By Lasisi Olagunju

“There were many famous warriors in the village during the pillaging by the Fulani and yet the village was swept off almost completely by the invading warriors. This was not because they (the enemies) were stronger but due to their trickery, the people of Eruku became susceptible (vulnerable). When the invaders came, they would besiege only one quarter at a time and they would send a message to the other quarters not to worry as they were not their intended target. Unfortunately, other quarters would stand by while one quarter was invaded. This same trickery continued and many of the inhabitants were captured and sold to the white slave traders until the whole village was reduced to only ten people and one dog at the end of the last war.”

That is an excerpt from a short history of the Kwara town, Eruku, that was ravaged in broad daylight by Fulani bandits last week. The account is credited to a 1956 publication by the late educationist and a leader of the community, Dr Alexander Omotosho Obateru. I got it on the Internet.

What is described in that history happened about 200 years ago (circa 1820-1825). In January last year (2024), there was uproar online over the installation of a Fulani ‘king’ in that town (see Facebook post by Trust Bethnews/ Eruku Descendants Union on 26 January, 2024). In 1905, Spanish-born American philosopher, George Santayana, published ‘The Life of Reason, or The Phases of Human Progress’. In the twelfth chapter entitled ‘Flux and Constancy in Human Nature’, he writes that “when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I took time to read most of the eighty-eight comments which the Eruku chieftaincy post and the attached four photos attracted. A particular comment there foretells today: “We came home for the new year and our observation was what you posted. I noticed they have actually infiltrated our village. You see them everywhere with no manner at all, behaving like omo onile.” ‘Omo onile’ means child of the owner of the land.

The city of Nineveh was promised that “affliction shall not arise the second time.” For that Kwara ‘city’ and many more across northern Nigeria, affliction coming in repeated times has become destiny. The attackers of two centuries ago have reincarnated. They are back; deadlier than they were during their earlier incarnation.

Last Friday, overwhelmed by bandits and banditry, the Federal Government closed down 47 federal secondary schools across the North, and some in the South, particularly in Ekiti. Same day, Plateau and Katsina states did the same; Yobe at the weekend. Niger State did its own before Friday; Kwara did in some local government areas; Taraba closed dormitories. The picture is scary. From the derived savannah of Kwara and Kogi, through the montane forest of the Jos Plateau, to the Sahel of the far North, a canopy of tragedy has enveloped the country.

The terrorists are winning – or they have won.

Where I come from, proverbs are connecting rods; they bind generations and experiences; they carry the weight of morality and memory; they code meaning. Because big misfortunes assault Nigeria, miserable ones squat to shit into its mouth. As we grappled with this crisis, President Donald Trump of the United States doubled down on his verbal intervention in our affairs; he told Fox News at the weekend that Nigeria remained a disgrace:

“I think Nigeria’s a disgrace, the whole thing is a disgrace. They’re killing people by the thousands. It’s a genocide, and I’m really angry about it. And we pay, you know, we give a lot of subsidy to Nigeria. We’re going to end up stopping. The government’s done nothing. They are very ineffective. They’re killing Christians at will. And you know until I got involved in it two weeks ago, nobody even talked about it!” Trump said all this at a time Nigerian top shots were hopping from one elevator to another in US high-rise buildings, begging to be heard. They are still there scrambling to extinguish the fire of global outrage at what we do to ourselves. Indeed, when bad luck chooses a man as a companion, even a ripe banana will knock out his teeth. Our ancestors were right.

What does it mean to be a disgrace? David Lurie, the protagonist in J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel, ‘Disgrace’, loves Lucifer. He describes him as “a being who chooses his own path, who lives dangerously, even creating danger for himself.” Nigeria is that fallen angel; every word in the ‘Disgrace’ quote speaks to the ways of Nigeria. Choices have consequences; some of them eternal. The consequence of the path we chose is a nation cast into the furnace of disgracefully unremitting insecurity.

