President Bola Tinubu, in his June 12 broadcast, condemned terrorists and their work but told us not to “assign blame or point fingers” because “crime has no ethnicity.” Crime may indeed have no ethnicity, but that does not relieve us of the duty to identify the environment that breeds and sustains it. A desert does not cease to be a desert because it contains a few oases.

As I write this, Yoruba schoolchildren and their teachers have spent a full month in captivity, held in the bush by badly brought up boys from northern Nigeria. Exposed to the rain, exposed to the sun, the abducted remain bargaining chips in a conflict they knew nothing of. Their captors reportedly demand the release of northern terrorist commanders in northern detention centres.

The president says fingers should not be pointed. They will be pointed. Every wound points to the object that inflicted it. Every crime points to its perpetrator. Every nation seeking a cure must first locate the source of its affliction.

A friend heard the president and said this president is as afraid of the North as all those before him. The fear of the North is regularly reflected in our reluctance to “point fingers” and confront uncomfortable truths about the sources and scale of the country’s insecurity and crises of development.

No harm seems too grievous to excuse when it comes from the North. A General from the North died in the captivity of terrorists birthed by the North, yet his state government announced that he died “a natural death.” The terrorists reciprocated the courtesy and graciously released his corpse for burial.

At his burial, there was no loud clerical revolt against the murderers, no moral earthquake, no national reckoning; no thunderous fatwa was pronounced against the killers. There was no collective outrage strong enough to shake the land. It was simply another distinguished star extinguished.

If you think the North is well, read what Ishaka Rabe Abubakar, son of the murdered General, said about the mysterious return of his father’s corpse:

“Many people saw the announcement that the funeral prayer would be held at six o’clock. People then asked me, ‘How was the corpse brought back?’ I replied that I cannot answer that question. Rather, the government should be asked about it. Even I myself would like to know how the corpse was brought.”

Read that again.

A General was abducted. A General died in captivity. His corpse was returned. Yet his own son says he does not know how the body came back and would like the government to explain.

Should we not ask: What kind of country is this? How does the family of a murdered General not know how his remains were recovered? Who brought the corpse from the forest to the city? The bandits? The state? Some intermediary? Who, and how? What does this say about the authority of the state and the depth of the crisis consuming Northern Nigeria? 

With the General’s death, we should finally say: enough. But we will not. We will not because saying so would mean confronting uncomfortable truths about the North, and we have convinced ourselves that the North must never be offended. But is it not in the interest of the North – and of Nigeria – for this kind of death to die with the General?

Northern Nigeria has for decades incubated much of the violence, extremism, and instability that continue to threaten national cohesion, yet public discourse by our leaders often avoids naming this reality directly. Until we are willing to define the problem honestly and acknowledge the region’s central role in the crisis, meaningful solutions will remain elusive.

The bandits who would not release General Rabe Abubakar alive eventually released his corpse for burial without arrests. If that does not tell the story of what and who controls Northern Nigeria today, nothing will.

The problem called Northern Nigeria should have a solution. What that solution is I do not know. What I know is that the solution cannot lie in denying the problematic choices and realities that have brought us to this shore of unremitting insecurity.

We are in a mess; what (or where) is the way out? Someone did an experiment in 1898:

A cat is locked inside a wooden cage. The door can be opened by pulling a string, but the cat has never seen such a mechanism before and has no idea how it works.

Wanting to get out, the cat tries everything. It squeezes against the bars, scratches them, bites them and paws around frantically. By sheer accident, it hits the string and pulls it. The door opens and the cat escapes.

The cat is then put back into the cage. Again, it scratches, bites and struggles until it accidentally pulls the string and gets out.

This is repeated many times. Gradually, the cat learns. It takes less time to find the string on each attempt. Eventually, the moment it is placed in the cage, it goes straight to the string, pulls it, and frees itself.

From this experiment conducted in 1898, American psychologist, Edward Lee Thorndike, concluded that problem-solving often happens when we try different approaches, when we discard what does not work, and repeat what does until a solution is found.

Nigeria lacks the wisdom in that story in its handling of insecurity and the denial of its causes. Thorndike’s cat did not solve its problem by surrendering to the cage or pretending there was no cage. It solved it by confronting reality until it found the string that opened the door.

Can we ever get out of our security mess without getting the North to redefine its goals and choices? Can a man turn his back on civilisation and not become a threat to himself and his neighbours? Is it possible for us to encourage the North to undergo a change of direction and gain insight into the roots of its challenges? If it persists in choices that are unhelpful and harmful, what options remain open to its neighbours? Is accommodative denial one of those options?

The cause is the solution. To deny the truth about our North is to say that the Kalahari is not a desert because it receives enough rainfall.

