Drought, the riverbed now a roadway
Weathered stones mark the tracks of climate change
Signs of futures impending,
The inevitable only delayed

Branches, stripped bare and denuded
Masked with the orange glow of fires
Just out of the line of sight
Drawing closer, but only of concern in the heat of emergency

Temperatures rising
The temper of society
What hope for trees of life and the rivers
That once coursed through our plains
That we pay rote notice,
Fig leaves at that, to our fellow men

Once a Riverbed, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Til it's done by D'Angelo
• Roads by Portishead
• River run dry by The Family
• Temperature Rising by Les Nubians
  Some prefer the version with Talib Kweli

File under: culture, observation, perception, environment, climate, dismay, poetry, Observers are worried, toli

Writing log. October 8, 2022

How Faith, Fear, and Forgetfulness Made a Nation Unravel

I. Prologue — The Gospel According to Trump

If you’ve lived long enough, you learn that every few years Nigeria is rediscovered. One week it’s rediscovered as an investment frontier — our population a “demographic dividend.” The next, we’re rediscovered as a humanitarian crisis, our kidnapped, murdered or hungry children props for pity campaigns and hashtags. And now, under a new American administration of crusading saints, we’ve been rediscovered as a mission field.

When Donald Trump and his cabinet threaten to “deal with Islamic extremists in Nigeria,” it feels less like a policy announcement and more like an audition tape for a televangelist channel. It is the foreign policy equivalent of a sermon: the self-anointed rescuing black Christians from black Muslims, armed with drones and righteousness.

One almost wants to thank them for noticing us. We have been screaming into the void for years — about killings, kidnappings, burned churches, and bombed mosques — only to discover that it takes the alchemy of an American election cycle to make our dead photogenic again. Suddenly, Nigeria is trending. Suddenly, we are the frontline of civilisation.

But the irony is rich enough to choke on. Trump’s America, where school boards ban books and churches preach ethnic purity, has appointed itself the saviour of our pluralism. A country whose own mobs chant “Jews will not replace us” is lecturing us on tolerance. One imagines a global exchange programme: our clerics and their preachers meeting to compare notes on how to weaponise God most efficiently.

Still, before we get too indignant, we should admit the obvious: Nigeria has made itself an easy sermon. Nigeria is that dysfunctional parish where everything goes wrong at once. Bandits rule highways, pastors bless oil scams, soldiers double as smugglers, and every new government promises to “fight insecurity” as if it were a person you could arrest. The Americans didn’t invent our chaos — they merely licensed it.

So, while Trump thunders about Islamic extremism, I’m more interested in the quieter extremism of the everyday lives of Nigerians — the kind that doesn’t trend. The slow violence of a government that cannot feed or protect its people. The bigotry we print on billboards and call faith. The way every disagreement becomes a holy war because real justice feels unreachable.

This essay is an attempt to map that terrain of violence — not just the spectacular explosions that reach CNN, but the ancient sediment beneath them: the unpaid debts of history, the tribal fevers that predate independence, the religious hierarchy that outlived the Caliphate that created it. The Fulani herdsman with his stick and the bandit with his rifle, the Christian vigilante and the Muslim emir — they are all, in some tragic way, inheritors of the same unfinished story.

To understand why the world now calls Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern,” we must first understand how it became a country of particular forgetfulness. Nigerians have forgotten — or chosen not to remember — that today’s “herder–farmer conflicts”, bandit raids, and jihadist wars are not ruptures but rehearsals. Every generation re-enacts the same drama with new props: AK-47s instead of spears, hashtags instead of messengers.

The stage was built two centuries ago, when faith became both weapon and passport in the north. The Sokoto Caliphate, born of jihad and legal genius, organised a vast economy of tribute and captivity. Islam was its constitution, Arabic its bureaucracy, and slavery its workforce. Non-Muslim communities in what we now call the Middle Belt paid in crops, cattle, and bodies. The conquerors called it reform, their victims called it Tuesday.

That order collapsed under British conquest in 1903 but never truly ended. The British, masters of minimal effort, abolished slavery and then kept the slavers as district heads. They replaced tribute with taxation, the emir’s whip with the Resident’s fountain pen. The old hierarchy learned a new language — Indirect Rule — but the moral logic was unchanged: Islam and Hausa-Fulani identity at the top, the “pagan tribes” supplying labour and loyalty below.

When independence came in 1960, we simply renamed the colonies regions (and then ultimately, states). The emirs stayed, the hierarchies stayed, the myth of northern unity stayed. In the decades that followed, we added new cast members — pastors, imams, generals, oil barons — but the script remained the same: power justified by divine appointment, dissent managed through fear, and every crisis outsourced to God.

Now, two centuries after Usman dan Fodio’s jihad, we live among its descendants — both literal and ideological. The herder with his cattle in Plateau, the bandit in Zamfara, the jihadist in Borno, the Fulani militia in Benue, the politician quoting scripture on campaign — they are all products of this unbroken lineage of faith and impunity. The Caliphate taught people to conquer in God’s name, colonialism taught them to administer injustice politely, democracy taught Nigerians to monetise it.

And so, when an American president declares Nigeria a land of extremism, he is half right — but for the wrong reasons. The real extremism here is not religious devotion but the extremism of neglect. Nigerians have normalised a level of dysfunction that would qualify as civil war anywhere else. Insecurity is the national weather report and corruption, the official language.

What makes Nigeria unique is not the presence of violence but the absence of consequence. People are killed in their thousands and no one resigns. Governors hold press conferences beside mass graves and quote the Bible and Quran. Policemen collect bribes from the families of the dead. In some towns, the only reliable public services are the church and the mosque.

Nigeria’s tragedy is banal: not only do people die, they die unremarkably. In a nation of daily massacres, murder has lost its news value. Perhaps that is why foreign sermons sting — they remind Nigerians of crimes they’ve learned to scroll past.

I do not write this as an exercise in despair. If I sound irreverent, it’s because reverence is part of the disease. We have worshipped our killers for too long — politicians, generals, clerics, warlords — mistaking their violence for vision.

What follows, then, is not a defence of any faith or ethnicity but a long autopsy of a wounded country. I will trace how the simple act of grazing cattle became a metaphor for Nigeria’s failure to govern itself. How the ghosts of the Caliphate still collect tribute through bureaucrats and bandits alike. How the British left us a map drawn in blood and told us to call it a federation. How post-independence Nigeria inherited slavery’s architecture and called it culture.

I will wander from the dusty archives of Bauchi and Ningi, where cows and egos collided, to the forests of Zamfara, where helicopters allegedly ferry stolen gold while villagers barter their children for ransom. We will examine why people still die for blasphemy in a country that claims to be democratic, and why those who cheer such killings are awarded national honours. We will study the new priesthood of corruption — the governors who negotiate with terrorists, the spokesmen who tweet bigotry as policy.

And somewhere in the middle, we will meet ourselves: a people so traumatised by history that we mistake repetition for destiny.

So let the Americans preach. Let them send their envoys and threaten their sanctions. We have our own prophets, and most of them carry guns.

Selected Sources & Notes

• U.S. Dept. of State. Annual designations for Countries of Particular Concern (2020–2021) and notices concerning Nigeria.
• Africa-focused reportage summarising CPC placement/removal and ongoing advocacy (use as political context, not as sole authority).

II. Three Names for the Same Fire

In Nigeria, we do not describe violence. We brand it.

Every few months, a new label arrives — freshly minted in the newsroom or the governor’s press statement — trying to name an old phenomenon. “Fulani herdsmen.” “Fulani bandits.” “Fulani militia.” Three names for the same fire, depending on who’s burning and who’s counting the bodies.

The “herdsman” is our oldest villain and our oldest neighbour. He is the thin, dark figure walking beside a line of cattle, his stick or gun or both slung across the shoulders like punctuation. To the farmer, he is a trespasser; to the trader, a customer; to the cattle rustler, a target; to the politician, a campaign issue. His cattle eat what they please, his movement is older than our borders, and his presence carries a certain inevitability, like harmattan dust or corruption.

The “bandit,” by contrast, is a modern entrepreneur. He trades in fear and ransom. He thrives where the state is absent, speaks whatever language bullets understand, and treats abduction as a business model. Sometimes he is indeed Fulani; sometimes he is everyone else wearing Fulani as camouflage.

