution of all. The family teaches restraint, fairness, empathy, or fails to. From there emerges the individual, personifying those lessons in public spaces. Individuals form institutions—markets, schools, churches, unions—that reflect private ethics at scale. From these institutions emerges society, and from society, government.

    Government is not an alien force imposed from outer space. It is society invested with power. Humans give both government and civilisation character, and constitute the fragments from which nations are assembled. Thus, when families normalise sharp practices, markets grow ruthless. When dishonesty is excused at home, its permeates social institutions, rotting all to the core. The society that rewards cunning over conscience, suffers transactional leadership.

    This is why the line Nigerians draw between themselves and their government is often dishonest. The landlord who raises rent without justification condemns state exploitation. The trader who inflates prices protests inflation. The transporter who refuses fare reduction curses leadership failure. Yet, leadership rarely invents cruelty; it simply magnifies it.

    Sometimes, the bad leadership we complain about is simply a perfect reflection of who we are. National rebirth, therefore, cannot be legislated into existence, it must be practically lived. It requires a re-education of instinct, a deliberate refusal to profit from another person’s pain. True rebirth demands that relief be allowed to mean relief, not merely another opportunity to extract advantage.

    Nigerians must acknowledge improvement when it occurs, however briefly, and let it manifest through news pages, markets and motor parks with the same speed as bad news. Good citizenship is not only about what we can take, but also what we are willing to restrain.

    It’s about time we embraced a humane path to national rebirth: easing another person’s burden is not foolishness. It is survival in a shared space. Until this lesson is learned, fuel price cuts will remain symbolic gestures and governments will cycle endlessly through blame and disappointment.

    Nigeria’s greatest enemy has never been external. It has always been internal: in the citizens’ eagerness to exploit one another and call it business.

    Nigeria must stop feeding on itself, lest it becomes trapped in an exhausting loop, endlessly fighting its own reflection and wondering why it never wins.

  • Africa, not battlefield for Europe’s ambitions

    Africa, not battlefield for Europe’s ambitions

    A strange stillness settled over Benin in the seconds before and after it got ambushed. It was the kind of quiet that precedes treachery; a momentary lapse creeping like a thief, to divest the unsuspecting republic of its peace.

    Mutinous boots thumped through its tracts as a band of renegade soldiers turned their rifles against the nation in an attempted coup.

    Yet, as treason crackled in the morning breeze, Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Sierra Leone rose in a rare symmetry of purpose, not like the scattered sovereignities of old, and united with Beninese forces to thwart the coup.

    The story will be told for generations of how the renegade soldiers stormed the state television, dissolved the republic by fiat, and appointed a new ruler while citizens watched in disbelief. Folks will recount how they attacked the presidential residence and sought to seize the machinery of the state.

    But the story that will endure longer is the rebuttal: the rattle of resistance across the Beninese command structure, and the rally of ECOWAS troops crossing the frontier lest the embers of mutiny take flame.

    From the skies, Nigeria’s fighter jets flew into Benin’s airspace with precision and purpose, dislodging the insurgents from strategic locations, including the national broadcaster and a military camp. From the ground, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone moved as coordinated units, all united by a common mandate: to preserve constitutional order, uphold territorial integrity, and demonstrate that West Africa had learned from its recent miseries.

    This was not ECOWAS of old, the dithering, statement-issuing bureaucracy mocked across dinner tables in Bamako, Niamey, Conakry and Ouagadougou. This was ECOWAS, informed by historical pain and animated by a new, almost startling decisiveness.

    Not too long ago, Mali fell to a coup, so did Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Guinea and Niger. And only weeks ago, Guinea-Bissau equally flirted with the abyss. The region has felt like a sequence of dominoes laid out by misrule and tipped by opportunistic soldiers.

    But not Benin. Not this time. For years, the Sahel had surrendered too easily to the gun as nations suffered constitutional collapse. But in Benin, something shifted. ECOWAS, long derided as a council of chronic throat-clearers, issuing barren condemnations, finally found its spine.

    Military forces from Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Sierra Leone converged with precision to assert that Africa, weary of being a theatre for experiments in destabilisation, still possessed its will to govern itself.

    Nigeria’s role was unmistakable. Responding to President Patrice Talon’s urgent call, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu ordered fighter jets across the border, taking over Benin’s airspace and neutralising the plotters’ positions at the state television station and a military camp. Ground troops followed, locking down strategic corridors and enabling Benin’s loyal forces to regain control. For once, the phrase “African solutions to African problems” did not sound like diplomatic poetry; it boomed like boots, wings, and resolve.

    Long caricatured as the giant that sleeps too often, Nigeria, in responding to the Benin coup, moved with the instinct of an elder startled awake by the cry of a younger sibling. Now, it must display greater commitment to eradicating terror at its home front.

    If this episode teaches Nigeria anything, it is that leadership surpasses rhetoric, and must be expressed in decisive moments. If the country is to reclaim its historic place as Africa’s bellwether, it must retool itself not only militarily but morally, politically, and economically.

