Author: Sam Aderibigbe

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The Handwriting on the Wall

/ Sam Aderibigbe / Leave a comment

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. 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

THE FIFTH COLUMN: How Nigeria’s Greatest Threat Comes From Within – Conclusion

/ Sam Aderibigbe / 1 Comment

To catch up on part 3

DEDICATION

In memory of the officers and men who laid down their lives for Nigeria—may their sacrifice to keep this nation united and indivisible never be forgotten.

8. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FIFTH COLUMNISTS — WHY PEOPLE BETRAY THEIR OWN NATION

Sabotage — especially the internal kind — is rarely dramatic. It is psychological.

It emerges from a mix of motivations, fears, conditioning, and incentives that quietly shape human behavior long before the final act occurs. To understand the fifth columnist, you must first understand the inner logic that drives them. Their sabotage is not always ideological; sometimes, it is simply a reflection of what we as a society have become.

1. The Psychology of Greed — When Personal Gain Outweighs the Collective

Some individuals genuinely believe that survival is personal, not national. Where institutions are weak, greed begins to look rational. People choose the path that rewards them immediately, even if it harms the country in the long term. To such a person, Nigeria is not a home to build — it is a system to exploit. This mindset explains why a man can falsify documents, manipulate procurement, or undermine reforms without any sense of guilt. In his mind, the country has already failed him; he is merely taking his share.

2. Ethnic and Religious Loyalty — When Identity Becomes Stronger Than Nation

Many betray the nation unintentionally because their primary allegiance lies elsewhere — clan, tribe, faith community, region. Nigeria becomes secondary, almost abstract. This is why some defend wrongdoing when it is “our brother,” why others sabotage national policies because they favour “another group,” and why national cohesion is so fragile. When identity is stronger than citizenship, internal sabotage becomes normalized.

3. Fear — The Quiet Driver of Compromise

Fear is one of the most powerful psychological motivators.

Fear of losing relevance.

Fear of losing access.

Fear of punishment.

Fear of being labeled.

Fear of standing out in a corrupt system.

When people operate in environments where speaking up comes at a cost, silence becomes the safer choice. And silence, too, is a form of sabotage.

The bureaucrat who watches a file disappear does not always act out of greed — sometimes, he is simply afraid to resist those who orchestrated it.

4. Poverty and Survival Anxiety

A hungry man is not thinking about national destiny; he is thinking about the next meal. This desperation makes individuals susceptible to manipulation.

This is how thugs are mobilized.

How vote-buying thrives.

How misinformation spreads.

How citizens sell their conscience cheaply.

Economic instability weakens the psychological immune system of a nation, making sabotage easier to orchestrate.

5. Ideological Fanaticism — Belief Without Balance

Some individuals genuinely believe their ideology is the only path — political, religious, or philosophical. Once this belief hardens, they justify any act that advances “the cause,” even if it damages national stability.

It is how extremists are born.

How political movements become intolerant.

How reform attempts are sabotaged from within because they do not align with a particular worldview.

Fanaticism blinds people to nuance — and a nation without nuance becomes a nation without peace.

6. Disillusionment — “Nigeria Can Never Work”

Perhaps the most dangerous psychological driver is hopelessness. When people believe Nigeria is irredeemable, their actions shift accordingly.

They stop protecting institutions.

They stop defending truth.

They stop caring about the long term.

They become cynical observers of a fire they quietly help fuel.

Disillusionment breeds apathy, apathy breeds irresponsibility, and irresponsibility breeds sabotage.

Many fifth columnists are not cartoon villains — they are people whose faith in the idea of Nigeria has evaporated.

7. Learned Behavior — A System That Teaches Betrayal

Sabotage becomes a culture when:

  • people see dishonesty rewarded,
  • integrity punished,
  • wrongdoing normalized,
  • and mediocrity celebrated.

Over time, betrayal becomes a learned skill — not because people are inherently bad, but because the environment teaches them that loyalty is costly and opportunism pays. The system, reproduces itself, creating a new generation of fifth columnists who do not see their actions as betrayal, but as “how things are done.”

Why Understanding This Matters

A nation cannot heal what it does not understand. And the fifth columnist cannot be confronted only through policy or punishment; there must be a societal introspection that tackles the mindset that makes sabotage possible.

Whether the motive is greed, fear, identity, ideology, survival, or disillusionment, the result is the same: the weakening of the very country we all claim to love.

The war against the fifth column is not just institutional; it is psychological.

9. UNWITTING FIFTH COLUMNISTS — WHEN CITIZENS BECOME ENEMIES WITHOUT KNOWING

Not all fifth columnists operate with intention. Some are simply citizens responding to frustration, fear, tribal sentiment, or long-term disillusionment. But the effect is the same: they weaken the nation in ways they do not fully grasp. You see this in the little things that have become normal:

1. The Rumor Mills:

  • Forwarding unverifiable broadcasts on WhatsApp or social media
  • amplifying fear without verification
  • rushing to share sensational headlines before thinking of their impact, etc.

In a society already plagued by mistrust, misinformation becomes its own form of violence.

2. Defending Corruption When It Benefits “Our Own”: We have perfected a dangerous double standard:

  • corruption is wrong when it is their person,
  • but forgivable when it is our person;
  • injustice is unacceptable when we are the victims,
  • but tolerable when it punishes our opponents.

This is how societies lose their moral center, gradually, quietly, and without resistance.

3. Voting Based on Tribe, Religion, and Sentiment

Many citizens do not vote for competence; they vote for identity. They reward mediocrity because the candidate “shares our origin.” This is how we elect people who cannot serve the nation, only their constituency of emotion.

4. Supporting Wickedness Because It Hurts the Opponent

Some citizens celebrate policy failures, insecurity spikes, misfortunes, or economic hardship simply because it embarrasses their political rivals. Tragedy becomes content. Human lives become political ammunition. This is not politics. It is self-destruction wrapped in the illusion of strategy.

5. Giving Up on Nigeria

Hopelessness is a quiet saboteur. Giving up on Nigeria does not only manifest as silence. It shows up as derision, constant antagonism, performative pessimism, and the sneering insistence that “nothing good can ever come from this country.” Over time, this posture becomes a subtle form of sabotage. People stop defending what is left, stop demanding better, stop holding themselves accountable. A society cannot rise when its people have emotionally withdrawn from the idea of a shared future.

In these ways, ordinary citizens, without ever planning to, become part of the internal forces weakening the country. Not through hatred, but through habits. Not through conspiracy, but through resignation.

And this is why the fifth column is not only a political or economic matter — it is a societal one.

10. A CLARION CALL FOR A NEW NIGERIA — REBUILDING FROM WITHIN

If Nigeria will rise, the work must begin in the heart, before it manifests in institutions. The rebuilding of a nation starts with the rebuilding of its citizens.

Nation-building is not an abstract idea, It is a daily posture, a way of thinking and a way of living. It requires:

  • Integrity, even when shortcuts are easier.
  • Empathy, especially in a country where hardship is widespread.
  • Civic courage, to speak truth even when it is inconvenient.
  • National consciousness, the understanding that we are bound to one another.
  • Media literacy, to resist propaganda and misinformation.
  • A rejection of sentiment-driven politics, which has cost us decades of progress.

Nigeria will not be healed by good intentions alone. She will be healed by citizens who insist on doing the right thing, consistently and collectively. And yes, the task is enormous. But no nation ever transformed, without the uncomfortable work of introspection and cultural renewal.

11. WAY FORWARD & CONCLUSION — THE BATTLE WE MUST WIN

Nigeria will not fall because of foreign enemies; nations rarely do. Countries collapse when internal forces — political, economic, bureaucratic, social, and psychological, quietly align against their own stability.

And if you, reading this, recognize yourself in any of the categories described above, then it is time for honest reflection. It is time to repent, re-calibrate, and reconsider your posture toward the nation you claim to love. Because the real danger is not out there. It is in here;

In the systems we tolerate.

In the behaviors we normalize.

In the wrongs we excuse.

In the cynicism we have embraced.

In the jokes we forward, the lies we repeat, the shortcuts we justify, the sabotage we overlook because it benefits “our side.”

But the good news is also internal.

The same citizens who unknowingly weaken the nation can consciously rebuild it.

