The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Hostage season (2)

    Hostage season (2)

    Long before bandits preyed on schoolchildren, long before ransom notes began to read like market lists including palm oil, dried fish, onions, and yam tubers, Nigeria itself had been taken hostage.

    Thus, what we now call an epidemic of abductions is merely the physical manifestation of captive Nigerianness: with our consciences bound, institutions gagged, and the citizenry caught between fraying morals and failing structures.

    Truth is, the hostage crisis did not begin at gunpoint. It began in the dumbing down of Nigerian character; in the fragmentation of our family systems; in the erosion of public trust, and in the corruption that has become as ambient as the air we breathe.

    Nigeria’s kidnap-for-ransom enterprise has matured into a grotesque industry, sprawling from forest corridors to the fringes of urban life. Between July 2023 and June 2024 alone, SBM Intelligence reports that 1,130 kidnapping incidents were recorded, involving no fewer than 7,568 victims.

    In that period, abductors demanded N10.99 billion, but received only N1.048 billion, a mere 9.5 per cent of their outrageous demands. This gap reveals a frightening evolution: rather than targeting only business magnates, politicians, or oil barons, kidnappers have shifted their sights to the masses: to farmers, market women, students, commuters, villagers, minors, and the elderly.

    Yet the absurdity has assumed darker shades. In one widely reported case in the South-West, kidnappers demanded N3.5 million plus a carton of Schnapps, 30 litres of palm oil, 10 tubers of yam, and a keg of vegetable oil before releasing three captives. Elsewhere, abductors have asked for cooking oil, dried fish, garri, power banks, phone chargers, items required to restock a household inventory rather than a ransom ledger.

    This is what happens when criminality fuses with hunger; the consequence is a madness that confounds profit logic. It feeds, ultimately, an ever-widening maw of need.

    Yet, beyond the abductions that dominate news cycles, Nigeria suffers from a deeper, subtler captivity. Every Nigerian, in some form, is a hostage: hostage to creed, weaponising faith to justify bigotry; hostage to ethnic and religious loyalties; hostage to greed, that turns public office into a private empire.

    Many are hostage to hypocrisy, condemning loudly in public what they cuddle in private; hostage to poverty, which renders dignity an unaffordable luxury; hostage to materialism, chasing wealth with the desperation of a drowning man gasping for air.

    Some are hostage to sexual lust, weaponising desire to destroy marriages, careers, and destinies; hostage to rage, exploding at the slightest provocation because Nigeria heats everyone, like a pressure cooker; hostage to daily needs, locked in a battle that yokes survival to the next meal.

    Many more are hostage to imperialist agendas, gorging on colonist doctrines at the expense of indigenous wisdom. And perhaps most tragically, we are hostage to sentimentality, defending leaders who impoverish us, praising institutions that betray us, and romanticising the very dysfunctions that hold us captive.

    Amid this moral malaise, corruption manifests as a social ill and a vehicle of national dysfunction. Recent 2023 data reveal that 32.3% of Nigerians reported personal experience with bribery while dealing with public officials. In total, an estimated 87 million bribes were exchanged that year—approximately 0.8 bribes per adult. Among those who admitted paying bribes, the average number paid within 12 months was 5.1.

    The import is alarming: about US $1.26 billion in cash bribes changed hands in 2023; that is roughly 0.35% of Nigeria’s GDP.

    The citizen pays bribes to secure what is already his by right. The official extracts bribes to perform what he is already paid to do. And the system, greased by these transactions, chugs out detritus of misgovernance.

    To mend all that we have broken, we must rejig our cultural foundations. No society reforms itself without reshaping its stories; the narratives it consumes often become the beliefs it normalises, and the beliefs it normalises form the culture it lives by.

    Essentially, patriotism thrives on cultural standards. The politics we espouse and our lore of nationhood manifest the kernel of our sovereignty. A similar dynamic undergirds our politico-literary traditions. Politics thrives on artistic vistas and vice versa.

    What shouldn’t we do for an evergreen story? What shouldn’t we give? The evergreen story, if progressively spun, yields fresh insights through the imagination of the writer or filmmaker, who milks history and recalibrates reality to espouse a positive national lyric.

    What is the Nigerian lyric? What is our reality? What do our artists project about us to our internal and external publics? Filmmakers, for instance, possess a critical tool: storytelling. But too often, this instrument is pointed inward to glamorise crime, trivialise trauma, and distort our image in the pursuit of box office glory. A recent film, for instance, irresponsibly romanticised kidnap-for-ransom while maligning Islam, thus reinforcing stereotypes that worsen social fissures. This is artistic sabotage masquerading as creativity.

    It’s about time the government partnered with filmmakers to produce hard-hitting political thrillers, social dramas, and moral epics that diagnose Nigeria’s ailments and offer a path to healing.

    Hollywood perfected this strategy decades ago. Between 1911 and 2017, over 800 feature films received support from the U.S. Department of Defence. More than 1,100 television titles enjoyed Pentagon backing. These ranged from Iron Man and Transformers to Homeland, 24, NCIS, and others.

    The United States’ democratic enterprise is one of the most profitable constructions via art, in its bid to “make America great again,” at any cost. It is both music and philosophy, a sensory stream of thought feeding generations of writers, political activists, filmmakers, politicians, gender rights activists, academia, and so on.

    Hollywood, democracy and foreign aid do for America what painting and sculpture did for the Italians. They are potent tools for wooing and recolonising the world. Also, both China’s and South Korea’s cultural ascents were deliberately constructed around cinematic narratives aligned with national philosophy. Likewise, Nigeria must birth an artistic movement that elevates, not erodes, the collective psyche. The country’s creative economy stands at an inflection point. With projections estimating a leap from $5 billion in 2022 to $25 billion by the end of 2025, there is an undeniable hunger for indigenous storytelling. Yet, economic prosperity must not overshadow ideological direction.

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    Nigeria must fuse state power with cultural influence to dismantle the criminal economy, using cinema, storytelling, and public-facing art to drive awareness while strengthening intelligence systems with drones, satellite surveillance, digital tracking, and community-powered reporting tools that predict and prevent abductions.

    The government, in partnership with the creative sector, must spotlight the importance of state policing, securing forest corridors and rural communities, using film, radio dramas, and digital content to mobilise public vigilance, while a national forest security command, integrated with trained community vigilante units, constrains bandits’ operations.

    Through socially conscious art and nationwide cultural programming, the government must help citizens understand that no crime thrives where jobs, education, and social welfare exist, and the government must walk in virtual lockstep with what it preaches.

    A nation’s heart beats in its stories. A country without a socially responsible literary and artistic community is a body without a soul. Our filmmakers must move beyond the monotonous tropes of gender wars, feminist-misandrist vendetta-laden plots. Our novelists must cease writing solely for Western patronage and pity.

    Shall we script a new national narrative? One that does not lament Nigeria but reimagines her. One that does not beg for Western approval but commands global reverence.

    It’s about time we resolved the maladies that make the Nigerian dream the fantasy of thieves, kidnappers, and blinkered murderers.

  • Undertaker journalism

    Undertaker journalism

    The Nigerian tragedy is seldom written in the ricochet of bullets alone. Sometimes, it is scripted in newsrooms, goaded by keypad confidence. Thus the journalistic frenzy to thump the “publish” button, a mania amplified by a press that forgets, that journalism, even at its freest, is never free of consequence.

    Today, Nigeria is locked in an existential struggle with terror, weakened by governmental missteps, and a press that often mistakes adversarial passion for professional duty.

    I do not, hereby, plead for capitulation or censorship. The media must never become lapdog to a captured state, nor submit to the patronage of criminal actors. But there is a difference between watchdog journalism and rabid barking that alerts the burglar to the location of the sleeping homeowner. In the case of Brigadier General Musa Uba, executed after being captured by ISWAP terrorists following an ambush, Nigeria witnessed the devastating consequences of a press that prioritised speed over discernment and exposure over prudence.

    Taiwo Adebayo, an investigative journalist, was one of the few to articulate the tragedy with clarity, dispassion, and professional responsibility. His reflections reveal uncomfortable truths about journalistic practice and the deeper malaise of contemporary reportage.

    His well articulated piece highlights the abandonment of social responsibility ethics in an age of hyper-competition, digital ego tripping, click-bait survival, and the commodification of despair.