    Nigeria’s leadership must reinforce democratic institutions at home, because no unstable nation can stabilise others. It must address the roots of discontent: corruption, unemployment, inequality, and the absence of social justice. It must also prioritise regional diplomacy that is proactive rather than reactive, rebuild its economic might to project influence without apology, and revive its cultural leadership, because Africa will only listen when Nigeria speaks from a place of cultural clarity, not chaos.

    A Nigeria that works is a fortress for West Africa. A Nigeria that falters is an open invitation to adventurers and external meddlers seeking to redraw the region’s political landscape.

    As a rallying force in ECOWAS, Nigeria must equally foster the redefinition and understanding of Africa’s coups as something more than local tragedies, but as chess moves in global contests.

    The Wagner Group helps midwife coup in Mali. Western governments look the other way when their “allies” elongate presidential tenures. Foreign forces train soldiers who later topple governments.

    Western powers have long perfected the art of remote-control revolution. Nick Turse’s investigations, for instance, reveal that at least 15 U.S.-trained officers across West Africa and the Sahel have been directly involved in coups from Mali to Burkina Faso, Gambia to Mauritania. The evidence is damning, alleging a pattern of security assistance that strengthens armies but weakens democracies; a structure where Africa becomes a proving ground for imperial doctrines rather than a sanctuary for its own sovereign interests.

    Europe too has played its part—France most notably—entangled in the politics of extraction, diplomacy of condescension, and a strategic playbook that treats African sovereignty as a variable, not a constant. Little wonder it got booted from its Sahelian perch.

    Neocolonialism is not a theory here; it is the continent’s living, breathing antagonist. And this is precisely why what happened in Benin matters. Because, for once, Africa did not wait for permission to save itself.

    To appreciate the significance of the intervention, one must understand the violence that precedes coups; the kind fed by governance corruption, economic mismanagement, elite impunity, youth unemployment, the absence of justice, and the corrosion of civic hope. Coups hardly emerge from thin air; they ferment from bad leadership.

    Foreign hands succeed in African coups only because local governance fails first. Where institutions are weak, loyalties cheap, and public faith eroded, the gates are always ajar. The colonist merely walks through the rupture and prevails.

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    Yet from the rupture resonates an indispensable question: how does ECOWAS restore the nations that have walked away—armoured in junta rhetoric—without the continent slipping into a theatre of inter-state bloodletting?

    The answer must be both practical and moral, disciplined and tender: a programme of reintegration that marries sovereignty to dignity, security to accountability, and regional solidarity to the everyday needs of ordinary people.

    This is where Nigeria must once again assert its influence. Soft power will prevent ECOWAS from being incited to an avoidable war with nations currently being led by military junta. That is the next phase of the Western styled remote-control revolution: in time, Africa will suffer the enabling circumstances that would pit nations against each other.

    And while African countries bomb each other to smithereens, imperial actors will sell weapons to warring parties, barter artillery for rare earth and other minerals. This is the dystopia Nigeria must lead fellow African nations to reject.

    Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger formalised their exits amid a wider drift toward a Sahelian alignment that views ECOWAS with suspicion and contempt. These departures were informed by deep grievances about the way regional power has been exercised and the perception that intervention sometimes favours externals over locals.

    Any path back must therefore begin with a candid acknowledgement of those grievances, publicly and privately. A first strand of policy must be the dramatic expansion of listening: a process of mediated truth-seeking and sustained dialogue convened in Abuja, Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey.

    This measure must shun theatrical reconciliation and embrace pragmatic diplomacy.

  • The poisoned frame

    The poisoned frame

    Smoke often rises first from the smallest ember. If you understand this, you’d appreciate, perhaps, the subtle art of poisoning minds that sit before the TV screen as if before an altar.

    What Nigerians watch, they imbibe. What they imbibe, they become. And in that delicate bonding between fiction and memory, laughter and unease, something sacred is surreptitiously rewritten.

    Sometimes, the fumes spiral from a song hummed lightly on a film set, in a script polished for foreign applause, or a story retold from the purse of a patron.

    Before the fire becomes visible, it ignites quietly in the hearts of artistes who mistake attention for purpose and foreign validation for breakthrough.

    The tragedy of our age is not that Nigerian artistes are powerless; it is that too many are willing to lend their genius to the unravelling of their own society. Thus, they become envoys of a doom they do not fully understand, actors in an imperial pageant masked as entertainment. Yet, art is never merely entertainment. Think of it as a battlefield of the subconscious or a soft weapon, wielded manipulatively, until the mind bends in compliance.

    For years, the Nigerian government treated the arts as a colourful accessory; something to be deployed by politicians during campaigns, only useful when musicians rouse crowds or when actors could be paid to recite slogans.

    Beyond elections, the arts were left to starve. Grants vanished into bureaucratic crannies, training academies were abandoned, and a lot of visionary storytellers were reduced to beggars. So when Netflix, Amazon Prime, and foreign non-profits stretched out their hands, local artistes rushed forward like orphans furnished with an unexpected banquet.

    This foray of global streaming sites brought relief, fame, and a sudden gush of resources. Predictably, cinematography improved, and storytelling matured. But beneath the upgrades, a terrible rot manifested. The same door through which relief entered also ushered in a disturbing lust for foreign approval, and that lust has begun to twist the moral spine of our storytelling.