The same voices that once spread confusion can become amplifiers of truth.

The same hands that bent the rules can strengthen them.

The same society that excused sabotage can learn to confront it boldly and consistently.

The fifth columnists, the enemies within,  are powerful, yes. But they are not invincible.

Their strength thrives only where clarity is absent, where responsibility is avoided, where citizens outsource their conscience to tribe, religion, anger, or apathy.

The greatest antidote to them is simple but profound: clarity, responsibility, and courage.

Clarity to see through manipulation and misinformation.

Responsibility to hold ourselves to the standards we demand of others.

Courage to confront wrongdoing, whether committed by the powerful or by those closest to us.

May we have the courage to confront the fifth columnists, and the humility to ensure we do not become one… Amen.

THE FIFTH COLUMN: How Nigeria’s Greatest Threat Comes From Within – Part 3

/ Sam Aderibigbe / 1 Comment

To Catch up on Part 2

6. GLOBAL CASE STUDIES — WHEN INTERNAL WEAKNESS INVITES EXTERNAL POWER

Across the world, some of the most devastating national breakdowns have followed the same script: internal fractures create vulnerabilities, and external forces simply walk through the cracks. Foreign powers rarely initiate collapse; they exploit openings created by domestic dysfunction — divisions, corruption, mistrust, weakened institutions, and leadership failures.

This pattern is as old as geopolitics itself.

Libya — A Nation That Fell From the Inside Before the First Bomb Dropped

Long before NATO airstrikes, Libya was already unraveling. Decades of authoritarian rule had created rival factions divided along tribal, regional, and ideological lines. The leadership hoarded power, silenced dissent, and failed to build a unifying national identity. By the time external powers intervened, Libya was structurally compromised. External actors did not create the vacuum — they simply filled it. And the result was a catastrophe that Libya still bleeds from today.

Iraq — When Authoritarianism Leaves a Nation Hollow

The 2003 invasion of Iraq did not succeed only because America was powerful; it succeeded because Iraq was internally brittle. Decades of repression, ethnic fragmentation, and deep mistrust had eroded national unity. A divided society presented multiple access points for foreign actors. When a nation lacks internal cohesion, sovereignty becomes negotiable.

Syria — Domestic Tensions Become International Battleground

Syria’s descent into war began with domestic grievances, political rigidity, and systemic repression. Foreign powers — regional and global — only amplified what had already taken root. Today, Syria stands as one of the clearest examples of how an internal crisis can attract a global cast of actors, each pursuing its own interests while the nation itself disintegrates.

Venezuela — Economic Mismanagement as a Doorway to Intervention

Venezuela’s turmoil did not begin with sanctions; it began with internal mismanagement, institutional decay, corruption, and polarization. Once the trust between government and citizens collapsed, external pressure found fertile ground. A weakened nation does not negotiate, it reacts.

Afghanistan — A Fractured Nation Becomes a Theatre for Global Rivalries

For decades, Afghanistan’s internal fragmentation, tribal divisions, competing warlords, weak governance, and shifting loyalties, created the perfect environment for external actors to shape outcomes. Afghanistan did not become a pawn in global rivalry because foreign powers were strong, but because the nation itself was deeply divided.

The Global Pattern

Across all these examples — Libya, Iraq, Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan — the same truth repeats itself: external intervention becomes most effective when internal cohesion is weakest.

Foreign powers rarely “break” nations; they exploit nations already breaking themselves. This is why Nigeria must take its internal vulnerabilities seriously, corruption, division, misinformation, weak institutions, tribal politics, and the fifth-column mentality that treats the nation as expendable. Foreign powers will always have interests. That is normal. But only Nigerians can decide whether those interests become threats.

No foreign agenda can penetrate a nation that is internally disciplined, unified, and alert. It is the internal fractures, the fifth columnists, knowingly or unknowingly, that open the door. And if Nigeria must avoid the tragedies of those nations, then Nigeria must fix the weaknesses that make foreign interference possible.

7. THE TRUMP ERA — WHEN AMERICA LOST THE MORAL HIGH GROUND

For decades, the West, and particularly the United States, styled itself as the global guardian of democracy. It lectured nations on electoral integrity, institutional strength, civil liberties and good governance. But the Trump era tore a hole straight through that moral costume, like a knife, cutting through a veil.

In January 2021, the world watched the unimaginable: American citizens storming the U.S. Capitol, attempting to overturn their own election. The same ingredients Nigeria has battled for years, misinformation, propaganda, internal sabotage, institutional weakening, were suddenly on display in Washington, not Abuja.

For once, the myth shattered.

It became clear that nations are not strong because they talk about democracy. They are strong because their internal systems hold under pressure. And even in America, those systems shook violently like a city hit by a very strong earthquake. Yet while the U.S. still struggled to address its internal fractures, we watched something even more troubling: the same Trump, who presided over that turbulence, threatening military action against Nigeria on the back of a deeply contested, politically convenient narrative of “Christian genocide.”

He spoke of sending U.S. troops.

He signaled the Pentagon to “prepare options.”

He vowed to cut aid and “go in” if Nigeria did not act the way he wanted.

All this while the African Union, Nigerian officials and multiple analysts were saying in clear terms:

“There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria. The violence is real, but it is more complex than that.”

The irony is almost painful: A country wrestling with its own internal extremism, election denial, political violence and racial tension was threatening to “fix” another nation thousands of miles away — based on a simplified story that flattens our reality and erases half the victims. It is the very contradiction Jesus warned about: “First remove the log from your own eye, then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

America’s political fractures, from the mishandling of its 2020 election aftermath to its ongoing culture wars, should have inspired humility. Instead, in this Trump era, they often amplified arrogance. And this is the hypocrisy at the heart of much Western foreign policy: the nations most eager to prescribe governance models abroad, often struggle to uphold the same standards at home.

For Nigeria, the lesson is profound:

                  •    We must stop outsourcing our democratic self-esteem to external validators.

                  •    We must stop imagining that Western democracies possess flawless blueprints.

                  •    We must stop reacting to every foreign statement as though it is divine instruction.

             •   We must recognize that every nation battles its own fifth column — including the United States of America.

If America, with all its wealth, sophistication, and centuries-old institutions, can be shaken by its own internal enemies, then no nation has the moral authority to treat Nigeria as a pupil in perpetual need of scolding. The lesson is simple: a fractured house cannot lecture another on stability.

And this must be stated clearly and without apology: The United States has neither a moral nor legal justification to threaten military action against Nigeria under any pretext. International law does not permit unilateral intervention based on one-sided narratives, sensational reports, or the lobbying efforts of partisan groups. Even in past controversial interventions — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — Washington still attempted to present some form of legal reasoning, however debated.

But Nigeria? No such justification exists.

The very idea that a foreign legislature feels entitled to deliberate on internal Nigerian affairs — as though we are a protectorate or an extension of their electoral base — is troubling. It would be unthinkable for Nigeria’s National Assembly to abandon matters of national relevance and begin conducting hearings on domestic disputes in the United States. Such an act would attract ridicule, It would be condemned as meddling, irresponsible, and absurd. Yet the same individuals who would tear our lawmakers apart for such overreach see nothing wrong with foreign politicians doing precisely that to Nigeria.

This is the hypocrisy — an old, pungent hypocrisy — that continues to stain global politics.

Nigeria must reject the idea that our legitimacy is validated abroad.

Our destiny will not be drafted in Washington, London, Paris, or Brussels.

Our democracy will not be shaped by foreign debates, foreign celebrities, foreign lobbyists, or foreign anxieties.

If this nation will rise, it will rise because we built it, deliberately, intelligently, courageously, and from within.

To be continued and have a Merry Christmas!

THE FIFTH COLUMN: How Nigeria’s Greatest Threat Comes From Within – Part 2

/ Sam Aderibigbe / 2 Comments

To catch up on Part 1

Why This Matters

A nation is the sum of its citizens.

When citizens normalize shortcuts, defend wrongdoing, celebrate false assertions, inflame divisions, or spread unverifiable information, they inadvertently strengthen the hands of those who deliberately undermine the nation. This is why the social saboteur is still part of the fifth column — not just the ones acting innocently, but also those who do it deliberately. Some citizens amplify misinformation, distort narratives, or stoke tensions not out of ignorance, but because outrage brings engagement. Views bring money. Sensationalism brings followers. And in today’s digital economy, trending has become a business model.