Geography is diligent in paying attention to details: The Kalahari stretches across about 930,000 square kilometres of Southern Africa, covering parts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. Its very name evokes hardship. Derived from the Tswana words Kgala (‘great thirst’) or Kgalagadi (‘waterless place’), it is a land defined by scarcity. Yet, geographers tell us that the Kalahari, unlike the Sahara, receives too much rainfall to qualify as a desert. But that fact does not alter the Kalahari’s fundamental character. Rain falls there, sometimes in surprising quantities, yet its water disappears almost as soon as it arrives, swallowed by the sand. Water comes, but it does not stay; it does not nourish the land or transform its condition. The surface remains dry, harsh and thirsty. To insist that the Kalahari is not a desert because rain falls there is to mistake an incidental fact for an essential truth.

That is the error we often commit when discussing Northern Nigeria. Whenever anyone points to the region’s central role in the country’s security crisis, there is an immediate rush to denial. We are told not to criminalise a whole region; we are told that millions of northerners are peaceful and law-abiding. We are reminded that the North has a huge population, and a land mass that feeds the nation. We are told that the far north has produced brilliant scholars; just judges; brave, courageous soldiers, statesmen and patriots. All that is true. But it is as true as saying that rain falls in the Kalahari.

The uncomfortable fact remains that the overwhelming concentration of poverty, hunger, banditry, insurgency, mass abductions, cattle rustling, extremist violence and ungoverned spaces is located in the North. The major terrorist groups emerged there. The vast armies of out-of-school children that provide fertile ground for terror recruitment are there. The forests that have become sanctuaries for criminal empires are there. The decades of neglect, elite manipulation, educational backwardness and governance failures that nourished these crises are largely there.

Acknowledging these facts is not an attack on the North. It is the beginning of wisdom. A physician who refuses to diagnose a disease because he fears offending the patient condemns both himself and the patient to disaster.

Every society has problems. The South has its own. But the scale and persistence of insecurity emanating from the North have transformed a regional challenge into a national emergency. The first step towards solving any problem is to admit that it exists and to understand its roots.

Nigeria needs a president who would tell the North that it is Nigeria’s implacable enemy. Northern Nigeria does not need defenders who explain away its crises. It needs reformers who confront them. It needs leaders who can tell hard truths. It needs an educational revolution, economic renewal, community accountability and a sustained campaign against the culture of bad choices that has allowed violence to flourish.

The Kalahari receives rain, yet remains thirsty because the water sinks into the sand before it can nourish the land. Northern Nigeria has continued to receive resources, power, sympathy and countless interventions. Yet insecurity persists because the deeper structural problems remain unresolved. Governments have poured money into programmes, development commissions, agencies and military operations, but much of that effort vanishes into the same barren terrain of denial, elite failure and institutional decay. Pouring more and more money into the crisis without confronting those underlying defects is like a rainmaker expending all his energy on the desert. “Not one spring, not thirty, not a thousand springs will change the desert…” The rain falls; the desert remains unchanged. As Ayi Kwei Armah wrote: “The desert takes. The desert knows no giving;…it is not in the nature of the desert to return anything but destruction.”

But is that true of all deserts? Las Vegas in the United States; Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and Doha in Qatar are desert cities. Add to that list Riyadh and Mecca and Medina. They are all rich and safe because they do not do what Northern Nigeria does. Climate does not manufacture kidnappers. Those are products of human choices and human failures.

So, the way out? Students of societal decline insist that every enduring crisis carries within itself the clue to its resolution. The cure for mass abductions, mass killings and the industrial-scale production of insecurity will not be found in denial. It lies where the disease originates. If the roots of the problem are in the North, then that is where the nation must direct its most rigorous diagnosis and its boldest remedies.

A people cannot solve a problem by running away from its source. The answer to insecurity lies in understanding the conditions that produce it. The cure is often hidden in the cause.

Educate the children of the North. Equip them with modern knowledge and marketable skills. Open classrooms where there are now recruitment grounds for banditry and terrorism. Create opportunities beyond the motorcycle, the cart, the illegal mine and the gun. A society that leaves millions of its young people without education, hope or productive employment should not weep when millions of them become instruments of violence.

If the North has become the principal incubator of the forces driving banditry, terrorism, kidnapping and communal violence, then the North must also become the primary theatre of reform, introspection and reconstruction. The problem cannot be solved elsewhere. The cure must begin where the disease is most deeply rooted.

That is the lesson of every serious inquiry into human failure. The physician does not treat symptoms while ignoring the infection. The engineer does not rebuild a collapsed bridge without first investigating why it fell. Thorndike’s cat did not escape its cage by denying the existence of the cage. It escaped by confronting the obstacle until it found the string that opened the door.

Nigeria’s northern crisis cannot be cured by sentiment, slogans or political correctness. It requires the courage to identify the social, educational, economic, religious and political conditions that sustain violence and to reform them without fear or favour. A nation that fears to name the source of its affliction condemns itself to endless treatment without recovery.

The danger confronting Nigeria has an address. Our tragedy is that we are afraid to read it aloud. Even when confronted with the consequences of insecurity, we often reach for words that blur reality rather than illuminate it. The recent death of Major General Rabe Abubakar in bandits’ captivity illustrates this tendency.

