There is an old story, told in the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel, of a king who threw a feast while his city was quietly being surrounded. In the middle of the banquet, a hand appeared and wrote four strange words on the plaster of the wall. The king’s face went pale — not because he understood the message, but because some part of him knew it was a verdict. By morning, Babylon had fallen.

I have been thinking about that story a great deal lately, because Nigeria has become very good at feasting in front of warnings it refuses to read.

The panic in our country today is unlike anything in recent memory. And with social media, every tremor is amplified a hundredfold — bad news travels at the speed of a forwarded video, while the slow, patient work of reassurance never trends. What we are living through is not just insecurity. It is the feeling of insecurity — the uncertainty, the distrust, the creeping bigotry — metastasising faster than the violence itself. That feeling is now more pronounced than it was a year ago, or two years ago. Something has shifted in this decade, and we can all sense it.

The mass abduction in Ogbomosho has dragged into the open a fear many of us had quietly buried: that what we believed could never happen here, has happened here.

What actually happened in Oriire

On the morning of Friday, 15 May 2026, at around 9:30 a.m., armed men on motorcycles rode into the Ahoro-Esiele and Yawota axis of Oriire Local Government Area in Oyo State and attacked three schools almost simultaneously — a community grammar school, a Baptist nursery and primary school, and an L.A. primary school. By the time they melted back into the forest, they had killed an assistant headmaster and a commercial motorcyclist on the spot, and carried away seven teachers along with a still-uncertain number of pupils, some of them as young as five.

Days later, the country was forced to watch what we should never have had to watch. A video surfaced of one of the abducted teachers — a mathematics teacher — murdered in captivity. His family, in their grief, had to beg Nigerians to stop circulating the footage of his death. Governor Seyi Makinde confirmed the killing. President Tinubu called it barbaric and ordered a technology-driven rescue. The Inspector-General visited. A police zonal headquarters was physically relocated to Ogbomosho to coordinate the operation.

And still the violence did not pause for our outrage. Within days, gunmen seized two officials from the old Cocoa Research Institute compound near Ibadan, and not long before, forest guards had been killed at a national park station in the same belt. This was not a single tragedy. It was a front opening.

For generations, the South West told itself a comforting story: banditry was a Northern problem. Boko Haram was a North-East affliction. The herder-farmer killings belonged to the Middle Belt. We watched it all from inside a cocoon, maintaining a studied, almost aristocratic aloofness — government most of all — and in that comfort we failed to read the handwriting on the wall. What we feared most is now upon us, and we were caught napping.

The handwriting, as I read it, comes in two parts: a historical warning and a contemporary one.

Part One: The Historical Warning

Here is a pattern I want you to sit with, because it is uncomfortable and, I believe, instructive. For almost every major rupture in Nigeria’s national life, the fuse was lit in the South West.

Walk with me down memory lane.

The first coup of 15–16 January 1966 did not emerge from nowhere. Its immediate kindling was the chaos in the old Western Region, the infamous “Operation Wetie,” the season of arson and street violence that grew out of the bitter rivalry between Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Ladoke Akintola. The region split along personality lines, the Federal Government threw its weight behind the Akintola faction, and the West descended into ungovernable disorder. That disorder did not stay local. It snowballed into the counter-coup, and ultimately into a civil war that cost more than a million lives.

Then there is June 12. The annulment of the 1993 presidential election, won by Chief MKO Abiola, a son of Abeokuta in the South West, set off a chain reaction that reshaped the republic: nationwide protests and strikes, the “stepping aside” of military president Ibrahim Babangida, an Interim National Government under Chief Ernest Shonekan, the palace coup by General Sani Abacha, and the dark years of Hamza al-Mustapha and the dreaded Strike Force. It took the deaths of both Abacha and Abiola, weeks apart in 1998, for the establishment to finally concede a transition to civil rule, the very Fourth Republic we live under today.

