By Kenny Odugbemi

Through the Old Etonian Lens: How empires lose wars, how power signals, and why numbers lie without architecture

1. THE ETONIAN READING OF THE SIGNAL

An Old Etonian is taught to read a battlefield like a balance sheet. Two numbers are presented:

1. 10 senior officers killed at the frontline “under insurgent condition”
2. 774 insurgents deradicalized

On paper, 774:10 looks like victory. Under the Etonian lens, it signals the opposite. Here’s why:
Etonian Principle Application to This Data Real Signal
Empires die when officers die first Senior officers at frontline = tactical collapse or betrayal. Empires put generals in HQs, sergeants in trenches. “Fell in frontline” implies command chain is broken, or commanders distrust the chain
The dangerous man is underestimated 774 “deradicalized” = mass surrender/rehab program. Insurgents don’t surrender 774 at once unless they see state weakness Mass deradicalization without officer safety = insurgents choosing terms, not state imposing them
Cashflow beats bodycount 10 dead colonels cost 30 years of training each. 774 deradicalized cost stipends. State lost 300 man-years of doctrine; gained 774 welfare recipients
Complicity hides in asymmetry If senior officers die at the front while mass surrender happens behind the front, ask: who opened the gate? The “complicity in armed forces” allegation arises because the numbers violate doctrine
Etonian verdict: When officers die and insurgents live, the insurgency has infiltrated the payroll or the battle plan. When deradicalization outruns battlefield control, the state is negotiating with itself.

2. SWOT OF NIGERIA’S COUNTERINSURGENCY POSTURE UNDER THIS DATA

S – STRENGTHS

1. DDR capacity exists: 774 deradicalized means Operation Safe Corridor has throughput. Empires need off-ramps, not just bullets.
2. Intel penetration: Mass surrender suggests intel or hunger is working inside insurgent camps.
3. Political will to rehabilitate: Deradicalization is empire behavior — Romans used it, British used it in Malaya. Victory = conversion, not just killing.

W – WEAKNESSES

1. Officer attrition at command level: Losing 10 senior officers = loss of institutional memory, terrain knowledge, troop trust. Takes 15 years to replace a Lt. Col.
2. Tactical inversion: Senior officers should not be in contact enough to die in tens. Doctrine breach signals either desperation, poor junior leadership, or compromise.
3. Perception war lost: Troops see officers dying while “repentant” insurgents get stipends. Morale inverts. Empire rule: never pay your enemy more than your soldier.

O – OPPORTUNITIES

1. Use 774 as human intelligence: 774 debriefed insurgents = map of logistics, funding, IED factories. Empire turns prisoners into clerks.
2. International legal architecture: Prosecute foreign financiers in UK/U.S. under terrorism financing laws. Quiet man with a subpoena beats loud man with a gun.
3. Diaspora vetting: Many insurgent sponsors live abroad. Use UK UWO + US Magnitsky to seize assets. Fund SAF with seized terror money.

T – THREATS

1. Complicity narrative hardens: Every officer death becomes “inside job” on social media. Civil-military trust collapses. Empires fall when legions distrust centurions.
2. Deradicalized recidivism: If 774 re-radicalize, state loses legitimacy and DDR funding. Borno data 2016-2023 shows ∼15% recidivism risk. Without jobs, Ponzi restarts.
3. Two armies emerge: One in uniform, unpaid and dying. One in rehab, paid and training. The quiet dangerous man is the one managing both payrolls.

3. LESSONS FROM FAILURE: WHY EMPIRES LOSE DESPITE BIGGER BATTALIONS
Historical Parallel Etonian Lesson Nigeria Application
Roman Empire, Teutoburg 9 AD 3 legions lost because local guide was a traitor. Officers died first. 10 senior officers = command betrayed or blind. Fix vetting, not just firepower.
British, Malaya 1950s Won by resettling Chinese, cutting food to insurgents, and protecting officers DDR works only if supply lines die and officers live. Do both.
US, Afghanistan 2021 $2T spent, ANA collapsed when officers sold units. Deradicalized Taliban became government. | 774 deradicalized + 10 officers dead = same asymmetry. Don’t fund both sides.
Core lesson: An army that pays to deradicalize while failing to protect its colonels is running a Ponzi. New money — DDR budgets — pays for old failure — dead doctrine. Empire rule: Protect the centurion, then convert the barbarian.

4. PARADIGM SHIFT: FROM “PONZI COIN” TO “EMPIRE SHILLING” IN COUNTERINSURGENCY

4.1 The Empire Doctrine for Internal Security

1. Invert the casualty ratio law: No senior officer crosses Start Line without 3:1 junior officer density. If 10 seniors die, 30 captains must have died first. If not, court-martial the deployment order.
2. Tie DDR to assets, not stipends: Every 1 deradicalized insurgent = 1 hectare of irrigated farm + 1 arrest of sponsor. No farm, no discharge. No sponsor in court, no stipend. Cashflow must create assets.
3. Publish the “Empire Ledger” monthly:

• Officers KIA:
• Sponsors arrested:
• Assets built by DDR: [Farms, km road, MW power]
  If Ledger Item 3 < Item 1, Minister of Defence resigns. Empire measures in concrete.[Names][unit][cause][bank][country]

4.2 Power in the Plumbing: Quiet Architect Moves

1. Create Military Asset Fund: 10% of defence budget + all seized terror assets → MAF. Can only buy ISR drones, MRAPs, and pensions. Run by 5 boring engineers with 10-yr tenure. Empire survives ministers.
2. UWO for terror: Any Nigerian with >$100k property in UK who can’t explain income while LGA is under Boko Haram = Unexplained Wealth Order trigger. London becomes your second army.
3. 774 LGAs, 774 armories: Decentralize QRF to LGA level under retired warrant officers. Empire rule: Rome was defended by farmers. If 10 colonels die, 774 sergeants hold the line.

4.3 The Least Threatening Man Strategy

1. Make the Accountant General of the Army famous: Not the Theatre Commander. The man who stops stipends when an officer dies wins wars. Bureaucracy is the battlefield.
2. Deradicalization oath on assets: Every “repentant” swears on a farm he must cultivate for 5 years. Farm fails, oath broken, jail. Use land, not lectures. Empires bind men with deeds.
3. Internationalize the shame: Every officer death triggers automatic ICC Article 15 communication naming suspected sponsors. Use lawfare. The dangerous man files from The Hague, not TikTok.