They know exactly what they are doing.

They know fear spreads faster than facts.

They know division generates more clicks than unity.

For them, national stability is a distant concern; virality is the goal.

So at the social level, the fifth column sits on a spectrum:

  • the genuinely misled,
  • the emotionally reactive,
  • the weary and disillusioned,
  • the social media influencers and wannabe activists chasing relevance,
  • and the fully conscious actors who weaponize outrage and misinformation for profit, engagement and virality.

And this is the painful truth: the collapse of nations is rarely caused by one great betrayal; more often, it is caused by millions of small compromises, some innocent, many intentional. Until we confront this truth, we will keep fighting external battles while the internal ones continue to multiply in broad daylight.

“The single biggest threat to our democracy is the notion that we don’t have to believe in facts.”
Barack Obama 

4. THE BUREAUCRATIC GATEKEEPERS — KILLERS OF POLICY AND PROGRESS

Every nation has its political class and its business elite, but there is a third layer that quietly determines whether a country works or fails, the bureaucracy. In Nigeria, this layer is often overlooked, yet it is one of the most powerful internal forces shaping national outcomes.

Here lie the people who do not run for office, do not appear at political rallies, do not court public attention, but who hold the levers that determine whether policies live or die. These bureaucratic gatekeepers are the custodians of files, processes, approvals, permissions, data, and institutional memory. And because they sit deep inside the engine room of government, their influence is rarely challenged and often underestimated. Their sabotage does not come through protests or open confrontation.

  • It comes through delays.
  • Through silence.
  • Through procedural ambush.
  • Through selective interpretation of policy.
  • Through “missing” documents that suddenly reappear after the price is right.
  • Through committees that never meet.
  • Through memos that “did not reach the table.”
  • They have mastered the art of slowing down progress until it suffocates.

We have seen this pattern repeatedly in Nigeria’s history.

During the post-oil boom reforms of the early 1980s, many of the modernisation efforts championed by technocrats were quietly frustrated by bureaucrats who feared losing control over existing systems. Records were withheld, processes disrupted, and key agencies resisted changes that threatened entrenched interests.

During the banking consolidation reforms of the mid-2000s, insiders repeatedly noted that some of the strongest resistance did not come from the banks themselves, but from within parts of the bureaucracy responsible for implementing the reforms. For many career civil-service actors, greater transparency and simplified oversight meant fewer opportunities for discretion, influence, and rent-seeking. As several analysts observed at the time, the challenge was not only technical, it was cultural and institutional.

Even today, across ministries and agencies, many well-intentioned reforms fail not because they lack political backing, but because mid-level and senior bureaucrats ensure they never fully take off. A contractor who refuses to “cooperate” suddenly discovers that his file has gone missing. A reform-minded appointee finds themselves stonewalled by staff who were in those offices before them, and who will remain long after they leave. Procurement becomes more complicated when transparency threatens established networks. Digital reforms struggle when manual processes are more profitable for those who control them.

This is not incompetence. It is a system of quiet self-preservation.

These actors operate beneath the political radar but influence everything from budget releases to project planning, licensing, customs clearance, recruitment, and regulatory enforcement. They know the bottlenecks because they built them. They know how to stall progress without ever appearing rebellious. They protect old structures because those structures protect them. In a sense, the bureaucracy becomes a nation within a nation, insulated from elections, public opinion, and, too often, accountability.

And this is what makes them part of the fifth column. Not because they are ideological enemies of Nigeria, but because they defend a system that slows down the country’s development. They are the custodians of the status quo — and the status quo is dysfunction. A visionary leader may come into office. A strong policy may be written. A budget may be approved. A reform may be announced with fanfare. Yet everything grinds to a halt in the hands of bureaucrats who have perfected one subtle but deadly skill: blocking progress without leaving fingerprints. They do not shout. They do not fight. They simply ensure things do not move.

It is difficult to build a nation when those who hold the administrative machinery are invested in keeping things exactly as they are. Until this layer is reformed, protected, and modernised, Nigeria will continue to drag its feet — not because of a lack of ideas, but because of an internal machinery designed to frustrate execution.

5. THE ROLE OF FOREIGN POWERS — BUT NOT WITHOUT INTERNAL ALLIES

It is tempting to place the weight of Nigeria’s troubles on foreign governments. But the truth is more complex. Nations, especially powerful ones, do not operate on morality. They operate on interest. They protect their strategic corridors, their economic leverage, their ideological reach. That is the real currency of geopolitics. The deeper danger lies elsewhere: in the local actors who willingly open the gates.

Foreign interference only becomes effective when internal collaborators, political actors, lobbyists, civil society influencers, social media influencers, wannabe activists, and even security insiders, create the cracks through which external influence flows. History is clear on this point: no nation collapses purely from external assault. Collapse begins from within. Weak institutions, fragmented societies, compromised leaders, and citizens who become foot soldiers for agendas they do not fully understand — these are the true entry points.

This is not theory. This is history.

Across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, we have watched powerful nations, the United States, France, Britain, Russia and others, quietly shape political outcomes in countries that refused to align with their interests, often under noble labels: “democracy promotion,” “counter-terrorism,” “protecting minorities,” “defending human rights.” From coups engineered during the Cold War, to destabilisation efforts masked as “support for civil society,” to covert alliances with rebel groups and armed factions, the playbook is well-established.

Nigeria is not exempt.

The Trump Threat — Compassion Wrapped Around a Loaded Gun

In November 2025, the U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered the Pentagon to prepare “options” for possible military action in Nigeria, citing an alleged “Christian genocide” and an “existential threat” to Christianity in our country. He coupled this with threats to cut off U.S. aid if Nigeria did not act the way Washington wanted. On paper, it sounded like a moral crusade: defend persecuted Christians; punish those who ignore their suffering.

In reality, the picture is more complicated.

Data from independent conflict monitors and reporting by global media have repeatedly shown that while Christians have suffered brutal violence in Nigeria, Muslims and other groups have also been killed in large numbers, especially in the northeast where Boko Haram and ISWAP have wiped out entire Muslim communities. The African Union, Nigerian officials, and several analysts have publicly rejected the “genocide” label as inaccurate, warning that this kind of simplification does more to inflame tensions than to solve them. Nigerians have not been silent either. Protests broke out in places like Kano with placards reading “There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria” and “America wants to control our resources,” rejecting both the label and the coercive tone of the threat.

Yet, instead of nuance, the world got a soundbite: “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. We may have to go in.”

In Washington, some lawmakers eagerly lined up behind this framing. A resolution was introduced in the U.S. Congress that not only condemned the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, but also explicitly declared readiness to “support President Donald J. Trump in taking decisive action”, language that many Nigerians read as political cover for some form of intervention. To many of us watching from here, it felt less like sober diplomacy and more like theatre: our trauma turned into talking points, our complexity reduced to a neat narrative that fits a domestic political script.

The Nicki Minaj Moment — When Celebrity Platforms Carry Lopsided Stories

Into this already charged atmosphere stepped an unlikely actor: Nicki Minaj. In November 2025, the American rapper addressed a United Nations event, speaking emotionally about what she described as “Christians being targeted” in Nigeria, churches burned, families displaced, communities living in fear. She thanked Trump for “prioritizing the issue” and used her huge platform to demand urgent action. On one level, her empathy is genuine and admirable. It is true that Christians in Nigeria have suffered massacres, kidnappings, church burning and terror attacks. Those lives matter. Their pain is not imaginary. But again, what was missing was the rest of the story.

The same conflict data and human-rights reports that document attacks on Christians also show that Muslims have been killed in even greater numbers in some regions, and that much of the violence is driven by a toxic mix of jihadist insurgency, banditry, land disputes, failed governance and criminal opportunism, not a single, neat campaign of one religion exterminating the other. Yet the global clip that trended was simple: “In Nigeria, Christians are being targeted.” Full stop.