We closed schools and closed life. American philosopher, John Dewey (1859-1952) said, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” He was right. Closure of schools pauses the life and future of learners. Whether students are locked out of school or schools are locked out of learning and teaching, it is a catastrophe to all of humanity. Tragically, both experiences are happening right now in northern Nigeria. The enemy is winning, wining and happy. I pray this flu of banditry and terrorism does not become COVID-2025/26 locking down the whole country. The cloud is heavy.

In ‘Getting Ready for the Dark Ages?’ Kajsa Friedman and Jonathan Friedman say, “When things get bad, we get worse.” They speak about the “polarisation that increases to near hysteria when elites lose control”, and the “interminable decline” and “internal self-destruction” that follow. Internal self-destruction is the poor stealing children of the poor like fish eating fish to get fat. The Nigerian elite have lost control of the steering wheel; the polarisation is galling, the decline is real and unstoppable; it looks like an irreversible teeter towards the apocalypse.

To the victims of the rounds of havoc, there is no government, there is no state. Their state is helplessness. The people wreaking havoc all over the country are extremists of the worst order. They operate without masks and damn the state to cough, catch or caution them. They think the truth of their criminal existence is the truth we must all abide with. Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, writes in ‘Two Thousand Seasons’ that destroyers come always chanting one extreme truth. They always come to “turn earth to desert.” They are a people “whose spirit is itself the seed of death.” The destroyers came for Nigerians, and Nigeria looked away in complicit criminality. That is why they keep coming. And that exactly is why our government is panting and the reason Nigeria is “a disgrace.”

Government said the mass closure of schools was a temporary safety measure. But how brief is that temporary? When ‘temporary’ ends, will the destroyers not renew their coming and we close again? This fall is a free-fall.

There is a country called Afghanistan; its own madness was thought temporary, it is now permanent. And the world has abandoned the madman with his mother’s corpse. It is having a good meal of the cadaver. Northern Nigeria has Afghanistan as a model of what its future could be.

“They are in a very bad situation… the only thing they had was education, but right now they do not have it.” This quote is about the female children of Afghanistan where secondary education for girls was outlawed four years ago by the ruling Taliban. The reign of the Taliban was thought a joke; it is now permanent. Some people in this country covet what Afghanistan does. And they are working very hard to have it.

Two months ago, the United Nations published an interview with activist Fatima Amiri, a victim of Afghanistan’s peculiar regime of repression. The voice in the quote above is hers; and she says more. She says: “It has been four years that people in Afghanistan are having these problems…There are no changes in Afghanistan; still schools are closed, still universities are closed, still a woman cannot go outside alone.”

The lady speaks about Afghan girls who continue to learn “in secret, in the dark, online, through whispers, through books that are like precious treasures.” Some people here earnestly yearn for this experience. And they are winning.

Sixty-two-year-old Dauda Chekula told The Associated Press news agency at the weekend that four of his grandchildren, aged seven to 10, were taken at the Catholic school in Niger State where over 300 school children were abducted on Friday. “We don’t know what is happening now, because we have not heard anything since this morning,” he said. That was on Saturday. Today is Monday, the question is still: What is happening?

Now, you watched the horror of that Kwara church attack: Old women who wanted to run from danger but could not run because old age refused to let them; children wailing and wondering why it must be some people’s job to hunt them like rabbits; pastors asking God why it was that moment of triumph that defeat walked in. The worshippers’ voices were shrill, high-pitched, in victory over calamities when they were shut up by gunshots followed quickly by the boots of the unwanted visitors.

Do criminals reincarnate? I read somewhere a New York prison physician who wrote in 1903 that “few indeed are the criminals who come to our prison at Sing Sing with minds that were at birth tabula rasa, whose mental powers at birth were not already thickly sown with seeds of crime.” What is the difference between what we saw in the Christ Apostolic Church video, the agony of the aged and the cries of children, and the scene described by Samuel Ajayi Crowther on his own capture by bandits in March 1821?