5. ETONIAN CLOSING ON THE 10:774 PARADOX

Right now Nigeria is running a security Ponzi: new DDR money pays for old doctrine failure, while the balance sheet — trained officers — bleeds out.

An Empire Counterinsurgency flips it:

1. Officers stop dying because the plumbing — ISR, QRF, vetting — works.
2. Deradicalized stop returning because assets — farms, jobs, law — exist.
3. Sponsors stop funding because London takes their houses.

Until the ledger shows Officers Saved > Insurgents Deradicalized > Sponsors Jailed > Assets Built, the complicity signal you flagged will remain the loudest truth on the battlefield.

First move: Gazette “No Officer Alone Policy” + “Asset-for-Amnesty Law” in 30 days. Then sack the first general who violates it.

Empires don’t win by deradicalizing faster than they bury colonels. They win by making it impossible for a colonel to be killed and unprofitable for an insurgent to be born.
EMPIRE VS. PONZI SCORECARD FOR DEFENCE HQ
Using the Old Etonian Lens on: “10 Senior Officers Fell… 774 Insurgents Deradicalized” + CDS “Prodigal Son” Doctrine

1. CONTEXT: THE CDS “PRODIGAL SON” STATEMENT

Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Olufemi Oluyede, publicly likened terrorists to the biblical prodigal son during the inaugural lecture of the Joint Doctrine and Warfare Centre, Abuja. 0bac

Direct quote: “But even in the Bible, we heard about the prodigal son. If there was not that window for the man to come back, would they have come back?” 0bac

Doctrine stated: Terrorists, being “Nigerians, mostly,” deserve rehabilitation and a “window to repent” rather than automatic elimination. This is the policy basis for Operation Safe Corridor. 0bac

Public reaction: HURIWA called the analogy “deeply offensive, intellectually flawed” and “a dangerous moral equivalence”. Citizens online asked if “forgiveness as a security doctrine” was appropriate while soldiers die. cd1afdd5

2. EMPIRE VS. PONZI SCORECARD FOR DEFENCE HQ

The Old Etonian test: Empires build assets that outlive men. Ponzi schemes pay old debt with new money until legitimacy dies.
Metric Empire Behavior Ponzi Signal Current Nigeria Status Score
Officer Preservation Generals in HQ; sergeants in trenches. Centurions protected. Senior officers die at frontline while enemy surrenders 10 senior officers “fell in frontline” under insurgent condition PONZI
Asset Creation from War Every surrender → 1 farm, 1 road, 1 arrest of sponsor 774 deradicalized = 774 stipends; no linked assets 774 insurgents deradicalized via Op Safe Corridor; no public asset ledger tied to them PONZI
Doctrine Clarity Army fights to win; rehab is civilian function CDS likens killers to “prodigal sons” deserving return Moral equivalence confuses troops + victims PONZI
Moral Hierarchy Fallen soldiers honored first; enemy last “Saving the killers” while “killed treated with indifferent” — CDS Musa himself warned: “If he has to use his money for surgery… he will not want to make any sacrifices” Troops crowdfund medical bills; deradicalized get stipends + skills PONZI
Plumbing Control ISR, drones, welfare, pensions run by quiet bureaucrats Rehabilitation run solely by Defence HQ, not NASS or civilian ministry Military funds/judges/executes DDR. Empire rule: separate powers PONZI
Dangerous Man Location Dangerous man is quartermaster who cuts stipends if assets fail Dangerous man is CDS using pulpit to preach forgiveness Doctrine comes from sermon, not statute PONZI
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Score: 0/6 Empire. 6/6 Ponzi.
Under Etonian rules, Defence HQ is currently running a Security Ponzi: new DDR money pays for old doctrine failure, while the asset — trained officers — is liquidated.

3. WHY “SAVING THE KILLERS” WHILE “KILLED TREATED WITH INDIFFERENT”

Etonian diagnosis of the asymmetry:

1. Cashflow inversion: CDS Musa warned in 2023: “If a soldier is happy, prepared and ready, he will give you his best… If he has to use his money for surgery… he will not want to make any sacrifices.” Empire pays soldiers first. Ponzi pays defectors first to buy headlines.
2. Complicity signal: 10 senior officers dying at frontline violates force-protection doctrine. Etonian rule: When centurions die, either the map is wrong or the map-reader is paid by the enemy. Hence public inference of “complicity in armed forces.”
3. Prodigal Son doctrine inverts legitimacy: The prodigal son returned to a father, not to the brothers he robbed. CDS applies the parable to terrorists, but victims’ families are the “elder brother.” When elder brother sees prodigal fed while he’s unpaid, he deserts. That is how legions mutiny.
4. No legal architecture: DDR run by DHQ alone means no civilian veto. Empire separates powers: Army kills/captures; Justice tries; Civilian ministry rehabs. Fusion = abuse. a6a80bac

4. RECOMMENDATIONS: FROM PONZI TO EMPIRE COIN

4.1 Immediate Doctrine Correction — “Empire Ledger Act”

1. No Officer Alone Law: Statutory ban on senior officers in contact without 3:1 junior officer ratio. Violation = automatic Board of Inquiry.
2. Asset-for-Amnesty Law: 1 deradicalized insurgent = 1 hectare cultivated or 1 sponsor convicted. Publish monthly: Officers KIA | Sponsors Jailed | Assets Built by DDR. If Assets < KIA, DDR budget cuts 50%.
3. Reparations First: Before any stipend to deradicalized, pay all arrears to KIA families + wounded. Etonian rule: Empire buries its dead in gold before it feeds its enemies bread.

4.2 Plumbing Shift — The Quiet Architect

1. Move DDR out of DHQ: Create National Victims & Reintegration Commission under Ministry of Justice. Army only captures. Empire separates judge, jailer, redeemer.
2. Military Asset Fund: 10% of defence budget + seized terror assets → MAF. Can only buy ISR, MRAPs, pensions. 10-yr tenure for trustees. Empires are built by boring men.
3. UWO for Sponsors: Trigger UK Unexplained Wealth Orders for any Nigerian with >$100k UK property while his LGA is under Boko Haram. Fund MAF with seizures.