Now contrast that with everything else. The Maitatsine uprisings in the North. The Niger Delta militancy in the South-South. The long Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East. The IPOB agitation in the South-East. The herder-farmer bloodletting in the North-Central. Each one horrific. Each one consequential. And yet none of them, on its own, has ever shaken the foundations of the Nigerian state the way a South-Western crisis has.

I am not claiming mysticism here. The reason is structural, not spiritual. The South West sits at the centre of the country’s media, commercial and political gravity. When it convulses, the whole nation feels the tremor; when the periphery bleeds, the centre too often looks away. That is precisely why the periphery has bled for so long with so little consequence — and precisely why what is now happening in Oyo should terrify the people in power far more than they are letting on. The handwriting has reached the wall they cannot pretend not to see.

Part Two: The Contemporary Warning

If you have followed the military’s campaign in the North-East and North-West with any seriousness, you know the cost has been staggering. The Multinational Joint Task Force, the Chadian army, and our own troops have pommelled Boko Haram, ISWAP and the bandit networks at a terrible price in blood. I do not write this as an abstraction. I lost a dear cousin in one of those operations, and he was one of many who never came home. So let me say plainly what some commentators say carelessly: this war is real, and it is being fought by real men who die for the rest of us.

But here is the lesson that flows from those sacrifices, and it is a lesson in physics as much as in security. When you squeeze a balloon, the air does not disappear. It moves.

Sustained military pressure does not vaporise armed groups. It displaces them. And these are men who have been migrating for a generation already — the long arc of jihadist displacement runs from Afghanistan and Syria, through Libya, down into Niger, and into Nigeria, leaving wreckage at every stop. Hunted out of one sanctuary, they look for the next.

This is not my private theory. In March 2026, SBM Intelligence reported that bandit networks broken up by operations in Zamfara and Katsina were already pushing into new ground, including parts of Kano and — crucially — probing the South-West corridor. Their warning was blunt: military gains in one zone routinely shove armed groups into previously calm ones. And after the Ogbomosho attack, the Defence Headquarters itself stated that the perpetrators were displaced Boko Haram fighters pushed south by the very offensives we have been celebrating.

So follow the displaced fighter’s logic, because it is colder and more rational than we like to admit. He cannot go South-East — that is a cauldron of military-IPOB confrontation. The Middle Belt is already saturated, a live theatre of herder-farmer war. So where does the water find its level? It flows toward the South West.

And the trajectory of chaos is legible if you bother to trace it:

• June 2022 — Owo, Ondo State. Gunmen disguised as worshippers attacked St. Francis Catholic Church on Pentecost Sunday, detonating explosives and opening fire, killing at least 40 people — children among them — in an attack later attributed to ISWAP. Security analysts at the time noted the attackers had come from elsewhere, into one of Nigeria’s most peaceful states. With hindsight, Owo reads like a testing of the waters.
• Early 2026 — Kwara State. In the villages of Woro and Nuku, militants killed well over 160 people in a single two-day massacre and abducted dozens, reportedly after residents refused to submit to their version of Sharia. The frontier had crept to the Yoruba-speaking edge of Kwara.
• May 2026 — Ogbomosho. And now the marauders are inside the old heartland, doing in broad daylight what we swore was impossible.

Can you see the pattern? Can you see the trajectory? Owo, then Kwara, then Oriire. The water has been finding its level for four years, and we kept telling ourselves the floor was dry.

The Numbers We Looked Away From

If the displacement thesis feels too neat, let the figures speak for themselves — because the warning was written in data long before it was written in Oyo.

Between 2023 and May 2025, by one widely cited account, at least 10,217 people were killed by armed groups across northern Nigeria, most of them women and children. In an earlier window, 2018 to 2020, armed banditry alone accounted for some 4,900 deaths and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons. And in November 2025, in a single month, more than 402 people — most of them schoolchildren — were abducted across four North-Central states, a mass kidnapping that, by sheer scale, surpassed the Chibok abduction of 2014 that once horrified the entire world.