I reproduce Crowther’s banditry and abduction story:

“I suppose sometime about the commencement of the year 1821, I was in my native country, enjoying the comforts of father and mother, and affectionate love of brothers and sisters. From this period I must date the unhappy…day, which I shall never forget in my life.

“I call it an unhappy day, because it was the day in which I was violently turned out of my father’s house, and separated from relations; … and which I was made to experience what is called slavery…

“For some years, war had been carried on in my Eyo (Oyo) country, which was always attended with much devastation and bloodshed; The enemies were principally the Oyo Mahomedans, with the Foulahs (Fulbe), and such foreign slaves as had escaped from their owners. Joined together, making a formidable force of about 20,000, they had no other employment but selling slaves to the Spaniards and Portuguese on the coast.

“The morning in which my town, Ocho-gu (Osogun), shared the same fate was fair and delightful; when, about 9 o’clock a.m. a rumour was spread in the town that the enemies had approached. It was not long after when they had almost surrounded the town; the men being surprised, the enemies entered the town after about three or four hours’ resistance.

“Women, some with three, four, six children clinging to their arms, running through prickly shrubs, which, hooking their loads, drew them down. While they found it impossible to go along with their loads, they endeavoured only to save themselves and their children, they were overtaken and caught, with a noose of rope thrown over the neck of every individual, to be led in the manner of goats. In many cases, a family was violently divided, each led his away, to see one another no more.

“Your humble servant was thus caught — with his mother, two sisters (one an infant about ten months old), and a cousin — while endeavouring to escape. My load consisted of nothing else than my bow, and five arrows in the quiver, the bow I had lost in the shrub while I was extricating myself, before I could think of making any use of it. The last view I had of my father was when he came to give us the signal to flee. He entered into our house which was burnt. Hence, I never saw him more. Here I must take thy leave, unhappy, comfortless father! I learned, some time afterward, that he was killed in another battle.”

If this 204-year-old story is told in some villages in today’s northern Nigeria, it will easily pass as their current experience. Nigeria’s terrorists come in our history as Shakespeare’s “twice-told tale.” G. R. S. Mead in 1912 thoroughly examined life beyond “the cribbed, cabined, and confined area of one short earth-life.” If the dead are gone forever, why do we have descendants of bandits of 200 years ago re-enacting the crimes of their forebears today with gripping exactitude? Why are the crimes committed today done with the same cold-blooded barbarity as they were done two, three centuries ago? And if we know terrorists will always come back, even after now, why are we negotiating peace with them? Why are we not thinking of permanently shredding and flushing them into the Atlantic, soul and all? A dubious Masai proverb says, “If your enemies poison the well, you don’t purify the well, you invent a sharper poison.” Nigeria’s terrorists need that “sharper poison” not accommodation.

Besides, politicians love it when their enemy is served poisoned dinner. Is that why today’s power is getting the George Floyd treatment from northern Nigeria? Some people are happy that the blistering insecurity wracking the country will sink their enemies who are in power. They think terror will help them defeat this government in 2027. They are mistaken. Unless we all rise up and find a quick way out of this hole, these contrived, horrendous landslides will bury all of us before 2027. That is if we are not defeated already. May all the captured across the country not die in captivity.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Farooq A. Kperogi

The events and atmospherics of the past few days in Nigeria feel eerily and frighteningly familiar. They are redolent of the disabling instability and helplessness (and more) of 2014 and 2015 when Goodluck Jonathan was president. 

Three crises are unfolding in near synchrony. One, there’s a resurgence of Boko Haram activities. Two, there’s an alarming escalation of mass kidnappings in the northwest and north central zones. And three, we’re seeing more coordinated banditry along major travel corridors in most parts of the country. 

Each one has appeared before, but they almost never spike simultaneously unless something systemic has shifted. That alone raises alarms.

We have gone back to counting stolen children, watching shaky videos of terrified pupils, hearing anguished parents on television, and listening to federal officials who seem permanently shocked into inertia. The déjà vu is unsettling.