4.3 Narrative Shift — Kill the “Prodigal Son” Framing

1. CDS speech doctrine: Ban biblical analogies for active combatants. Use legal terms: “surrendered hostile,” “convicted,” “paroled.” Empires use law, not parables.
2. Empire Honours: Annual parade for KIA families before any DDR graduation. Optics = doctrine. Rome paraded eagles, not penitents.
3. Name sponsors monthly: If 774 can be deradicalized, 77 sponsors can be named. Dangerous man is the one with the subpoena.

5. CONCLUSION: THE ETONIAN VERDICT ON DEFENCE HQ

Right now, Defence HQ fails the Empire test because it spends moral and fiscal capital on the prodigal while the centurion’s family crowdfunds his coffin. That is the definition of a Ponzi: new money — public sympathy + DDR budgets — services old sin — officer deaths + terror sponsors — without creating assets.

An Empire Counterinsurgency does the opposite: Protect the centurion, prosecute the sponsor, then convert the barbarian on a farm the barbarian builds. Until Officers Saved > Sponsors Jailed > Assets Built > Insurgents Deradicalized, the “complicity” insinuation will remain the truest intelligence on the battlefield.

First move: Gazette “Asset-for-Amnesty” and “No Officer Alone” in 30 days. Sack the first general who breaks either. Empires are not preached. They are enforced.

6. SUPPORTIVE QUOTES FROM WORLD SECURITY LEADERS

Gen. James Mattis, USMC (Ret.), Former US SecDef: “No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it’s over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.” — Deradicalization without victory is unilateral ceasefire.

1. Field Marshal Viscount Slim, British 14th Army: “There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels.” — If 10 colonels die at the front, doctrine — not just enemy — killed them.
2. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: “The soldier must be prepared to become a propagandist, a social worker, a civil engineer… but first he must survive.” — Officers dead cannot civil-engineer.
3. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, US Army (Ret.): “You don’t have to like your allies to beat your enemy, but you do have to trust them. And trust is built on shared sacrifice.” — Paying deradicalized before KIA families destroys trust.
4. Sir Robert Thompson, Malayan Emergency: “The government must function in all areas and provide a better life. If it does not, the insurgent will.” — Assets, not sermons, beat insurgency.

Final Etonian maxim: “Empires are remembered for what they built after the war. Ponzi schemes are remembered for who they paid during it.”

regards

Kenny Odugbemi
08032002585

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

By Sir Ifeanyi Ejiofor, Esq.

There are tragedies that wound the heart, and there are those that indict the conscience of a nation. This, regrettably, is both.

To enlist in the Armed Forces of one’s country is, by every civilised measure, an act of courage and noble sacrifice. In saner climes, such a commitment is met with dignity, protection, and an unwavering assurance that the State shall neither forget nor forsake its own. Yet, in this deeply troubling account, that sacred covenant appears not merely broken, but callously discarded.

Late Jude Osondu Ude, a young and promising Nigerian, a Master’s degree holder, and a soldier on the cusp of his confirmation as a Lieutenant, chose the path of honour. Inspired by the legacy of his father, himself a retired soldier, he embraced the uniform with zeal, patriotism, and a resolute desire to serve his country gallantly. It was, tragically, a devotion that would cost him his life.

He was initially posted to Ibadan and later deployed on special assignment to Katsina. There, he served with the 17 Brigade, where he rose to head the Garrison. By all consistent accounts, Jude was fearless, disciplined, and uncompromising in his pursuit of those who threaten the peace of the State. Ironically, perhaps fatefully, these very qualities appeared to unsettle certain shadowy interests within the system, individuals whose sympathies, it is alleged, are disturbingly misaligned.

The official narrative, as casually dispensed, suggested an ambush. A convenient explanation, tidy, unexamined, and, it would seem, profoundly misleading.

For the emerging truth is far more sinister.

On the 15th day of March 2026, within the very precincts of the 17 Brigade Garrison in Katsina, a supposed sanctuary of brotherhood and arms, Jude Osondu Ude was brutally stabbed in what bears all the hallmarks of an internally orchestrated attack. Not felled by the enemy at the gates, but cut down from within. One is left to wonder: when the fortress becomes the battlefield, where then does a soldier find refuge?

Gravely wounded, bleeding, and fighting for his life, he staggered within the barracks, seeking, perhaps, the protection of comrades. He was later admitted to hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries on the 22nd day of March 2026, a week after the savage assault. Thus ended the life of a man who had sworn to defend others, but was denied defence in his own hour of peril.

Yet, the tragedy did not conclude with his death. If anything, it deepened into a most unconscionable neglect.

In what can only be described as a national embarrassment of the highest order, the remains of this fallen soldier were abandoned, yes, abandoned, by the very institution he served with unwavering loyalty. No structured support. No dignified process. No honour befitting a life sacrificed in service.

His father, aged, grief-stricken, and himself a former soldier, was left to shoulder the burden that ought to have been borne by the State. At a staggering personal cost, he paid ₦750,000.00 merely to transport his son’s corpse from Katsina to Enugu. Additional expenses followed: ₦50,000.00 on road logistics, ₦20,000.00 on feeding those who accompanied him, ₦25,000.00 for mortuary services, and ₦35,000.00 for ambulance conveyance. Not a single kobo was provided by the Nigerian Military.

One is compelled to ask, perhaps rhetorically, perhaps painfully: what, then, is the worth of service? Is this the “reward” for loyalty?

The indignity reached its bleak crescendo on the 5th of April 2026, Easter Sunday, when Jude was laid to rest in his hometown in Ezeagu Local Government Area of Enugu State. No ceremonial guard. No final salute. Not even the symbolic presence of a single soldier from the 82 Division, Enugu. He was buried, quite literally, as though he had never worn the uniform.

One dares to observe, with restrained but biting irony, that had he instead enlisted in a modest civic association, perhaps even the Boys’ Brigade, he might have received more honour in death than was accorded him in service.