    There is a lot that distinguishes terrorism reporting from random reportage; it is strategic terrain, in which a seemingly harmless sentence may save or destroy lives, where an innocuous headline or rider may either protect neighbourhoods or expose them to slaughter.

    Brigadier General Uba, Commander of the Nigerian Army’s 25 Task Force Brigade, in Borno, initially escaped the ISWAP ambush and communicated with colleagues, from his hiding in the forest, while awaiting rescue. But he was exposed by Nigeria’s digital media sphere. News media, raring to update and publish first; eager to sate the lust of a public addicted to breaking news, compromised Uba.

     The first wave of reports declared him missing or abducted. Another set, possibly published to reduce embarrassment within military circles, suggested that he had been rescued. But ISWAP, like every insurgent group with digital intelligence capability, was listening. They monitored the reports, identified the window of vulnerability, mobilised a unit, and swept the area. The general was recaptured near a village in Damboa. His phone confirmed his rank and value. Soon after, he was killed.

    While this manifests as military failure; it was also a newsroom-assisted catastrophe. The Nigerian newsroom must hold itself accountable for endangering Uba, for failing to ask the crucial questions in a conflict where human lives hang in the balance: Is this information confirmed? Could publishing it worsen the danger? Is the intelligence incomplete, unverified, or strategically sensitive? Does the public’s right to know in this moment outweigh the risk of losing a life?

    Had those questions guided the reporting, as Adebayo rightly observed, the press could still have informed the nation, without informing the enemy. Responsible editorial judgment is hardly censorship. It is the basic social duty journalism owes the society that protects its freedom.

    General Uba, therefore, was betrayed by the press that should have protected him through thoughtful, sequenced, ethically weighted reporting, until his rescue was complete or his fate was certain.

    But the problem exceeds procedural lapses, it is complex and deeply embedded. Vast segments of the Nigerian press have adopted a posture of reflexive cynicism, an adversarial tone that casts the nation as a perpetual disappointment and its institutions as irredeemable. In the process, patriotism has become outmoded, even suspicious. Love of country is treated as a sign of naivety or complicity.

    Thus, many journalists will celebrate the American military, the British special forces, the IDF, or the French Foreign Legion as the gold standards of military competence. But when reporting on Nigerian troops, they prefer frames of cowardice, incompetence, corruption, or buffoonery. Some of those criticisms are deserved, taking into cognizance, the tactical lapses and operational misconduct that have marred counterinsurgency operations.

    Yet to consistently strip one’s own defenders of dignity while upholding foreign counterparts as flawless heroes constitutes both irresponsible journalism and ideological self-harm. The Nigerian soldier—the one sleeping in foxholes in Sambisa and the one patrolling across vast, hostile terrain—may not be perfect. But those men and women are the living wall between Nigeria and fragmentation.

    The press that reports their battles, therefore, ought to do so with balance, sobriety, and an allegiance to peace above sensationalism.

    Yet media irresponsibility is an illness that extends beyond the newsroom. It is the symptom of a broader civic decay as the journalist is rarely the lone saboteur of the Nigerian enterprise.

    Doctors, engineers, bus conductors, teachers, bankers, students and unemployed youths, to mention a few, have adopted a bitter doctrine of mockery of their homeland. Too many Nigerians speak of the country as if it were a cursed burden rather than a shared project. Thus the gleeful taunt: “If Nigeria happens to you, you will learn the hard way.” This is despair masked as humour. It is helplessness weaponised into collective self-disdain. And until this disposition shifts, no reforms will yield enduring transformation.

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    That is why the media and the literary arts must be courted both as observers and active participants in national renewal. Nations that have overcome great crises, from post-war Japan to post-genocide Rwanda, did so through policy and narrative. They re-authored themselves, telling new stories about who they were and what futures they deserved.

    Nigeria must do the same. Our press and cultural institutions must become partners in reframing patriotism as a responsible civic posture, even as we replace mockery with narratives of ownership and duty. National progress is not a spectator sport thus the need for a practical national reorientation plan, anchored in Nigeria’s capacity to actualise radical reforms and sustain its proceeds.

    The stakes have grown higher amid internal threats posed by terrorists, bandits, separatist militias and external pressures. There are desperate actors abroad, including a missionary political lobby in the United States, agitating for intervention under the guise of protecting Nigerian Christians from targeted genocide. No serious student of geopolitics doubts that humanitarian pretexts have historically served as covers for invasion, regime change, and neo-imperial disruption.

    If Nigeria becomes the next theatre of “saving Africans from themselves,” the loss will be borne by Nigerians, not Washington. It’s our children whose classrooms will be shelled. Our farmlands will become battlefields and our cities will be bombed to rubble. The economy will collapse under artillery and sanctions, and the multi-ethnic federation that we are so proud of, will splinter beyond repair.

    Nigeria has far more to lose from foreign intervention, than it stands to gain. Thus, the press as a chronicler of national events must always protect the country’s security and sovereignty through socially responsible reporting. Going forward, journalists must weigh every revelation with the seriousness of a surgeon deciding where to cut.

    The media must collectively build stronger newsroom ethics for real-time conflict reporting; journalists must be trained on how insurgent groups mine media coverage for tactical intelligence; even as we build institutional structures for dialogue between the media and security agencies.

    The intent isn’t to turn the fourth estate into a propagandist arm of government, but to renew civic patriotism and remind journalists that freedom of the press exists so that society may live, not die prematurely.

  • Before you cut your nose to spite your face (2)

    Before you cut your nose to spite your face (2)

    Donald Trump’s threat to invade Nigeria to protect Christians from genocide asserts the dire logic of colonial rescue: the white knight arriving to save the native land from itself, and in so doing, carve out fresh domains of control.

    By responding with cheers and urging foreign invasion under the pretext of faith, Nigerians enact a tragedy of identity: we become supplicants rather than sovereign agents.

    It is entirely proper to mourn the deaths of Nigerians, to demand justice for victims of terrorism, banditry, herder-farmer clashes, and kidnappings. But to elevate that mourning into a narrative of “Christian genocide” is analytically flawed and cynical.

    The celebrated scholar Bulama Bukarti (PhD, SOAS, University of London) anchors us in clarity. His analysis — in his PhD thesis — of the major civilian attacks by Boko Haram from May 2011 to December 2020, based on the Nigerian Security Tracker (NST) of the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S., reveals that Boko Haram struck 83 churches, resulting in 1,521 deaths, and 72 mosques, yielding 2,017 deaths.

    Bukarti’s work asserts that killings are not exclusively or even primarily Christian-targeted; they are indiscriminate acts by violent extremists whose mission is carnage. In contrast, the voices declaring Christian genocide are rooted in fog, not scholarship. Their claims are built on hyperbole, not data. They sprout from a divisive grievance-economy, not evidence.

    When a Nigerian pastor, political hanger-on, disgruntled election loser, or sectarian demagogue applauds Trump’s threat, they expose a willing slave-mind. To cheer that a foreign soldier might walk through Abuja, Kaduna, or Borno on a flawed claim that “Christians are being deliberately massacred” is to pawn our sovereignty for the shackles of an occupying force.

    No doubt, we have our problems. Bandits and terrorists prowl the northeast, northwest, and northcentral regions, preying on lives and homes; the southeast sees local actors murdering co-Christian neighbours under the guise of separatism.

    Chukwuma Soludo, Governor of Anambra State, recently affirmed that many perpetrators in the southeast bear Christian names. “People are killing themselves; Christians killing Christians. The people in the bushes are Emmanuel, Peter, and John, all Christian names, and they have maimed and killed thousands of our youths. It has nothing to do with religion,” he said.

    By ignoring such conflict dynamics and urging a foreign invasion meant to “save Christians,” we misdiagnose our sickness and submit our necks to the leash of American colonists hawking gall as goodwill.

    If we peel back the rhetoric, we’d see through the multiplex of interest. Nigeria occupies a resource-rich terrain, key to the supply chains of U.S. high-tech and defence industries: oil, natural gas, rare earths, uranium, lithium, cobalt, heavy mineral sands. The country is ranked fifth globally in rare earth deposits, behind China, the U.S., Myanmar and Australia.

    Trump’s performative compassion for Nigerian Christians stems from Washington’s panic over America’s rare earth-dependency on China. Recently, Trump’s threat to slap the latter with a 140 per cent tariff over rare earths failed, thus, he reversed course to secure yearly access to mineral flows on China’s terms. Then, Washington’s focus shifted to Nigeria, which occupies a corridor, extending through Niger and Chad to Sudan, of vast critical minerals.