Read the Katsina State government’s statement announcing the death of the General. How did the government conclude that the General “died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension”? Who made that diagnosis?

The General was murdered by those who abducted him. To describe his death as “natural” is to excuse the crime that caused it. If the state in habitual denial insists on baptising that tragedy as a natural death, it kills the man twice: The first death occurred in captivity; the second occurred in the language that sought to make sense of it.

Nigeria is afraid of the North. The North, in turn, appears very afraid of the bandits and terrorists it has bred and failed to tame. It is a dangerous situation. A nation that fears to confront the source of its insecurity courts a grim future.

If you doubt this, read General Tukur Buratai’s warning issued yesterday. He said that unless we confront the evil ravaging the land head-on, future headlines may be about abducted ministers, governors and other high-profile victims. Buratai is a former Chief of Army Staff. His warning should trouble us all.

The evidence is already before us. Forty-six Yoruba schoolchildren and their teachers were abducted on May 15, 2026. By today, June 15, they have spent a full month in captivity. Thirty-one days is a very long time to be cut off from family, school and the ordinary rhythms of life.

The death of General Rabe in captivity, and the continued ordeal of those schoolchildren and their teachers, have left the country—especially the South—deeply anxious and increasingly impatient.

If the present trajectory continues, the North may yet wheel Nigeria itself into the mortuary alongside its countless victims—and that day may come sooner than many imagine.

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

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By M. O. Idam, Esq.

Among the figures of classical antiquity, Odysseus stands out as a master rhetorician who employed an almost unrivalled command of language to persuade audiences, often using half-truths, cunning arguments, and deception to advance his goals. I guess Mr. Okonkwo must either be a student of this character or a certain descendant, though they certainly do not share the same lineage.

Be it one or the other, it is no exaggeration to say that God has gifted actor Okonkwo with the cherished gift of the gab. How I failed to notice this throughout his short-lived but frankly eventful career in Nollywood can only be attributed to my lack of interest in that genre of movie production, which was famously riddled with pitiful storylines, predictable endings, and shabby directing. I often dismissed it as the “Asaba lazy cast” style (no offence intended). Nigerian actors and their craft will always have my respect for their decent choice of making a living, wrapped in arts and culture.

I was not going to waste my time on home videos that would leave me sad afterwards and imprint a peasant psychology in my head throughout the day, so I quit watching them. No doubt, I once thought “Living in Bondage” was actor Okonkwo’s name. It was not long before I realised it was the title of his popular movie, now assigned to him by those uncomfortable with his new public persona, having chosen to make a living in the arena of modern-day Nigerian politics, where dishonesty is the best-selling point, eagerly sought after by renowned politicians.

It is a trade that has richly benefited Mr. Bwala, Ambassadors Omokri and FFK, men previously famous for their deceitful cantatas and double standards.

How the actor was able to smoothly sway his way to stardom through a witty tongue is quite intriguing. His electrifying diction can resolve an obstructed labour case without the assistance of midwives in the labour room. He has become a lad to behold in newsrooms. Actor Okonkwo would have me replay his speeches several times, such that I would often forget he was telling a lie, or that he may have previously said the exact opposite of whatever he was saying at the given moment. Sadly, that trait happens to be one of the most valuable assets in the Nigerian political space today.

Not only has he praised his now-despised principal to high heavens, describing him as next in sainthood only to Archangel Michael, a corruption-free Nigerian, and the most qualified man to lead Nigeria, citing his initial grouse upon exit as merely that Obi was too diplomatic in handling issues concerning the Labour Party leadership crisis. According to the ace actor, “Obi is not as tough as he should be as a leader.” That was the only reason he gave for leaving Obi’s camp.

That reason later changed to Obi not being capable of leading Nigeria, and today it has graduated into the allegation that Obi is a fraud who engaged in extorting aspirants under the NDC.

This allegation has been sustained despite being firmly denied by the very man whom Mr. Okonkwo claimed supplied him with the information. But was that even going to unmake Mr. Obi if Kenneth was factual? The answer is no. Obi’s criminality, if proven, would still amount to the sainthood of both Tinubu and Atiku combined. There exists no better politician in the presidential race than Obi today, if truth is still relevant in Nigeria.

Mr. Okonkwo’s new vocation should be rewarding enough to pay his children’s tuition fees and cater for other eventualities when the election is over; otherwise, he might find himself out of a job after the election season. I am sure Atiku himself must be scared, if not wary, of retaining his services after the elections, whether he loses or wins, considering that Mr. Okonkwo may have exceeded even Atiku’s expectations in conveniently throwing jabs at his former principal—the same man Atiku once described as the best personality he could run with in 2019. That fact alone may make it difficult for even Mr. Okonkwo’s present principal to keep him in his employment or leave him close enough to access privilege information from him.

Mr. Okonkwo must know that those who sell their brothers for shillings may find willing buyers, but they rarely earn their trust.

