Security

Featured

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 – 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…