Then there is the “Fulani militia”(some would say terrorist) — a label so elastic it can stretch to fit any act of violence north of the Niger. It is both description and verdict. To call a killer “Fulani” in today’s Nigeria is to declare the motive, deliver the judgment, and close the case. Nuance died here long before the victims.

But these categories are not new; they are only renamed. Our ancestors fought the same wars and made the same excuses, only with less technology. We have simply upgraded the weaponry, not the wisdom.

To prove that, let me take you back to 1847 — to a place called Dua, in what is now Bauchi State in north-east Nigeria. A story about a cow, a cleric, and a lesson Nigeria keeps refusing to learn.

The Cow at Dua

After the jihad of 1804, the newly founded Sokoto Caliphate spent decades consolidating power, folding resistant regions into its orbit. One of the most stubborn areas lay around the Ningi Hills — a frontier of independent-minded communities, some Muslim, many not, suspicious of both emirs and reformers.

In 1847, a learned Hausa scholar from Kano named Malam Hamza fled persecution by the Fulani rulers of that city. A dissident cleric, he had fallen out with the emirate establishment and was being hunted for insubordination — an early casualty of religious politics that turned doctrine into hierarchy.

Seeking refuge, Hamza and his followers wandered southward until they reached the land of the Butawa people, under the suzerainty of Dan Daura, a Fulani chief of Marra in Bauchi territory. Dan Daura, recognising Hamza’s scholarship, welcomed him warmly. He needed a teacher for his son, and the prestige of hosting a learned cleric would enhance his standing with the emir of Bauchi.

As Adell Patton Jr. records in his meticulous 1975 thesis on the Ningi Chiefdom and Resistance to the Sokoto Caliphate, Dan Daura even escorted Hamza to Emir Ibrahim of Bauchi in 1848 to secure permission for the scholar’s settlement. The emir, wary of housing a known rebel, reportedly warned Dan Daura: “Someday these mallams will prove too strong for you.”

Prophecy loves Nigeria. It is always fulfilled on schedule.

Hamza and his people settled in Dua, building houses, teaching Qur’anic lessons, and practising medicine and magic — the two were often indistinguishable in those days. His reputation grew quickly. The Butawa admired his learning and the protection charms he distributed. Soon, the stranger from Kano had more authority in Dua than the Fulani chief who hosted him.

Then came the cow.

One afternoon, a Fulani herder’s cow wandered into a Buta man’s garden. The farmer, perhaps tired of unpaid damages and arrogant trespass, shot the animal dead and shared the meat with his neighbours. The herder, outraged, went straight to Dan Daura and accused the Butawa of murder — not of the cow but of justice. He claimed the animal had been killed not for trespassing but because the Butawa simply wanted meat.

Dan Daura summoned his council, weighed the complaint, and ruled that the Butawa must pay compensation. He then travelled the eleven miles to Dua to enforce his judgment.

But the Butawa refused. They were no longer the same people who had meekly received Fulani orders a year before. Under Hamza’s influence, they had discovered something dangerous: self-regard. They argued that the cow had trespassed, that payment was unjust. Voices rose, tempers flared. Somewhere between Quranic citation and cultural insult, the meeting collapsed into threats.

Dan Daura stormed back to Marra, furious. He accused Hamza of sedition and decided to return with soldiers to discipline the Butawa. Meanwhile, Hamza rallied his hosts to arms. He promised them victory and immunity, boasting of his sihr — spells that could make their skin resistant to swords and arrows.

At first the Butawa hesitated. They demanded proof. Hamza attempted a demonstration. Whether miracle, trick, or myth, it worked. The Butawa joined him.

When Dan Daura marched back with his troops, the Butawa and Hamza’s followers ambushed them. The chief’s men, outnumbered and demoralised, broke ranks. Dan Daura fled for his life, abandoning Marra.

A year later, Bauchi forces retaliated. Hamza was killed in battle in 1849; his brother, Malam Ahmadu, continued the fight until his own death in 1855. Their successor, Dan Maje, seeking safer terrain, moved the movement’s headquarters to Lungu, a mountain fortress in Ningi territory. There, they displaced and massacred indigenous non-Muslim populations — Ka, Sammo, Ingaya, Baguwa, Kyabara — destroyed shrines of tsafi worship, and built the first mosque and palace.

Lungu, ringed by natural cliffs, became the unassailable capital of Ningi. From its heights, Dan Maje and his council of Hausa ulama launched raids far and wide — east into Zazzau’s frontier, south into Warji land — taking slaves, collecting tribute, expanding dominion. Bauchi and Kano sent expeditions repeatedly, but the mountain refused to fall. Lungu remained untaken until 1934.

The Moral of Lungu

I recount this story in full because it is the miniature of our entire history: a local grievance inflated by pride, religion, and politics into generational violence.

What began as a quarrel over a cow became a war of theology; what began as hospitality ended as conquest. The scholar fleeing persecution became the persecutor. The oppressed became enslavers. The natives who sought protection lost their land and lives.

Every motif of modern Nigeria is already here:

• The herder–farmer dispute morphing into ethnic war.
• The politicisation of religion.
• The opportunistic leader using faith to mobilise arms.
• The displacement of indigenous populations in the name of God or progress.
• The unkillable fortress of impunity — Lungu by another name.

It is as if we photocopied 1847 and distributed it across the 21st century. In Benue, Plateau, Kaduna — the same choreography: cattle trespass, retaliation, rumours, militias, massacres, blame. Communities repeat the emir’s warning; journalists replay the emir’s disbelief. Every year we rediscover that cows and politics make a lethal combination.

Had Nigerians read their own history, we might have recognised that herder–farmer violence was never about grass alone. It has always been about power, control, belonging, and hierarchy. The Caliphate’s legacy turned land into theology; the colonial state turned theology into administration; the republic turned administration into corruption. What we call “Fulani herdsmen crisis” is simply the persistence of an old order — faith and tribe as licence, violence as negotiation.

Names and Amnesia

So when people ask whether it’s Fulani herdsmen, Fulani bandits, or Fulani militia, I tell them: it is history with a new headline. The vocabulary changes; the moral geography does not.

The tragedy of Nigeria is not ignorance but amnesia. We keep forgetting that the past is not behind us but beside us, grazing in the next field.

Selected Sources & Notes

• Patton, Adell, Jr. The Ningi Chiefdom and the African Frontier: Mountaineers and Resistance to the Sokoto Caliphate ca. 1800–1908. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1975.
• Imam Mahmud b. Muhammad. Tārīkh ’Umara Bauchi (as cited and translated in Patton, 1975).
• ENACT (Institute for Security Studies). Policy briefs on north-west banditry, ransom economies, and illegal mining linkages.

III. The Caliphate and the Making of a Permanent Underclass

Every empire begins with a sermon.

In what is now northern Nigeria, it began in Sokoto in 1804, with Usman dan Fodio — scholar, reformer, warrior, preacher of purity — announcing that Hausaland had gone astray and that Allah demanded renewal. Renewal, of course, required a little blood.

Dan Fodio’s jihad was framed as moral rescue: to rid Hausaland of corrupt rulers, pagan practices, and the mingling of Islam with “innovation.” But moral reform is rarely content with hearts; it always wants territory. Within a decade, the jihad had carved out one of the largest pre-colonial states in Africa — the Sokoto Caliphate, stretching from modern Niger Republic to Cameroon, from the Niger River to Lake Chad. At its peak, it governed more land and people than some European kingdoms.

Its theology was brilliant; its social order, less so. The Caliphate turned faith into a caste system: Muslims on top, unbelievers at the bottom, slaves as infrastructure. The scholar Murray Last called it “a state built on the backbone of bondage.” Paul Lovejoy, who spent his life mapping that bondage, estimated that by the mid-nineteenth century one-half to two-thirds of the population within Caliphate territories were enslaved or servile.

The Caliphate justified this through law. The Qur’an forbade the enslavement of Muslims but permitted it for “unbelievers” captured in jihad. The jurists of Sokoto took that clause and built an economy on it. They wrote fatwas explaining that any pagan land refusing Islam was dar al-harb — territory of war — and its people could be captured, taxed, or killed. Religion became not only creed but census.

Slavery as Governance

Every emirate had its slave market and its routes. In Kano, the Kurmi market became a regional hub where Warjawa, Gbagyi, and Ningi captives were traded like grain. In Zazzau, slave-raiding parties rode south yearly, plundering Kaduna, Kachia, Kagoro, and Jema’a, dragging entire families northward. In Nupeland, wars along the Niger turned thousands of non-Muslim captives into palace labourers; the ethnographer S.F. Nadel called it “a black Byzantium” for its bureaucratic precision in owning humans.