—M. O. Idam

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

By Max Amuchie | The Sunday Stew

Last week on The Sunday Stew, we unveiled the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a quantitative metric I developed as an extension of the Trinity of State Decay. It is meant to be a mathematical instrument for measuring the degree of separation between a state’s juridical sovereignty and its lived reality. I had planned to follow up today with the first instalment of a three-part series on the methodology and indicators of the DSI.

Then, from the middle of last week, there was a development that sent me into a sustained period of reflection.
​On Wednesday, Zenodo — the open-access repository developed by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the European Commission — published my 16,315-word theoretical treatise, ‘The Trinity of State Decay (Part 1): Sovereign Decoupling and Rival Sovereignty — A Theoretical Statement.’ On Thursday, Harvard Dataverse, owned and operated by Harvard University, published the same work. On Friday morning, an email arrived from the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), operated by GESIS — the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany — confirming that they too had accepted, published, and archived the paper.

​I sat with that for a while. It is exactly three months since The Sunday Stew made its debut. In those three short months, we have produced an original analytical framework (The Insecurity Triad), a comprehensive theoretical formulation (the Trinity of State Decay), and a quantitative index (DSI). Within the same period, the framework entered global scholarly circulation, and now the theoretical paper has been published by three of the world’s most respected scholarly repositories within seventy-two hours of each other. I found myself thinking about the symmetry of it: three months. A trilogy of original contributions. A triple publication in a single week.
​Numbers sometimes carry meaning far beyond arithmetic. This one felt like it was trying to tell me something.

​I. The Seed Planted in a Library

​When The Sunday Stew was conceived, I did not set out to become a framework architect, a theorist, or an index creator. But looking back, I think the seed was planted much earlier — by accident, in the history section of the University of Calabar library.
​I was preparing a term paper on Nigerian history. Our lecturer was the late Dr. Erim O. Erim — a man you had to do your absolute best to satisfy. I was moving along the shelves when I stopped. What arrested me was a name on a spine: Sigmund Freud. His biography. I could not understand what such a book was doing in the history section. I took it anyway, borrowed it, and in one week read it cover to cover.

​Of everything I read about Freud’s life, one idea lodged itself in my subconscious and has never left: Freud’s concept of immortality. He defined it simply but profoundly: immortality is being known by many anonymous people. Not a mystical phenomenon, but a psychological and systemic one. It is the act of leaving behind an intellectual footprint so distinct that your ideas are absorbed by millions of people who may never meet you, but who must use your language to understand their own reality.

​Freud did not merely write a theory. He changed the global vocabulary. Because of Freud, anonymous people who have never read a page of psychoanalysis use the words ego, subconscious, projection, and defence mechanism every single day. They are operating within his architecture without ever knowing it. That, he argued, was immortality.
​I was a young man in a university library who had come looking for Nigerian history and stumbled into a philosophy of intellectual legacy. I did not know, at the time, that I had been given a compass.

​II. The Book C.Don Handed Me

​Several years later, when I lived in Lagos, I had someone who was (and still is) a friend, a big brother, and a mentor. The home of C.Don Adinuba — then at Ilupeju — was like my second home. I could walk in at any time. C.Don was the perfect host, and his wife a hostess of uncommon warmth. There was never a dull moment in that house. He knew I loved books, and he is himself one of the most intellectually deep people I have ever encountered.
​On one of those days, he pulled a book from his shelf, handed it to me, and said: “Go and read this.” I looked at it. The author was unfamiliar. I asked: “Who is Edward Said?” He replied: “Just go and read the book.”
​Representations of the Intellectual — which grew out of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC — turned out to be, apart from the Bible, one of the most impactful books I have ever read. In its pages I first encountered Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks has made an enduring impression on my intellectual formation and theoretical development. Said’s argument — that the intellectual’s vocation is to speak truth to power, to represent the unrepresented, and to refuse the comfort of specialisation in favour of the discomfort of genuine engagement — became a way of understanding what journalism, practised seriously, is actually for.

​And from Antonio Gramsci, particularly his broad conception of the intellectual, I came to understand that intellectuals are not confined to universities, research institutes, or academic titles. Gramsci argued that intellectual activity exists wherever people help shape ideas, interpret reality, organise knowledge, and influence how society understands itself. Through that lens, I realised that journalism is not merely a profession of reporting events; it is an inherently intellectual vocation.

​As a journalist, I do more than gather facts and relay information. I help frame public conversations, interrogate power, highlight social challenges, preserve collective memory, and contribute to the global marketplace of ideas. This understanding deepened my sense of responsibility to society. It reinforced the belief that journalism carries a duty not only to inform but also to enlighten, challenge assumptions, encourage critical thinking, and provide citizens with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.

​Gramsci’s perspective helped me see that the journalist occupies a vital bridge in the relationship between structured knowledge and public life. The responsibility is therefore not simply to report what happens, but to pursue truth rigorously, interpret developments thoughtfully, and contribute constructively to the intellectual and moral development of society. In that sense, journalism became for me not just a career, but a pure form of public intellectual engagement.