To make matters worse, Nigerian officials were reportedly barred from the room during that UN event at the specific request of the organisers and their U.S. hosts, a move that fed the perception here that our country was being tried and sentenced in absentia. This is how modern fifth-column dynamics work in a globalized world:

  • Local actors feed selective or exaggerated narratives to foreign lawmakers, lobby groups and faith networks.
  • Those groups frame Nigeria to their audiences as a simple morality tale: righteous victims, evil persecutors, cowardly government.
  • Politicians and celebrities, some genuinely moved, others clearly responding to well-organized lobbying, amplify the story on platforms like Congress, the UN and cable news.
  • Before long, a foreign president is threatening to send troops “guns-a-blazing,” and our complex security crisis is reduced to a campaign slogan.

A UN podium carries moral weight. A viral celebrity clip carries emotional weight. A congressional resolution carries diplomatic weight. When all three are built on a partial picture, truth struggles to breathe. The real tragedy is that while these narratives trend, many of the actual victims of Nigeria’s violence, Muslim communities erased in the northeast, Christians attacked in largely Christian southeast states, farmers and herders killed in reprisal cycles in the Middle Belt, become invisible if they don’t fit the script. Once again, the point is not to deny suffering. The point is to insist that our story will not be told for us, around us, and against us.

Foreign Powers, Local Mouthpieces

Foreign powers have always behaved like foreign powers. That is not new. The tragedy is when citizens become the mouthpieces of external ambitions, knowingly or unknowingly. Some internal actors:

  • feed foreign agencies distorted data,
  • exaggerate local conflicts to attract funding or asylum,
  • curate “genocide” language for Western ears while downplaying the suffering of groups that do not fit their chosen narrative,
  • lobby against their own country in foreign capitals because personal victory matters more than collective peace.

Foreign politicians and influencers, while sometimes sincerely moved, are not neutral. Some are clearly being courted and lobbied to press a particular line, as we have seen with prominent U.S. legislators pushing “Christian genocide” resolutions and publicly cheering Trump’s threats of military action.

This is what fifth-column activity looks like in the age of soft power: not just bombs and spies, but reports, hearings, think-tank papers, NGO briefings, faith-based lobbying, celebrity speeches and emotionally charged narratives tailored for Western consumption.

Nigeria must be alert.

In a world where narratives move faster than facts, misinformation is the new weapon of intervention , and influencers, lawmakers and even pastors can become instruments of a fifth column that begins inside our borders.

To be continued

THE FIFTH COLUMN: How Nigeria’s Greatest Threat Comes From Within

/ Sam Aderibigbe / 2 Comments

Part 1

Every nation knows its enemies. Some stand at the borders with guns. Others manipulate markets from abroad. But the deadliest ones 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. These are the fifth columnists — the enemies within.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: WHERE THE IDEA CAME FROM

The term “fifth column” was first used 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. Since then, the phrase has described people who undermine a nation from within — not with open confrontation, but with quiet collaboration, deceit, and subterfuge. In a modern context, we might add: sometimes, this sabotage is even carried out unknowingly.

NIGERIA’S PRESENT REALITY: A NATION UNDER STRAIN

We are in a moment of deep national vulnerability. Economic hardship is biting. Politicians are having a field day of their own wantonness. Trust in institutions is low. Insecurity remains a dire threat across the length and breadth of the nation. Hope flickers on and off like unstable power supply. Everyone feels the weight, and in such moments, real enemies do not need to invade — they simply need to influence, corrupt, divide, mislead, and sabotage. And this is where the fifth columnists thrive.

THE FIFTH COLUMNISTS IN NIGERIA TODAY

1. THE POLITICAL CLASS — POWER WITHOUT PATRIOTISM

In every nation, politics is supposed to be the arena where ideas compete for the good of the people. In Nigeria, it too often feels like a battlefield where survival, revenge, and self-preservation take precedence over nation-building.

Many in our political class did not come to serve — they came to secure relevance, to guarantee a life of

opulent retirement. They came to fortify networks. They came to protect old loyalties and cultivate new ones. Nigeria becomes secondary. The people become expendable. National interest becomes negotiable. So instead of building the country, they perfect the craft of undermining it. They sabotage reforms the moment those reforms threaten their influence and affluence. They weaponise tribe and religion because a divided country is easier to manipulate. They leak sensitive information — not out of principle, but to weaken whoever is in power or to negotiate their own political escape route. They prefer chaos over accountability, because chaos is profitable. And they treat public office like a dynasty, a birthright, an inheritance — anything but a responsibility.

The tragedy is that this isn’t new. Nigeria’s political class has long known how to manufacture crisis as a political strategy. From the First Republic through the military era and into our present civil rule, scholars and observers have documented the same pattern: crisis is rarely just an “accident”; it is often a tool. Leaders allow tensions to fester, sometimes even stoke them, only to later arrive as “saviours” offering stability on their own terms. Seasoned voices — from public intellectuals to clerics — have warned repeatedly that politicians in Nigeria habitually inflame divisions, not as a last resort, but as a deliberate method of control.

These are not exaggerations; they are lived experiences. Even in recent months, civil society groups have accused political actors of fermenting internal disorder to weaken incumbents and make the country ungovernable. It is one of the oldest tricks in our political playbook: if you cannot win power, destabilise the one who has it. A political class that should be the custodian of stability often becomes the architect of instability. And this is why they belong at the centre of any conversation about the fifth columnists in Nigeria. Because the fifth column is not always made up of foreign agents or shadowy figures.

Sometimes, it is those who sit in parliament by day and conspire in the dark by night. Sometimes, it is those who swear allegiance to Nigeria with one hand raised, while the other hand signs away her future. They are the ones who use our divisions as bargaining chips, who fan the flames of insecurity so that elections can be postponed or opponents weakened, who sabotage reforms so that the rot remains beneficial, who cannot imagine a Nigeria that works because a working Nigeria exposes their emptiness.

These are not “opposition” figures or “ruling party” figures — they exist on all sides. Their loyalty is not to APC or PDP or Labour or any movement. Their loyalty is to power — raw, unfiltered, and self-serving. This is why Nigeria has suffered more from this enemy within than from any threat abroad. Betrayal from inside the house is always more devastating than an attack from outside.

It is so easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build.
Nelson Mandela

2. THE ECONOMIC SABOTEURS — MERCHANTS OF MISERY

Nigeria’s economic troubles are often discussed as though they are the product of fate or bad luck — global oil shocks, currency weakness, supply chain disruptions, inflationary cycles. But beneath these broad explanations lies a quieter, more uncomfortable truth: a portion of our economic pain is engineered, curated, and sustained by people who understand how to profit from a fragile system.

These saboteurs are not necessarily dramatic figures. They are not insurgents or political arsonists. They are businesspeople, importers, brokers, middlemen, market actors, and institutional insiders who operate in the grey zones where regulation meets opportunity. Their power does not come from ideology. It comes from access, information, relationships, and from an intimate understanding of where the cracks in our economy lie — and how to widen those cracks when necessary. They know how dependent the country is on imported fuel, foreign exchange, staple foods, pharmaceuticals, spare parts, construction materials, and even basic household items. And instead of strengthening these supply lines, they exploit them.

A minor policy announcement can trigger a “scarcity” that did not exist 48 hours earlier. A rumour of price review can empty warehouses overnight. A shift in the exchange rate can become a justification for arbitrarily inflated commodities. Goods that passed through porous borders suddenly flood the market and undercut genuine manufacturers already battling high production costs. And in this same network sit the importers and distributors of fake and substandard products, individuals whose decisions quietly compromise public safety and national competitiveness. The expired drugs, adulterated fuel, counterfeit vehicle parts, substandard electrical cables, weak building materials, and diluted industrial chemicals that circulate in our markets are not accidents; they are the outcome of deliberate choices made by people who have weighed profit against consequence and chosen profit.

Their actions affect everything — from the number of road accidents caused by fake tyres, to the cost of healthcare inflated by counterfeit pharmaceuticals, to the tragedies of building collapses caused by inferior materials. These are not “mistakes” or unfortunate oversights. They are forms of economic behaviour that weaken a nation from the inside. What makes these actors part of the fifth column is not merely the harm they cause, but the fact that they depend on a malfunctioning system to thrive. Stability does not serve them. Efficiency does not serve them. Transparent markets do not serve them. A functional regulatory ecosystem threatens their business model.