Read that last sentence again. We have now normalised, in a single month, a kidnapping larger than Chibok. The thing that defined a national trauma a decade ago is now a Tuesday. We are now inured to people dying like fleas and we are not as much bothered about it.

The handwriting was not faint. It was written in ten thousand graves. We simply chose not to read it.

The Questions That Demand Answers

So the central question is not what do we do now. It is: how was any of this a surprise?

Was the southward drift genuinely invisible to our intelligence and security establishment — the same establishment that produces the very reports that analysts read openly? Were the state governments truly unaware of a pattern that private firms published months in advance? Had no one noticed the migration on the ground?

Because that brings me to the part of this story that is hardest to write honestly.

The Exodus We Refused to Count

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of observation that gets twisted into something ugly, and I refuse to traffic in that.

In my own area, the number of non-indigent okada riders — commercial motorcyclists — has roughly tripled in two years. I have seen numerous riders in places I had never seen them before, in parts of Ijebu Ode and Ibadan, arriving in numbers that simply did not exist a short while ago. Many are young men, freshly arrived, looking unkempt, rough, riding with a recklessness that makes a passenger’s hair stand on end.

Now, here is the line I will not cross. The issue is not their ethnicity, their region of origin, their appearance, or their command of English. To make it about that would be both morally wrong and analytically lazy — and it would let the actual culprits, the people we elected, off the hook. The vast majority of these young men are simply chasing a living, as the poor have always done.

The real issue — the governance failure hiding underneath the prejudice — is this: nobody knows who is moving, where, or why, because no one is keeping count. There is no registration. No vetting. No record. A population large enough to triple a local transport workforce can relocate across the country and the state apparatus has no idea who came, when, or with what intent. That is not a story about migrants. That is a story about a state that has stopped governing its own territory — from the governor’s office down through the local-government chairman to the ward councillor, the tiers of authority that sit closest to the street and are likeliest to notice a new face, and the very ones who have noticed nothing at all.

A handful of saboteurs, scouts and informants hidden inside an unregistered, untracked mass movement is not a paranoid fantasy; it is, by the Defence Headquarters’ own account, roughly how the killers reached Ogbomosho. The answer to that is not suspicion of strangers. The answer is a state that actually knows its own people — through proper identification, residency records, and real intelligence work — so that the law-abiding majority are protected and the few bad actors among them have nowhere to hide. We have neither, and so we have the worst of both worlds: the innocent are profiled, and the guilty walk free.

The Way Forward

It would be easy to end this where the anger ends, at the doorstep of the marauders. But buck-passing is a luxury we can no longer afford, and the marauders are a symptom, not the disease.

Some hard questions belong squarely to our South-Western governors and by extension, all State governors. What, precisely, has been done with the security votes — those opaque, unaudited sums that vanish into the office of every governor each month in the name of security? What was done with the intelligence that was available, if it was acted upon at all? But the questions cannot stop at the governor’s gate. They run all the way down the ladder — to the local-government chairmen, the state house of assembly members, and the ward councillors who sit closest to the people and ought to know every new face on their street. What, exactly, have any of them been doing? Have they applied themselves to thinking, and to thinking creatively — not about how to corner the next allocation or win the next election, but about how to make the lives of the people they govern safer and better? Have our leaders, at every tier from the statehouse to the council ward, been proactive about security, or merely reactive — convening emergency meetings only after the children are already in the forest, rushing Amotekun to the borders only once the bandits are already inside them?

Because that is the ritual we keep repeating: alarm, outrage, an emergency security meeting, a flurry of border patrols, a presidential condemnation — and then silence, until it is the next town’s turn. We are forever bolting the stable after the horse has fled.