​These two books — one stumbled upon by accident, one pressed into my hands by C.Don — formed the philosophical foundation on which everything that follows in this column rests. I did not know that at the time. I know it now.

​III. The Question That Started Everything

​When The Sunday Stew made its debut on March 8th, I initially envisioned a column anchored broadly on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context. But the second edition on March 15 inspired our current trajectory. Entitled ‘A Country Without Earthquakes — Yet Shaken by Itself’, it explored the tragic reality of Nigeria manufacturing catastrophic man-made disasters while other nations contend merely with natural ones. The insights that came from writing that piece—drawing heavily from an expansive interview a former colleague and I conducted with the late Professor Jubril Aminu in 2012—inspired the rigorous analytical direction this column ultimately took, beginning with the development of The Insecurity Triad.

​At the outset, I only set out to understand why Nigeria keeps bleeding. I wanted to discover why the same communities bury the same dead in the same circumstances decade after decade, while the state issues the same predictable condemnations, commissions the same redundant reports, and recommends the same superficial reforms that are never implemented. I set out, in other words, to do journalism.
​What I did not anticipate was that the honest, uncompromising pursuit of that question would eventually produce what the academy calls a macro-theoretical framework—and that this framework would, in time, find its home at Harvard and other top-tier scientific repositories.
​The Trinity of State Decay did not arrive fully formed. It emerged from a profound frustration—the frustration of a scholar-journalist who has spent years watching analytical frameworks imported wholesale from external academic traditions fail to explain the immediate reality happening in front of his eyes.
​Failed state theory, useful as far as it goes, describes a static outcome. It names the corpse but completely fails to trace the actual cause of death. The Fragile States Index produces superficial comparative rankings but isolates no mechanisms. What was missing was an indigenous framework that could explain the operational process—the structural logic by which sovereign authority fractures and is progressively displaced by rival formations.
​The insight, when it came, was disarmingly simple: states do not lose control randomly. They lose it systematically along three specific axes—Money, Land, and Mind. When the state loses its command of fiscal and economic legitimacy, when it loses territorial authority over its physical space, and when it loses ideological and psychological hold over the behavioural psyche of the population, something else moves in. Not chaos. Something far worse than chaos: a disciplined, purposeful Shadow Order, which is often more efficient at its enforcement functions than the formal state it is displacing.
​This is what the Trinity of State Decay theorises. Not the mere failure of the state—but the active production of an alternative to it.

​The geography of legitimate knowledge production has long maintained a centre and a periphery. The global centre produces the theoretical frameworks; the periphery receives them, submissively applies them, and occasionally pushes back against them in minor footnotes. What is happening right now with the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU)—with The Insecurity Triad already circulating in global academic repositories and the Trinity of State Decay now anchored across multiple institutions—is a clear demonstration that intellectual rigour does not possess a postal address.

​The publication of the Trinity of State Decay on global scholarly platforms is not an end point. It is the formal opening of a conversation three decades in the making. If in the months, years, and decades to come, a professor at Harvard, a post-doctoral fellow in Legon, a PhD candidate in Oxford, or an undergraduate in Makerere writing a term paper finds it useful and engages with it, our purpose will have been fulfilled. None of them may ever know me personally, just as I never knew Freud, Gramsci, or Said.

​Coda: The Symmetry Completes Itself

​I began this reflection thinking about the symmetry of three: three months, a trilogy of contributions, a triple publication. But symmetry, I have come to understand, is not always visible at the beginning of a journey. It reveals itself exclusively in retrospect—which is, incidentally, also how Sovereignty Decoupling becomes visible to those who are living through it.
​A young man borrowing a biography of Freud by accident in a university library. A mentor handing him Edward Said across a table in Ilupeju. Several years of frontline journalism asking the same stubborn questions about why our nation bleeds. A column that began as political commentary and rapidly transformed, by structural necessity, into a site of deep theoretical production. And now: Harvard, Zenodo, GESIS-SSOAR, all in a single week.
​Three months. A trilogy. A triple publication. And with SSOAR’s confirmation arriving on Friday morning, our overall global archival footprint expands to seven critical institutional repositories when we include the foundational papers of The Insecurity Triad: SSRN, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SocArXiv, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. The symmetry, it appears, was not done with me yet.

The Trinity of State Decay is now available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/ZQWEM7), Zenodo (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20580627), SSOAR (nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-110533-8), ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. Read it. Push back against it. Apply it. Find its limits. That is exactly what it is there for.

​Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.