So scarcity becomes a tool, distortion becomes strategy, weak enforcement becomes an asset, and the suffering of millions becomes an acceptable cost. This is why a country with refineries cannot keep fuel on its streets. Why a nation with fertile land imports food at levels that make no economic sense. Why even after an appreciating naira, prices remain stubbornly high — because the market is not responding to fundamentals; it is responding to incentives.

Nigeria operates a political economy where some actors benefit when things do not work. And when that happens, national progress becomes an inconvenience. These saboteurs do not need to appear in newspapers or on television. They do not need to threaten government publicly. They simply operate behind closed doors — in ports, in approval offices, in procurement chains, in supply routes, in warehouses, and in networks that have perfected the quiet art of extracting value from dysfunction.

Their weapon is not violence; their weapon is influence, and in many cases, their impact is far more damaging than that of those who carry arms. They form a critical part of the fifth column — the internal actors for whom Nigeria’s fragility is a source of personal stability. Until the incentive structure that empowers them is dismantled, the nation will continue to bleed from wounds inflicted not by external enemies, but by those who operate comfortably within its economic bloodstream.

3. THE SOCIAL SABOTEURS — HOW SOCIETY BECOMES AN UNWITTING ACCOMPLICE

A nation’s strength is not measured only by the competence of its leaders. It is also measured by the attitudes, values, and everyday decisions of its people. And in Nigeria, one of the most uncomfortable truths is that some of the sabotage undermining our progress is not orchestrated by politicians or economic elites alone — it is reinforced by ordinary citizens who mean no real harm, but whose choices slowly weaken the national fabric.

These social saboteurs are not “enemies” in the dramatic sense. They are neighbours, colleagues, influencers, commentators, kinfolk — people who love Nigeria in sentiment, but undermine her in practice. They don’t collapse nations in one big act; they weaken them in a thousand small ways.

a. The Normalisation of Wrongdoing — “Our Own” Syndrome

Nigeria has a long history of excusing corruption or incompetence when it benefits our tribe, our kin, or our political family. We have seen this pattern across decades. When a major financial crime is exposed, reactions split along ethnic and partisan lines. Some condemn the act, others defend the actor, and many retreat into “this is an attack on our people.”

This response pattern is not new.

In the 1970s, during the military era, several probes into public institutions were dismissed in many regions as “political witch-hunts,” even when the evidence was overwhelming. This moral flexibility — this willingness to defend wrongdoing when it favours “our side” — is part of what weakens the national conscience.

It creates an environment where:

                  •  Truth becomes negotiable,

                  •  Accountability becomes selective, and

                  •  Justice becomes a tribal conversation.

A country cannot grow when its citizens defend wrong instead of confronting it.

b. The Social Media Battalions — The New Agents of Confusion

Today, social media has become the largest amplifier of national tension. A rumour from a WhatsApp group can spark panic, a misleading tweet can inflame ethnic tempers, wreck companies, careers, lives and communities, a sensationalised video, often stripped of context, can trend nationwide in hours.

We experienced this during: COVID-19, when false cures circulated faster than official warnings, the cash redesign policy, where misinformation created fear and long queues, multiple election cycles, where unverified “results” and provocative audio clips travelled across the country before INEC could speak, several security incidents, where old videos resurfaced and were misinterpreted as fresh attacks and many more of such. In these moments, many citizens acted as accidental saboteurs — not out of malice, but out of emotion, fear, frustration, or stark ignorance. Yet the result was the same: confusion, division, and the erosion of trust in institutions.

Throughout Nigeria’s history — from the 1966 coup rumours, to the June 12 crisis, to post-2000 ethno-religious tensions — misinformation has played a central role in stoking national anxiety. Social media has simply accelerated a pattern that has always existed: the rapid spread of unverified narratives, often weaponised by those who understand the psychology of a divided society.

c. The Merchants of Division — When Identity Becomes a Tool

Nigeria has always struggled with ethnic and religious rhetoric being used to frame national issues. In the 1940s and 50s, even colonial intelligence reports noted that emerging political leaders were building followership along ethnic lines rather than ideological clarity — often in ways that served colonial interests. That legacy never truly disappeared. Whenever a national debate arises:

                  •  Analysts interpret it through ethnic allegiance,

                  •  Commentators redefine it through religious identity,

                  •  Public figures speak to “their people,” not to the nation.

We saw this play out during controversies around: Resource control, security appointments, protests and agitations, constitutional amendments, even sports and cultural representation.

This habit of segmenting national issues into ethnic grievances slowly erodes unity and strengthens the hands of those who profit from division. It is subtle sabotage — death by a thousand cuts to the very idea of Nigeria.

d. The Culture of Impunity — A Society That Outsources Responsibility

Every time a citizen jumps a queue, evades a duty, pays bribes, throws trash into the gutter, or circumvents due process, a piece of the national system breaks.

We saw this during; fuel scarcity periods, when people with “connections” bypass queues, port congestion, worsened by informal payments, exam registrations where shortcuts are celebrated, building construction where regulations are ignored for speed and cost-saving, passport processing, where “agents” thrive on citizens’ impatience.

These acts seem like survival tactics, but collectively they create an environment where rule of law becomes optional. From the 1980s economic crisis onward, we saw the rise of “alternative systems” to get things done because official systems were too slow or corrupt. Over time, the workaround became the culture, and the culture became a form of self-sabotage.

Why This Matters

To be continued…

The Intimidation of Power: Why Arming the FRSC is a Step Backwards for Nigeria’s Road Safety

/ Sam Aderibigbe / Leave a comment

There’s a thin line between order and oppression — and when power begins to arm itself against those it is meant to protect, that line dissolves into tyranny disguised as security.

The recent call by the Corps Marshal of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) for its officers to bear firearms is more than an administrative request; it is a revealing metaphor for a nation drifting steadily toward the intimidation of power — where authority seeks validation not from legitimacy, but from weaponry.

Continue reading →

Jamb, Jammed, and Jamboree: Nigeria’s Reckoning with Failure, Reform, and Public Outrage

/ Sam Aderibigbe / Leave a comment

In a nation constantly battling systemic failure and trust deficits in public institutions, the 2025 UTME glitches and the tragic incident in Ibadan have stirred national debates — not just on accountability, but on how we process failure, responsibility, and governance. This piece offers a measured opinion on these events and the reactions they have provoked.

JAMB’s Glitch – A Break from the Norm

For many Nigerians, trust in public institutions has long been eroded by years of systemic failure, opaque processes, and a culture of impunity. So when nearly 380,000 candidates — mostly from Lagos and the South-East — were caught in the web of a technical glitch during the 2025 UTME, it was unsurprising that tempers flared and chaos ensued. What was surprising, however, was the response. In a country where officials often double down or offer half-hearted denials, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, the Registrar of JAMB, did something revolutionary: he owned it.

He publicly apologized. He acknowledged the glitch. He admitted institutional failure. And he ordered a retake for the affected candidates. That singular act of transparency — so simple, yet so rare in Nigeria’s public sector — is worthy of note. This is not to excuse the glitch. Lives have been disrupted. Dreams put on hold. But we must be honest: this is the first time in recent memory a public servant in Nigeria responded to such a crisis not with blame-shifting or stonewalling, but with candor and corrective action.

To put it in context, JAMB under Oloyede has transformed from a cesspool of corruption into a data-driven, accountable body. Between 2016 and 2023, JAMB remitted over ₦50 billion to the federal government — a shocking leap from the ₦3 million remitted in some previous years. Systems were automated, processes sanitized, and revenue leakages plugged. It is precisely because of this track record of reform that we must resist the urge to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Technical glitches must be fixed. Affected students deserve redress. But let’s not allow outrage culture to burn down the few institutions that are, quite frankly, trying to get it right.
Accountability, when it shows up in a landscape starved of it, should be reinforced — not crucified.

On Failure, Suicide, and Responsibility

For decades in Nigeria, failing JAMB was more or less a rite of passage. Students would write the exam once, twice, sometimes three or four times before eventually gaining admission. It wasn’t ideal, but it was expected — and endured. The phrase ‘jammed by JAMB’ became cultural shorthand for the long road from ambition to admission. And yet, for all the disappointment, few — if any — ever contemplated taking their own lives. Fast forward to today, and we are confronted with heartbreaking reports of a student allegedly committing suicide after seeing their UTME results. Whether or not this particular case is confirmed, the mere possibility has become all too familiar. It begs a piercing question: What has changed?