In light of these grievous circumstances, we hereby call upon the Honourable Minister of Defence, General Christopher Musa (Rtd.), whose leadership we have long held in high regard, the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Waidi Shaibu, and the Chief of Defence Staff, General Olufemi Oluyede, to immediately institute a thorough, transparent, and uncompromising investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Late Jude Osondu Ude at the 17 Brigade, Katsina.

The spectre of internal sabotage, rivalry, and clandestine complicity must not be allowed to fester within an institution entrusted with the nation’s security. Those found culpable must be identified and brought to justice without fear or favour. Only then can public confidence in the military be meaningfully restored.

Let it not be said that silence prevailed where outrage was demanded.
Let it not be recorded that impunity was permitted to triumph over justice.
Let it not become the norm that a soldier must fear not only the enemy without, but the dagger within.

We further state, with all due solemnity, that should no meaningful administrative steps be taken within fourteen (14) days from the date hereof to unravel this most disturbing episode, we shall be constrained to invoke all lawful mechanisms to compel accountability and redress.

A nation that fails to honour its fallen heroes does more than betray the dead, it imperils the living.

The growing whispers of internal sabotage within the military are no longer rumours to be dismissed; they are alarms that must be heeded. For when loyalty is punished, when courage is envied, and when sacrifice is met with abandonment, the very foundation of national security begins to erode, quietly but catastrophically.

Late Jude Osondu Ude may have been silenced, but the questions his death raises will not be buried with him.

Justice must not only be done, it must be seen, felt, and restored.

#JusticeForJudeUde

#HonourOurFallen

#EndMilitaryImpunity

#AccountabilityNow

#NoMoreSilence

#DefendTheDefenders

#BarEjioforWrites

Signed:
Sir Ifeanyi Ejiofor, Esq., (KSC)
Dunu-Ezeugosinachi
April 11, 2026

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

By Max Amuchie | The Sunday Stew

A nation does not collapse all at once. It erodes — layer by layer, system by system — until what once appeared unshakable begins to give way under the weight of forces it can no longer contain.

This column said that last week. It bears repeating now because there are moments in the life of a crisis when description is no longer enough — when the accumulation of evidence: the kidnapped schoolgirls, the abandoned farms, the bombed houses of worship, the ransomed businessmen, the burning villages — demands not another account of what is happening, but a coherent theory of why it is happening, how the pieces connect, and what it means.
We have arrived at that moment.

In The Sunday Stew, this inquiry has already traced the contours of kidnapping, banditry, and insurgency as distinct but increasingly interwoven forms of violence. The present analysis consolidates these patterns into a single explanatory framework — The Insecurity Triad — as a way of understanding their systemic interaction.
The framework emerged from a growing dissatisfaction with the lenses through which insecurity is commonly understood. Journalistically, these events are too often reported as separate incidents—kidnappings here, raids there, bombings elsewhere—without accounting for the structure that binds them. Policymaking has suffered from the same fragmentation, responding to symptoms in isolation rather than confronting the architecture that sustains them.

Part of the problem lies in the dominance of external security frameworks, especially the Global War on Terror (GWOT) shaped after September 11, 2001, where violence is largely interpreted through counter‑terrorism lens. That framework was necessary for its time and remains analytically useful. However, it obscures local dynamics like resource extraction, weak state authority, and the emergence of rival or parallel sovereignties. The world has changed. Contemporary insecurity—particularly in West Africa—has outgrown the categories that framework alone can provide. To rely on it exclusively is not rigour; it is lag.

What is needed is not it’s abandonment, but its expansion. We need a formulation capacious enough to hold together the economic drivers of kidnapping, the territorial logic of banditry, and the ideological ambitions of terrorism as distinct yet converging forces. A Nigeria‑ or West Africa–specific frame should reorient reportage, analysis, and policy beyond drones and raids, while insisting that the state deploy its full coercive weight against the shadow order and treat force as a central, deliberate instrument of restoring authority—rather than as a last resort.

Banditry and kidnapping are not terrorism in the strict sense. They are driven by economics and territorial control. Yet when they converge with terrorism, they form a more intricate and mutually reinforcing arrangement — one that cannot be understood, or addressed, through a single analytical frame.
It is from this gap — between reality and its interpretation — that The Insecurity Triad emerges.

From Insight to Definition
No framework emerges in isolation, and this is no exception. The Insecurity Triad rests on five scholars whose ideas, taken together, form a causal chain — from the structural weaknesses of the post-colonial state to the fragmentation of sovereignty itself, and finally to the lived reality that fragmentation produces.

Ali Mazrui: The Logic of Convergence
Mazrui, in The Africans: A Triple Heritage, argues that African identity is shaped by three interlocking civilisational forces — Indigenous, Islamic, and Western — and that understanding Africa requires holding these forces together.
The Triad borrows this logic. Where Mazrui described convergence as the making of identity, the Triad reveals convergence as the unmaking of security — a collision rather than a synthesis. His insight provides the method: insecurity must be read in interaction, not isolation.

Claude Ake: The State That Never Arrived
Ake, in A Political Economy of Africa and Democracy and Development in Africa, notes that African states often function not as public institutions but as instruments of private accumulation. Power is privatised; governance is secondary. Large segments of society remain unprotected and effectively ungoverned.
The Triad operates precisely in these abandoned spaces. Kidnapping, banditry, and terrorism are not merely security failures — they are symptoms of a state that never fully constituted itself as a public authority.

Jean-François Bayart: The Normalisation of Extraction
Bayart, in The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, extends this diagnosis by showing that the state itself is organised around extraction — the “politics of the belly.” Accumulation precedes service; governance becomes indistinguishable from appropriation.
Within this context, the actors of the Triad are not anomalies — they are imitators. The kidnapper pricing human life, the bandit taxing farmers, the insurgent levying communities all replicate, at the margins, the extractive logic of the centre.
The Triad, then, is not merely a consequence of state failure. It is the diffusion of predation.