​•Dr. Max Amuchie is a Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO, and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). He is the architect of The Insecurity Triad framework for African security analysis, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—original, indigenous analytical frameworks for understanding, categorising, and measuring conflict, state decay, and sovereignty in the Global South. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa, and the Global South in a changing world.
​X (formerly Twitter): @MaxAmuchie | Email: [email protected] | Tel: +234(0)8053069436

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

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

When he presented his budget proposals for 2024 to Nigeria’s National Assembly, the first full year of appropriations under his presidency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu identified as his priorities human asset development, poverty reduction and fighting insecurity.  In the first week of February this year, his official spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, appeared to forget that when he acknowledged that 133 million Nigerians were multi-dimensionally poor but claimed that had nothing to do with the Federal Government. According to Mr. Onanuga, the states and local governments were responsible for that.

On the same day, 450 kilometres away, Vice-President, Kashim Shettima, provided a full rebuttal of Mr. Onanuga’s escape into sovereign abdication. The occasion was the launch of the Stakeholder consultation of the South-East Development Commission, (SEDC) for its regional development plan called South-East Vision 2050 (SEV2050). At the event, Vice-President Shettima went beyond merely reaffirming the leadership and responsibility of the Federal Government in eliminating poverty. He also underscored that this had to be “inclusive, sustainable, and anchored on peace and productivity.”

The event in Enugu was the coming out promenade of the SEDC. The Commission is one of the seven regional development commissions now in existence under President Tinubu’s Ministry of Regional Development. There is one for each geo-political zone of the country in addition to the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), the oldest and richest of these development commissions.

SEV2050 was clearly a pitch for political support and constituency building by the Commission. The Commission achieved the significant feat of lining up the public support of the governors of all five states of the south-east. By contrast, when its counterpart for the north-west organized similar event at the beginning of the year, none of the seven governors of the zone attended and invitees were guests of the Senate North-West Caucus.

As its primary mission, the SEDC Act of 2024 charges the Commission with responsibility to “receive and manage funds from allocations of the Federation Account for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of roads, houses and other infrastructural damages suffered by the region as a result of the effect of the Civil War….” The SEDC is the only regional development commission with an explicit mission of post-war reconstruction. One question that the consultation put before the Commission was: reconstruction from which war?

Anambra State Governor, Chukwuma Soludo, addressed this question in his remarks arguing that the region was in recovery from not one war but “two major wars”. One was the Nigeria-Biafra war, which was supposed to have officially ended on 15 January 1970. The second was what he called “an internal war of self-destruction that has been on since 2021.” Some people may argue that his dating of this second conflict to 2021 is either artificial or unrealistically recent.

It was notable that Governor Soludo failed to say who the parties were to this second war. Pointedly, however, he noted that “after the (first) civil war, there was a promise of rehabilitation and reconstruction; and…. this is yet to happen.” What he left unsaid was that the failure to fulfill that promise made what he described as the second war all but inevitable. Whether that was deliberate or inadvertent is immaterial.

Even as it sought to project an ambition over the next quarter century, the SEV2050 consultation could not escape the enduring backdrop of reconstruction that frames its search for a mission. The mistake will be to focus on brick and mortar and forget to prioritise a reconstruction of minds, memories, and mentalities.

Vice-President Shettima acknowledged as much with some deftness in his opening remarks when he paid tribute to “a region defined not only by memory, but by motion.” Like Governor Soludo, what he left unsaid was even more eloquent. It was impossible to miss the fact that he felt unable to affirm that this motion led to movement or progress.

How to transform motion into movement and ultimately to regional progress more than half a century after the end of the conflict whose memory continues to define independent Nigeria is what the SEDC seeks.

On show were early signs of constructive competition among the states of the south-east. It begs to be harnessed. But even as the states competed to advertise their states in Enugu, the event equally advertised the daunting challenges that confront the Commission. Three were evident.

One is a crisis of mismatched expectation. In Enugu, Governor Soludo illustrated this burden. Having advised the Commission to be realistic in its ambitions, he nevertheless asked it to lead the delivery of a “Marshall Plan” for the south-east, a reference to the US-led plan for Europe’s reconstruction after World War II. According to Governor Soludo, this regional Marshall Plan should include a regional security framework, and “super inter-state infrastructure” such as regional railways and regional highways.

The problem, however, is that an SEDC that purports to lead on the former is likely to antagonize the state governors and a Commission that claims to lead on the latter will be on a fool’s errand. At a controversial encounter with the Senate committee on the SEDC this past week, it emerged that the Commission only received N16 billion over its first 16 months of existence and in fact none in its first nine months. It has so far received no capital funds.

Two is the problem of evolving a viable business model for the SEDC. In establishing the regional development commissions, President Tinubu did not clearly articulate a mission or strategy for them. They were instead expected to find their path through the foliage of Nigeria’s bureaucratic and political Byzantiums. In the absence of this clarity of mission, the commissions labour under a mis-match between expectation and reality.

Within the various regions, ordinary citizens crave instant attention from these commissions. Ranged against them, political elites from the regions see a new patronage vehicle to be milked in the model of the NDDC.