Why is suicide creeping into the psyche of our youth as an option for academic or social disappointment? Why is self-harm — mentally, physically, even spiritually — becoming normalized among teenagers?
We must interrogate this tragic shift holistically:
– Is it peer pressure, amplified by curated perfection on social media?
– Is it parental pressure, where love is often perceived as conditional upon performance?
– Is it a societal failure, where one exam feels like the only doorway to a better life?
– Or is it the deafening silence of social services, mental health systems, and community care?
We must also ask, what are our children feeding on? Beyond food, what content, what conversations, what worldviews are they constantly consuming that tilt their minds toward hopelessness and despair at the slightest stumble?

This is not JAMB’s burden alone. It is shared. It is communal.

Schools must be more than academic factories — they must be safe spaces. Parents must nurture resilience, not just excellence. Governments must invest in guidance counselors, crisis lines, and youth-focused mental health infrastructure. We say “it takes a village to raise a child.” But today, that village is distracted — and our children are crying in silence.

Calls for Resignation – A Jamboree of Irrelevance

There’s an unsettling pattern in our national discourse — a reflexive call for resignation at every misstep, every glitch, every controversy. No nuance. No context. Just bloodlust disguised as civic engagement.

The recent clamour for Professor Ishaq Oloyede’s resignation following the JAMB technical issues is a textbook example. Here is a man with a stellar track record — a reformer who, as Vice Chancellor and now Registrar, has transformed rotten systems into functioning ones. Yet, despite his rare show of accountability and transparency, what meets him is a mob ready with torches. Are we truly invested in reform, or are we just addicted to outrage?
Worse still, why must ethnic and religious undertones stain every debate? When did we become so tribal in our assessment of public figures? When did performance take a backseat to primordial identities?
It appears we now operate on a culture of:
– Jumping on trends without reflection.
– Condemning without building.
– Criticizing destructively without offering constructive solutions.
– Cursing the country under the guise of frustration, and yet demanding that same country magically improve.

We’re quick to amplify failures, yet go mute when good things happen. We push negativity to trend, but overlook wins. We drown optimism with chronic cynicism and then wonder why hope is such a scarce commodity.

This is not accountability — it’s performance anger. And it serves no one.

Rather than calling for the head of a man who did what many never do — admit fault and offer a solution — we should be institutionalizing his example. Codifying it. Celebrating it. Demanding more of it from others.
If we truly want a better Nigeria, we must learn to differentiate failure from sabotage, error from incompetence, and honesty from weakness. Let us stop turning every issue into a jamboree of noise. Let us begin, instead, to build the scaffolding for the Nigeria we say we want.

As Theodore Roosevelt once said, “It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
If we truly care about Nigeria, we must move beyond hashtags and rage, and into the arena of building — brick by brick, word by word, act by act.

The Ibadan Incident – A Case Study in Dual Recklessness

The death of 14-year-old Kehinde Alade in Ibadan is as tragic as it is avoidable. A young life — full of promise — now lost. The public outrage that followed was expected. And rightly so. But beneath the noise lies a story of dual recklessness — one that demands sober reflection, not just emotional reaction.

According to eyewitness accounts and available video footage, Kehinde’s father was driving against traffic — an illegal and dangerous act in any society. When flagged down by law enforcement, he chose to flee rather than stop. In doing so, he endangered his own life, the lives of his passengers, pedestrians, and the Police/OYSTMA team attempting to do their job.

It was during this reckless chase that a police officer attached to the team allegedly fired a shot, which tragically struck Kehinde. The public has since focused much of its fury on the police. But let us ask the hard questions — all the hard questions, not just the convenient ones.

To the father:
– Why were you driving against traffic?
– Why did you refuse to stop when accosted?
– What were you trying to prove by fleeing?
– If your son had not been hit, would you have stopped at all?

On the other side, the situation of the police officer demands clarity, not condemnation. From all indications, it’s unlikely that the officer intended to kill the child. The more plausible explanation is that he was attempting to immobilize a fleeing vehicle — a vehicle that had clearly broken the law and posed a real-time threat to public safety. The key question is: Did he know there were children or other passengers in the back seat? In the heat of pursuit, facing a motorist defying lawful order and endangering both officers and civilians, the officer’s response — though tragic in outcome — appears grounded in duty, not malice.

If I were Attorney General of Oyo State, I would not press criminal charges against the officer. Instead, I would uphold a full review, recommend internal protocols where needed, and focus prosecutorial energy where it truly belongs: the father.

He should be charged with:
– Driving against traffic
– Fleeing lawful arrest
– Assault with intent to harm
– Damage to public property
– And involuntary manslaughter — for creating the very conditions that led to his child’s death

This is not an attempt to absolve the police of scrutiny — law enforcement must always be held to the highest standard. But if we are to build a functional society, lawlessness cannot be tolerated on either side of the divide. Justice must be based on facts, not feelings. It should be pursued with wisdom, not vengeance. We must stop creating a culture where citizens break the law with impunity, and yet cry foul when lawful enforcement — even under duress — ends in unfortunate consequences.

Let us mourn the child. Let us comfort the family. But let us not abandon truth on the altar of emotion.

“Justice must not only serve emotion, it must serve truth — or the society will rebel against fairness itself.”
— Adapted from Justice Akinola Aguda

Road Accidents and Nigeria’s Driving Culture – A Silent Epidemic

If Nigeria were at war, and we lost over 1,500 lives in just three months, the nation would be in mourning. Flags would be lowered. Presidential addresses would fill the airwaves. Yet that is exactly what happened in Q1 2025, not from conflict — but from road traffic crashes.

According to the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), 1,593 Nigerians died in 2,650 traffic crashes between January and March 2025 (21st Century Chronicle – https://21stcenturychronicle.com/2650-road-accidents-killed-1593-nigerians-in-2025-q1-frsc/). Thousands more were injured — many left with life-altering disabilities.

This isn’t new. Between 2013 and 2020, over 41,709 lives were lost to road crashes in Nigeria, according to aggregated data from FRSC and the National Bureau of Statistics (Dataphyte https://archive.dataphyte.com/latest-reports/road-safety/road-traffic-crashes-in-nigeria-claims-41709-lives-in-8-years/).

In 2023 alone, 1,349 people died and 7,744 others were injured in road accidents, according to FRSC reports published by ICIR Nigeria (ICIR Nigeria – https://www.icirnigeria.org/road-traffic-crashes-dangerous-states-to-drive-in-nigeria/).

And yet, as a nation, we treat road safety like a casual inconvenience rather than the public health emergency it has become.
The leading causes? Not a mystery:
– One-way driving
– Over-speeding
– Dangerous overtaking
– Vehicle unroadworthiness
– And a deep-rooted culture of lawlessness behind the wheel

Nigerian roads have become a theatre of madness — a place where road signs are suggestions, traffic lights are ornamental, and law enforcement is often either absent or compromised. The result is a silent epidemic, consuming lives daily, and leaving families shattered. But make no mistake: this is not just about reckless drivers. It is also about a system that has normalized indiscipline, underfunded enforcement, and undervalued the sanctity of life.

If we can arrest protesters in minutes, surely we can arrest motorists who take one-way and endanger entire communities. If we can mobilize for elections, surely we can mobilize for driver re-certification, urban traffic reform, and functional public transport systems.

The change we need isn’t technical — it’s cultural. We must reset our mindset on the roads, from entitlement to empathy. From impunity to accountability. Because until we do, our highways will remain graveyards, and our steering wheels, weapons in the wrong hands.

Recommendations – Turning Reflection into Reform

If there’s anything these recent events have taught us, it’s that systems don’t fail on their own — people do. But people can also reform them. These recommendations are not exhaustive, but they represent a starting point for real, measurable change.

For JAMB and Educational Institutions:

  • – Upgrade digital infrastructure and build system redundancies to prevent future glitches, especially in high-volume regions.
  • – Establish rapid-response protocols that allow swift investigation and remedy of technical failures.
  • – Create an open appeals and feedback mechanism that is transparent, student-friendly, and responsive — not dismissive.
  • – Invest in psychological support desks within educational boards to attend to students’ emotional and mental concerns post-exam.