William Reno: The Relocation of Authority
Reno, in Warlord Politics and African States, takes the argument to this core insight: when state legitimacy erodes, authority does not disappear — it relocates. In Nigeria, that erosion is not hypothetical. It is territorial. In the Northwest, the Northeast, and the Middle Belt, the state’s claim to sovereign authority competes — and in some spaces loses — against armed networks that govern on transactional terms: protection for compliance, access for tribute, order for loyalty.
This is why conventional responses fail. They assume a vacuum. But there is no vacuum — only competing centres of authority.
Each pillar of the Triad represents a form of rival sovereignty. A state that cannot recognise this reality cannot displace it.

Achille Mbembe: The Texture of the Shadow Order
Mbembe, in Necropolitics and On the Postcolony, provides the final layer. Where Reno shows that authority relocates, Mbembe shows what relocated authority looks like in practice. He argues that in the postcolonial context, sovereignty is exercised above all through the power to dictate who lives and who dies — to commodify life, claim space, and impose a rival moral order.
This is precisely what the Triad does across all three pillars simultaneously. The kidnapper commodifies life and prices safety. The bandit seizes productive territory and determines who works and who starves. The terrorist asserts an alternative ideological universe and decides whose beliefs constitute legitimate order. Together, they do not merely fill the space the state vacates — they govern it, on their own terms, by their own logic.

Mbembe gives the Triad its phenomenological dimension: not just the structure of the shadow order, but its lived texture — the daily reality of populations caught between a state that has withdrawn and armed actors who have moved in.

Taken together, these scholars outline a sequence: Mazrui provides the method — convergence; Ake identifies the condition — state absence; Bayart explains the culture — extraction; Reno delivers the consequence — relocated authority; Mbembe reveals the reality — the lived texture of a shadow order that prices life, claims territory, and contests belief.
It is a chain that moves from intellectual realm to political reality, from the academy to the village, from theory to the lived experience of insecurity.

That relocation maps directly onto the Triad:
Kidnapping: authority over persons — the power to price safety (Money);
Banditry: authority over territory — the power to control land and production (Land);
Terrorism: authority over belief — the power to shape ideological order (Mind).
Each is sovereignty in a different domain. Together, they constitute a shadow order — extractive, territorial, ideological — without formal recognition.

Nigeria is not merely a country with a security problem. It is a state where authority is contested, extraction is normalised, and power has fragmented into rival or parallel sovereignties. In the spaces where the state recedes, these sovereignties manifest as a shadow order — one that prices safety, taxes production, and contests belief itself, levying its own rules where formal authority has withered. This is what I mean by shadow order: not just a metaphor, but a recognisable structure of parallel governance that expresses the Triad in practice.

The Definition
Building on these insights, I now offer a definitive articulation of The Insecurity Triad as I have developed it:
The Insecurity Triad is an interlocking system in which kidnapping finances violence through ransom economies (Money), banditry governs territory and production (Land), and terrorism reshapes the ideological order (Mind). It conceptualises insecurity not as isolated threats or mere state failure, but as a convergent structure of economic extraction, territorial control, and ideological influence — expressed through the dynamic, mutually reinforcing interaction of these three forces.

As I stated in The Sunday Stew last week, this is not an imported or adapted theory. It is an original analytical construction of my own, grounded in five pillars of African scholarship — Mazrui, Ake, Bayart, Reno, and Mbembe — and tested against the realities of a fracturing state.

The Macro-Diagnostic

​While The Insecurity Triad framework provides the tool to decode, map and address the crisis, I have codified the Trinity of State Decay as the diagnostic lens that reveals the ‘Big Picture.’ It explains how the Administrative Mirage and the Shadow Order interact to make the Triad possible. We will explore this next week.
Don’t miss it.

Trust is Sacred. Stay Seasoned.

Dr. Max Amuchie is the CEO of SUNDIATA POST and the developer of The Insecurity Triad Analytical Framework. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context.

X — @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 was inaugurated as Nigeria’s elected president on 29 May 2015, Muhammadu Buhari identified three priority issues for his immediate attention. In the order in which he itemized them, these were: insecurity, persistent corruption and energy. President Buhari asserted that he would tackle these “head on” and, switching mental gears into his role as the leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), promised that “Nigerians will not regret that they have entrusted national responsibility to us.” He got that wrong but let’s not get ahead of the story.

A mere 200 kilometres away, on the same day and at a similar event in Kaduna, at his inauguration as the elected governor of Kaduna State, one of Buhari’s acolytes in the same party, Nasir el-Rufai, identified insecurity as “an obstacle to progress” and promised to “work with law enforcement officials to drastically reduce violent crime” and  “insure safety of life and limb.”

By the time both men left office eight years later – one as president and the other as state governor – they had each and together managed to achieve the exact opposite. What occurred was more than mere abdication on insecurity; it felt like active conspiracy in perpetrating and perpetuating it.

Few communities felt the consequences of this like the Adara. The Adara are found in Munya and Paikoro Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Niger State as well as in Kachia (Kaduna South Senatorial Zone). In Kaduna Central, the Adara are in Chikun and Kajuru LGAs. The experience of the Adara across these state boundaries advertise the failures of government on insecurity, especially since 2015.

As Nigeria prepared for general elections in 2019, Nasir el-Rufai as governor of Kaduna State decided to abolish the Adara Chiefdom and turn it into an Emirate. The Districts and Villages Restructuring (Amendment) Order ostensibly executed by the governor on the third anniversary of his inauguration in May 2019 – with no notice to the affected populations – abolished the stool of the Adara, occupied at the time by the Agwam Adara, Dr. Raphael Maiwada Galadima. In its place, Governor el-Rufai proposed to create a Kachia Chiefdom and a Kajuru Emirate respectively. The order was not gazetted until three months later in August 2018.

Rumours of this development unsettled coexistence among ethnically diverse communities in the Adara Chiefdom. Upon learning about it, the Agwam Adara was reported to have “resisted the change due to the fact that the Adara Chiefdom is dominated by an indigenous Christian population and therefore could not be described as an emirate or appointed an Emir.”

Around 18 October 2019, murderous violence broke out in Kasuwan Magani within the Chiefdom. Over 55 persons were reportedly killed. The state governor visited the following day ostensibly to assess the situation and provide reassurance to a febrile community. The Agwam Adara was also present at the assessment by the Governor, accompanied by his wife. Later in the evening, on his way back to his palace from the events of the day along the Kaduna-Kachia Road, some “armed men intercepted the convoy of the traditional ruler and opened fire, forcing them to stop.” This happened in Maikyali village.