    Trump’s threat of a “vicious military response” was provoked by Nigeria’s growing defiance of Western economic orthodoxy and its audacious steps toward self-determination. First is Nigeria’s deepening partnership with China, not in token trade but in revolutionary infrastructure: railways, ports, refineries, and telecommunications networks. Projects Western lenders had dangled for decades with sovereignty-eroding conditions.

    When Beijing arrived with a less paternalistic model, Nigeria reimagined its alliances and economic interests. Whatever one thinks of China’s motives, the difference is tangible. China builds, where the West exploits.

    Then came Nigeria’s stance in the global energy market. As Europe scrambled to replace Russian gas, Nigeria, blessed with immense reserves, found itself courted by Western buyers desperate for supply. The country, As pundits rightly note, negotiated smartly, seeking partnerships that would help transition its economy.

    Adding to Washington’s irritation is Nigeria’s quiet revolution in the oil sector. For the first time in history, Nigeria can refine its own crude at scale, thanks to the Dangote Refinery.

    Next, Nigeria’s growing independence became evident at the United Nations. When the conference voted on resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Nigeria abstained, out of moral clarity, not solidarity with aggression. How could the same nations that invaded Iraq on a lie, destroyed Libya under false pretence, and yet enable Israel’s genocidal siege on Palestine, even as you read, claim moral high ground? Nigeria thus declared that it would no longer be anyone’s automatic vote.

    The final straw came when Nigeria announced it would begin accepting payments for its oil exports in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. To Washington, this was heresy. Dollar dominance, especially in global energy trade, is the cornerstone of American power. When countries start trading in yuan, rupees, or their own currencies, it chips away at that hegemony. Nigeria’s decision, coordinated with other oil producing nations, symbolised a seismic shift. Trump’s reaction was predictable. He declared that nations who “betrayed the dollar” might face “vicious consequences.”

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    His threat of military action over fabrications of genocide, intones American menace of resource grab, a base installation, and a fresh chapter of dependency. Nigeria must never invite that.

    If America is allowed to invade under any pretext, the losses will be immense: the surrender of territorial integrity, the erosion of the principle of self-determination, the setting of a precedent for any foreign power to define our “crisis” and dispatch its troops accordingly.

    Such an invasion would corrode the social contract between Nigerian citizens and their government: that we govern ourselves, make our own mistakes, and chart our own course. It would endanger our right to choose alliances, currencies, economic structures. And once the foreign boot is in the door, it will not depart simply because we protest.

    Nigerians must, therefore, rally to defend our territorial integrity and national pride. We must resist disgruntled election losers and pastors who have lost the trust of their flocks, following their failed prophecies of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s defeat at the 2023 elections. Their claims of Christian genocide are borne of cynical intent; and their calls for America’s invasion betray a desire for destabilisation, not reform.

    Nigerians must seek the country’s unity, not its unraveling. President Tinubu and his service chiefs must equally intensify the fight against terrorists, bandits, and kidnappers; especially in the southern corridors where the danger is less acknowledged.

    Besieged families will find it hard to commit to the Renewed Hope Agenda if their loved ones are not safe. Thus, Tinubu’s leadership must entrench more credible, transparent, and localised security measures that protect lives and property, across faiths and ethnicity.

    There must be a data-driven accountability of killings, so no group is compelled to believe only one faith is under siege; a national narrative that honours victims but refuses divisive victim-capital of artificial genocide claims.

    No matter how turbulent the United States is—with soaring gun violence and racial strife—Americans do not call in Russia or China to invade their cities. They defend America, flawed though their democracy may be.

    Likewise, Nigerians, for all our faults, must refuse the abdication of agency. We must distinguish legitimate calls for justice from neocolonial invitations to subjugation. We must recognise the credibility of scholarship, such as Bukarti’s, in preference to sectarian shouts, exaggerated statistics and grandstanding demagogues.

  • Before you cut your nose to spite your face (1)

    Before you cut your nose to spite your face (1)

    The thing about a knife: it is easy to feed a town to the sharpened kiss of its blade. Whether adult or minor, male or female, Muslim or Christian, the blade hardly discriminates.

    Hence, there was no pity on the edge of the machete that butchered the Hurti clan. And there was no mercy in the stab that decapitated the peasant farmers of Zabarmari. On April 2, Fulani militia struck Hurti, a Christian community in Bokkos, Plateau State, killing 46. On November 28, 2020, Boko Haram terrorists struck Muslim farmers in a rice field in Jere LGA, Borno. They tied them up and brutally slit their throats. The United Nations put the death toll at a minimum of 110, describing it as the “most violent direct attack against innocent civilians” in 2020.

    Lest we forget the bloody Yuletide of 2011, on December 25, Boko Haram bombed St. Theresa Catholic Church, Madalla, killing 37 worshippers. Three years later, on November 28, 2014, the terrorist group struck the Great Mosque of Kano during Juma’at prayers, killing 100 Muslim worshippers.

    Permit me to intone, Simon Kolawole, at this point: Did the phrase “genocide” creep into your mind at the dawn of the first two tragedies, or the latter? When the terrorists bombed the Nyanya motor park, the UN building, the THISDAY offices, and the police headquarters in Abuja, did you deem it a joint genocide against Muslims and Christians alike? Or did you, like many Nigerians, assign victimhood and martyrdom to your faith alone?

    Did you cherry-pick which corpses to count and which to forget? This selective moral vision is why, decades after terror first came bursting through our borders, we are unable to tame its scourge. It explains, too, why we are once again tap-dancing to the gimcrack trumpet of United States President Donald Trump’s evangelical crusade.

    Last week, Trump conveniently found his Caps Lock and, with it, a new crusade. Twice, he posted about Nigeria, first to allege that “thousands of Christians” were being slaughtered by “Radical Islamists,” and then to warn that the United States might stop aid, or worse, ‘invade guns-a-blazing.’

    This same Trump, who turned a blind eye to the real-time genocide in Gaza, where U.S.-funded Israeli jets have carpet-bombed hospitals, kindergarten schools, churches, mosques, and refugee camps, killing hundreds of thousands, now presumes to avenge Nigerian Christians.

    Trump’s genocide fever is stoked by curious characters like Bill Maher and Senator Ted Cruz, who, from the comfort of American studios, cite inflated casualty figures. Maher, an atheist, recently claimed that “over 100,000 Christians have been killed since 2009, and 18,000 churches burned.” Cruz quoted smaller – about 50,000 murdered Christians – but equally dubious figures. They do not acknowledge that Muslims have died in equal or greater numbers as victims of the same nihilist terror they mislabel as religious war.

    These merchants of outrage, who see “genocide” in Nigeria but “self-defence” in Gaza, peddle suffering as spectacle, feeding the American evangelical machine that thrives on tales of persecuted Christians abroad.

    The same zealots who cheered as the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) buried both Muslim and Christian Palestinians have suddenly grown teary-eyed over “Nigerian victims” half a world away. Not even US Congressman Scott Perry’s claim, in February, that the USAID had been funding Boko haram and other international terrorist groups, matters in their consideration.

    There’s a word for this kind of drama: shall we call it dissembling or outright pretence?

    If Trump, Cruz, Maher and fellow evangelicals in the US and Nigeria were genuinely moved by faith or fairness, their voices would rise for the Christian families bombed in Gaza’s Holy Family Church, where bodies of priests and children still lie beneath the debris. They would mourn the Muslim and Christian medics who perished when Israel flattened the Al-Ahli hospital. But their compassion nourishes a different calculus.

    Nigeria, to them, is both a morality market and a slave plantation, and it is ripe for the taking. Recall that Cruz, in a July address, emphasised that America must fiercely fight off China from Africa’s mineral trove, and so doing, protect the US’ capacity to stash its mineral reserves. It is the old colonial catechism: civilise the savage, save the heathen, exploit the land, now rebranded for the algorithmic age. This is the inconvenient truth in the gospel written by imperial hands.

    But perhaps more tragic than Trump’s threat is the chorus of Nigerians cheering the menace. In newsrooms, cafés, churches, and on social platforms, Nigerians applaud their own humiliation, demanding that the US invades their country to “save the Christians.”