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    Themes once alien to our cultural psyche now parade our screens clad in the seductive costume of “global appeal.” What used to be the secret shame of a society is now served boldly as the new Nigerian aesthetic—nudity disguised as liberation, profanity repackaged as authenticity, and unrooted individualism marketed as evolution.

    Filmmakers, desperate to appeal to global markets, embraced themes detached from local realities: unnatural sexuality presented as rites of passage, hyper-violent fantasies framed as courage, and gender wars curated for global applause. More worrisome is the portrayal of the Nigerian family as a relic to be dismantled. The sanctity of kinship, the dignity of masculinity, and the rituals of femininity are recast as outdated burdens deserving obliteration.

    Many of the loudest voices championing these anti-family, anti-male, and anti-national narratives are those with access to foreign funding, mostly female filmmakers celebrated by global organisations eager to bankroll stories that weaken traditional moral codes. Their male counterparts, denied similar access, find themselves struggling against a tide of ideologically curated cinema designed to disintegrate society from the root.

    And what the filmmaker destroys, the journalist amplifies. Foreign non-profits, touting benevolent grants and “capacity building,” discovered the Nigerian press as fertile ground. Thus, they till the newsroom like virgin soil, providing grants, international fellowships, instant wealth and exposure.

    Many new media founders surrendered gladly; after all, who wants to wrestle with unpaid salaries, failing printing presses, and decrepit newsrooms when foreign funding offers the good life?

    The transformation was swift. One such beneficiary, once my colleague, now a multimillionaire with a billionaire’s appetite, joked that he had “no business with poverty ever again.”

    He recounted the indignities he suffered under his former employer: salaries delayed for months, threats from politicians, and management that treated journalists like indentured labourers. Soon after he found salvation in foreign funding, another grant dangled before him, this time to advocate for same-sex marriage. He accepted without hesitation, not minding that it’s outlawed by Nigerian laws. “Nigeria doesn’t pay my bills,” he said. “I owe no one anything.”

    I reminded him that he actually owed his country, family, and society a duty. He laughed, called me a dreamer, and walked away.

    But dreams matter. Nations rise and fall by the dreams they preserve or the nightmares they import. The danger lies not in individual filmmakers or journalists finding opportunities abroad; it lies in the ideological strings tied to those opportunities and the negative framing they inspire.

    Foreign governments understand what many Nigerians ignore: cinema isn’t ordinary entertainment, and the news story isn’t ordinary publicity. Either can be used as a weapon, a lullaby, a sermon, or psychological operation (psyop), depending on the intent of the handler. It is soft power painted in words, sound and colour.

    History is full of proof. During the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the United States, through the CIA, executed Operation PBSUCCESS, a psychological warfare that toppled the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reforms threatened the commercial interests of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. Propaganda films and clandestine radio broadcasts were used to sow fear, while a manipulated press fueled chaos, leading to Arbenz’s untimely resignation. Also, the films American Sniper, The Hurt Locker and Lone Survivor justify the reasons behind U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by generating sympathy for the American soldiers while inciting hatred against the Iraqis and Afghans.

    China’s massively funded film, The Battle at Lake Changjin, equally  transformed a historical military failure into a cinematic triumph to reshape national memory and inspire patriotism.

    In these distant curiosities subsists a warning: foreign powers do not invest in Nigerian movies and media out of love. They invest because culture is the first theatre of irregular warfare. They invest to reshape values, chip at institutional legitimacy, weaken families, and prepare the psychological ground for political and economic infiltration. Break the home and society collapses. Incite hostilities: turn women against men, youth against elders, religious faithful against themselves, and nothing stable remains.

    Today, many Nigerians embrace any narrative, even lies of “Christian genocide” and calls for foreign invasion, simply because it comes from their favourite politician, celebrated filmmaker, viral influencer, or a journalist presented as courageous by foreign NGOs.

    This disinformation is curated, funded, and spread to destabilise the country. In its wake, several religious opportunists, separatists, and failed presidential candidates have found common cause: demonise Nigeria, sabotage reforms, and invite foreign hostility. When they realised the U.S., despite its imperialist designs, was embracing a cooperative counter-terrorism partnership with Nigeria, they intensified their campaign, conjuring tales of mass persecution to sabotage the effort.

    The Nigerian government must rise to the sophistication of this battlefield. It must recognise that movies and media shape national values more powerfully than political speeches. Government must partner with the arts and news media, not as propaganda agents but as guardians of cultural integrity. Government must identify with visionaries, invest in their craft, and anchor national messaging in good governance, transparency, and public trust.

    There are unexplored facilities—funding schemes, training residencies, international collaborations—that can strengthen creative and media independence without ideological compromise. The state must activate them.

    As Nigeria navigates the complex geopolitics of terrorism, separatist agitation, religious extremism, and foreign interference, it must treat media and entertainment as strategic assets, not ornamental distractions.

    What we write and film becomes what we remember. What we remember becomes what we believe. And what we believe becomes the fate we accept.