The attackers murdered four persons, including close-protection assets from the Nigerian Police Force attached to the Agwam Adara. They then abducted the traditional ruler with his wife. One week later, the abductors killed the Agwam Adara and “his corpse was moved to Katari, about 85 kilometres between Abuja and Kaduna, before the kidnappers contacted the family of the late chief, informing them where to pick the corpse.” The state governor was absent from his funeral.

The affected communities were not natural strongholds of the governor or his party. In what was projected to be a close contest for the control of the state, marginal shifts in voting or turnout were likely to be dispositive. What looked like a design to create maximum violence in time for the elections of 2019 became a self-fulling prophecy. As the country prepared to head to the polls, Adara-land in Kaduna Central Senatorial Zone descended into an orgy of mass atrocities.

The first reported attacks were in Anguwan Barde in the Maro Ward around 10 February 2019, resulting in the reported killing of 11 persons. The attack on Karamai village about one week later reportedly killed over 40, with many more wounded. A contemporaneous incident in ⁠Banono village in Anguwan Aku reportedly killed at least another 26.

Around the same time, Nasir el-Rufai as governor claimed publicly that “66 Fulanis” had been massacred in Kajuru. Both the Police and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) were unable to confirm this and independent fact checkers accused the governor of peddling “misleading narratives”.

One month after the first attack, Unguwan Barde would witness another attack around 11 March 2019, which killed a reported 33 persons. Around the same day, a separate incident in Dogon Noma killed over 72 persons.

In one month, between February and March 2019, the Adara Development Association, (ADA), reported over 148 community members killed or massacred with at least 545 houses destroyed in multiple incidents. The Fulani community put the casualty count among their own community at 131. In what looked like a statistical duel in human tragedy, the government was actively complicit.

In the period from the first reported attack on Anguwan Barde in February 2019 to the second week of April 2026, over 300 documented attacks or atrocity incidents occurred in the Adara communities of Kachia and Kajuru LGAs of Kaduna State, resulting in hundreds of human casualties and billions in destruction. Over 50 villages and settlements have been emptied into internal displacement.

Rather than find the perpetrators and bring them to book, the response of the government was to round up the leadership of the Adara community and lock them away in indefinite pre-trial detention for 112 days. As the Federal High Court would later find, they were consistently refused bail and were only released after the Director of Public Prosecutions found no grounds for their detention or prosecution.

The truth was to manifest five years later after the Adara leaders through the secretary-general of the ADA, Awemi Dio Maisamari, sued for civil remedies in 2024. In defence of the claim, government claimed that “the Adara Chiefdom and surrounding areas had become centres of violent crimes such as terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, armed robbery and murder, resulting in severe breakdown of law and order.” It further asserted that the scale of these atrocities “required immediate and extraordinary measures to restore peace and security.”

However, the government did not accuse the Adara leadership of having committed any of these crimes. Instead, it said, their mere existence was “prejudicial to peace” and a “significant threat to the stability of Kaduna State as a whole.”

When she eventually decided the case in May 2025, Hauwau Buhari, a judge of the Federal high Court, found as a fact that the arrest and detention of the Adara leaders was “not the result of an impartial, independent police investigation based on credible evidence of a crime, but rather stemmed from a politically motivated complaint.”

On Easter Sunday 2026, brave holdouts among the Adara in Ariko village in Kachia LGA went to church. While there, they were attacked in two different houses of worship by assailants who killed at least five and abducted over 38. Rather than deploy to rescue the victims, the government put out a false claim that they had been rescued. This reprised a similar script from January 2026 when the authorities similarly denied a deadly attack on Kurmin Wali community in which over 177 were abducted.

This past week, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has publicly claimed that in taking over from President Muhammadu Buhari in 2023, he essentially succeeded himself. It was a proud assertion of both policy and political continuity. In saying so, he asserted clear ownership of more than one decade of complicity by Nigeria’s ruling party in the use of atrocity violence for political purposes. That is not the renewed hope he promised. For the Adara People, it has been dystopia on a vampire scale.

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

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

“Too many lives hang in the balance for us to avoid an honest and intelligent debate on how this economy is being managed.”

By Pat Utomi

I was genuinely thrilled to read Sunday Dare’s response to my recent commentary on the management of the economy. Setting aside a regrettable touch of incivility, his engagement could have served as a stellar contribution to the marketplace of ideas—the very essence of a functioning democracy.

I know Sunday Dare well. For many years, he was often the one who welcomed me at the door of the Tinubu residence on Bourdillon. I have always rated him as considerably more polished than those in that orbit who are quick to descend into ad hominem barbs and base insults. Consequently, I do not mind the name-calling or the attempts at denigration; it goes with the territory of public discourse in Nigeria. More importantly, his intervention provides an opportunity to elevate the conversation on economic management with better information and a clearer context. Too many lives hang in the balance for us to avoid an honest and intelligent discussion of this matter.

“What we call stabilisation often creates the illusion of progress—freeing credit and enriching a few—while failing to deliver real, broad-based growth.”

Setting the Record Straight: A Rebuttal of Innuendo

Before returning to the core economic debate, let me dispel the predictable disinformation attempts. I remain grateful to God that, after nearly fifty years of public life, those who wish to be nasty are forced to recycle two tired references: my time at Volkswagen of Nigeria (VWoN) and my role as a Non-Executive Director on the BankPHB Board.

Consider the Volkswagen narrative. Notice that no one ever points to a single infraction I committed there. It is always an innuendo—the vague insinuation that a company I worked for failed at a later point in its history. By that logic, one might as well accuse Bola Tinubu of culpability for Mobil’s eventual exit from Nigeria. I would never say anything so intellectually dishonest. Yet this is the flimsy weapon his supporters wield whenever they are unable to offer a reasoned response.

“I began to see these so-called reforms as a Ponzi scheme of sorts—offering the appearance of vitality without building a real economy.”