This week, armed outlaws stormed a school in Kebbi State and abducted scores of girls in an attack that jolted the national conscience. Only days later, another gang invaded Papiri village in Niger State and snatched schoolchildren who were preparing for early morning classes. 

The Niger State raid struck me with personal force because the village head of Papiri is my paternal second cousin. His mother is my father’s first cousin. In Borgu tradition, we’re considered cross cousins and therefore “joking mates.” I have tried to call him since news of the abduction broke without success.

At the same time, Jihadist violence in the northeast has recrudesced with chilling familiarity and renewed virulence. Islamic State West Africa Province and remnants of Boko Haram have regrouped around the Lake Chad basin. They attack civilian communities and security installations with renewed vigor. 

 From Bama to Marte, villagers describe nightly fear as if nothing has changed since the peak of Boko Haram’s reign a decade ago.

 I earned the concentrated wrath of late president Muhammadu Buhari’s devotees in early 2018 when, in a February 24, 2018, column titled “Bursting the Myth of Buhari’s Boko Haram ‘Success’,” I pointed out that Boko Haram appeared to be defeated not because the government had done anything but because the group had been “weakened by an enervatingly bitter and sanguinary internal schism.”

It appears like the group has been able to overcome its internal dissension enough to be able to coordinate attacks on its targets.

Parallel to this resurgence is the evolution of kidnapping into a national business. What started as an insurgent tactic has been copied, refined and monetized by criminal gangs across the northwest and north central then exported to the south. 

Independent trackers show that billions of naira have circulated through ransom payments over the past decade with recent reports describing a structured kidnap economy complete with financiers, logistics networks, informants, negotiators and money launderers. What Nigeria once called banditry has now matured into a rational industry with predictable revenue streams and diversified risks.

So, yes, the national atmosphere today resembles the Jonathan years. But this time the crisis is deeper and more dispersed.

The national mood of despair, helplessness and anger is a replay of the late Jonathan era when Boko Haram hoisted its flags over swathes of Borno and Yobe. Chibok became a global shorthand for Nigerian dysfunction. Now, the factually incorrect but emotionally resonant narrative of an exclusively targeted “Christian genocide” that spares Muslims has become the rallying cry to galvanize global attention to Nigeria’s growing insecurity. 

Back in 2014, Bola Ahmed Tinubu was the most potent voice of the opposition. He excoriated Goodluck Jonathan for incompetence and indecisiveness, demanded his resignation and insisted that a president who allowed any part of Nigeria to fall under insurgent control had forfeited his legitimacy. 

He was not alone. The opposition constructed a political identity around Jonathan’s inability to contain insecurity and many Nigerians embraced that narrative.

Fast-forward to 2025 and the roles have reversed. Tinubu is now president. Yet armed groups have carved out de facto fiefdoms from Sokoto to Zamfara to parts of Niger and Kwara. 

Mass abductions of schoolchildren that once symbolized Jonathan’s collapse now occur with increasingly terrifying regularity on Tinubu’s watch. 

The same constitutional structure that prevented Jonathan from responding with agility still binds Tinubu. The same centralized federal police that Jonathan could not reform remains unreformed. The same chorus of political rivals calling for resignation is back, this time directed at Tinubu.

To understand why Nigeria is once again trapped in this cycle one must follow the incentives. In 2014 Boko Haram sustained itself through robbery, looting, cattle rustling, bank raids and forced taxation of communities under its control. 

Over time, the insurgency splintered. Islamic State West Africa Province emerged as a faction that taxed traders, herders and fishermen around the Lake Chad basin with a degree of predictable order. Boko Haram’s faction retained a chaotic violence that relied on spectacle and terror. Their internal war weakened both sides but did not erase the insurgent social structures that had taken root in northeast Nigeria.