    Even presumed intelligentsia are furnishing the hysteria, as if our land-tract were a chessboard and our people pawns for American domination. It is heartrending to see a nation incite its own doom with applause. Among these cheerleaders are frustrated separatists and partisan clergy, people who see in Trump’s threat a shortcut to unseat a government they despise. To them, Tinubu’s Muslim-Muslim ticket remains an unforgivable sin, and his presidency an affront to prophecy. So they embrace Trump’s threat as divine justice, even if it means burning the house to kill the rat.

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    But do they imagine that when America comes ‘guns-a-blazing,’ it will pause to separate saints from sinners? Or that the invader’s bullet will discriminate between masjid and altar?

    To call the Nigerian conflict a “Christian genocide” is to consecrate a lie. The United Nations Convention on Genocide (1948) defines the crime as acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” No credible evidence supports such intent in Nigeria’s case.

    What we face instead is a tangled web of poverty, criminality, politics, and faith: banditry in Zamfara, terrorism in Borno, herder-farmer clashes in Plateau. It is a war against the nation itself, not against one religion. As Reverend Joseph Hayab of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) stated, “These terrorists started by killing Christians, then moved to killing virtually everybody.” The Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI) agrees. So does MURIC. Even the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, reminds us that “many Muslims in Nigeria are themselves victims of the same intolerance.”

    Senior Adviser to President Trump on Arab and African Affairs, Massad Boulos, has dismissed allegations of a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria, acknowledging that, “People of all religions and all tribes are dying as a result of terrorist acts. We even know that Boko Haram and ISIS are killing more Muslims than Christians. People are suffering from all sorts of backgrounds. However, any loss of life is one too many, and we should work together in partnership to put an end to this.”

    Yet Trump’s evangelical forces ignore this complexity, preferring the simplicity of the “Christian victim” narrative, because it suits their script of intervention. History teaches us that when America claims to protect, it often destroys. They protected Iraq from tyranny and left it in ruins. They liberated Libya into chaos. They defended Afghanistan until its mountains bled. Now, they brandish “Christian genocide” to justify a new conquest: Nigeria, the heart of Africa’s black pride, rich in oil, gas, and rare minerals.

    Trump’s threat is no charity to Nigerian Christendom; it is imperial strategy, another bloodthirsty ploy to balkanise a resource-rich land. If we allow it, they will set us against each other, arm our warring divides, and pretend to keep the peace. And while we kill each other, they will harvest our resources.

  • Bomb threats and panicky legislators

    Bomb threats and panicky legislators

    The earth is littered with the bones of potentates who believed they were eternal. History thrives on their ruin or renown. Let this guide every Nigerian in public office. No matter how highly placed they are, providence eventually halts their pompous strides and yanks the rug from beneath their pretentious ideals.

    The recent disclosure of a bomb threat against the National Assembly rankles ominously, no doubt. But we had it coming. Now, this article does not defend bomb threats or violent insurrection. Those acts are crimes against the common life. But to pretend that violence detonates out of nowhere, and that despair, manipulation and mass anger are spontaneous combustion, is to traffic in a convenient fiction.

    The social tinder that allows unscrupulous demagogues and foreign spoilers to light the match is assembled every day by bad governance: by governors who hoard and fail to deliver; by legislators whose opacity invites conspiracy; by public servants who confuse rent-seeking for stewardship. When the people are rendered impoverished and luckless pawns, the wreckage of trust becomes fertile ground for recruiting the disenfranchised.

    The warning bell clanged recently as lawmakers reported terror threats against the National Assembly, including a claim that terrorists threatened to bomb the legislative complex. Chairman of the House Committee on Internal Security, Hon. Garba Ibrahim Muhammad, disclosed during a public hearing on a bill to establish the Legislative Security Directorate, held at the National Assembly complex, Abuja.

    The proposed legislation is titled “A bill for an act to provide for the establishment and the functions of legislative security directorate in the national assembly; to provide for the qualification and condition of service of the sergeant-at-arms and other personnel of the directorate and for related matters, 2024 (HB 1632).”

    But beyond the legislators’ panic and cry for metal detectors, subsists a deeper malaise that renders the legislative chamber porous to fake IDs, petty traders, unvetted access and civic outrage. There was the corrosive fable of the “per-lawmaker N1bn”: a claim that lawmakers futilely battled to prevent it from calcifying into public belief. A former aspirant, David Ayodele Asalu, asserted publicly that every federal lawmaker receives not less than N1 billion annually for constituency projects, with senators supposedly getting more. That claim went viral, but the House of Representatives denounced it as “deliberate disinformation.”

    If untrue, the danger is not merely factual error but the story’s utility. For a youth who has no work, a retiree who waits months for a pension, who sees a road undone and a local clinic unbuilt, the allegation simplifies injustice into a single enemy, and imputes motive where there may be complex fiscal flows and bureaucratic mismanagement. Such simplicity becomes potent and accelerates rage.

    Otherwise, the numbers are damning. In 2024 alone, Nigeria reportedly budgeted about N724 billion on its National Assembly and 36 State Assemblies. This includes N50 billion for salaries and allowances of lawmakers at both federal and state levels, N294.7 billion specifically for the National Assembly and related bodies, and N379.28 billion for the state assemblies.

    This renders futile the former Senate President, Ahmed Lawan’s previous argument, the monthly salary of a senator is N1.5m, while that of a member of the House of Representatives is N1.3m, stressing that the alleged N13.5m monthly salary was actually their quarterly office running allowance.

    Recent findings revealed that the Nigerian Senate President actually receives N2.48 million as basic salary, while other senators receive N2.26 million monthly. Even so, the quarterly office allowance (running cost) for a senator amounts to N52m per annum, while the N8m for a member of the House of Representatives amounts to N32m in a year.

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    Nigeria could save around N250 billion every year by switching to a unicameral legislature or making lawmaking part-time. This money could be redirected towards improving healthcare, education, and infrastructure, thus aligning with the country’s economic realities and developmental goals.

    The federal government and the National Assembly must make concerted efforts to reduce the astronomical cost of governance as the current profligacy is unsustainable and morally indefensible. The maintenance of a Senate and House of Representatives, with their attendant expenses, is no longer a luxury we can afford.

    President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has to his credit, pursued visible palliatives: expanded transfers via FAAC, the establishment and roll-out of NELFUND student loans, targeted scholarships, and investments aimed at stabilising the naira and boosting infrastructure and security. But policy without partnership is like seed scattered on a stone. If governors, lawmakers, and bureaucrats act at cross-purposes, hoarding funds, refusing to clear arrears, or allowing projects to rot, the centre’s good intentions are nullified on the periphery.

    NELFUND has disbursed loans to hundreds of thousands of students, and FAAC lifts have meant larger sums reaching subnational governments than before. But the arithmetic of revenue is not the arithmetic of care. An increase in aggregate allocation means nothing if it is not accompanied by transparency, by conditionality, and by political courage to confront mismanagement at the subnational level. The numbers can be said to climb while the lived condition of citizens remain in decline.

    And so we arrive at a harder truth: the people will only believe in bold national reforms when the political class shows it is worthy of belief. Grand rhetoric must be matched by grand gestures of restraint and identification, not just from presidents and ministers but from governors, legislators, and local power-brokers. This could look like the clearing of pension arrears; timely payment of civil servants’ wages; an enabling business environment: transparent execution of constituency projects with independent audits; and, crucially, visible punishments for corruption at every level.

    It is never enough to funnel palliatives and incentives to mitigate economic distress. Democracy does not naturally spring forth from the soil of free markets. It must be grounded in self-sacrifice. A healthy democracy must frequently challenge the economic interests of the elites for the benefit of the people. Yet government officials and corporate actors address the economic crisis by funnelling funds and resources into the financial sector because they are conditioned to maintain and manage the existing system rather than transform it.

    Perhaps the most heartbreaking subplot of Nigeria’s travails is the erosion of the middle class. Inflation, unemployment, and taxation have squeezed this demographic, leaving many struggling to maintain their status. Historically, the middle class serves as the backbone of any nation, driving consumption, innovation, and economic stability. In Nigeria, this group has become increasingly vulnerable, trapped between rising living conditions and stagnant income.

    Reviving this social stratum will require more humane and intentional policies: affordable housing, access to quality healthcare, and educational reforms that prioritise skills for a modern economy.