Farther east, in Adamawa, Modibbo Adama — one of dan Fodio’s most zealous disciples — launched campaigns against the Bachama, Chamba, and Mumuye peoples, transforming the Benue valley into a slave corridor. By the 1880s, as Paul Lovejoy records, slaves made up roughly half the population of the emirate. The ruling Fulani elite used them as soldiers, concubines, farmers, and bureaucrats. The caliphate’s wealth was literally human. (It must be stated here too that women made up a significant majority of the enslaved population in the Sokoto Caliphate, with some estimates suggesting 60–80% were female. Sexual subjugation and slavery was a core feature of the institution in the Sokoto Caliphate, a system supported by its political and legal structures.)

Even religion could not save you quickly. Conversion, while noble, did not cancel bondage; a slave could become Muslim and remain property. Freedom required not faith but favour — usually purchase, inheritance, or the emir’s generosity. Islam, in this sense, functioned less as emancipation than as etiquette for domination.

Tribute and the Geography of Fear

Where direct conquest was impractical, tribute achieved the same effect. Non-Muslim or newly converted communities along the Caliphate’s frontiers were required to send grain, livestock, cloth, and slaves annually to their supervising emirates. Bauchi demanded cattle and salt from the Gerawa; Zazzau extracted labour from the Atyap; Nupe took children from Gbagyi settlements. Refusal meant raids.

The Caliphate was not one monolith but a network of hierarchies radiating from Sokoto. Each emir owed allegiance and taxes to the caliph; each district owed tribute to the emir; each non-Muslim village owed bodies to the district. It was governance by cascade, a pyramid sustained by fear and faith.

Some records preserve the very language of that subservience. Letters from emirs to the caliph open with self-abasement: “Your slave prostrates before you and kisses the ground.” Chiefs of “pagan towns,” writing through interpreters, address emirs as “masters of our heads.” Even after conquest, they were allowed to keep their villages only by acknowledging their inferiority.

The Theologians of Enslavement

The intellectual justification for all this lay in the writings of dan Fodio and his circle.

In his Bayan Wujub al-Hijra, dan Fodio argued that it was obligatory to separate from and fight Muslim rulers who mixed Islam with paganism. His son Muhammad Bello, in Infaq al-Maysur, elaborated a theology of governance where jihad purified the land and the caliphate was the earthly expression of divine order. Abdullahi dan Fodio, in his legal treatise Diya’ al-Hukkam, codified the rights of the victorious Muslim over the defeated unbeliever: their property, land, and persons could be seized as booty; their children could be enslaved.

A generation later, Nana Asma’u, dan Fodio’s daughter and revered scholar and prolific poet, wrote verses celebrating the jihad’s moral mission: bringing light to the “dark villages.” The light, of course, was sometimes accompanied by chains.

From these texts, a moral arithmetic emerged: enslavement was mercy if it led to conversion; tribute was gratitude; resistance was sin. The Caliphate thus baptised violence with jurisprudence. Its legacy is not only physical but psychological — the internalised belief among many northern elites that hierarchy is divine order, that some are born to rule and others to serve.

The Frontier of the Unbelievers

Nowhere was this order more violently expressed than along what later came to be called the Middle Belt — a mosaic of ethnic groups who resisted Islamisation. The Caliphate saw them as kafirai (unbelievers) and useful resources. Slave-raiding was continuous. The historian Mahmud Modibbo Tukur described the area south of Zaria and Bauchi as a “hunting ground.”

Travellers of the period record villages burnt and emptied. Heinrich Barth, the German explorer who visited in the 1850s, wrote of the “slave roads” leading north from the Benue valley, lined with the skulls of those who tried to escape. The Panshanu cairns along the Jos–Bauchi road still mark massacre sites, mounds of stone raised over piles of bones — monuments built by survivors so the dead would not vanish entirely.

The British and the Afterlife of Slavery

When the British conquered the Caliphate in 1903, they abolished slavery on paper but left the structure intact. Frederick Lugard, architect of Indirect Rule, wrote approvingly that “the Fulani, though autocratic, have the habits of administration,” and kept them in power. Emirs became “Native Authorities”; slaves became “tenants”; tribute became “taxation.” The same pyramids, new labels.

The British even helped stabilise the religious frontier, using Muslim emirates as buffers against “pagan disorder.” The “pagans” were folded into provinces governed by their former raiders. In Plateau and Southern Kaduna, chiefs now reported to emirs whose ancestors had enslaved their people. The British called it efficiency; the victims called it continuity.

By the 1920s, missionary records from the Middle Belt still describe Christian converts being flogged by district heads for refusing to work on emirate farms. In some areas, newly freed slaves were re-enslaved through debt or forced labour. Abolition, as the historian Toyin Falola notes, “ended the name of slavery but not its logic.”

The Birth of the Permanent Underclass

Thus was born Nigeria’s most enduring social divide: Muslim emirates inheriting power; non-Muslim minorities inheriting suspicion. The Caliphate’s religious map became the colonial administrative map, which became the electoral map. Those who once paid tribute still pay political rent; those who once collected it now collect federal allocations.

This is why the term “Middle Belt” carries more than geography; it carries memory. It is the frontier of unbelief, the region perpetually caught between conquest and neglect. To this day, in some northern languages like Hausa, words, especially those used to describe other “tribes” and non-Muslims, still bear the residue of that old contempt.

In speaking of the presence or otherwise of so-called Fulani supremacy (or Muslim dominance) today, we are naming the afterlife of that Caliphate structure. The theology of inequality outlived the empire that birthed it. It survived colonialism, independence, and democracy. It lives in our bureaucracy, our politics, our sense of who belongs and who does not.

The greatest tragedy is not that the Caliphate enslaved millions; it is that the rest of the nation inherited its moral vocabulary. We still sort people into believers and unbelievers, indigenes and settlers, northerners and southerners. We still believe power is a divine attribute, not a civic trust.

The Caliphate is gone, but its ghost sits quietly in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, stamping passports of belonging.

Selected Sources & Notes

• Last, Murray. The Sokoto Caliphate. London: Longman, 1967.
• Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; and “Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2021.
• Nadel, S. F. A Black Byzantium: The Kingdom of Nupe in Nigeria. London: Oxford University Press, 1942.
• Tukur, Mahmud Modibbo. The Imposition of British Colonial Domination on the Sokoto Caliphate, 1903–1914. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1999.
• Barth, Heinrich. Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa. London, 1857–59.

IV. Rebellion as Mirror

History loves repetition. The Ningi rebellion’s moral transformation — from the persecuted to the persecutor — is a mirror for future insurgencies. Every Nigerian revolt since then has carried this double life: first, as moral defiance; then, as moral substitution.

The Mahdist uprisings that followed in the late 19th century borrowed the rhetoric of purification while re-enacting the same hierarchies. Boko Haram repeated the gesture almost perfectly: denouncing corruption and Western sin, then enslaving women, taxing villagers, and creating a state whose logic is indistinguishable from, if not worse than the empire it despises.

In Ningi’s mountains we see the prototype. Hamza’s disciples fled Fulani persecution, then enslaved non-Muslim peoples. Boko Haram’s founders “fled” a corrupt secular state, then built a regime of the same corruption — only sanctified. Even Nigeria’s politicians practice this rhythm: every reformer becomes a ruler, every ruler a reformer-in-waiting.

It would be tempting to treat this as fatalism, but it is not destiny. I call it inheritance. When a society’s idea of legitimacy is drawn from conquest, it will reproduce conquest as governance. When power is justified by proximity to God, every rebel becomes a future God-ordained leader.

The Psychology of the Fortress

Lungu’s walls have long fallen, but the fortress remains internalised. Northern Nigeria still carries this mountain inside it — the belief that safety lies in enclosure, that righteousness requires separation. Communities retreat into ethnic, religious, or regional bastions, each convinced the other is out to enslave them again.

The Fulani herder sees the farmer as usurper and nuisance. The farmer sees the herder as conqueror. Both live in the shadow of ancient raids. In Plateau, Benue, Southern Kaduna, the language of self-defence echoes Ningi’s: we will not be dominated again. Every reprisal or killing in “self-defence” is framed as history correcting itself.