In the northwest a different conflict economy germinated. What began as local clashes between armed herders and farming communities evolved into a sprawling banditry complex. Criminal groups discovered that kidnapping offered more lucrative returns than cattle rustling or territorial raids. 

In time, the operations became systematized. Negotiators emerged. Safe houses and holding camps were erected. Ransom payments moved through informal financial channels. Corrupt intermediaries took commissions. A web of collaborators, enablers and silent beneficiaries flourished.

By 2020 analysts described Nigeria’s kidnap economy as a mature market with predictable seasonal variations. When cash became scarce, criminal groups shifted to looting harvests or taxing miners. When security forces pressured one corridor, criminals migrated to neighboring states. When the public grew desensitized to individual abductions, gangs resorted to mass kidnappings to restore bargaining power. The crisis became self-sustaining.

What sustains this national theatre of insecurity is not mysterious. A centralized and lethargic security structure leaves governors unable to respond to emergencies in their own states. Corruption drains operational resources and incentivizes some actors to prolong insecurity. 

Youth unemployment in rural belts produces endless recruits for jihadist and bandit networks. Weak intelligence systems and politicized law enforcement create impunity. Communities that cooperate with the state face revenge attacks without reliable protection. Simplistic narratives, whether religious or ethnic, prevent honest diagnosis.

Yet this cycle is not irreversible. Nigeria needs genuine devolution of policing powers so that states can create accountable and competent security forces to supplement federal agencies. The kidnap economy must be treated as a financial crime problem that requires surveillance of ransom flows, rigorous enforcement of anti-money laundering statutes and prosecution of urban collaborators. 

The military must purge procurement fraud and prioritize intelligence-driven operations that protect civilians rather than advertise body counts. Schools need real protective infrastructure, not empty safe school pledges. The state must rebuild trust with communities through accountability for abuses and consistent presence rather than episodic raids.

Nigeria also continues to avoid hard but necessary options. One example is the use of foreign military contractors to support counterinsurgency operations. In 2015 Goodluck Jonathan hired South African and Eastern European mercenaries who helped achieve some of the most significant territorial gains against Boko Haram in years.

 Muhammadu Buhari cancelled the arrangement out of vain nationalist pride, and the momentum evaporated. Given the scale of today’s threats, Nigeria should reconsider specialized external support with proper oversight. What matters is saving lives, not protecting political egos.

Ten years ago, Nigerians rallied around the simple demand that their children should be safe in school and their villages safe from predation. A decade later, they are repeating the same plea. If it was fair for Tinubu to say in 2014 that no leader should preside over the occupation of Nigerian communities by non-state armed groups, it is fair to say the same to him now.

Nigerians want what they have always deserved, which is a country where sending a child to school is not an act of faith in divine mercy. They want a government that treats mass abduction not as an inconvenient blemish but as an intolerable crisis. They want an end to a nightmare that feels scripted to repeat itself every decade.

This is a pattern that can be broken. Whether it will be is the question that hangs over the republic.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Ikeddy Isiguzo

NO outrage. No shock. No anger as terrorists kill Brigadier-General Musa Uba in the North-East sector. Nigerians were processing that affront when news of terrorists’ attack on worshippers at Christ Apostolic Church, CAC, Eruku in Kwara State during their church service.

The attackers went away with 35 worshippers. They are asking for ransom of N100 million on each of them. By Monday, 25 students of Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State, were abducted, their vice-principal and a security guard were killed.

The killing of Brigadier-General Uba, and the abductions of the female students, reeked of betrayal and sabotages that have shocked normal Nigerians – yes, many of us may not be normal. How does a Brigadier-General die in an ambush in the way he was killed? He had reportedly been rescued, awaiting evacuation when the terrorists were said to have “intercepted” messages on this high security operation.

They killed him. The terrorists are gloating over their victory. We allowed them. First, the ambush failed. Yet, they got Uba, a fine officer by the many accounts of his career.

Nobody has been arrested and punished for the treachery that caused this death. There was no urgent operation in the area to teach the terrorists a lesson. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Commander-in-Chief, was loud with his silence.