    The political class must also understand that the rage brewing within the disenfranchised working class and below forebodes a dangerous backlash. Pervasive hopelessness has driven too many into the arms of dubious demagogues and charlatans, who peddle utopian fantasies to a desperate populace.

    The question before us is not whether we can stop violent men, because we must, but whether we are willing to stop making violent men inevitable. The answer to that requires a more humane and relentless approach to governance: lawmakers who account, governors who pay, and a presidency that insists that its policies be matched by subnational partners who will not sabotage them.

    Until that day, every cratered road, empty clinic, unpaid pension and disenfranchised youth is an invitation to chaos. And invitations, once accepted, are hard to rescind.

  • God’s chosen (2)

    God’s chosen (2)

    Life as a “chosen pawn” is no walk in the park. Your heart is thick with repentance, but your penance has no audience. Perhaps because your chosen idols have counted you as part of the sacrifice.

    Your date with epiphany begins with promise. Pardon the recap in real time. On January 1st, the Year of Retribution, at precisely 8:40 am, you are ushered into a media parley at the “captured” State House in Abuja. You have rehearsed “appreciable” questions for the occupying force’s spokesman and the Commander of the counter-insurgency, aka Operation Chosen Lion.

    Your wit is honed to impress, and your conscience, neatly folded like a newspaper back copy. But few hours into the propaganda parley, you are briefed that resistance fighters had breached the perimeters of the north central’s open-air prison. You are told they are being crushed and pushed back.

    You applaud the newly constituted God’s Chosen Army for its daring and professionalism, stressing that Nigeria’s former military “would have caved and taken to their heels.”

    The Commander beams appreciatively at you – glorying in your impassioned sycophancy – while your colleagues rue their inability to beat you to the butt-lick and crawl. Eventually, you are discharged with a handsome reimbursement for your time.

    Sometime between your take-off and ascent to the FCT skyline, you learn that God’s Chosen forces are battling resistance fighters close to your residential district in Lagos. But you can neither call nor text, in compliance with aviation rules.

    Instantly, you become hysterical, wondering if your home has been caught in the carnage. As your plane descends astride the southwest perimeters of Nigeria’s open-air prison, you become anxious about the fate of your family amid the onslaught. But you’ve been assured, after all, that you would always be spared any of God’s Chosen military assault, given your relocation outside the internment camps.

    As you get closer to your neighbourhood, you are turned back by God’s Chosen special forces combing through for fleeing rebels. In your hysteria, you receive a call from your wife’s phone. ‘Thank God, they made it out before the siege,” you mutter. You are relieved to hear your seven-year-old daughter at the end of the line.

    But she is pleading over the phone for you to come rescue her. You hear shots being fired, drowning out your daughter’s screams. And then, silence.

    You hear nothing of your family until two weeks later, following the withdrawal of God’s Chosen forces from the area. Your daughter’s body was found alongside five others: your wife and four other daughters, inside your family car, a Kia Picanto.

    Satellite images reveal how they were targeted by heavy artillery and run over by God’s Chosen army tanks. Your family car got riddled by exactly 335 bullets, and you can barely recognise your seven-year-old daughter, her sisters and your wife, from their severely mangled corpses.

    In your grief, you recall your mockery of the sad fate of a six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab. On January 29, 2024, in Gaza City, Hind Rajab pleaded over the phone for emergency workers to rescue her from a car riddled with bullets. Her body was found two weeks later, on February 10, 2024, alongside the bodies of six of her family members in the car they drove to flee their neighbourhood as Israeli forces invaded.

    Picture your daughter in the mangled carcass of Hind Rijab. Picture her as the bloody carcass of each murdered Palestinian newborn and toddler. Suddenly, it’s not so witty or “touche” anymore to write, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” in response to social media outrage to the genocide in Gaza. “How about October 7?” now resonates like a dumb riposte.

    You realise how dubious it was of you to write the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from October 7. Yet, your grief manifests as ghosts of your past hypocrisies. Each bullet in each of your family members resonates as a headline that once mocked the suffering of others. The irony is pungent, the poetry unbearable.

    You had gone to report on “order” as directed by God’s Chosen leadership, and broadcast “balance” effected through carpet-bombs. You drafted your editorial masterpiece right before you left the God’s Chosen media parley, telling your fellow Nigerians that the occupying force was grossly misunderstood; that their tanks were moral instruments deployed in a siege against anarchists masquerading as resistance fighters.

    You quoted the scriptures to justify bombardments, as though God moonlighted as a munitions dealer. In your voice, objectivity becomes fiction, crafted according to the designs of those who rewrite history with the blood of others. It isn’t true if it’s not just. And justice requires choosing sides; always against annihilation.

    Now, faced with your family’s execution, your knees collapse. As you grieve, you see your colleagues still live-tweeting God’s Chosen propaganda and competing for soundbites. Their eyes avoid yours. They will file their reports and sleep. And you, broken father, will write one last column, perhaps a confession or a curse. But it will come too late for your daughter.

    Now, you attempt the literature of rebellion, but your voice has lost its vigour, like a redundant hyperbole in a rant against God’s Chosen. Eventually, you collapse in the wreckage of your own rhetoric, your press badge dangling like a noose of your own design.

    It takes a special kind of maleficence, and insolence perhaps, to rejoice at the murder of infants. Those who justify sniper bullets in the head of a three-year-old abroad may welcome sniper bullets in the head of their child or grandchild. Karma comes full circle, always.

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    You find that, not even a swift recourse to frantic remorse, could make heaven spare you your just deserts. You are accountable for your secret lusts and espoused chaos. The goodness you espouse will make you; the evil you applaud will unmake you.

    Forget Deir Yassin, Sabra, Shatila, Jenin, Khan Younis. Forget the siege, the deathly checkpoints, and the snipers who target children. Forget the journalists who got buried with their cameras alongside their families. Forget starvation, too, because remembrance is rebellion.

    And now, in the same logic of convenience, you will forget your heartfelt losses as you parrot God’s Chosen phrases: “security operation,” “neutralised threats,” and “collateral damage.” You will sanitise massacre into lexicon as your coloniser’s grammar becomes your creed, and your craft, once meant to awaken, now anesthetises.

    Gaza was an experiment. The world watched it burn and called it geopolitics. It watched children being vaporised and called it defence. It watched truth die and called it complexity.

    The same logic is rehearsing for its Nigerian debut. Every dollar grant that demands ideological loyalty and silence from your newsroom prepares you for future occupation. Every journalist who flatters tyranny abroad must prepare to relive it soon in his native dialect.

    And when the performance begins, and the skies darken with imported drones and a colonist pall, both your patriotism and humanity will be tested.

    Every God’s Chosen pawn has a price. What’s yours? A dollar grant? A travel visa? Or an opportunity to relocate your family abroad?

    These days, the Nigerian newsroom objectively debates everything but the daily savagery depicted in Gaza. Journalists fear the rancour that may arise. But, I want to say to dear colleagues, in the poetic tenor of Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer, can we not be sad together at the descent of humanity? Can we not grieve the death of innocents? Can we not at least mourn together?

  • God’s chosen

    God’s chosen

    War breaks out in Ethiopia, and a faction of self-identifying Zionists, aka Beta Israel, flees grievous persecution. The United States and Europe intervene, pleading with Nigeria to temporarily harbour them.

    They are relocated to key parts of Nigeria, namely: Abuja, Lagos, Borno, Kaduna, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba, Oyo, Kogi, Ogun, Niger Delta, Calabar and Akwa Ibom.

    The refugees apply for citizenship, and approval is expedited – thanks to Western diplomacy and Nigeria’s overzealous Zionist divide. Predictably, the new Nigerians are affectionately called “God’s Chosen.”

    A few months after they attain citizenship, skirmishes break out between them and their “non-chosen” host communities over political privileges and economic resources. The conflicts are stoked by local and international actors into religious wars between Muslims and Christians on one hand and indigenes-settlers crisis on the other hand.

    You reprise your role as devil’s advocate, defending the predatory sweep of the refugees turned God’s Chosen, across Nigeria’s fertile tracts, claiming that since they have been granted citizenship, they may call dibs on privileges, land, and resources, even over their native hosts. You argue: “People must welcome progress…The resources were there all along, and we did nothing good with them.”

    You cite God’s Chosen’s exploits in the extractive industries, financial, agricultural and technological sectors, to rationalise their more daring sweep across the socioeconomic and political circuits.