And now, in the wake of Ogbomosho, the President has renewed his call for state police, urging the National Assembly to fast-track the enabling law. It is the loudest prescription in the room, and I will be honest: I do not share the enthusiasm for it. My hesitation is not with the diagnosis but with the cure. Handing each of our thirty-six governors command of an armed, uniformed police force is a profound concentration of coercive power — and we already live in a polity where incumbents weaponise the institutions they control. Picture that same force during a contested election, or turned on a troublesome journalist, a rival’s rally, a stubborn local council. The bandits, God willing, will be beaten back in a season or two; a governor’s private police force would not disband when they did. It would harden into a permanent feature of our politics. The real danger is that the remedy outlasts and outweighs the disease, and until our institutions are mature enough to restrain that kind of power, I would rather we did not hand it over.

So if the answer is neither the over-centralised federal police that has plainly failed nor thirty-six governors each with a private army, what remains is the difficult middle — and its shape has already been sketched, including in a sharp four-point thread by @mobilisingniger on X. It is worth building on, because each piece leads into the next.

It begins with fighting as a region rather than as six islands. The South-West states — together with Kwara, which sits on the frontier — should mount genuinely joint security operations, pooling intelligence and assets across state lines, with the better-resourced states (Lagos foremost, with its capacity for air support and logistics) carrying more of the common defence. Bandits do not respect state boundaries; the response should not either. The instrument to do that already exists, and we do not need to invent a new one: empower Amotekun, but standardise it through the Office of the National Security Adviser. Rather than letting the outfits drift into thirty-six private armies, they should be reviewed, retrained and regulated under the ONSA, which would then authorise a graduated, accountable upgrade to their weapons. That threads the needle — real capability and local knowledge on the ground, with federal coordination keeping it honest. It is worth remembering that Amotekun was itself born from exactly this threat — the earlier influx of armed pastoralists into the region — so the tool is already in our hands. It simply needs teeth and discipline in equal measure.

From there, follow the money and cut off its supply. Much of the financing — and the physical cover — for these armed groups now runs through Nigeria’s sprawl of ungoverned, illegal mining sites; shutting them down, and keeping them shut under strict state and federal monitoring, drains a reservoir the bandits depend on. You cannot win a war while quietly bankrolling the enemy. And finally, treat the collaborators as exactly what they are. The informants, the scouts, the fixers, the sympathisers who feed and shelter terror are not bystanders, and the law should stop pretending otherwise — aiding terror is terror. This is where the whole argument rejoins my Fifth Column series, because the collaborator is the fifth column in its oldest and most literal form.

The phrase itself was born in war: during the Spanish Civil War, General Emilio Mola, advancing on Madrid with four columns of troops, boasted that he had a “fifth column” already inside the city — sympathisers “whose sabotage, propaganda, and betrayal would weaken Madrid before a single bullet was fired.” That is not a metaphor for Ogbomosho; it is a literal description of it. The deadliest enemies, as I wrote in that series, are not always the loudest — they are “the ones who wear our colours, speak our language, attend our churches and mosques, and pledge loyalty in broad daylight while quietly weakening the very foundations of the country they claim to love.” A foreign army did not open the gates of Oriire. Neighbours did. Which is why intelligence has to be treated as prevention rather than post-mortem — the patient, well-resourced work of acting on a pattern before the bodies arrive, not after.

Yet rifles, regional outfits and even good intelligence will not, on their own, win this. There are three more fronts, and they are fought not with weapons but with information, political will, and unity.

The first is the information war, because we are no longer only fighting men with guns; we are fighting men with phones. In the Fifth Column series I described the “social media battalions,” the spectrum of saboteurs that runs from the genuinely misled to the fully conscious actors who “weaponize outrage and misinformation for profit, engagement and virality”. For these last ones, “virality is the goal” — they know fear spreads faster than facts, and that a manufactured panic pays better than a quiet truth. When someone fabricates an attack that never happened, recycles an old massacre as breaking news, or stokes an ethnic fire purely to harvest impressions, that is not free speech — it is arson with a keyboard, and it gets people killed. There should be real legal consequence for the deliberate spread of falsehood meant to incite violence or panic. But — and I say this as a writer who has spent years advocating for good governance — that authority must be drawn with surgical care. The line runs between demonstrable, malicious falsehood and incitement on one side, and honest criticism, satire and dissent on the other; our own recent history is full of governments reaching for “fake news” and cybercrime laws to muzzle journalists and ordinary critics, and a law that silences dissent is a cure worse than the disease. Prosecute the arsonist, yes — but through independent courts, against a narrow and clearly defined offence, never as a blank cheque for the state to decide which truths its citizens may speak.