Tinubu’s silence was a great example for his commanders. Did Brigadier-General Uba die in vain? How does that affect the morale of the military, the ordinary troops, who would note the fate that befell their commander? It would be wrong to say that Tinubu did entirely nothing over the embarrassing killing of Brigadier-General Uba.

He postponed trips to South Africa and Angola. That was good for the headlines. Vice-President Kashim Shettima eventually will represent Tinubu who has made a great sacrifice by missing the trips. Or the meetings? “As the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, I am depressed with the tragic death of our soldiers and officers on active duty.

May God comfort the families of Brigadier General Musa Uba and other fallen heroes. I am also depressed that heartless terrorists have disrupted the education of innocent schoolgirls,” Tinubu said, according to a State House statement on Tuesday.

The President should snap out of his depression to act with the urgency the situation demands. The country is being attacked from any point of the terrorists’ choice.

What makes these incidents shameful and cast more doubts about Nigeria’s determination to throw terrorists out of our territory is the complete absence of fire in the President’s eyes as he mouths his platitudinous solutions to terrorism.

Sabotage of the efforts of our military and security agencies is treated as if it has no implications. When former President Goodluck Jonathan said there were Boko Haram members in his government, Tinubu was in the forefront of those who accused him of incompetence and suggested that Jonathan should resign.

“This is clear sabotage. We received credible intelligence from the DSS that this school was likely to be attacked. The DSS further advised that we convene an emergency Security Council meeting, which we did.

The decision was that we would provide round-the-clock protection for the students,” said Governor Mohammed Nasir Idris of Kebbi State, when he visited the school on Monday morning. According to him, he acted on the DSS report because failure to act on similar intelligence led to the December 2020 kidnapping of over 300 pupils of a school in Kankara, Katsina State.

“The heavily armed security personnel spent time taking photographs with the students, only to abandon them 30 minutes before the attack,” Governor Idris lamented. Who ordered their withdrawal? The Governor was infuriated enough to call what happened by its name, sabotage.

Security agents who went after the fleeing terrorists were ambushed – twice – another sabotage. Who provides the intelligence that the terrorists use for these successful ambushes? As we were asking these questions, without answers, with no plans in sight to improve the security situation, terrorists struck in early hours of Friday at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri in Niger State.

Some sources said that over 200 pupils, and some teachers were abducted. The state government blames the school for re-opening without obtaining a security clearance. The school counters that it got no security message from government. The impunity of the terrorists must be stopped. Excuses, even reasons, are inadequate for their boldness.

Tolerating terrorists, as those “peace meetings” imply, is not a solution. Dr. Bashir Kurfi, a well-known expert in community security in the North-West, narrated this incident on television: “A notorious bandit killed an Assistant Commissioner of Police in Katsina. He wore the uniform of the officer he killed, during a peace deal organised by the State Government, with officers of the Nigerian Armed Forces in attendance.”

The terrorists are emboldened by the realisation that the law accommodates their lawlessness. Now that they have the additional benefit of “intercepting” the communication of our military and security agents, how can we win the war on terror? Senator Sunday Steve Karim, Kogi West, Chairman Senate Services Committee, sees the current rising insecurity “as acts being perpetrated by mischief makers with the sole aim to tarnish President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration despite the concerted efforts by the administration to fix the country for the betterment of all and sundry”.

Which mischief makers “tarnished” Jonathan’s administration? The issues are straight forward – are we seeing Tinubu’s (in)security agenda? What is Tinubu doing outside propaganda, distance from securing Nigeria and his 2027 elections? For Senator Karim of Kogi State and the likes of Governor Hyacinth Alia of Benue, one of the most attacked States, to join in the sophistry about Christians and Muslims being attacked as proof that there is no genocide, is to play politics with lives.