For long, the NDDC has defined the business model of the regional development commissions. Under this model, these commissions operate largely as front offices for extortion which holds the fate of citizens of the concerned region(s) hostage in carve ups by political insiders sharing development funds as private loot. By 2022, according to one report on the NDDC, “12,000 out of 13,377 projects were abandoned after paying trillions of naira for them.” As development agents, they have been largely ineffectual. To replicate this will be the kiss of death for the SEDC. To fail to do so will attract blackmail from politicians under ruse of oversight.

Three, therefore, SEDC will face pushback from the usual species of greedy political grubbiness. The event in Enugu had in attendance the Vice-President, the Governors of all the south-east States, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives who was represented by Majority Leader, Professor Julius Ihonvbere.

But it was impossible not to notice the absence of the Chairman of the SEDC Committee in the Senate and former Governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu; his counterpart in the House of Representatives, Chris Nkwonta; and the man who refers to himself as “Number Six Citizen”, Deputy Speaker, Benjamin Kalu. Senator Orji Kalu reportedly sent one of his daughters to represent him. She holds no relevant public office. Anyone who thinks the near collective absence of the National Assembly caucus of the region was a coincidence misunderstands how the place works.

As a convening, the SEV2050 event in Enugu was arguably as successful as its planners could have hoped. It appears the SEDC will not be short of goodwill or ideas as it sets out on its mission. Quite clearly also, it will not be short of adversaries.

Post-war reconstruction is an existential undertaking. The SEDC has neither the resources nor the latitude for the errors that have defined the NDDC. If the Commission can confine its mission and secure protection against baleful political extortion from predictable sources, it may lay durable foundations under its current leadership for a business model suited to its unique and historic mission.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

• This is a slightly revised version of an article first published February 8-10 2025.

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

At the African Studies Association conference here in Atlanta late last year, Professor Tade Aina, Senior Programs Director at the Andrew Carnegie Foundation and one of Africa’s most cerebral sociologists, called me aside and said while he appreciated my interventions on the insecurity engulfing Nigeria, he was disappointed that I had never explored how mining fuels it.

I never stopped thinking about the insights he shared with me, which several other people have corroborated. This week, I decided to stop thinking and start digging.

Let me be clear from the outset that illegal mining is not the sole driver of Nigeria’s insecurity. Professor Aina didn’t suggest that. It would be analytically lazy and factually wrong to say that. Nigeria’s unabating insecurity sprouts from state absence, rural poverty, elite complicity, climate stress, ethnic anxieties, religious extremism, collapsed local economies, ungoverned forests, arms trafficking, the hollowing out of traditional authority and the astounding incompetence of successive governments.

 But illegal mining has become one of the least discussed engines that lubricate the machinery of terror in parts of Nigeria.

Ample evidence shows that bandits and terrorists sometimes operate around mining sites. This has made mining a conflict economy. It feeds violence, finances armed groups, incentivizes territorial capture, corrupts local authority and creates an illicit transnational supply chain that converts Nigerian blood into foreign profit.

As far back as June 16, 2020, Dr. Maurice Ogbonnaya of the Institute for Security Studies wrote that “collaboration between politically connected Nigerians and Chinese corporations in illegal gold mining drives rural banditry and violent local conflicts” in parts of Nigeria, including the Northwest, the Northcentral and, to some extent, the Southwest.

He also reported that sponsors of illegal mining also fund banditry and cattle rustling in mining communities to displace people and create opportunities for illegal miners to operate.

The ENACT policy brief of November 19, 2020, also written by Ogbonnaya, put it even more starkly. It said criminal collaboration in illegal gold mining between “Nigerians in high positions of authority” and foreign corporations deprives the state of legitimate earnings and “drives rural banditry and violent local conflicts.”

That sentence deserves to be engraved on the forehead of our national security establishment. For too long, official Nigeria has treated insecurity as merely a military problem. It deploys soldiers, bombs forests, declares bans, arrests a few expendable poor people and then returns to sleep.

But the people who buy the gold, arrange the licenses, launder the proceeds, bribe officials, hire local muscle and export the minerals are rarely the ones who face the law.

The WikkiTimes investigation of September 16, 2023, by Yakubu Mohammed offers one of the most chilling windows into this dark economy. The report showed that Chinese-affiliated miners operating under the licenses of Eso Terra Investment Limited and Majelo Global Resources Limited plundered minerals in Kurebe and surrounding villages in Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State while bribing the Dogo Gide terror faction. The report said mining continued despite the presence of ISWAP and Dogo Gide’s faction, and despite the flight of many residents after attacks by both terrorists and the military.

One local miner told WikkiTimes that terrorists would seize mined stones and block their movement until they were paid “N5 million or more.” He added that “even motorcycles were taken to them.” Another miner said, “So the bandits were paid N3 million every week.”

That is not ordinary criminality. It is taxation by terror. It is sovereignty ceded to murderers. It is the privatization of state power by men with guns, lubricated by mineral greed.