The second front is the financing above the foot soldiers. Bandits do not manufacture their own rifles, and terror does not fund itself; somebody buys the weapons, launders the ransoms, greases the safe passage, and looks away at the convenient moment. For years Nigerians have watched foot soldiers paraded before cameras while the financiers and political godfathers behind them stay untouchable. As I argued in the series, no insurgency thrives without internal allies who “create the cracks through which external influence flows” — and for a certain breed of our political class, chaos has always been a profitable strategy. The government must find the spine to follow the money all the way to its source and prosecute the sponsors, however highly placed. Until the men who fund the fire face the same justice as the men who light it, we are merely trimming weeds and leaving the roots in the ground.

The third front is the ground we are about to walk onto: 2027. An election year arrives carrying every incentive to weaponise this insecurity — to tribalise it, to convert a national tragedy into ammunition for one camp against another. We have seen this film before; I have written about how we are tempted to vote our identities instead of our interests and to reward the merchants of division. Government has a duty here that runs beyond security: to lead, loudly and consistently, in cooling ethnic and religious sentiment rather than fanning it for advantage. And it must communicate — quickly, factually, without spin — its genuine wins and the true state of operations on the ground. Not propaganda; information. Because nature abhors a vacuum, and where credible official information is absent, the fabricators and the naysayers rush in to write the story for us. The antidote to disinformation is not punishment alone; it is a state that tells its people the truth faster than the liars can invent one.ature abhors a vacuum, and where credible official information is absent, the fabricators and the naysayers rush in to write the story for us. The antidote to disinformation is not punishment alone — it is a state that tells its people the truth faster than the liars can invent one.

The Battle We Must Win

There is a thread that runs through everything I have written about this country, and I will not abandon it here. The state will not save a people who have outsourced their entire sense of responsibility to the state. Community vigilance, honest cooperation with security agencies, the refusal to shield a criminal because he is “our own,” and a citizenry that demands accountability between elections rather than only during them — that is the foundation everything else rests on.

In the conclusion of the Fifth Column series, I argued that the greatest antidote to the enemy within is “simple but profound: clarity, responsibility, and courage.” Clarity to see the pattern for what it is, instead of the comforting lie that it could never reach us. Responsibility to govern the spaces we have left ungoverned. And courage to confront the collaborators among us, even when they wear familiar faces.

The hand has written on our wall. It has been writing for years — in Owo, in Zamfara, in Kwara, in four hundred stolen children in a single November, and now in a mathematics teacher who went to work one Friday morning and never came home.

But here is where our story and Belshazzar’s must part. When the hand wrote on the plaster of his palace wall, it was not a warning — it was a verdict already passed. MENE: God has numbered your kingdom and finished it. TEKEL: you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. PERES: your kingdom is divided. There was nothing left to reform, no committee left to convene; the sentence had been written before the feast began, and “in that night was Belshazzar slain.” He saw the writing only in time to read his own obituary.

We are not yet there, and that is the entire mercy of this moment. The writing on our wall is still a warning, not a sentence. We have been weighed, and yes, we have been found wanting: the vanished security votes, the ignored intelligence, the silence from the people that should act. We are being pulled, hard, toward division. But our kingdom is not yet finished; our number as a nation is not yet up no matter what some naysayers think. We still hold the one thing Belshazzar did not — time. Time to act, to govern, to reackon our own people, to confront the enemy within and the patrons above him.

The hand has written. We have read it. The only question left is whether we will rise and act while the ink is still a warning — or sit back down, refill our cups, and discover too late that it had hardened into a verdict.

SELAH