It is a historical fact that virtually all motor assembly plants in Nigeria collapsed. Even if we were so uncharitable as to blame the staff on whose watch an industrialisation strategy crumbled, it is noteworthy that two German Managing Directors—Piech and Bublitz—and another Nigerian ran the company after I left, of my own volition. My thoughts on the company’s challenges before and after my joining are fully documented, including in a This Week magazine piece I wrote when headhunters approached me in 1985. In my book To Serve is to Live, I described my move to VWoN as a result of being “whitemailed.” The record is clear.

As for BankPHB, where I served as a Non-Executive Director—often on a leave of absence while running for public office—it is telling that the same smear campaign never targets the actual Chairman of the Board, Kola Abiola, or esteemed figures like Akin Kekere-Ekun. This selective outrage reveals a desperation to find something unpleasant about those who speak truth to power. Other directors who were far more involved in daily operations have gone on to occupy larger roles in the industry, a testament to the fact that governance could not have been the caricature some paint. The conclusion is obvious: they simply cannot find anything of substance. It takes grace to operate in the manner I have been privileged to do. To God be the glory.

The Core Issue: Stabilisation or Ponzi Scheme?

What truly seems to have gotten under Sunday Dare’s skin is my characterisation of certain economic stabilisation reforms as a “Ponzi scheme of sorts.”

“When arguments fail, innuendo becomes the refuge—but Nigeria deserves better than recycled smears.”

Perhaps Sunday forgets easily. If memory serves, he was present at a programme organised by Alim Abubakar at Oxford University over a dozen years ago. I was on the faculty. Had he been in my class for all the presentations, he would have heard me use those exact words even back then.

Let me be clear: I supported the Washington Consensus and Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The promise then was that the pain would precede the gain. I even employed the J-curve to explain the lag between policy implementation and economic results.

“We cannot afford distractions; the future of millions depends on getting economic policy right.”

However, the reality I observed was starkly different. I watched a select few become fabulously wealthy through financial-sector reforms and privatisation, yet sustainable, broad-based growth never materialised. Reading Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s critique of the IMF as a debt collector for Wall Street banks—and witnessing firsthand how SAP decimated our education and healthcare systems, the very bedrock of human capital development—forced a reckoning. I began to see such stabilisation outcomes as akin to a Ponzi scheme: they free up frozen credit lines and create an illusion of market vitality, but they offer little in terms of genuine entrepreneurship stimulation or frameworks for making markets work efficiently.

“A functioning democracy demands ideas, not insults.”

As a personal initiative, I began teaching Entrepreneurship at the Lagos Business School and collaborated with colleagues at Harvard Business School to design a course on Making Markets Work. By contrast, stabilisation programmes naively assumed that markets would naturally follow liberalisation, ignoring the lessons of strategic industrial policy in Asia. We ended up as the world’s poverty capital, having missed the growth those policies promised. A few months ago, BusinessDay published extracts from a book I am currently writing on this very subject.

More Reflective / Statesman Tone

“To watch Nigeria repeat the same economic mistakes is painful; to see those who should know better refuse to learn is even more troubling.”

When the Asian Financial Crisis erupted in 1997, I embedded myself in Malaysia and Indonesia and was present at the World Bank Annual Meetings in Hong Kong, where the ideological battle came to a head. My op-ed in The Guardian, written from Jakarta in October 1997 and titled ‘The End of Anwar Ibrahim,’ should still be available for those who care to educate themselves. I suspect Sunday Dare would be even more shaken if he were to read Bad Samaritans by the South Korean-born Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang.

To be alive and watch Nigeria repeat the same mistakes is painful. To see individuals like Sunday, who have the background to interrogate these ideas more effectively, resort to abuse instead of learning is profoundly discouraging.

Having made the basic point, I welcome a rigorous debate on this matter with anyone. I promise to turn the other cheek to any further insults. Freeing our children from the road to serfdom is a cause worth being insulted for.

Pat Utomi
Founder, Centre For Values in Leadership

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

This is the fourth time that I have written on this same subject, civic incompetence and danger of complacency even as we lament daily about the illusion called ‘dividends of democracy.’ I have written and spoken to this same theme under different titles. One of the titles has been on the danger of ignoring PVC as a weapon of mass destruction of corrupt leadership. I have had to return to this same subject at this time because we are on the march again. The race for 2027 has even taken the steam out of the need to protect the people who should vote in 2027. What is urgent is this: understanding the times. Yes a time to understand that we should not bow to the shenanigans an peccadilloes of the our dealers, sorry leaders, currently distracting us from paying attention to what we need to do to take back our country through #Project 2027.

In the next ten months, we will certainly face the consequences of our electoral choices. And here exactly is the thing, unless we wake up now from our usual complacency, after the 2027 elections, we may return to reading from another book of lamentation. Yes, we have been complaining about the 16 years that the locusts ate through the PDP from 1999-2015. We may be lamenting at the moment that the last ten years under the ruling APC have been unspeakably harrowing. We may have been wondering why democracy hasn’t delivered much good to us other than some form of freedom in the last 27 years. We can justifiably claim that democracy has become less participatory since 1999 with poor voter turnout even in off-season elections.

Fellow Nigerians, this isn’t a time for questions and lamentation. Let me restate this: lamentation isn’t a strategy for change. This time of anomie is indeed a time for actionable reflection on where the rain actually began and the rainmakers. It isn’t a time for complacency the artful enemies of democracy want to use against our great country again. It is a time to look out for our voter cards or register for new ones. Yes get ready to look for where we can vote again if we want democracy to work for our common good. Lest we forget, this is not a time to ask why a section of the country isn’t lamenting over collection of PVCs while a section is agonising over difficulties in registering and collecting. We may not want to ask now why political leaders and politicians who are feeding fat from our complacency aren’t mobilising people to register to vote and keep their cards for elections.

And so before we rush to the media after the next elections to shake the tables about how INEC allegedly manipulated the elections and how some powerful forces destroyed the opposition parties to achieve that, let the people, especially the youths heed the call made by INEC the other day that they should take advantage of a new window for registration to possess voter cards. Let’s encourage ourselves in the new call. An ancient word warns us that if we consider the weather, we will not sow. Let’s not sit down without considering the danger of assumptions that INEC Chairman has concluded the 2027 elections outcome because of his current challenge with ADC leadership tussle. Yes, Let us defeat the congenital election riggers who have brought reproach to our country through rigged leadership recruitment processes. First, let us defeat these powerful vote buyers and sellers by conquering voter apathy, a deadly malaise power mongers would readily celebrate.