    Like an over-exuberant choirboy, you validate the ‘seizure’ by proxies, of public governance, business and politics by God’s Chosen, arguing that its in Nigeria’s best interests. “We must let more able hands exploit our industries and manage our affairs,” you claim, amid the scariest forms of media and state capture.

    God’s Chosen permanently displace over 30 million Nigerians from their homes in resource-rich regions. They demolish 8,000 towns and built an apartheid structure that relegated Nigerians to state-sanctioned categorisation as “cattle” and imposed citizenship at a subhuman level.

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    Yet, you condemn revolt, justify apartheid and the cleansing of indigenous peoples by  God’s Chosen as an expedient measure. In over two decades of oppression, Nigerians suffer segregation, state-sanctioned murder and incarceration of children, youths and the elderly.

    Justifiably, the oppressed rise in rebellion on Nigeria’s Independence Day, October 1. Shots fired by the insurgents and friendly fire from God’s Chosen special forces kill hundreds of civilians and armed fighters on both sides of the divide.

    God’s Chosen seize the opportunity to assert absolute grip on the country. Snipers, proxy militia, and AI-guided killer drones are deployed to murder children, journalists, medics and aid workers. They carpet bomb schools, hospitals, churches, mosques and capital cities, displacing 70 per cent of targeted domains and killing over 10 million.

    As your reward for being unquestioning lapdogs, the God’s Chosen-led government grant you and fellow journalists residence in a less segregated section of the apartheid state, yet far from the boulevards of First Class citizenry.

    Then, the final phase of the cleansing begins. Bloody insurrections erupt and escalate across the Lake Chad region, Mambilla Plateau, Lagos, Niger Delta, and other resource-rich regions. You see God’s Chosen execute false flag attacks against their own: multiple explosions rock foreign consulates on Nigerian soil, killing scores and injuring more.

    Simultaneously, Western-sponsored ‘Islamist militia’ lay siege to Christian communities across the country. It’s a classic script used to justify pogroms, “the protection of Christians,” and ethnic cleansing in parts of the country deemed hostile to imperialist interests.

    Amid the siege, the press and intelligentsia are systemically purged: you see brilliant and defiant colleagues get murdered, and you embrace speaking doctored truths, in self-preservation.  You justify your cowardice as a “sensible” acceptance of what you cannot change, unlike Hamas, which poked the bear by attacking Israel on October 7.” 

     You soullessly applaud the occupiers’ tactics until your ancestral home gets bombed with your parents indoors. For inexplicable reasons, your neighbourhood gets invaded, on Christmas Day, by God’s Chosen forces. Your wife, daughters and sons are sodomised. You saw this happen to your Muslim compatriots during Eid celebrations and rationalised it with a slanted editorial and a shrug.

    Now, it’s your turn, and you are outraged. You wonder why such an attack was carried out on Christmas day, but the occupiers simply toss you a half-hearted “Sorry” and scoff at you, stating that to you it was Christmas, but to them, it was December 25, just another date of statutory siege.

    All pretensions cease, and the diplomatic mask comes off. You find that beneath every God’s Chosen smile is a sneer; whether Christian or Muslim, adult or minor, male or female, clergy or politician, you are all fair game to occupying forces.

    They call it reclamation, a divine repossession of ancestral land. Thus, on every hilltop and billboard, they hoist legendary totems of unfamiliar messiahs. As the terror persists, you seek global support, but the international community urge you to either accept bloody domination or a two-state solution. Either way, you lose.

    You learn to kowtow to external powers behind the throne at the Presidential Villa and several states of captured Nigeria. “We were promised Nigeria before your time. We have simply taken back what’s ours,” says God’s Chosen. Thus, over 200 million Nigerians, comprising 250 Nigerian ethnic groups, become mere tenants overstaying a divine lease as God’s Chosen collect rent in blood and precious tracts.

    The cameras roll, but you conveniently ignore the genocide and civil deaths as blind spots of your reportage, lest you suffer a grisly end as journalists in war-torn Gaza. You discover your true fate beneath the totem pole as a “disposable pawn” and “useful idiot.”

    Sadly, you experience what you call “justice” and “not genocide” in Gaza. The same murderousness you quoted scriptures and brazen lies to validate, now resonates to you in your native accent.

    “What’s our sin? All we did was offer you refuge?” you cry, as you are herded into a Nigerian equivalent of Gaza’s open-air prison.

    You forget that cruelty, once applauded, migrates to find new theatre, fresh flag and victims. Now, you understand why the Palestinians fought through seven decades of occupation till October 7.

    E gún esin ní keke, e ló ńt’àpá, baba ta ni won máa ki irin bò ní’kùn tí kò ní ju apá? (You spurred a horse and wondered why it kicked; who’d be struck with steel in the belly and not react?)

    You justified massacre abroad while sneering at the carcasses of the victims. So the heavens farmed karma into your soil.

    “No, it was different,” you claim. “I supported righteousness.” But righteousness wears many uniforms. Today, it wore occupier amulets. Tomorrow, it may resurge with Nigerian charm.

    Your torment persists like an unpaid debt as God’s Chosen proclaim, in the tenor of your oft misinterpreted scripture, that the Niger River must redden with sacrificial blood before peace could return.

    Across Nigeria, silence becomes a currency dearer than the proverbial black gold as once fiery patriots flee to undisclosed havens abroad. You witness, in real time, the complete suppression of the press and civil society.

    You, who once glorified siege in cocky and slanted editorials, have eventually savoured its flavour: the taste of ash and septic breath.

    You, who once flooded your timelines with praise for Israel’s bombs, fall disconcertingly quiet under Zionist occupation.

    Je kí ńfi ìdí hee, lálejò fi ńti onílé sóde: Let me hang in here is how a guest takes over the house from a host.

    The siege you once spiritualised has arrived at your doorstep. Now, you understand that in every occupied territory, there are no chosen people, only chosen victims.

  • They will not tell you it’s a trap

    They will not tell you it’s a trap

    Every deadly storm starts with a drizzle. Thus, Nigerians must exercise greater caution in their civic agitation, lest they are slaughtered as sacrificial lambs by rights activists baiting a revolutionary flood.

    Let us be guided by the parable of the maleficent rainmaker, who summons the rain from his safe spot at the mountaintop, knowing only the valleys below will get submerged in flood.

    Right now, it is pouring slogans and expletives at the summit of Nigeria’s civic space. Leading the proceedings are civic actors luring Nigerians to frolic in their rub-a-dub of rage. Think of them as witch-doctors inciting the populace into a primordial dance with unknown gods; when the beat segues to a bloody tempo of rage, they will disappear without a trace. As the consequences manifest, no magical chant will save us.

    Every revolution, in the end, manifests with a torrent of storms: protracted anarchy, maniacal rape of women and children, ethnoreligious conflict, and widespread disillusionment. They will not tell you it’s a trap.

    Any patriot inciting you to violent insurrection must be seen and treated as an enemy of the people. There is a reason the ‘woke’ activist affects a dramatic rage tailored for camera lights. His visions of social justice are often conceived, like a blind Homer, fiddling epic arcs of cinematic light. Always camera-ready, his every thought and action seem streamlined for media coverage.

    This is their familiar modus operandi: a failed politician, NGO-entrepreneur or crusading journalist likens himself to a rights activist cum revolutionary. His followers call him a truth-sayer and the voice of the youth. Thus, several youths idolise him. He is the romanticised revolutionary, who transfigures by patriotic ecstasy and defeats all odds hurled at him by the predatory ruling class.

    To achieve this, he assures them that Nigeria must implode and, through that implosion, welcome him as the messiah who would rescue all from the stranglehold of the incumbent political class. But for a snag, this romanticised revolutionary is also a predator.

    His activism is funded, inspired by shady non-profits and diplomatic actors, and supported from the war rooms of intelligence agencies abroad and foreign consulates on Nigerian soil.

    Like a situational hero sculpted of spunk and spittle, this self-styled patriot-activist invites the ambling spectator and spiritless wanderer to admire his votive rant against the incumbent political class. No doubt, there is a lot to accuse every incumbent government of. History, by default, absolves him of his righteous rage, as Nigeria wilts to policy failure, unemployment, nepotism, farmer-herdsman conflict, organised crime, ethnoreligious carnage, terrorism – all ushering the country to the precipice. Nonetheless, the ageing leadership hold tenaciously to power, never letting go. When they do let go, they reinsert themselves via stooges, their children and sworn associates.

