Victims, twice, by Hakeem Baba-Ahmed

2026-03-24 - 01:13

“The saddest thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies”– African proverb In the last four weeks we have witnessed the highest upsurge of organized violence in our country. Even for a nation that has lived with endemic violence for the last 14 years (not counting the violence over grievances in the Niger Delta which spanned more than a decade from end of the last century to the current one), it has been shocking how vulnerable we are becoming to losing lives, property and fortunes to varied and mutating threats. Worse, our seeming helplessness over our vulnerability appears to be rising to levels which make it easy for those with responsibility to secure us to feel less responsible because we victims are part of the problems that make us victims. A Global Terrorism Index 2025 recently released by the Institute for Economics and Peace ranks Nigeria fourth in the world. Terror attacks rose by 43 percent, from 120 incidents in 2024 to 171 in 2025. Significantly, civilians constitute 67 per cent of all victims, or soft targets. Defence and security personnel, people trained, paid and sworn to protect the unarmed citizen represent 33 per cent of all victims. What this means is that our attackers deliberately target the civilian population which is either under-protected or abandoned by leaders and state agents who should protect citizens. It is profoundly depressing to hear highly-placed people suggest that victims of insurgencies are responsible for giving it the oxygen it needs to grow. It is not a new tactic to push the blame on the victim. What is new is the defeatist idea that the enemy cannot be defeated unless its victims are identified and treated as its facilitators. There are no nicer ways to say our leaders have led us to lose a virtual war against terrorists and other opportunistic criminal elements. Too often leaders have used the excuse that they inherited a problem, which then becomes worse under them. The same leaders who pledge to rid us of all evil. The same leaders who ask for our trust because they understand the problem, and have the answers. Then they do the same things predecessors have done: too little in effect, too familiar to the enemy and too casual to make any difference. Soon it registers to the enemy: this, too, can be defeated. It has not always been this way. Our history records events when a combination of will, resources and muscle combined to pull the country from precipice, even not entirely. The Nigerian military triggered a chain of events towards a civil war, then fought it with vision, commitment and resources. More important, the end of the civil war was not just the result of a military victory. The nation moved away from the civil war because the same military which triggered it deployed wisdom, unity and responsibility in keeping a nation that had gambled with many sensitive challenges as it attempted to stand on its feet as a decolonizing country. Then we confronted an armed uprising against a Nigerian state which behaved as if there are no consequences for depriving communities in the Niger Delta that saw wealth pass-by leaving them with the consequences of its creation: poverty, ruin and a sense of helplessness in seeking attention and some justice. The nation has paid dearly for the folly of allowing popular grievance to grow into an armed struggle, and we have not heard the end of this yet. The developing nexus between illegal mining which increasingly attracts the Northern peasant, spawns him into an armed criminal and links him with a dangerous global dimension is being treated as a mere nuisance. Yet it represents one of the most serious threats in and for Nigeria, with massive implications for national security when it creates an illegal army that will be fighting what they see as a just war since they cannot farm or herd cattle. Farmer-herder conflicts had been routinely managed for centuries by elaborate African dispute resolution mechanisms, until an incompetent and greedy leadership emasculated those mechanisms with corrupt state institutions and predatory politics which leave the herder, the farmer, the economy and national security as victims. Policing as the premier state institution for keeping order and preserving the law has been destroyed by the sheer weight of abuse and neglect. Now the Federal Government wants to create compartmentalized and more vulnerable versions of it at state levels to give the ruling elite greater muscle to control the citizen, not eliminate the criminal. Corruption has eaten so deeply, it has created a nation of corrupt people where survival as an honest, hardworking citizen is virtually impossible. Leaders cannot fight it even if they want to: it is the very lifeblood which creates and sustains them. The state is too weak to protect the honest and hard working citizen who asks only to be left alone and safe. He is in the South-East, governed more by the strong arms of thugs pursuing dubious political goals than by the state barricading leaders to keep them safe. He is in the North-East, living under the insurgents’ dictates for more than a decade, and is being accused by the Nigerian state for being a collaborator. He is all over Nigeria, exposed to kidnappers, bandits and ethnic militia who have more resources to buy intelligence, weaponry and submission of the citizen than the state is willing to make available to its security institutions. Whether it was poor communication or deliberate and pointed accusation, the top brass of the military recently hinted that populations who have lived with and under insurgents in the North -East are collaborators and facilitators of their own misfortune. The lesson here is clear. Those whose responsibility it is to protect the citizen accuse him of being the architect of his own misfortune. Presumably, top military officers feel less culpable for failures when they point to the victim as sources of their weaknesses. The same argument can be labelled at Nigerians who have chosen leadership that have successively deepened its woes. Days after some of the worst bombings in Maiduguri, President Bola Tinubu and a large entourage of Ministers and officials travelled to the UK on state visit. The entourage included the new Minister of Defence and the very powerful National Security Adviser, Malam Nuhu Ribadu. The British establishment they visited is extremely versed in Nigeria’s current security situation. An informed, professional diplomacy should have advised that the British have an unimpressive esteem for Nigeria’s leadership which in any case, appears to have turned to the US as a potential saviour. The huge entourage was pampered by a Britain eager to slow the drift towards the US. The Nigerian contingent relaxed and enjoyed itself, signing agreements that had more symbolism than substance. Lagos and those close to the President will be happy. Nigerians will continue to worry whether Tinubu’s administration can turn the tide against our nightmares, or wait until he gets a fresh mandate in 2027 with a promise to do better.