Meanwhile, the elite, descendants of conquerors and conquered alike, use that memory like currency. Politicians evoke “our heroes past” to justify modern greed. The Caliphate’s clerical discipline gives way to today’s bureaucratic secrecy. The logic Ningi defiance becomes the rhetoric of every regional champion.

We have all inherited the fortress, and we have all become its guards.

The Long Echo

By the time the British “pacified” Lungu in 1934, the Ningi highlands had become legend — a story of courage, faith, and autonomy. But behind the legend lay familiar debris: burnt villages, displaced people, a trail of tribute and blood. The archives describe Ningi’s final surrender with bureaucratic coldness: “Peace established. District reorganised under Bauchi Emirate.” The conquerors and the conquered were folded once again into the same administrative column.

What remains today is the echo.

When armed groups in the northwest occupy forests and declare independence from Abuja, they are repeating Ningi’s gesture. When a militant group declares a caliphate in Borno, it is replaying Sokoto’s sermon. When communities form self-defence militias in Plateau and Benue, they are invoking the memory of villages that once fled the Caliphate’s whip or Ningi’s sword.

We are a nation of historical reruns. Each rebellion promises liberation; each ends by proving that freedom without reform becomes another hierarchy.

If the Caliphate created the architecture of dominance, Ningi perfected its imitation. Between them, they built the grammar of our present: the cycle of victimhood and vengeance, the theology of conquest, the politics of replication.

The lesson of Lungu is simple but unsparing: without moral revolution, every political one is a rehearsal for tyranny.

Selected Sources & Notes

• Patton, Adell, Jr. The Ningi Chiefdom and the African Frontier: Mountaineers and Resistance to the Sokoto Caliphate ca. 1800–1908. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1975.

V. Empire Outsourced: Indirect Rule and the British Gift of Inequality

When the British finally arrived, they did not so much conquer the North as inherit it.

The Fulani horsemen had already done the hard work: pacified the countryside, classified the people, collected the taxes. All the British had to do was change the stationery.

The Art of Minimal Effort

In 1903, after the fall of Sokoto and Kano, Lord Frederick Lugard surveyed the wreckage of empire and saw not chaos but opportunity. The Caliphate’s hierarchy impressed him. “The Fulani,” he wrote, “though autocratic, possess the genius of administration.”

Translation: Why govern when others can do it for you?

Thus was born the masterpiece of colonial laziness known as Indirect Rule — a system that allowed Britain to run an empire with a handful of officers and a mountain of assumptions. The emirs kept their palaces; the people kept their chains; and the Union Jack fluttered gently over both.

Slavery was outlawed but not dismantled. Every “freed” person became a tenant on the land of his former master. Tribute became taxation, collected by the same men with the same arrogance but new titles: District Head, Native Authority, Warrant Chief. Bureaucracy replaced the whip; the hierarchy remained.

The Bureaucracy of Belief

In the logic of Indirect Rule, Islam was synonymous with civilisation. Christian or “pagan” communities were treated as anthropological curiosities — useful, picturesque, but in need of tutelage. Reports from colonial officers in Plateau and Tivland speak of “primitive hill tribes,” “backward pagans,” and “warlike elements.” The same people who had resisted Caliphate slave raids were now being disciplined by British paperwork.

Lugard’s administration redrew the map but preserved the theology. Muslim emirates were rewarded with autonomy; non-Muslim districts were folded into their jurisdiction “for ease of administration.” In Plateau and Southern Kaduna, communities that had once paid tribute to Bauchi and Zaria now did so through the colonial treasury. Chiefs who had tasted a few years of independence found themselves reporting again to emirs — this time in the name of the Crown.

In Tivland, where neither Caliphate nor emirate had ever held sway, the British invented chiefs from scratch, appointing pliant men to collect taxes. Where there were no aristocracies, the empire created them. Where there were no tribes, it named them. Every community was tagged, counted, and ranked on the moral ladder from “civilised” Muslim to “wild” pagan.

The empire turned anthropology into policy, and racism into routine.

Postscript:
I must add here that the frontiers were complex. While the Sokoto emirates industrialised slaving, they were not the sole actors. In the Middle–Benue zone, some non-Muslim polities and communities also captured and traded persons during warfare and raiding. Jukun formations around Wukari and several Chamba chiefdoms periodically raided neighbours. Tiv groups, too, engaged in warfare that produced captives (alongside widespread pawnship/servitude), even as Tiv communities were themselves frequent targets. The scale, organisation, and legal-religious justification often differed from Caliphate practice, but the wider frontier economy drew in multiple actors across the nineteenth century Benue valley. The point stands: colonial “tribe-making” met a pre-existing, many-sided landscape of coercion. (see selected notes below for more reading on this)

Continuity by Other Means

The efficiency was astonishing. With fewer than 400 British officers, an area larger than France was governed through a chain of native officials paid in prestige. The Emir of Kano ruled one-third of what is now northern Nigeria; his courtiers’ robes were still embroidered with Quranic verses, only now the salaries came from the colonial budget.

The British had achieved the impossible: a Christian empire powered by Muslim theocracy.

In official dispatches, administrators praised the “loyal Fulani ruling class.” In private letters they sneered at them as “languid orientals.” It was a relationship of mutual exploitation. The emirs provided order; the British provided weapons and recognition. Both sides despised the “pagans,” who provided labour.

By 1914, when Lugard amalgamated north and south into the artificial organism called Nigeria, the template of inequality was already perfected. The Caliphate’s old moral pyramid had become a fiscal one. At the top were emirs and Residents; at the bottom, the same villages once raided for slaves — now supplying porters for tin mines and taxes for railways.

The Moral Economy of Indirect Rule

The British justified this arrangement with the language of paternalism. They claimed that northern peoples were “not ready” for democracy, that emirs were natural rulers. The irony was biblical: colonialism presented itself as protection from the very despotism it sustained.

When Christian missionaries complained about restrictions on proselytising in Muslim emirates, the government replied that such interference would “disturb native customs.” When non-Muslim communities demanded autonomy, the colonial Resident scolded them for “ingratitude.” Freedom, like progress, had to wait its turn.

The empire excelled at moral outsourcing. It delegated cruelty and collected taxes. It taught local tyrants to speak the Queen’s English while flogging their subjects in Hausa. The result was a hybrid regime — half Caliphate, half corporation. Nigeria became a company with a theology department.

Case Studies in Continuity

In Zaria Province, the Atyap and Bajju peoples, long victims of slave raids, found themselves under the new Zaria Native Authority. They paid head tax to the descendants of their former enslavers. Appeals for self-rule were ignored until the 1930s, when the government grudgingly created “minor chiefdoms” still supervised by the emir.

In Bauchi Province, the Ningi hills were finally declared “pacified.” The British placed Dan Maje’s hard won capital back under Bauchi’s emirate administration — the same emirate he had fought for eighty years. History folded neatly upon itself.

In Plateau, the empire’s mining interests required labour. The so-called “pagan tribes” were forcibly recruited for tin mining around Jos. Colonial reports describe “labour migration” in the same tone used earlier for slave caravans: quotas, routes, punishments. Only the accounting system had changed.

The Invention of Tribe

Indirect Rule did not merely preserve inequality; it manufactured identity. To simplify taxation, census officers divided populations into “tribes,” freezing fluid identities into rigid categories. Hill peoples became “minority tribes”; Fulani and Hausa became “major tribes.” These labels entered schoolbooks, constitutions, and common sense. A colonial fiction became the foundation of our politics.

The result was a bureaucracy that could not see individuals but groups ranked by usefulness. A century later, we still live inside that spreadsheet.

If the Caliphate turned faith into government, the British turned government into paperwork. Both ruled through intermediaries; both saw the governed as raw material. The Caliphate’s motto might have been “Obey God.” The British version was “Obey your District Officer.” Both meant the same thing: kneel.

By the time the Union Jack was lowered in 1960, the empire had achieved a miracle of continuity. The emirs kept their thrones, the missionaries got their converts, the miners got their labour, the British got their royalties. Only the slaves got freedom — and even that, mostly on paper.

