LAST week, I asked fellow Nigerians, readers of this column what else we can do about insecurity that we haven’t done. It was a rhetorical question. Truth is there’re lots we can do that we haven’t done. Are we no longer Nigerians? The most resilient group of peoples in the world? Are we not the ones that flourish where others flee? We are Nigerians! Remember, when armed robbers took this country hostage and laid serial sieges, how did we respond?
With the central police system failing all of us, we reached into our inventive inner selves and came up with home-grown solutions that endure till this day. First, we got vigilantes. We formed community development associations that fashioned out initiatives against insecurity. One of such initiatives was to hire night guards to keep watch on the neighbourhood while we slept. We also invented access control measures in our residential areas. As I speak, there are very few streets in our towns and cities that do not have gates. These gates are locked by midnight and reopened between 5am and 6am in most towns and cities. Some neighbourhoods even restrict usage of generators beyond certain hours of the night.
With these incessant kidnappings, we have to reach deeper into our inventive selves and bring out even more effective solutions. I am particularly delighted at the experience of natives of Ohuhu, in Abia State. There, last week, two indigenes were kidnapped. One of their abductors handed a phone to one of them to make calls and state ransom demands for their release. The person given the phone dialled a number he could remember, but chose to speak in his language, Igbo, which the abductors did not understand, and in the process, described the location of the den where they were being held. Of course, he was mercilessly beaten by the abductors for that. But the good side is that residents of Ohuhu mobilised their youths, stormed the kidnappers’ hideout, and rescued their people.
Lesson: There is benefit in having a sense of community. Another lesson is for those of us who are still ignoring their indigenous language and raising their children using the English language. Let that stop, as you don’t know the day your child will need his mother tongue, the language his ancestors spoke, to save his/her life.
Just before starting to write this, I saw a video in which residents of Anchau town, in Kubau Local Government Area of Kaduna State mobilised and chased away bandits that invaded their peace. That gladdened me a lot, and alongside the Ohuhu experience, it shows that we are the only ones that can save ourselves. In fact, peoples long used to drilling boreholes and digging wells for water supply, buying and fueling generators, and now shifting to the solar option for electricity are expecting too much from a government that is wired to do nothing except loot the commonwealth for their selfish benefits to provide them adequate security. By now, we must be in agreement that all our governments have scored, on the WASCE grade, a disgracing F-9 in governance. Even the security agencies cannot protect their own.
If they can, how come they sat down in their barracks and idled away while Major-General Rabe Abubakar not just got kidnapped, but died a captive in kidnappers’ den? To show that nobody was on that case, the terrorists brought back the body of the general, handed it over, and walked back to their dens majestically and nothing happened to them? That made me sick. Just can’t wrap my head round it: that in Nigeria, year of our Lord 2026, under the Renewed Hope Administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, outlaws are running a show like this!
As you read this, the calendar says it’s June 19. That makes it 34 days after terrorists stormed some communities in Oyo State and kidnapped teachers, schoolchildren, and beheaded a school teacher. And the rest still remain captive. As all this horror is going on, the political group that manages our affairs remains fixated on just one thing — elections. When they win elections, who will they rule over? People in kidnappers’ dens? Or schoolchildren at home for fear of being kidnapped if they go to school? Who?
Again, I commend the spirit of of my fellow countrymen. Amid all this horror, some people still try to make us laugh. I saw a skit online in which a child was being asked why he didn’t go to school. He replied, saying they have a holiday. What holiday, we just celebrated Eid-el-Kabir, the questioner asked. And the child replied: “We have bandits holiday!”
Going forward, let communities organise their youths and form them into defensive phalanxes against terrorists. The terrorists are not spirits. They are not ghosts; they are real flesh and blood, like you and me. Not ethereal. Let us confront them. From here, let communities be warned. Because our rulers have weaponised poverty against us, many of us are selling our patrimony. Ancestral lands are being sold in many towns and villages. It is suspected that terrorists are buying lands in the forested parts of our states and creating hideouts there. Beware who you sell land to. Where possible, let people burrow into the recesses of their culture, as some traditional leaders have mooted, and seek solutions to this insecurity problem, and the earlier, the better. We just cannot go on like this. TGIF.