The debates about whether the Americans and other allies should help Nigeria out of our current miasma is belated. Nigerians who wish their country well are more concerned with when the interventions to retrieve Nigeria from the harms Tinubu’s handicaps, incompetence and compromises have cost the country since 2015 when he was a major investor in Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency.

Tinubu winning the next election cannot be more important than our lives and having a country that works for Nigerians. Finally… . JUSTICE James Omotosho has sentenced Nnamdi Kanu to life imprisonment on terrorism charges, ending a matter that made a round of the courts for a decade. How great it would be to try terrorists and their sponsors!.

ZAMFARA State Governor Dauda Lawal: “I swear to Almighty Allah, wherever a bandits’ leader is located within Zamfara State, I know it and if he goes out, I know. With my mobile phone, I can show you where and where these bandits are today. But we cannot do anything beyond our powers.

“If today, I have the power to give orders to the security agencies, I can assure you, we will end banditry in Zamfara State within two months. Most of the time, I shed tears for my people because I can see a problem but because I don’t have control over the security agencies, I cannot order the security operatives to act in time.

“There was a time, the bandits invaded Shinkafi local government and I was sitting here when the security operatives were alerted but they refused to go to Shinkafi simply because they were not given orders from Abuja. This is the problem we are facing but we trust God and surely, He will come to our rescue”. – Governor Lawal on Arise TV on 4 September 2025.

Isiguzo is a major commentator on minor issues

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Jeff Godwin Doki, Ph.D

In the month of November 2025, the US President, Donald Trump, designated Nigeria as a country with particular concern CPC. But this was not the first time the US was designating Nigeria as a country of particular concern. The same Donald Trump had done a similar thing in December 2020 and it was left for his successor, Joe Biden, to delist Nigeria in 2021. The obvious implication is that this is the second time, in five years, that Donald Trump has designated Nigeria as CPC, and as they say in the proverbs, there can be no smoke without fire.

But it was Donald Trump’s recent threat to invade the Nigerian state for carrying out genocide and mass atrocities on Christians that raised many diplomatic eyebrows and swiftly divided commentators and intellectuals into two opposing camps. On the one hand, are those who see the threat as an extension of economic imperialism. This group holds that the US is trying to create a crisis in Nigeria so as to justify the exploitation of Nigeria’s rich mineral resources.

On the other side of the debate are those who have taken a more elastic approach by insisting that Nigeria is unable or unwilling to combat insecurity and there is a need for an international power like the US to intervene in line with the Responsibility to Protect Principle. As usual, there are always three angles to any situation: your view, my view and the truth. So which view is the truth?

We must concede that most of the severe and persistent threats to global peace and stability in the present century are arising not from conflicts between major political entities but from increased discords within states, societies, and civilizations along ethnic, racial, linguistic, caste or class lines. These new conflicts are particularly prevalent in Africa, a region that seems to have lost its geostrategic significance with the end of the cold war. The truth is that many African countries that depended largely on super power patronage during the cold war such as Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Zaire, Somalia, Liberia have degenerated into war zones. But beyond Africa, the Middle East, Southern Asia and the Pacific are not exempted from this ugly trend.

Most of these conflicts stem from poverty, bad governance, deepening social inequalities and weak or corrupt governance. Besides, issues like self-determination, ethnic and religious divisions, resources, private armies and war lords all characterize these conflicts. Taken together, we can say that most of the current conflicts in the world today are, deep- rooted intrastate affairs. But most importantly, these intrastate conflicts have led to a redefinition of the international world order to include issues like sovereignty, non-intervention, good governance and the security of citizens.

The logic here is that although most conflicts in modern society do not take place between states, many intrastate conflicts are viewed as threats to international peace and security. It is therefore very important to resolve intrastate conflicts for the benefit and wellbeing of the international community in general. Added to this is the fact that contemporary international order is based on a society of states that enjoy exclusive jurisdiction over a particular piece of territory and rights to non-interference and non-intervention that are enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. As a matter of fact, Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter forbids the use of force as an instrument of state policy. However, there are two exceptions to this rule. The first is the State’s inherent right to self-defense as enshrined in Article 51, the second is enforcement measures as authorized by the UN Security Council (UNSC).