Perhaps the most devastating line in the WikkiTimes report came from Engineer Adamu Garba Musa, Director of Mining in the Niger State Ministry of Solid and Mineral Resources. Reacting to the paper’s findings, he asked: “If bandits are disturbing people, how come the company is working successfully?”

That question captures the whole Nigerian security tragedy in one sentence. How can ordinary villagers be unable to farm, travel, sleep or bury their dead in peace while mining companies operate in the same “unsafe” spaces?

The answer is simple. The insecurity that is tragedy for villagers is business cost for illegal miners. They simply add bandit bribes to operating expenses. The villager pays with blood. The miner pays with cash. The terrorist collects from both.

Good Governance Africa’s March 5, 2026, report on Zamfara’s criminal gold economy says Zamfara has become a major theater of insecurity not only because of the scale of violence but also because natural resources now play a central role in sustaining it. The report argues that gold has become “a strategic resource for violent actors,” not merely a law-and-order problem.

Reuters reported on May 15, 2026, that a joint NEITI and ANEEJ report found that Nigeria loses vast mineral revenue to illegal trading networks dominated by foreign buyers, shell companies and armed criminal groups. It said foreign buyers, especially Chinese actors, exert disproportionate influence over pricing, purchasing arrangements and export channels.

 It also noted that 80 percent of mining in Northwest Nigeria is estimated to be illegal, with activity surging between 2022 and 2024 in areas affected by banditry and terrorism.

For balance, it is important to point out that China has denied allegations that its nationals or companies fund terror through illegal mining. In February 2026, the Chinese embassy in Nigeria described such allegations as “completely baseless” and said China has “zero tolerance” for illegal mining by its companies.

That denial deserves to be reported, but it does not erase the repeatedly documented involvement of Chinese nationals, Chinese-linked entities and Nigerian collaborators in illegal mining scandals. The problem is not China as a country. The problem is a predatory extractive economy in which some foreign actors, Nigerian officials, local fixers, armed groups and criminal middlemen have found profitable accommodation.

The Nigerian government knows this. In December 2024, Reuters reported that Nigeria lifted a five-year ban on mining exploration in Zamfara, a ban imposed in 2019 after incessant bandit attacks. The minister of solid minerals, Dele Alake, said illegal miners had exploited Zamfara’s resources during the suspension. In other words, the ban punished lawful possibilities while rewarding unlawful realities.

Nonetheless, the government has recently taken steps that should not be dismissed. Premium Times reported on February 17, 2026, that the Ministry of Solid Minerals established 388 mineral buying centers in 2024 to boost revenue and curb illegal mining. Alake also said mining marshals had arrested more than 350 illegal miners and prosecuted more than 150. He said artisanal miners were being encouraged to form cooperatives so they could become formalized, bankable and taxable.

These are useful steps, but they will be useless if they target only the barefoot digger and leave the air-conditioned criminal untouched. As I’ve always argued, Nigeria does not lack laws. What it lacks are consequences for powerful lawbreakers.

So, what should be done?

First, illegal mining must be treated as a national security emergency. Every major mining site in Zamfara, Niger, Kaduna, Katsina, Nasarawa, Plateau and elsewhere should be mapped through satellite imagery, local intelligence and on-the-ground inspection. The government should know who owns which license, who operates the site, who buys the minerals, who transports them and where they end up.

Second, beneficial ownership of all mining licenses must be published in a searchable public database. Nigerians should know the real human beings behind shell companies. A license should not be a mask for bandits, retired generals, politicians, foreign proxies or politically connected criminals.

Third, mineral buying centers must be tied to strict traceability. Gold, lithium and other high-value minerals should not move from pit to port without documentation. Every bag should have an origin, a buyer, a tax record and an export trail. Any mineral without a traceable source should be treated like stolen crude oil.

Fourth, Nigeria must go after the money. Arresting poor artisanal miners while leaving exporters, financiers, corrupt officials and foreign buyers untouched is judicial theater. Bank accounts should be frozen. Suspicious mineral exports should be seized. Customs, immigration, mining cadaster officials and security officers who facilitate illegal mining should be prosecuted publicly.

Fifth, foreign governments whose nationals are repeatedly implicated must be engaged diplomatically but firmly. Nigeria should not indulge xenophobia, but it must also not outsource its sovereignty to predatory investors. Any foreign national convicted of illegal mining linked to terror financing should face imprisonment, asset forfeiture and deportation after serving the sentence.

Finally, the military response to insecurity must be joined to economic disruption. Bombing forests while allowing mineral money to flow to terrorists is like mopping the floor while the tap is running. Terror persists because it pays. Make it unprofitable.

Nigeria’s tragedy is not that it is poor. It is that even its wealth has become a weapon against its people. The gold beneath Zamfara’s soil, the lithium in Nasarawa, the minerals in Niger, the tin in Plateau and the other rare-earth minerals elsewhere in Nigeria should build schools, hospitals, roads and livelihoods. Instead, too often, they buy guns, motorcycles, bullets and silence.

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