Selected Sources & Notes

• Lugard, Frederick. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. London: Blackwood, 1922.
• Tukur, Mahmud Modibbo. The Imposition of British Colonial Domination on the Sokoto Caliphate, 1903–1914. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1999.
• Plateau tin mining labour and missionary reports, 1910s–1930s (provincial archives; mission papers).
• Meek, C. K. A Sudanese Kingdom: An Ethnographical Study of the Jukun-Speaking Peoples of Nigeria. London: Kegan Paul, 1931.
• Fardon, Richard. Wukari and the Jukun: Studies in a Nigerian Polity. London: International African Institute / Kegan Paul, 1988.
• Fardon, Richard. Between God, the Dead and the Wild: Chamba Interpretations of Ritual and Religion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988.
• Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Lovejoy, Paul E. “Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2021.
• Akiga, Sai. Akiga’s Story: The Tiv People. (ed. R. East; rev. ed. with intro/notes). London: International African Institute / Oxford University Press, 1939; updated ed. 2015.
• Bohannan, Paul. The Tiv of Central Nigeria. London: International African Institute, 1954 (later eds. 1969).
• Ikime, Obaro (ed.). Groundwork of Nigerian History. Ibadan: Heinemann, 1980.
• Abubakar, Sa’ad. The Lamibe of Fombina: A History of Adamawa, 1809–1901. Zaria: Northern Nigeria Publishing Company, 1977.
• Exhibition essays: Rubin, Arnold, and Marla C. Berns, eds. Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011. (Historical overviews in this volume summarise Benue-valley raiding networks.)

VI. Independence Without Emancipation

Freedom came to Nigeria wearing borrowed clothes.

The British packed up, waved their little flags, and left, but the architecture of subservience stayed exactly where they’d bolted it down. We inherited an empire, called it a nation, and sang the anthem like a spell to make it true.

The Caliphate’s emirs remained on their thrones; the British Residents simply became “Permanent Secretaries.” In the North, the new flag replaced the Union Jack, but the hierarchy below it was unchanged: emirs in palaces, peasants in compounds, and the Middle Belt still paying tribute — only this time to government instead of Muslim emirates.

Independence was no act of heroism. It was, in fact, an administrative transition. The Queen was replaced by a Governor-General; God Save the Queen by Arise, O Compatriots; Indirect Rule by Federal Character. The accents changed; the arrogance stayed.

The North Remains North

In the years after 1960, the British left behind their favourite pupils: the northern oligarchy — the educated sons of the Caliphate and its allies — now rebranded as modern statesmen. The South got universities; the North got inheritance.

Sir Ahmadu Bello, Premier of the Northern Region, grandson of Usman dan Fodio’s brother, is often widely quoted as saying: “The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great-grandfather, Othman dan Fodio.” If he did say it, then one can understand how for him, the North was not just geography but also was genealogy. “One North, One Destiny” became not a slogan but a doctrine — a holy mission to preserve Caliphate privilege under the flag of federalism.

The British had taught the Fulani elite to govern on behalf of empire and independence simply meant they would now govern on behalf of the nation. Same seat, different anthem.

Meanwhile, the Middle Belt — those stubborn people of “the bush,” as old reports called them — remained the invisible scaffolding. Their villages fed the cities; their sons filled the army; their lands filled the census forms that justified northern dominance.

The Caliphate had collected tribute in grain; the republic collected it in votes.

Colonial Habits in Native Costume

Independence did not kill indirect rule but nationalised it. Governors became viceroys, ministers became Residents, and the same disdain for accountability travelled smoothly from colonial office to Nigerian cabinet.

When the British flogged a farmer for refusing tax, they called it order. When Nigerian police beat protesters for demanding power, they called it unity. Different uniform, same theology of obedience.

The first republic was less about emancipation than imitation. Parliament copied Westminster’s decorum but none of its restraint. Northern politicians quoted the Bible and the Qur’an with equal cynicism, invoking divine right to justify bureaucratic rot. Civil servants learned the British art of polite corruption — “Sir, the file is on my table” — a euphemism for eternal disappearance.

The emirs and their successors in power adjusted gracefully. They stopped raiding villages and began raiding budgets.

The Military and the Mirage of Modernity

When the soldiers arrived in 1966, promising to save the nation, Nigerians cheered — our national reflex. We have always loved a coup as long as it wears epaulettes and talks about discipline.

The generals promptly re-enacted the colonial script: divide, dominate, and redistribute spoils. They created states the way bakers cut cake — arbitrarily and with an eye on who gets the biggest slice. The British had ruled through emirates; the military ruled through states of emergency. Both justified their excesses by invoking order.

By the late 1970s, Nigeria had more generals than philosophers and more decrees than schools. The oil boom poured billions into government coffers, which promptly evaporated into Swiss banks, London flats and imported Mercedes-Benzes. The old Caliphate theology — some are born to rule, others to serve — had simply been translated into bureaucracy: some are born to steal, others to applaud.

The Myth of One North

The North that emerged from colonial rule was less a community than a coalition of fears. Fulani aristocrats feared the loss of divine right; Hausa bureaucrats feared irrelevance; the Middle Belt feared both. The slogan “One North, One Destiny” hid a thousand resentments.

When minorities protested their subjugation under emirate authority, the response was predictable: suppression in the name of unity. The Tiv riots of 1960 and 1964 were crushed with military force; the people who had never been colonised by the Caliphate were now being colonised by the Republic.

Ahmadu Bello, charismatic and imperious, saw himself as both traditional ruler and moderniser. His government poured funds into education for “Northernisation” — the polite term for replacing southern professionals with northern loyalists. It was affirmative action for the privileged, colonial logic rebranded as self-determination.

The British had called this “trusteeship.” Bello called it “progress.” The Middle Belt had no words for it.

Freedom in Translation

We often say the British gave us the English language. What they really gave us was the syntax of hypocrisy. We learned to recite constitutions we had no intention of obeying. We memorised the word “democracy” and pronounced it like an apology.

At independence, Nigeria inherited these:

• faith replacing governance.
• corruption as culture
• national “unity” being more important than justice.

Every government since has worshipped these ideas like saints.

The Persistence of Hierarchy

The logic of the Caliphate still breathes through our institutions. Civil servants call ministers “Your Excellency” with the same fear peasants once reserved for emirs. Political appointees bow, clap, and chorus blessings at rallies. The master–servant rhythm of feudalism survives, dressed in agbada and ankara.

In the Middle Belt, the underclass persists, in even more forms than the past. Schools crumble, rural development is nonexistent, hospitals are a disgrace, roads vanish into dust. The governors empty the coffers with nothing to show for it. Then the violence erupts, and the victims are buried with bureaucratic silence.

In southern Kaduna, old slave routes now serve as mass graves. In Benue, herder–farmer clashes are explained away as “communal violence.” In Plateau, the ghosts of the Butawa and the Ningi hills nod grimly: we told you so.

If colonialism was a theft performed in English, independence was the same theft translated into pidgin and Hausa. Every new ruler swore to “move the nation forward,” which usually meant moving the treasury abroad. We built universities but starved ideas, we built mosques and cathedrals but not a conscience.

The British had ruled with a whip. Nigerian leaders rule with the army, police and DSS in one hand and God in the other. The result is the same: obedience, poverty, and funerals.

Independence did not free the peasant. It only freed the master from supervision. The empire merely changed management.

The Nation as Inheritance

By the end of the twentieth century, Nigeria had perfected what the Caliphate began: hierarchy as heritage. The powerful inherit not just wealth but the right to impunity. The powerless inherit not just poverty but the responsibility for the sins of the powerful.

The novelist Chinua Achebe once said, a country where “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” But leadership here is not simply a position; it is a lineage. Our problem is not that we forgot the Caliphate or the British. It is that we remembered them too well.

VII. Blood in the Fields: The Cycle of Killings of Christians

There are weeks in Nigeria when the news reads like a Book of Lamentations.

A village in Plateau razed before dawn. A church in Benue turned into a morgue. A pastor’s wife raped beside her husband’s corpse. A convoy ambushed on the Abuja road. The numbers blur, the names fade, the pattern repeats.

In the past decade alone, tens of thousands of Christians in northern and Middle Belt Nigeria have been killed in attacks blamed on herders, militias, or “unknown gunmen.” The phrase “Christian genocide” has begun to circulate in the media — a rallying cry for advocacy and, sometimes, revenge.

It is not hard to see why. Entire communities have been erased. Mass burials have become seasonal rituals. Survivors speak of government silence that sounds like approval. If grief could be graphed, the Middle Belt would be a black hole.

