Lasisi Olagunju’s Monday Lines, titled “Northern Nigeria will soon kill Nigeria”, is a powerful piece. It is angry, lyrical, wounded, and in several places painfully true. No honest Nigerian should deny the scale of banditry, insurgency, mass abductions, rural terror, poverty, educational collapse, and elite failure in large parts of Northern Nigeria. To deny that reality is to lie against the blood of the dead and the tears of the living.
Yet a powerful argument can still suffer from a dangerous intellectual laziness or worst still double think. A bitter truth can still be carried in a poisoned cup. That, for me, is the trouble with Olagunju’s article. It begins by asking Nigeria to diagnose its illness honestly, but ends up flirting with the old disease of regional indictment. It asks us to name the source of violence, which is fair. Then it stretches the charge until a whole region begins to look like the only accused person standing in the dock.
Much as I hate to be dragged into senseless ethnic, tribal, regional and religious altercation, one must still say this. The constitutional responsibility for protecting the lives and property of innocent citizens rests squarely on the Commander in Chief and the Nigerian state. And at present we know who he is, where he comes from and the language he speaks.
Bandits may emerge from forests, but the duty to prevent, confront, degrade, arrest, prosecute, and defeat them belongs to the government. No columnist should be allowed to transfer that burden from the state to an entire region, as if ordinary northerners, many of whom are victims themselves, command the army, control intelligence, supervise borders, fund security operations, or direct the police.
That is the first contradiction in the argument. The article condemns denial, and rightly so, but it almost denies the central role of leadership failure. It speaks of the North as if it were one living creature with one mind, one will, one guilt, and one intention. But who is this North? Is it the child in Zamfara who has never seen a functional classroom? Is it the woman in Katsina whose husband was killed on his farm? Is it the displaced family in Borno? Is it the poor almajiri roaming streets created by policy failure? Is it the soldier from Kano dying in the bush? Is it the teacher in Niger State whose school has become a target? Is it the cleric who speaks against violence at personal risk? Or is it the politician who weaponised poverty for votes and now pretends to be shocked by the harvest?
To call all of them “the North” and then place the burden of Nigeria’s collapse on their collective head is not diagnosis. It is over simplification. And simplification, be it over or under, is often the first cousin of injustice.
There is also a curious intellectual hypocrisy in seeing nothing good from the same region one has chosen to indict. If the North is to be blamed collectively for the crimes of bandits, will it also be credited collectively for the industrial contributions of northerners who built businesses that employ Nigerians across regions? Aliko Dangote and AbdulSamad Isiyaku Rabiu are northerners. Their companies have created thousands of jobs for Nigerians, many of them southerners. Some of their largest industrial footprints are located in the South, including the Dangote Refinery and petrochemical complex in Lagos and BUA’s major cement investment in Edo State. These enterprises pay huge taxes. Dangote Group reported paying over N402 billion in taxes in 2024! Let that sink for a moment. Not only that, but support supply chains, engage contractors, transporters, technicians, engineers, casual workers, vendors, and professionals across the country.
If ethnic blame is to be allocated, shall ethnic credit also be allocated? If the sins of criminals from a region are to be charged to the whole region, will the productivity of industrialists from that region also be counted as a northern contribution to southern prosperity? The logic must be consistent, or it is not logic at all. It is a vernomous ethnic jingoism wearing the gown of analysis.
The truth is simpler and harder. In every tribe, every region, every religion, and every ethnicity, there are the good, the bad, and the ugly elements. There are builders and destroyers. There are patriots and parasites. There are reformers and reactionaries. There are those who open factories and those who burn villages. There are those who teach children and those who abduct them. There are those who heal wounds and those who profit from blood. To see nothing good in an entire region is not courage. Repeat: it is ethnic jingoism dressed as public commentary.
But Lasisi Olagunju is right that Northern Nigeria has become the major theatre of Nigeria’s gravest security challenge. That fact should not be sugar coated. The North West, North East, and parts of North Central have suffered and even exported waves of insecurity. Banditry, terrorism, cattle rustling, kidnapping, illegal mining related violence, farmer herder conflict, and mass displacement have found fertile ground there. The out of school children crisis is also more severe in the region. Poverty is deeper. Governance is not just weaker but virtually non existing in many rural corridors. The forests are poorly governed. The borders are porous. Local elites have too often lived on the misery of their own people.
But to say these things honestly is different from saying Northern Nigeria is the Nigeria’s enemy. That phrase is not only unfair. It is politically reckless. A region is not an enemy. A failed system is. Bad leadership is an enemy. Corruption is an enemy. Violent extremism is an enemy. Poverty weaponised by politicians is an enemy. A state that cannot protect children can be an enemy of its own constitutional promise. But a region, with millions of innocent people, cannot be reduced to a monster simply because monsters operate within it.