Most importantly, the international law, part of which I have quoted in the preceding paragraph, is prefaced on the assumption that states exist primarily to protect the security of their citizens. In other words, the security of the state is considered important and worth protecting because it is the primary responsibility of the state to provide security for individuals. But there are times when states (like Nigeria) cannot provide security for its citizens. As a matter of fact, in recent times threats to individual security have tended to come from an individual’s own state than from other states. This is as much as to say that some states (like Nigeria) are often the perpetrators of genocide and mass atrocities or states (like Nigeria) are simply incapable of protecting their populations because they lack the capacity to defeat or make peace with rebel groups.

It is only when we understand the state from the perspective of security and responsibility that we may truly appreciate the role of the international community in mitigating the worst effect of armed conflict and protecting populations from genocide and mass atrocities. And this is the point where the threat of the US to invade Nigeria and save its citizens from genocide and mass atrocities becomes pertinent. Truth to tell, the threat of the US to intervene and end genocide in Nigeria is premised on the idea that external actors have a duty as well as a right to intervene and halt genocide and mass atrocities.

The US President who is one of the advocates of this position, holds that sovereignty should be understood as an instrumental value because it derives from the state’s responsibility to protect the welfare of its citizens. In other words, Donald Trump is simply saying that when a state, like Nigeria, fails in its duty to provide security to its citizens, it has lost its sovereign right to non-interference and non-intervention. To put it differently, Humanitarian Intervention has become internationally warranted and the principle of non-intervention is publicly discarded since issues of massive humanitarian crises are a legitimate concern for the international society.

It is left to be said that beginning from the 1950s, the UN began to develop peace keeping operations aimed at providing assistance to states to maintain order. But it was the humanitarian crises of the 1990s that gave more fillip to this way of thinking.

In contemporary international law, sovereignty means responsibility of the state to protect its citizens. It was the former Sudanese diplomat, Francis Deng, that developed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle. In his book, Sovereignty as Responsibility (1996), Deng argued that sovereignty carries with it certain responsibilities for which governments must be held accountable not only to their own national constituencies but ultimately to the international community. It is against this backdrop that Donald Trump’s threat of intervention to halt genocide in Nigeria is truly justified. Although behind such a justification is the fear that such magnanimity from the US is nothing but a reflection of global and economic relations which are at the heart of the Dependency theory.

And this brings us to the question: how responsible is the Nigerian government? It is clear to anybody with two eyes that it is a government with a huge penchant for a façade of normality. Its claim to be waging war against terrorism is a sham. The recent change of Service Chiefs is also only a ruse and not a solution. We all know that from Riyom and Bokkos in Plateau State to Yelewata in Benue State to Zamfara and Kebbi, we are confronted almost on a daily basis with a reality of citizens burying their loved ones to avoidable acts of terrorism. At the same time, we see Nigerian Politicians goose-stepping on red carpets of blood at political rallies every day. The major agenda of the political class is to regroup under different political parties or associations in order to loot and plunder our national treasury.

The Nigerian government is not willing to provide good leadership, it is only obsessed with victory at the polls in the year 2027. We have a government that has utter contempt for its intellectuals and revels in the systematic decimation of its youth. We live in country that does not realize that children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future. We have a government that has made the universities a target of its animosity. A government that announces fantastic figures of trillions of Naira for contracts to construct coastal roads while its universities and hospitals are shut down at weekly and monthly intervals. It is apparent that the Nigerian government has completely lost touch with the idea of sovereignty and responsibility. It is left for Donald Trump, the American President, to realize that the Nigerian problem is about human security in general because both Christians and Muslims in Nigeria have become playthings in the hands of terrorists and bandits.

Jeff Doki, an expert in Peace and Conflict Studies, is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Jos (UNIJOS), Nigeria

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.