And yet, this heavy label “genocide”, while emotionally accurate to many, risks becoming politically convenient. It frames the violence as a single, one-directional purge — Muslims killing Christians — when in fact Nigeria’s map of death is a tangled web of intersecting motives and overlapping graves. Naming the Christian victims is not to overlook the thousands of Muslims also buried without justice: the Hausa farmers slaughtered by bandits in Zamfara; the people killed by Boko Haram in Borno; the children abducted from Islamic schools and left to rot in forest camps.

Yet naming both is not to dilute the suffering of Christian communities. It is to insist that Nigeria’s violence is not sectarian purity — it is democratic in its cruelty.

A Theology of Abandonment

Still, it is undeniable that Christian minorities in the north and Middle Belt live with a special vulnerability. They occupy the frontier — the old geography of tribute reborn. The Caliphate may be gone, but the habit of domination lingers. In some emirate capitals, church buildings still require “permission” from traditional councils. In rural Kaduna, Christian farmers still speak of themselves as yan kasa — people of the ground — while Fulani herders, even transient ones, are treated as custodians of the air.

The attacks follow the rhythm of seasons: dry-season grazing, wet-season farming, harvest-season reprisal. What begins as a quarrel over land ends in massacres justified by identity. In southern Kaduna, villages with names like Zangon Kataf, Kagoro, and Kaura have become bywords for annihilation. In Benue, herders sweep through Guma, Gwer, and Logo, torching hamlets, leaving crucifixes in the ashes. Each cycle resets the myth of innocence: this side avenging that side, that side avenging the last.

The Bureaucracy of Denial

Official Nigeria meets these horrors with a shrug polished into protocol.

Police issue statements blaming “communal clashes.” Governors visit the ashes and quote scripture. The president — any president — condemns the killings “in the strongest terms,” then flies abroad for medical treatment.

When Christian groups cry genocide, Abuja replies with arithmetic: others have died too. When Muslim groups cry neglect, Abuja blames bandits or “foreign elements.” The tragedy is managed by press release. No minister resigns; no general loses a pension.

We have perfected the art of mourning without consequence.

The Commerce of Blood

Behind many of these killings lies commerce, not creed. In the north-west, forests have become fiefdoms for Fulani-led bandit cartels, whose ideology is profit. They kidnap for ransom, seize villages to control gold deposits, and massacre indiscriminately when resistance arises. Reports of helicopters ferrying gold out of Zamfara are whispered like folklore but backed by enough smoke to suggest fire.

In some of these regions, Muslims are the majority of victims — villagers, miners, traders — all killed by men who claim kinship but not compassion.

Elsewhere, in Borno and Yobe, Boko Haram and ISWAP kill in God’s name, but their victims include both mosques and churches. In their perverse theology, insufficient piety is as punishable as unbelief.

Across this devastated geography, one truth repeats: the Nigerian state has collapsed as moral referee. Every grievance, religious or economic, becomes self-help. Every militia becomes government by other means.

Blasphemy and the Banality of Extremism

If the fields of Benue and Plateau show the anatomy of mass violence, the streets of northern cities reveal its moral source: a culture that still confuses piety with cruelty.

In 2022, a student named Deborah Samuel Yakubu was lynched in Sokoto for alleged blasphemy. She was beaten, stoned, and burned while police watched. Videos circulated online; her killers celebrated.

Earlier in 2015, a person who would become presidential aide to the late Muhammadu Buhari, Bashir Ahmad, tweeted that supporting death for blasphemy was a badge of faith. He then in 2024 tweeted that “it is an honor to be called an Islamic extremist”. This was just before he announced that he was awarded with a national honour, the Order of the Niger (OON).

In a country where mobs murder on camera and officials defend them on Twitter, the line between extremism and governance has evaporated.

In Nigeria, bigotry is not whispered; it is broadcast. It earns applause, appointments, and national honours.

Nigeria’s crisis of belief also sits robed and dignified on the judge’s bench.

In August 2020, Yahaya Sheriff-Aminu — a 22-year-old singer in Kano — was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging for “blasphemy” after circulating a song on WhatsApp that allegedly contained unflattering lines about the Prophet Muhammad. The sentence came from an Upper Sharia Court operating in a republic whose constitution forbids any state religion. The irony would be funny if it weren’t fatal.

When the case reached appeal, the lawyer representing the Kano State government, Lamido Abba Sorondinki, stood before journalists, not as a servant of the law but as its avenger. “Let me tell you one thing,” he thundered, “this man will be executed if this court affirms the decision of the lower court. We will execute him!”

Here was the state, speaking not in the language of justice but of jihad. The same country that claims to protect religious freedom allows its courts to condemn a man to death for a song.

These blasphemy laws — revived and re-enshrined during the Sharia revival of the early 2000s — have turned the northern legal landscape into a minefield where faith is policed by fear. They sanctify outrage and deputise zealotry. They remind us that Nigeria’s problem is not only violent religion but also legislated piety — the quiet extremism of the courtroom that dresses bigotry in legal robes.

It is easy to condemn the mob that lynched Deborah Samuel in Sokoto; it is harder to admit that the mob echoes the actual law of the land.

This is the theatre of a country that wants to be both the Vatican and Vegas, both Mecca and Mogadishu — a place where faith is always righteous, never responsible.

And then there are the ethnic extremists. When Bayo Onanuga, now a senior media adviser to President Tinubu, launched into open ethnic incitement during the 2023 elections, he did not lose his job — he gained followers. His words were not dog whistles; they were war drums:

“Let 2023 be the last time of Igbo interference in Lagos politics.”

“It is Yoruba land. Mind your business.”

And when challenged: “I don’t owe anybody any apology.”

That a public official could write this, defend it, and still sit comfortably in government tells you everything about Nigeria’s moral collapse. The message was clear: hate is not only tolerated here — it is policy-adjacent. When people like Onanuga call for exclusion, they are not ostracised; they are promoted. In a country where mobs kill for blasphemy and aides tweet for ethnic purity, extremism is not an underground movement. It is a government career path.

The Dangerous Comfort of Simplification

It would be easy — comforting even — to call this a Christian genocide. It would give the chaos a villain and the West a moral script. But that simplification obscures the truth: Nigeria’s violence is a mosaic of neglect, greed, and inherited theology. The killers come in every creed; the dead fill every church and mosque.

To call it simply Christian genocide risks excusing the state. It implies a clear intention where there is mostly indifference. What we suffer is not a single campaign of extermination but a sustained collapse of conscience.

Nigeria is dying not because its people hate one another, but because their government loves no one.

Shared Graves

In Zamfara, Muslim villagers bury their dead under neem trees. In Benue, Christian farmers do the same under mangoes. The prayers are different; the soil is the same.

Every religion in Nigeria believes in resurrection. What we lack is repentance.

Selected Sources & Notes

• Africa Center for Strategic Studies. Multiple briefs and dashboards on North-West banditry and Middle Belt violence (2019–2025).
• Reuters. Coverage of the lynching of Deborah Samuel Yakubu in Sokoto, May 2022.
• Amnesty International. Annual/spot reports on Nigeria (entries covering blasphemy killings and impunity).

VIII. The Republic of Impunity: How Nigeria Rewards Extremists and Negotiates with Killers

If Nigeria were a company, its motto would be: “No consequences, only condolences.”

Here, failure is promotion, corruption is seniority, and extremism is résumé experience. Every massacre comes with a press release, every scandal a committee, every outrage a shrug. The one thing no Nigerian government has ever done is hold the powerful accountable.

Government by Ransom

When criminals kidnap a hundred schoolchildren, the state first denies it, then prays about it, then quietly pays. The ransom is called logistics support. The killers are called stakeholders. The parents are called resilient Nigerians.

Bandit leaders appear on television, giving interviews about justice and forgiveness. The government calls them repentant. They are offered cash, cars, and “deradicalisation”. Their victims are offered condolences and silence. It is restorative injustice at its most creative.

When you reward violence, you get more violence. Nigeria now runs a thriving terrorism-to-table economy: today’s killer is tomorrow’s consultant on peacebuilding.

Extremism as Political Capital

Hatred here has become a political asset. Politicians deploy it the way colonial officers once used the whip — efficiently and without apology. Ethnic chauvinism wins elections; religious posturing secures funding. To be moderate in Nigeria is to be unemployed.

Every administration swears to “fight insecurity,” and every administration ends up funding it. Governors hand stipends to militias in the name of community defence. Legislators donate motorcycles to vigilantes. Presidents form committees on peace that produce reports no one reads.