At the heart of Nigeria’s crisis is leadership failure. This is the wound Olagunju touches but does not cut deeply enough. The Nigerian system is so rotten and crude that it often gives the inept, the clueless, the corrupt, and the incompetent an easy ride to power. It rewards noise over knowledge, loyalty over competence, tribe over capacity, cash over character, and manipulation over merit. Such a system cannot produce security merely by shouting “North” or “South”. It will produce decay everywhere, only in different costumes.
In the North, decay may wear the face of banditry. In the South, it may wear the face of _Yahoo-Yahoo_, oil theft, cult violence, kidnapping, ritual killings, separatist militancy, urban crime, land grabbing, electoral violence, political thuggery, drug lords and economic sabotage. The manifestations differ, but the parentage is often the same. Weak institutions. Inept, Corrupt and incompetent leadership. Abandoned youth. Broken schools. Captured or compromised security systems. A justice system that moves like an aged and tired tortoise when the poor are victims, but like Iranian missiles landing in Tel Aviv and Haifa when the powerful are threatened.
The Nigerian state has failed in its most basic constitutional responsibility. That duty is not solliloquising with presidential nation’s address. It is protection. A government that cannot secure school children has no moral right to lecture citizens on patritism. A government that cannot explain how a kidnapped General died and how his corpse returned has no right to hide behind sweet talks. A government that allows bandits to negotiate from the forest as if they were a parallel authority has already surrendered part of its sovereignty. The shame is not northern alone. It is Nigerian.
The Commander in Chief must be held to account. State governors must be held to account. Security chiefs must be held to account. Clerics who speak softly when their voices should thunder must be held to account. Community leaders who shield criminals must be held to account. Politicians who use insecurity as bargaining capital must be held to account. This is how serious nations diagnose disease. They do not curse geography and then go home satisfied.
The North needs reform, no doubt. It needs an educational revolution. It needs to rescue millions of children from the streets, from ignorance, from hunger, from clerical exploitation, from political manipulation, and from the false romance of violence. It needs jobs, skills, rural roads, modern agriculture, policing, local intelligence, credible justice, and moral leadership. It needs religious authorities who will say clearly that kidnapping, ransom taking, murder, forced recruitment, and terror financing are crimes before God and man. It needs political leaders who are⁰ not afraid of losing reelection because they told their people the truth or truth to power.
But Nigeria also needs a national system that stops breeding bad managers of public affairs. That is the root. We cannot keep producing incompetent leadership and then act surprised when incompetence produces catastrophe. We cannot run elections like auctions and expect saints to emerge from the counting room. We cannot turn public office into private investment and expect public service to survive. We cannot allow ill prepared men to occupy powerful offices and then blame forests when the state collapses into those forests.
Olagunju’s anger is understandable. Many Nigerians are angry. The families of abducted children are angry. The victims of banditry are angry. Farmers who cannot reach their farms are angry. Traders who pay illegal levies to armed men are angry. Soldiers fighting without adequate equipment are angry. Communities abandoned to terror are angry. Anger, in such a situation, is not a crime. It is an evidence that the conscience is still alive.
But anger must be disciplined by fairness, objectivity and balanced analysis If not, it becomes another weapon. The North must confront its demons, yes. But Nigeria must confront the system that keeps producing demons in every region. The North must answer hard questions. But the Nigerian state must answer harder ones. Who allowed the forests to become governments? Who allowed schools to become hunting grounds? Who negotiates with killers? Who profits from insecurity budgets? Who supplies arms? Who launders ransom money? Who protects informants? Who turns poverty into political capital? Who keeps winning elections while citizens keep dying?
Those are the questions we must ask if we are serious.
The danger confronting Nigeria has an address, yes. But it has more than one address. It lives in the forest, but also in government houses. It hides in rural camps, but also in inept leadership. It carries guns, but also carries official titles. It speaks through kidnappers, but also through abandoned schools, ghost projects, compromised security reports, and elections that reward the worst among us.
Nigeria will not be saved by blaming the North. Nigeria will not be saved by defending the North blindly either. The North must be told the truth. The South must be told the truth. The presidency must be told the truth. The governors must be told the truth. The truth is that Nigeria is being eaten by a leadership culture that has lost shame out of what remains of its conscienve. Until that culture is defeated, every region will continue to produce its own version of collapse.
So let us diagnose properly. Northern insecurity is real. Northern elite failure is real. Northern poverty is real. Northern educational collapse is real. But the deeper national disease is a corrupt leadership recruitment system that keeps handing power to those least prepared to use it for the common good.
That is the cage. That is the string. If Nigeria wants to escape, it must stop pretending that the cage is only in the North. It is everywhere the wrong people are lifted into power, everywhere institutions are weakened, everywhere justice is traded, everywhere competence is mocked, and everywhere citizens are abandoned until they become victims or threats.
The North will not kill Nigeria alone. Bad leadership will. A rotten system willy. Cowardice willy. Corruption will. Ethnic hatred will. And the tragedy is that all of them already live among us._Shogo!? Ookaaay. Toh, Allam majare akoba_