For Police and Traffic Enforcement Agencies:

  • – Implement mandatory de-escalation and engagement training, emphasizing discretion, discernment, and proportionality.
  • – Deploy body cameras and dashcams across units to increase transparency, protect officers, and restore public trust.
  • – Enforce accountability for rogue behavior within the force, just as rigorously as we pursue violations by citizens.
  • – Clarify and publicize engagement protocols, especially during traffic stops, to avoid ambiguity and abuse.

For Nigerian Society at Large:

  • – Rebuild civic education from the ground up — in schools, homes, religious institutions, and on media platforms — to nurture responsible citizenship.
  • – Destigmatize mental health struggles and create safe, accessible support systems for young people battling pressure and anxiety.
  • – Promote parenting education and community support structures to help caregivers raise emotionally resilient and ethically grounded children.
  • – Champion a culture of responsibility over rage, where justice is pursued with clarity — not chaos — and patriotism includes lawfulness.

These are not futuristic ideals. They are present possibilities.
We can act — or we can wait for another tragedy to force our hand.

Conclusion – From Noise to Nationhood

Whether it’s a testing glitch or a traffic tragedy, we must retire the culture of scapegoating and embrace the hard, necessary work of reform. Our default cannot continue to be outrage without outcome, or blame without balance. We must resist the urge to set fire to every institution that stumbles — especially when those at the helm take responsibility and show the will to fix it.

True nation-building begins not when perfection is achieved, but when accountability is encouraged, when justice is measured, and when every citizen — from registrars to road users — plays by the rules.

Let us build a society that is:
– Accountable, not accusatory.
– Law-abiding, not lawless.
– Humane, not hysterical.

A nation where every misstep is not met with gasoline, but with grace, governance, and the grit to do better.

“No matter how long the night, the day is sure to come. Let us work for the day.”
— Nnamdi Azikiwe

You Are Not Just Entitled — You Are Responsible

/ Sam Aderibigbe / 1 Comment

Building the Nigeria We Dream Of Starts With Us

“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country – John F. Kennedy, 1961

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” — Proverbs 14:34

The Illusion of Entitlement

In Nigeria today, a spirit of entitlement has taken root. It’s subtle but widespread—the belief that because we are citizens, we are owed good roads, constant light, safety, healthcare, and justice. And we are. But the truth is this: entitlement without engagement is a deception. Yes, we are entitled to better governance. But expecting national transformation without personal responsibility is like expecting harvest where no seeds were sown. We cannot continue to demand change while refusing to be the change.

You Can’t Microwave a Nation

We often talk about “the system” as if it’s some detached beast. But the system is people. It is you and me. The corruption in high places didn’t fall from the sky—it started with the little compromises in low places. We cheat the queue, pad our invoices, pay for shortcuts, then wonder why Nigeria is broken.

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” — Plato

Entitlement makes us wait for miracles from above. But responsibility demands we get involved—in our businesses, offices, schools, and streets. The new Nigeria won’t be served to us on a silver platter. It will be built by deliberate Nigerians.

From Ranting to Rebuilding

It’s easier to rant than to rebuild. That’s why Twitter trends faster than transformer repairs. But what good is a tweet that doesn’t lead to action? What use is a protest that ends in apathy? We cannot keep tearing down without building up. Every curse on Nigeria that isn’t followed by a contribution to its healing is a missed opportunity. Every insult thrown at our leaders that isn’t matched with personal integrity is just noise.
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” — Romans 12:21

David vs. Goliath: A Model of National Responsibility

Israel was stuck. Goliath mocked their destiny daily. And though soldiers stood armed and trained, none would move. Until David showed up—not in armor, but in purpose. His power wasn’t in position—it was in responsibility. He didn’t wait for a crown; he carried a cause.
“Is there not a cause?” — 1 Samuel 17:29
David didn’t fight in the name of Judah or for personal glory. He fought for Israel and the name of the Lord. That’s what Nigeria needs: men and women who show up—not because of title, tribe, or trend, but because the nation is worth it.

The Cookie Jar Syndrome: Why Selfishness Is Killing Our Future

Beyond courage, another disease is draining our destiny: selfishness.

The “Cookie Jar Syndrome” is a mindset where every opportunity, deal, or engagement is seen primarily through the lens of personal gain—often to the detriment of the common good. In this mentality, every negotiation, project, or contract becomes a personal cookie jar: What’s in it for me? Short-term profit overrides long-term purpose. Private interest eclipses public good. And because everyone is reaching for their own cookie, the jar eventually empties—leaving behind poverty, distrust, broken systems, and widespread cynicism.

“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” — Hubert H. Humphrey

If Nigeria must be rebuilt, we must kill the cookie jar mentality. Ask yourself in every deal: Am I serving myself alone, or the greater good? Measure success not just by what you gain, but by what you build.

“A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.” — Proverbs 13:22

Real nation builders aren’t cookie grabbers—they’re cookie bakers. They think: How can I make more for everyone, not just hoard for myself?

Practical Nation Building: What You Can Do Today

Let’s stop asking “Who will fix Nigeria?” and start asking, “What can I fix?” Because true national change starts with personal responsibility. It’s not about grand speeches or high office. It’s about ordinary people doing the extraordinary with what they have—where they are.

1. Excel in Your Assignment: Be a Model of Diligence
Whether you’re a teacher, tailor, techpreneur, trader, banker, or barber—do your work with integrity and excellence. Every job in Nigeria matters. Every assignment is a platform for transformation. When you deliver with consistency, fairness, and skill, you elevate standards.
Imagine a Nigeria where public servants don’t demand bribes, where artisans don’t cut corners, where professionals keep time, and contracts are honored without excuses. That’s not wishful thinking—it starts with you. Let excellence be your protest. Let diligence be your demonstration. Don’t just complain about the rot—be the reform.

2. Engage, Don’t Just Outrage: Call Your Reps. Send Feedback. Show Up
It’s not enough to vent on social media. The real work is in engaging the system with clarity and purpose. Nigeria’s democracy may be flawed, but it is still a system that can be influenced. Know your local government chairman, your House of Reps member, your senator. Write letters, emails, and petitions. Tag them publicly and privately. Join public hearings or town halls when they’re called. If they’re not, demand one. Support citizens and organizations that are monitoring budgets and demanding transparency. Ranting is reactive. Engagement is proactive.

3. Partner for Local Impact: Start Something. Invite Others
You don’t need to wait for the presidency to fix your neighborhood. Start small. Co-fund a borehole with your neighbors. Clean up the market with your youth group. Organize a food bank, library, or free lesson for kids in your area. Start a WhatsApp group to monitor local council projects. Use your church or mosque platform for civic education. The power of collaboration is that it multiplies influence. Where one person can reach ten, ten people can transform a community. The most powerful movements in history started small—with people who cared enough to act.

4. Raise Citizens, Not Cynics: Train Your Children in Values
One of the greatest tragedies in Nigeria is the normalization of dysfunction. Many children grow up learning how to “hustle” the system instead of fix it. That cycle must break—with you. Teach them honesty, responsibility, and empathy. Tell them stories of Nigerian heroes—not just of war, but of reform. Expose them to books, debates, and platforms that stretch their civic minds. Let them see you live with conviction, not convenience. Children don’t become nation builders by accident. They’re formed by intentional parents, mentors, and communities.

5. Live Like a Light: Let People See in Your Life What They Wish the Country Was
Be the Nigeria you dream of. Let your words and actions reflect the integrity, love, order, and honor that we want to see in our leaders. Don’t take bribes—or offer them. Keep promises. Respect time. Respect people, even when you disagree. Be the same person in public and in private.
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” — Matthew 5:14
Let your life be a protest sign. Let it be a roadmap. Let it be evidence that Nigeria can work—because in your corner, it already does.