The result is predictable: a state too armed to be a democracy and too afraid to be a dictatorship.

The Bureaucracy of Forgetting

Our national archives are graveyards of inquiries. Panels are set up after every major killing — Zaria, Jos, Agatu, Chibok, Zamfara, Plateau. They sit for months, produce volumes, and vanish. Justice in Nigeria is like rainfall in the desert: announced loudly, remembered briefly, felt by none.

Even our commemorations are selective. We mourn when cameras are rolling and forget as soon as the next outrage trends. The government has perfected the formula for pacifying grief: silence plus time.

The Privatisation of Justice

Because the state is absent, justice has become a private venture. Villages arm themselves; churches hire vigilantes; mosques build walls. Every community is a militia in waiting. The rich pay for escorts; the poor pray for invisibility. When law becomes optional, morality becomes nostalgia.

The Gospel of Negotiation

Our presidents talk to terrorists the way colonial officers talked to emirs — respectfully and with inducements. Boko Haram commanders who surrender are called repentant brothers. Bandit chiefs receive state envoys who arrive with bags of money and media crews, and leave with promises of peace that expire before the press conference ends.

In this republic, forgiveness is not virtue — it is currency. Every criminal knows the state will eventually come begging.

The Culture of Celebration

In most countries, scandal ends careers. In Nigeria, it starts them. A minister caught in fraud becomes a senator; a governor indicted for embezzlement becomes a party chairman; a warlord becomes an elder statesman. Our National Honours list reads like a rogues’ gallery.

We are a people who mistake endurance for virtue — we survive everything and change nothing.

The State as Forgetting Machine

There are more memorials to the dead in Nigeria than monuments to justice — mass graves, burned churches, bullet-pocked mosques, bridges named after generals who never fired a shot. Our history lives in ruins because ruins are cheaper than reform.

Every tragedy here expires with the news cycle. We mourn in real time, hashtag the corpses, and move on. The dead have a half-life shorter than a headline. The government has mastered the art of strategic amnesia: delay, deny, delegate, delete.

In other countries, the state preserves archives; in Nigeria, it buries them.

Documents vanish, panels dissolve, inquiries rot in basement cabinets. Even when massacres are investigated, the reports are filed under sensitive. Memory here is a security threat.

We forget the villages erased in Plateau because the census was never updated. We forget the abducted because ransom receipts are private. We forget the protestors shot at Lekki because denial pays better than justice. We ignore the Shias massacred because well everyone hates them anyway. Our governments treat remembrance as sedition.

Forgetting is not neglect; it is policy. To remember is to accuse.

The Archaeology of Silence

Sometimes history speaks through what it leaves behind.

In the Ningi hills, the sites of old raids have been swallowed by millet fields. Farmers plough through the bones of people whose names were never written down. In Benue, mothers still visit the riverbanks where their children were taken by militias. The land remembers what we refuse to.

There is no national museum for these stories, no syllabus that teaches them. Our history textbooks begin at amalgamation, as if nothing existed before the British drew borders. The Caliphate is reduced to a paragraph; slavery to a footnote; civil war to a euphemism. We have made our peace with ignorance because knowledge demands accountability.

The Trauma of Continuity

Forgetting does not heal — it metastasises. Every generation inherits the unfinished grief of the one before. The children of those who fled raids now flee bandits. The grandchildren of slaves still serve the same titles: Your Highness, Your Excellency. We reenact our tragedies with better cameras.

Because we do not teach the past, we are condemned to improvise it. Every conflict becomes unprecedented. Every atrocity surprises us like déjà vu we refuse to name. We keep rediscovering the same failures, astonished each time.

Satire as Eulogy

Sometimes I think satire itself is redundant in Nigeria; the news already reads like parody. How do you parody a nation where a man tweets “I support death for blasphemy” and then receives a medal? Where the government negotiates with terrorists but arrests journalists? Where a country once described as the giant of Africa now specialises in exporting grief?

Our leaders hold summits on security while their convoys block emergency exits. They quote scriptures about peace as their guards shoot into crowds. They build monuments to unity while carving the nation into tribal franchises. Nigeria is not failing; it is rehearsing failure professionally.

The Moral Vacuum

At the heart of this republic is a terrifying emptiness — not just corruption or incompetence, but a moral absence so vast it echoes. The Caliphate had faith; the British had hypocrisy; Nigeria has neither. We are ruled not by ideology but by appetite.

Every crisis is monetised. Every death politicised. Every atrocity normalised.

And because we never punish evil, evil keeps its pension.

Remembering as Resistance

In such a country, memory itself becomes an act of rebellion. To remember the dead is to defy the state’s demand for silence. To tell the truth about history is to break the pact of denial that keeps the powerful comfortable.

Chinua Achebe once wrote that “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” In Nigeria, the lions are still writing — quietly. Historians, journalists, survivors — they keep the archive alive, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

Remembering is not nostalgia; it is justice in exile. Each testimony, each photograph, each whispered name is a small resurrection.

The Bones Beneath Our Feet

I often think the dead have not left; they are simply waiting for recognition. Their bones line the highways, their stories hum beneath our cell towers. When the rain falls on Plateau, it washes through the unmarked graves of Christians and Muslims alike. The soil does not discriminate; only we do.

A nation that forgets its dead forfeits its future. If Nigeria ever wishes to be whole, it must first learn to remember — not just its martyrs but its monsters; not just the victims but the systems that made them.

Until then, we will continue walking on bones, mistaking silence for peace.

Selected Sources & Notes

• ENACT/ISS and SBM Intelligence reports on ransom economies and bandit ‘amnesty’ deals (2019–2024).
• Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch country files on Nigeria (impunity; protest repression; massacres).
• Public records and press coverage of National Honours recipients (various years).

X. The Myth of the Secular State: Faith, Politics, and the Failure of the Nigerian Constitution

Every few years, someone stands at a podium and declares, with the confidence of a drunk historian, that Nigeria is a secular state. The audience claps, the newspapers quote, and everyone goes home unbothered by the small inconvenience that the word “secular” does not appear anywhere in the Nigerian Constitution.

The Constitution does say, nobly, that “the Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion.” But like everything Nigerian, the meaning depends on who is in charge. What we have built is not secularism but multi-religious governance: a state that funds pilgrimages, builds mosques and churches, and appoints imams and pastors as “special advisers.” We have perfected the art of neutrality by paying for everyone’s holiness.

A Constitution of Compromise

At independence, the framers could not agree on what kind of country they were creating. The North wanted Islam respected; the South wanted Christianity protected; everyone wanted British subsidies continued. The result was a compromise so fragile it became permanent: Nigeria would belong to no faith and all faiths simultaneously.

The 1979 and 1999 constitutions preserved this vagueness. They banned a state religion but permitted Sharia Courts of Appeal in the North and Customary Courts of Appeal in the South. They proclaimed freedom of belief but embedded belief into bureaucracy. We turned theology into civil service.

Today, northern states fund Sharia enforcement agencies; southern states fund massive “thanksgiving” rallies. Pilgrimage boards send Christians to Jerusalem and Muslims to Mecca — all on public budgets. In a country that cannot pay teachers, we have found endless funds for salvation.

Religion as Bureaucracy

Visit any Nigerian government office and you’ll see what I mean. The clerk’s desk has both a Bible and a Qur’an, as if one were the office printer and the other the generator. The civil service opens with prayers from both books before opening any file. In our public life, neutrality means everyone preaches in turn.

We have national fasts instead of policies, prayer breakfasts instead of budgets. When disasters strike, officials call for “three days of national prayer” as though God were the Auditor-General. Insecurity, unemployment, inflation — all are treated as moral lapses to be corrected by collective repentance.

We are not governed; we are sermonised.

The Politics of Piety

Politicians here know that the shortest road to power is through heaven. They drape themselves in scripture the way colonial officers once draped themselves in medals. Every campaign is a crusade; every opponent, an infidel.

In the North, candidates boast of sponsoring mosques; in the South, they boast of building churches. Governors organise pilgrimages as policy. A budget line item called “Religious Affairs” quietly funds political support.

The irony is that most of these politicians believe in nothing but survival. Their faith is functional, their piety performative. They quote verses the way bankers quote interest rates — because it works.

The Rise of the Two Republics

This half-religious, half-bureaucratic state has produced two overlapping republics. One is governed by the Constitution; the other, by scripture. When they clash, scripture usually wins.