    This is what the revolutionnaire promises to dispel. In his world, citizenry angst and disillusionment with the ruling class are frantically poked into patriotic rage. Thus, he turns disgruntled citizens into pawns. And this is how he creates a cult-following. It’s frantic populism at its finest.

    In time, there is a split. There is always a split, as the masses soon find out, as they did during the Arab Spring, that regime change through violent protest is never what it’s cracked up to be.

    Revolutions throw up hierarchies, thus new castes are dramatised in the noisy climax of every sloganeer. The castes are scary. Rather than sound off on a fallacy, Nigerian youths will do well to sensitise themselves to a more visionary, peaceful revolution, founded on altruistic ideals. And this brings us to the quality of youth mooting #RevolutionNow, #10DaysofRage, among others.

    Let it be known that if Nigeria ever implodes Nepali-Gen-Z-style, many of us would have to live in closer quarters and with less protection from the monstrosity we dread. The Nigerian tragedy persists because it is a human tragedy and not a quirk interred in some mythical ‘system.’ Some Nigerians, for instance, are beasts in the closet. Left to their devices, they display unforgivable inhumaneness and lack of character.

    Who will forget in a hurry the dastardly murder of Favour Daley-Oladele, 22, who was decapitated and had parts of her eaten up by her supposed boyfriend, Owolabi Adeeko and his mum, in fulfilment of a money-making ritual. Of course, the Adeekos and their spiritual father, Pastor Segun Phillip, are ‘ordinary people.’ You could hardly ascribe such grotesqueness to them, close up, or from a distance. Of course, Owolabi is hardly the poster image of the Nigerian youth, but he projects the burgeoning mentality driving hordes of Nigerian terrorists, kidnappers, advance fee fraudsters (Yahoo Boys), call girls, armed robbers and political thugs in their youth. This is the quality of the youths we’d all be forced to live with if anarchy were to persist in contemporary Nigeria.

    A casual surf of the World Wide Web will reveal the magnitude of disillusionment affected by the citizenry towards the political class. And in apparent counteraction to their angst, growing support for the President Bola Tinubu-led administration subsists. Yet, a curious dissonance persists, even as you read, between anti-government and pro-government forces, thus rendering cyber-Nigeria a toxic space.

    The youths’ angst is understandable in a clime where elected leaders treat them with contempt. But rage will not save Nigeria; if unchecked, it will devastate the present and hopes for the future.

    Nigeria must avoid the fate of nations afflicted by the Arab Spring, where the promise of revolution gave way to brutal dictatorships. President Tinubu must take more proactive steps to humanely engage with the people. He could counsel his political class to make grand gestures of sacrifice in identification with the people’s plight while enforcing accountability at all levels of governance.

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    Federal interventions can play a critical role in state accountability; state access to local and international funds must be tied to certain performance benchmarks in delivering public services and meeting financial obligations. Poor-performing states should see reductions in allocations or a complete loss of aid, with those funds redirected to responsible local governments or projects.

    President Tinubu’s bid to decentralise power by strengthening local governments with more control over statutory funds is laudable, but even this measure seems dead on delivery, no thanks to sabotage by state governors.

    Yet, while the ruling class has much to answer for, the citizenry, especially the more literate and insightful among us, must display greater tact and caution in our push for social justice. Journalists and rights activists, in particular, must desist from inciting the populace and inflaming the polity with partisan views and fabrications.

    They must understand that the dubious demagogues pulling their strings—those who lost at the 2023 elections—have second and third addresses abroad. If Nigeria implodes, they will flee, leaving us to bear the brunt of the chaos they helped incite.

    And no foreign intervention is worth our attention if it comes seeded with carnage. Nigerians must wholeheartedly refute and avoid the discursive mechanisms through which they seek public support for the cause – be it #10DaysofRage, #RevolutionNow, #EndSARS or #OurMumuDonDo – their language of revolt often buries the possibility of citizen death and a descent to worse conditions of living.

    Of course, Nigerians possess the inalienable right to protest against perceived oppression and governance failure. But whenever and wherever this must be done, it must be done right. The language of civic activism must never be used as a political and cultural tool to validate and make mass atrocities socially acceptable.

  • Revolution is not cooking spice

    Revolution is not cooking spice

    Revolution isn’t cooking spice. It is not something you purchase in small nylon sachets on a busy street. Yet, folk sell it like spices, summoning its aroma in flavoured words, promising to make everything taste new.

    The sellers shout and the crowd leans in, clutching their coins and heady fantasies. But Nigeria is not a kitchen stall; it is an ecology of households and habits, of private demons and public horrors.

    If Nigeria is to mark 65 years of independence with anything resembling true rebirth, let that rebirth be a deliberate, internal jihad. It’s about time we shunned the fireworks of rage and mob grandeur frequently broadcast by conflict profiteers and romanticised by the disillusioned.

    Revolutions that do not tend to the seedbed of civic character result in anarchy. The consequences are better imagined: ethnic cleansing, random murders, rampant rape, burning markets, crushed neighbourhoods, displaced families and orphaned children.

    We must reject the rage-fuelled template. History and recent memory establish that uprisings, especially in a fragile polity, can be a match that sets dry tinder aflame; and the fire rarely knows the difference between palaces and boondocks. The so-called Arab Spring began as an earnest cry against corruption and tyranny; in places it yielded openings, but elsewhere it snowballed into protracted internecine wars, destructive vacuums and authoritarian relapse. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen, among others, show how revolutionary fervor without robust institutions or measured stewardship can produce catastrophe as often as it produces reform.

    The lesson is not that people must never act, but that action divorced from civic preparation and a plan for long-term governance risks annihilation of the very goods people seek: safety, livelihoods and dignity. Those who romanticise a fast, thunderous overthrow: demagogues, disgruntled election losers, and entrepreneurial rabble-rousers who dress ambition as moral crusade are desperate actors, who are less interested in the public good than in the power and patronage that follow breakdown.

    Others, sometimes foreign actors or ideologues, exploit youthful anger and digital fervour to accelerate outcomes that suit external agendas. Movements started online can be genuine, righteous and necessary; they can also be manipulated, redirected and weaponised. The #EndSARS movement of 2020, for example, began as a clarion call against police brutality and produced powerful civic energy and urgent reforms. But like most mass uprisings, its narrative was complex: genuine grassroots anger, social media amplification, and contested claims of outside manipulation and incendiary messaging all coexisted. The movement’s tragic collapse is a reminder that popular protest can be a force for accountability and also a prism through which external interests and local secessionist tensions play out, often leaving scars between communities.

    Nations do not emerge fully formed from constitutions or borderlines. Nations are neither remade nor redeemed by violent uprisings, but by the character of the 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.

    Our collective persona as a nation is reflected in the governor who once stole $4.2 million from his state’s coffers and stashed it to fund his vanities abroad, not minding what good such loot could do in resolving the educational, healthcare, and infrastructure woes of his state. It is reflected in the shenanigans of the former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor who currently seeks a plea bargain to escape punishment for fraud running into billions of naira, among others.

    It is reflected in the former female Minister of Petroleum, who aggravated fuel scarcity and economic recession through reckless looting of public fund. Yet she fights to walk free.

    Our collective personae flourishes in the antics of youths feverishly flying ethnic flags in defense of their ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ lawmaker, governor, minister, and ex-CBN governor irrespective of the atrocities committed by them and the criminal charges levelled against them.

    Our public offices aid and abett dubious citizenship. They legitimise our culture of being, which enables and justifies a public officer’s immediate descent into a basement of opportunism right after emerging as an elected representative. The latter locks himself or herself in that amoral cellar and embarks on a quest of inordinate acquisition, counting his spoils in material possessions.

    Such characters are, however, mere fragments of our bigger cultural dilemma. They are our decadence; our disease.

    Yet even as we have rightly identified their emergence as an affliction of the eye and disease of the mind, our chances at healing are hindered by chinks in our surgical armour: the fissures of ethnoreligious bias, illiteracy, willful degeneracy, greed, poverty, savage ego, and sheer malevolence.

    Nigeria’s geographic, religious and ethnic  fault lines make reckless upheaval especially dangerous. Where social trust is thin, identities are layered and historical grievances fester unhealed, the romanticised revolt too often degenerates into intercommunal violence.