Voices Worth Emulating: From History to Now

In every generation, there are men and women who rise above apathy to shape nations. Nigeria’s story—though fraught with struggle—has always had builders worth learning from.
Historic Statesmen & Builders:
– Chief Obafemi Awolowo – Premier of the Western Region, visionary in education and infrastructure. “The children of the poor you fail to train will never let your children have peace.”
– Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe – First President of Nigeria. “The realization of human interdependence and unity in diversity must be the base of our political ideology.”
– Sir Ahmadu Bello – Sardauna of Sokoto, moral and administrative leader. “The mistake of 1914 has come to stay.”
– Tafawa Balewa – First Prime Minister, known for humility and diplomacy. “We must stand united before the world.”

Final Word: A Nation Is Not Given. It Is Made.

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” — Psalm 33:12

We cannot continue expecting without investing. A new Nigeria will not be delivered through bitterness, hashtags, or silence. It will come through deliberate men and women—builders, not complainers. Reformers, not spectators. People who refuse to fold their arms while Goliath mocks their destiny.
“Nigeria is not just ours to inherit. It is ours to build.”
So rise. In your field. In your family. In your faith.
Because you are not just entitled to a better Nigeria—You are responsible for making it happen.


The Traffic Trap: How Corrupt Officers Exploit Lagos Motorists

/ Sam Aderibigbe / Leave a comment

Traffic enforcement is a crucial element of road safety, and I have always been an advocate for stricter compliance with traffic laws. The blatant disregard for these laws, especially by commercial drivers and even some private motorists, is a major source of frustration. However, my frustration extends beyond just the violators—it includes the law enforcement officers who selectively enforce these laws, sometimes as enablers of the chaos and at other times as opportunistic extortionists.

A Case of Reckless Driving Turned Extortion Attempt

On a recent Tuesday, I was caught in traffic along Agidingbi Road, coming from Ojodu. As the traffic light turned green, I moved forward, only for a reckless bike rider with a passenger—both donning hard hats—to suddenly dart across the intersection. Forced to slam my brakes to avoid a fatal accident, I found myself momentarily frozen at the intersection. Within those brief seconds, the traffic light turned red.

What followed was nothing short of a coordinated ambush. Policemen leaped in front of my car, banging on my windows and claiming I had beaten the traffic light. A supposed senior officer in mufti approached, accusing me of an infraction. I explained that I had been forced to stop because of the reckless biker, yet he dismissed my explanation and let me go without further conversation.

Thinking the issue was resolved, I parked by Big Treat, expecting further engagement from the officers. None came. But the next day, I received an SMS notifying me of a traffic infraction and demanding a fine. That moment confirmed what many Lagosians have always suspected—this system is not about enforcement; it is about revenue generation and extortion.

Rogue Policemen – Enablers of Traffic Infractions

The Nigerian Police Force, particularly the State Traffic Division, is a relic of inefficiency and corruption. The Big Treat roundabout, for instance, is a textbook example of how not to manage traffic. Police officers—especially the women—either passively observe lawlessness or actively participate in it.

It is common knowledge that commercial vehicles (Korope and Marwa) routinely run red lights and drive against traffic with impunity, knowing full well that a small “settlement” will absolve them. Yet, private vehicle owners are singled out for selective enforcement, stopped abruptly, and harassed under the pretense of law enforcement.

Additionally, along Wempco Road, these police officers frequently set up impromptu checkpoints, causing unnecessary gridlock simply to check vehicle particulars—something that could be automated or checked remotely. Do they ever consider the impact of their actions on commuters trying to get to work, school, or business engagements? Do they care about the productivity lost to these inefficient, outdated enforcement tactics? Or are they more interested in issuing their unofficial “pay-as-you-go” passes?

 Recommendations for a Modernized Traffic Enforcement System

Lagos State touts itself as the “Center of Excellence,” yet its traffic enforcement is far from excellent. We need modern solutions:

1. AI-Powered Traffic Monitoring: Rather than relying on human officers prone to bias and corruption, Lagos State should invest in AI-driven traffic monitoring systems. These systems can automatically capture traffic infractions without selective enforcement, ensuring that every violator—whether private or commercial—is held accountable.

2. Smart Ticketing and Automated Fines: Instead of officers jumping in front of moving vehicles, smart cameras should capture license plates, and automated systems should issue fines. This eliminates room for bribery and makes enforcement consistent.

3. Vehicle Particulars Verification via Digital Platforms: Instead of obstructing traffic to check vehicle documents, a centralized digital verification system should be integrated with law enforcement databases. Officers can scan a vehicle’s license plate and verify all documents without forcing a stop.

4. Transparent Traffic Infraction Appeals: Many Lagosians have fallen victim to fraudulent fines. There should be an independent platform where drivers can contest infractions with video evidence from traffic cameras, rather than being at the mercy of corrupt officers.

5. Comprehensive Traffic Officer Training: Officers should be retrained in modern enforcement methods, including conflict de-escalation, ethical enforcement, and effective traffic management. The archaic and dangerous practice of jumping in front of moving cars should be outlawed immediately.

6. Proper Placement of Bus Stops: Bus stops should not be located at major traffic intersections, as they contribute to unnecessary congestion. A prime example is the Allen Bus Stop heading to Alausa, positioned just after the traffic light intersection. This location creates significant gridlock because commercial vehicles often fail to park properly. Additionally, the area serves as a convergence point for traffic from Allen, Awolowo Road, and Aromire, making it a bottleneck. The bus stop should be relocated to a position before the traffic light, where there is sufficient space to accommodate vehicles. Furthermore, strict enforcement should be in place to ensure commercial vehicles park correctly while loading and offloading passengers at all bus stops.

Traffic Light Positioning and Visibility

While Lagos State deserves commendation for maintaining traffic lights, their placement in some locations is problematic. The intersection at Wempco Road and Agidingbi is a prime example—its traffic light is positioned so high that at certain angles, it is completely out of a driver’s line of sight. This poor placement creates a loophole that unscrupulous officers exploit, accusing drivers of running a red light when, in fact, they simply couldn’t see it.

To address this:

– Dual Placement of Traffic Lights: Traffic signals should be positioned both overhead and at eye level so they are visible from all angles.

– Regular Assessment for Visibility Issues: The Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA) should routinely evaluate all intersections and adjust the height or placement of signals where necessary.

 The Case of Traffic Cameras: Are They Just for Show?

Lagos boasts an extensive CCTV network, yet traffic violations persist at an alarming rate. Are these cameras truly functional, or are they simply decorative? Some seem positioned to monitor airplane traffic rather than road traffic.

If properly deployed, traffic cameras should:

– Monitor All Vehicles, Not Just Private Cars: Commercial drivers, who are often the worst offenders, should be held equally accountable.

– Provide Objective Evidence: Instead of relying on subjective accounts from officers with handheld cameras (which can be turned off or manipulated), traffic camera footage should be publicly accessible for contesting fines.

– Ensure Fair Application of the Law: The system should work for all Lagosians, not just as a tool for revenue generation from unsuspecting motorists.

 Conclusion: A Call for Overhaul

I have paid my fine, but I remain adamant that it was unjust. The recklessness of another road user put me in a position where stopping was the safest choice. Yet, the police officers who witnessed the entire event ignored the real traffic violator and conveniently targeted me instead.

It is time for Lagos State to overhaul its traffic enforcement system. Selective enforcement breeds lawlessness because it sends a message that compliance is optional depending on one’s ability to pay a bribe. AI and automation must take center stage in managing road safety, and rogue officers who prioritize extortion over enforcement should be dismissed.

The traffic chaos in Lagos is not just a result of bad drivers but also of bad enforcement. If the government genuinely wants to fix the problem, it must start with those responsible for maintaining order. Until then, Lagos roads will remain a jungle where law-abiding citizens are prey to a corrupt and inefficient system nurtured by the chaos.

Knowing What’s Right and Asking the Right Way: The Key to Getting What You Deserve

/ Sam Aderibigbe / 1 Comment

There’s a difference between what is rightfully yours and what you end up getting. Many times, the gap between the two is simply a matter of knowledge and the courage to demand what is due to you. Too often, people accept denials, delays, and outright exploitation because they do not know their rights or how to push for them effectively.

I learned this lesson firsthand, not once but twice, and these experiences reinforced the importance of being informed, persistent, and strategic in addressing issues—whether in personal matters, business dealings, or even nation-building.

Story 1: The X-ray That Almost Wasn’t Continue reading →