It is a time for participation. Please, don’t sell your PVC. Don’t destroy your PVC because of the present state of the nation. Some evil people who want our sufferings to continue are already buying PVCs for #Project 2027. It is evil but note the immediate consequence of your complacency: the buyers in your area know that they just want to kill support for your preferred candidates. They can’t use your PVC to vote in the real sense of it. Let’s consider the following data to galvanise ourselves to action on the power that PVCs can give or lose.

A whopping 6.7 million PVCs were not collected across 17 states and the nation’s capital as of January 4, 2023. With about five weeks before the presidential/National Assembly ballots on February 25. This is a huge figure. As of December 29, 2022, estimated 1,693,963 PVCs remained uncollected in Lagos State alone. PVC collection suffered a similar fate in other states. It was gratifying to note then that some people in Lagos were even paying to collect their PVCs at the time, just to defeat self-disenfranchisement. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had then opened the collection windows on December 12. That exercise was rounded off on January 22. As INEC was reiterating then, any registrant without PVC would not be allowed to vote in the 2023 polls, as only the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS) would be used.

Let’s refocus on our data board: For 2023, INEC’s register contained 93.4 million names, up from the 82.3 million in 2019. Many did not collect their PVCs then. The outcome was that just 28.6 million or 35 per cent voted in the 2019 presidential election. Interpretation: The percentage (35%) means that the 2019 winner of the presidential election was not truly representative of the whole voters. Researchers have established that apart from Zimbabwe’s 1996 presidential ballot that recorded a voter turnout of 32.3 per cent, Nigeria’s 2019 presidential election is the second lowest in recent elections in Africa. That trend trumped the 2020’s off-season National Assembly and Governorship elections. Among others, the Lagos East senatorial election scored a turnout of 10 per cent in 2020.

This dismal trend was also at play in the governorship ballot in Edo State in 2020, which recorded a turnout of 24.22 per cent; the Ondo governorship polls (2020) had 31.6 per cent voter turnout; Anambra in November 2021 recorded 10.38 per cent; Ekiti State in June 2022 had 36.5 per cent; and Osun State in July 2022 recorded 42.16 per cent. The recent Area Council election in Abuja reportedly recorded 7.5% voter turnout. This is tainting our democracy.

Would you remember the outcome of the 2023 presidential election in this same Lagos where some unknown registrants were paying to collect their PVCs? It was official: the current President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the man called Mr. Lagos didn’t win presidential election (in Lagos) where Labour Party defeated him. He also didn’t win in the nation’s capital, Abuja. This same INEC conducted the elections in Lagos and Abuja in 2023. Before I hear your scream that Citizen Amupitan has already written the 2027 elections result and kept them in Black Scorpion Nyesom’s armoured safe in London, let’s defeat voter apathy first.

As I have done several times here, I would like to join concerned citizens in encouraging the young ones, who are angry with the present ruling class and the power elite in the country to organise instead of agonising. I have been reading some views of some young Nigerians who daily haul insults at some elders who dare to accuse them of lack of organisational ability in their quest for change. I would like to appeal to the angry elders too on the need to spare the rods against the youth at this time for some specific reasons. One, I believe that some of our youths too have been remarkably inspired by so many unethical behaviours they have found in us, (their elders).

Therefore, instead of castigating our young ones as worthless, we should advise them to come out of the social media cocoon, and fight to register and collect their voter cards. We need to tell them about the power they have to change their present condition through their PVCs. The young unemployed graduates need to know that poor and clueless political leadership that enhances poverty in the land begins with election processes. And the only specific exercise that can change that is participation (in the processes). They also need to know that the powers that have held Nigeria down, stunted our growth would not want to encourage them to vote. They know how they have been winning elections without votes. That is why they don’t want electronic voting, real time transmission of results and their concomitant gains.  

This is a time to mobilise all the good people of Nigeria who have not been spoilt by the sustainable prejudices – to adopt many young Nigerians into collecting vital data about this country that needs urgent redemption. This is a time to know that social media noises don’t deliver victory to preferred candidates. That is again why the youth should come out of their shell, collect their ‘weapons of mass destruction’ called PVCs to vote out all these workers of iniquity including most of the audacious scoundrels in the nation’s parliament. 

Our younger ones need to understand that it isn’t only the presidential and governorship elections that matter. The most important institution in any democracy is the parliament. That is where the power to check executive rascality and excesses resides. That is also where the treasury can be safeguarded for the common good.

We shouldn’t have a mindset that it won’t be easy to displace a ruthless political class in a country whose oil(y) corporation has produced so many wealthy men without work. We should believe that it is possible to overthrow them through a free and fair election we should fight for. The clarion call is: don’t be afraid of their ‘war chest’ (their big election budget). Your PVCs, which are more powerful, shall make a way for us. We need to heed the warning of U.S former President Barack Obama that, “elections have consequences”.

But the young and good but complacent people should note that this is not a time to denounce the country and its electoral processes that have discouraged millions of voters. This is why the locusts always returned to eat our future. Therefore, here is the real thing: those who have not obtained their permanent voter cards after registering should stop complaining: They should obtain their PVCs today as the bombs we need early next year to blast these heartless rulers out of power. But what we should wear as a badge of honour now is the nugget below, which trended across platforms in June 2022. God bless the author I don’t know.

“Your PVC is not just a means of identity to open new bank account. It is actually a priceless weapon that you must use to fight for your life. Therefore, create time to visit the INEC office in your location, register and collect your card. Hurry now, obtain your PVC today and begin to see it as a powerful tool that must be used. If you are too busy to register or too big to vote, just remember that you are not too big to be ruled by thugs…”
This is what we should cast on a marble at home from today. Let’s stop lamenting and note that there are no polling stations on Twitter, Facebook, Tik-Tok, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc, lest we will regret our complacency the day after May 29, 2027.

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