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    We must therefore be honest: to overthrow a corrupt structure is not the same as constructing a just polity. Too often the poor pay the heaviest price for our experiments in instant remaking. Thus, must teach a new civic grammar: that the right to revolt is philosophically bound to responsibility and respect for rule of law.

    President Bola Tinubu’s administration,on his part, must build institutions that make governance responsive, humane and honorable. His government must measure policy success by lives improved, not by patronage expanded. The incumbent ruling class must avoid financial recklessness and obscenities while urging the citizenry to tighten their belts.

    The youth on their part must be sceptical of leaders who promise instant catharsis. They must look beyond what their rhetoric destroys to see what it builds. Those who live by humiliation, intimidation and petty cruelty will never make a humane state.

    The revolution Nigeria needs must be borne of patience. It will not photograph as readily as a burning barricade, but its fruits are durable: trust, predictable markets, better schools, safer streets, and a political class kept honest by a public unwilling to tolerate theft.

    If Nigeria is to become a decisive actor in Africa’s future, economically, culturally and politically, it must first become a more decent assembly of persons. Nations rarely thrive by grand treaties and trade deals; they are made by how neighbours treat each other, how families rear children and citizens stand for truth. Every country’s reach in the world is directly proportional to the nature of its civic interior.

    It’s about time we renounced our easy romance of rage. We must stop inciting our youths to equate destruction with virtue and instead cultivate a different heroism: the courage to be honest when it costs us convenience and the patience to build institutions that outlast us. That is the revolution we must espouse; the type that moulds citizens into caretakers of our common destiny and Nigeria into an inheritance worth passing on.

  • The journalist and digital lynch mob

    The journalist and digital lynch mob

    For the digital herd, the internet thrives as coveted theatre. There, everyone deals on fancied wile. 

    There, we relive the infernal crud of frantic personae: the political animal, apolitical pacifist, hyperbolic ‘influencer,’ data-fabulous millennial, and the defiant Gen Z, scud to the shore of national consciousness on the World Wide Web.

    Whatever the bent of their politics, they cuddle one prejudice and cringe from the other as their vanities dictate. Thus the endless clashes in defence and furtherance of banal bigotries or a desperate demagogue. Journalists, activists, rights activists, and failed political aspirants afflict our social space like pitiless hooligans.

    They mistake lava for wit and molten banality for intellect. Their voices weigh like a thundercloud; whether debating celebrity scuffles or their political preferences, their passions sparkle and flit from fetid intelligence to brilliant witlessness.

    There is a cult of ignorance knifing through Nigeria right now, ripping all that should bind us apart, particularly in cyberspace.

    This strain of anti-intellectualism rifles through our sociopolitical and cultural lives, nurtured by the false notion that the freedom of speech means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’ or that ‘my malevolence is just as good as your benevolence.’

    The malady manifests in cyberspace in real time. In this public space, everybody becomes a wilding, trading bitter realism, infantile whim, and pseudo-idealism with awful relish.

    The guts and sinews of every stereotype and theme-park hatred are validated via mind-numbing sloganeering, toxic bigotries, sophistry, and outright lies.

    A casual visit to Facebook or Twitter manifests as a pilgrimage: the esplanades of public discourse unfurl to a sordid, cutout version of anarchic thinking, replete with ethnoreligious bigotries and the hassle of incomprehensible logic. Then, there are the strange movements and morbid ideologies, all fostered and marshalled from bizarre platforms.

    In this public wilderness, everybody pontificates. Everyone mutates from philosopher to savage pawn and vice versa; they all speak impressive and atrocious lingo. Call it our patois of rebuke and immoderate assemblies.

    En route to the 2023 elections, we encountered Nigerians of vast mental stripes in our social space: the BATIFIED, ATIKULATE, AND OBIDIENT. Once you get past the facade of slogans and artifice, it’s mostly the same defiant, virulent passion driving the mob.

    For journalists, the temptation is great: a witty phrase, piercing critique, or the now ubiquitous fearless truth often gets rewarded with a flood of likes, feverish retweets, and adulation. But what is lauded today may be cursed tomorrow, and the same voices that elevate at dawn may crucify before nightfall.

    Thus, no magnitude of dopamine fulfilment or fleeting warmth of applause can justify the agony of toxic attacks by a malicious mob.

    For ample illustration, shall we consider some cases overseas, of media personnel whose careers were made and marred on social platforms?

    Consider, for instance, the sad case of Justine Sacco, who tweeted to her 170 Twitter followers in December 2013: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

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    The joke, allegedly intended as a satire, cost her more than she bargained for. While she slept on the plane, a motley Twitter mob gunned for her jugular, unaware that Sacco’s post equally mocked her personal bubble of privilege.

    That night, she trended ‘number one’ worldwide as the mob tweeted: “We are about to watch this Justine Sacco bitch get fired, in real time, before she even knows she’s being fired,” and “Everyone go report this c..t @justinesacco,” and so on, for a total of 100,000 tweets.

    Sacco got sacked. Her employer, the IAC, the Barry Diller-owned parent of Expedia, Electus, The Daily Beast, among others, pandered to Twitter’s cancel culture. Jon Ronson, recounting Sacco’s ordeal in his book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” highlighted the injustice of her sack following her trial by a digital lynch mob.

    Ronson asserted that supposedly nice people ‘like us’ sentenced Sacco to a year’s punishment in the unemployment arena over “some poor phraseology in a tweet, as if some clunky wording had been a clue to her secret inner evil.”

    On July 30, 2017, Kevin Myers, arguably one of the most fearless and prolific Irish journalists, watched his over 40-year journalism career get destroyed on Twitter. All it took was a few minutes.

    A digital lynch mob had gunned for Myers over a clumsy sentence in his unsparing column on the BBC’s gender pay gap. The incident presented a perfect opportunity for his enemies, during his illustrious career, to trigger a Twitter mob by twisting his text out of context and alleging that it was misogynistic and anti-Semitic.

    Myers was neither, argued Ruth Dudley Edwards, among others who condemned the mob action that conveniently ignored the journalist’s antecedents. A few hours into his victimisation, Myers was sacked by his news medium.

    For effect, Myers’ traducers dug up a 2009 article, with a headline cast (not by Kevin) by his employer with creative mischief: “I’m a Holocaust denier.” In tweeting the article, they mischievously left out the second part: “but I also believe the Nazis planned the extermination of the Jewish people.”

    In the article, Myers espoused free speech and condemned the criminalisation of those who thought there had been no Holocaust. For this, he was declared a global pariah, even though he condemned the genocide of the Jews as “one of the most satanic operations in world history.”

    Although he was eventually vindicated, nothing could compensate him for the terror he was subjected to by the Twitter mob and the loss of his job. In another incident, a once-respected essayist ended up driving for a food delivery app to make rent after he lost his job.

    Writing anonymously in an American journal, he acknowledged his part in his macabre fate. “I mobbed and shamed people for incidents that became front page news,” he confessed, “but when they were vindicated or exonerated by some real-world investigation, it was treated as a footnote by my online community.” No one ever apologises for a false accusation, and everyone has a selective memory regarding what they’ve done, he said.

    Upon reading Jon Ronson’s 2015 book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” the essayist revisited his Twitter archives and was shocked to discover that he had actively participated in the public shaming of Justine Sacco.

    “For years, I was blind to my own gleeful savagery,” he notes, admitting that the social justice vigilantism he personified on Twitter and Facebook has no human depth. “It’s only when we snap out of it, see the world as it really is, and people as they really are, that we appreciate the destruction and human suffering we caused when we were trapped inside.”

    Indeed, aggressive online virtue-signalling is a fundamentally two-dimensional act with rewards and consequences. The danger is rarely abstract. Across the world, journalists have discovered how swiftly an online audience mutates into a lynch mob.

    Reports document a rising tide of harassment and threats, disproportionately aimed at those who cover subjects interwoven with right-wing identity anchors or who probe the delicate egos of populist leaders.

    In Nigeria’s virtual space, this mob censorship is often masterminded by demagogues adept at weaponising the fury of the crowd to discipline truth-tellers. What begins as citizen vigilantism cum virtue-signalling, viral outrage, and hashtags soon morphs into a vindictive campaign to silence, punish, and ultimately erase the journalist who refuses to bend.

    For many a journalist, social media manifests as that intoxicating agora, where reputation is minted at dawn and destroyed by dusk.