In the North, Sharia courts decide criminal cases, enforce dress codes, flog citizens for “immorality”, and sentence people to death for blasphemy. In the South, governors close bars during crusades and attend church services in full convoy. Nigeria operates under divine federalism: God as Commander-in-Chief, prophets as permanent secretaries.

And when people protest, we remind them that “Nigeria is not a secular country” — a phrase used by both the pious and the corrupt, for opposite reasons.

The Hypocrisy of Tolerance

We like to boast that we are a religiously tolerant people. What we really are is religiously exhausted. We have so many gods to appease that we dare not offend any. Tolerance here means co-existence without curiosity, respect without relationship. Muslims and Christians share streets but not truths; they trade greetings but not trust.

Meanwhile, atheists are prosecuted for tweets, blasphemy suspects are lynched, and no politician dares to say publicly that the state should be secular. We are so afraid of God that we have forgotten justice.

The Cost of Divine Politics

The price of this confusion is paid daily in blood. When faith becomes a government department, heresy becomes a crime. When religion defines access, unbelief becomes treason. The mobs who burn students in Sokoto or invade villages in Plateau are not anomalies; they are products of a system that teaches holiness before humanity.

And because our Constitution cannot decide whether it serves God or the people, it ends up failing both.

Satire as Sermon

Sometimes I imagine a future Nigerian constitution with a preamble that reads:

We, the perpetually devout people of Nigeria, having failed to separate church, mosque, and state, do hereby dedicate this country to perpetual confusion under Almighty Management, Inc.

It would be the most honest document we’ve ever produced.

A Nation Between Altars

The tragedy of Nigeria is not that it is religious, but that it mistakes religiosity for righteousness. The mosque and the church have become extensions of the state, and the state an extension of the pulpit. We pray more than we plan, fast more than we think, forgive more than we reform.

A truly secular Nigeria is impossible; a truly moral one remains untried.

Until we decide that justice is holier than identity, we will keep building altars where we should be building schools.

Selected Sources & Notes

• Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999, as amended), Sec. 10; Secs. 275–279 (Sharia Courts of Appeal); Customary Courts of Appeal provisions.
• Nigerian Christian Pilgrim Commission (Establishment) Act, 2007; National Hajj Commission of Nigeria (NAHCON) Act.

XI. A Country of Particular Concern: The United States, Tinubu’s Nigeria, and the Global Theatre of Hypocrisy

Every empire needs its devils. America has always preferred African ones: photogenic in their suffering, quotable in their despair, and exportable as proof of Western virtue.

When Donald Trump and his cabinet threaten to “deal with extremists in Nigeria,” it is less foreign policy than moral cosplay — a crusade staged for voters who like their Christianity muscular and their compassion televised.

To the average white evangelical in Kansas, Nigeria is an action movie: black Christians martyred by black Muslims, and America flying in with drones and democracy. It is Rambo: The Gospel Edition.

But the plot, as usual, is lazy. The villains and victims are interchangeable; the facts inconvenient. The same America that arms Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemeni Muslims now poses as saviour of African Christians. The same State Department that sold tear gas to Abuja in 2020 now cites human-rights concerns with a straight face.

The Designation Drama

In 2020, the U.S. placed Nigeria on its list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) for “severe violations of religious freedom.” The headlines were triumphant: finally, someone noticed. The next year, under Biden, Nigeria was mysteriously removed from the list. No explanation, no reform, just bureaucratic amnesia.

Now, with Trump’s return and a cabinet of crusaders, the talk is of reinstatement. The new rhetoric drips with holy urgency: We will not stand by while Christians are slaughtered.

The truth is that designations are theatre. They produce press conferences, not peace. Washington wields them as diplomatic leash, tightening or loosening according to trade, oil, and optics. Nigeria’s blood is simply the ink for another policy memo.

Tinubu in the Foreign Wilderness

And what of our own president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the man who promised “renewed hope” and delivered recycled despair? Two years into office, he has yet to appoint ambassadors to more than a hundred countries. His foreign policy is a study in absenteeism; his diplomacy, an extended coffee break.

He has reduced international relations to the same transactional logic that governs Lagos politics: loyalty first, competence later. Ambassadorships are not postings but bribes — currency for re-election in two years.

So when Trump’s America now brandishes Nigeria’s name like a sermon prop, Tinubu’s government cannot even clear its throat. There is no one to answer the phone in half our embassies. We are the world’s most populous ghost.

The Global Optics of Failure

To Washington, this silence looks like guilt. To Nigerians, it feels like the usual static. The killings continue, the kidnappings multiply, and our president tours foreign summits like a weary salesman of imaginary stability.

Foreign correspondents parachute into Jos, photograph burned churches, and leave before the mosques next door are attacked. NGOs write reports that will gather dust beside the ones from 2014, 2018, 2021. Every few years, the same numbers are updated with new commas, the same adjectives reused: rising insecurity, spiralling violence, fragile state.

The world consumes our tragedy in serial format. We are both Netflix and newsfeed.

Hypocrisy Without Borders

America’s moral outrage is selective; Nigeria’s moral collapse is comprehensive. One preaches human rights while running migrant camps; the other preaches righteousness while running extortion rackets. Together they make a perfect duet in the choir of global hypocrisy.

When Washington lectures Abuja on corruption, it forgets who sold us the consultants. When Nigerian officials invoke sovereignty, they forget who launders their loot. Between the preacher and the thief, the congregation bleeds.

Nigerian Diplomacy

If Nigeria had a foreign policy doctrine, it would read: Wait for scandal, deny involvement, request assistance.

If America had one for Africa, it would read: Film tragedy, issue statement, move on.

Both sides have mastered the choreography of pity. The Americans arrive with a moral selfie stick; the Nigerians pose with folded arms and tragic dignity. Everyone gets what they came for — exposure, funding, absolution.

The Real Country of Concern

Let us be clear: Nigeria deserves concern, but not as Washington imagines it. The problem is not religion but governance; not Islam or Christianity but the cult of impunity that kneels before neither God nor law.

The violence that has turned Plateau, Benue, Zamfara, and Borno into cemeteries cannot be bombed into peace by a foreign crusade. It must be dismantled from within — by justice, not drones.

A country that murders its citizens and decorates their killers is already a country of particular concern — to heaven, if not to Washington.

The Global Sermon

Perhaps the Americans should pray for us instead of preaching at us. And perhaps we should stop treating every foreign rebuke as divine intervention. The world does not save countries like Nigeria. It studies them.

In this moral theatre, the curtain never falls. The audience changes, the script repeats. The preacher in Washington and the politician in Abuja are bound by the same delusion: that power is piety, and publicity is salvation.

But the rest of us, the congregation of the governed, know better. We live in the afterlife of every sermon.

Selected Sources & Notes

• U.S. Dept. of State. CPC designation of Nigeria (2020), subsequent removal (2021), and current advocacy debates.
• Major international reporting on Nigeria’s insecurity and foreign policy under Tinubu (2023–2025).

XII. What Must Change Immediately: Notes on Survival and Responsibility

When I warned, in October 2021, that unless something changed fast Nigeria would stumble into a “Fulani cleansing,” I was accused by some of exaggeration. I wrote that resentment was growing and that once violence acquired an ethnic face, there would be no separating the guilty from the innocent. The militants and bandits would melt into the forests, and ordinary Fulani men, women, and children would pay the price for a country’s refusal to think.

Four years later, the prophecy feels less like speculation and more like scheduling. We are living through the season of consequence. Killings now have no geography: north, south, plateau, plain. Christians die in the Middle Belt; Muslims die in Zamfara; travellers vanish on the Kaduna highway; children are kidnapped everywhere. The nation bleeds from so many places that the blood has become invisible. Death by a thousand cuts.

Every administration promises to “restore security,” as if insecurity were a visitor we could politely escort out. But the truth is simpler and uglier: Nigeria is not insecure — it is ungoverned. Bandits, extremists, militias, and opportunists occupy the vacuum where a state should be. Our rulers mistake statements for policy, condolences for justice. They count the dead the way accountants count losses — without grief, without memory.

If we are serious about preventing the collapse that every village already feels, we must begin not with emotion but with structure. Our borders, our laws, our definitions of citizenship, our notions of belonging must all be rebuilt from the ground up.

The Unfinished Emancipation

We have never faced our legacy of slavery. We prefer to remember the abolition, not the afterlife. The descendants of those once called pagans in the north remain underrepresented and underdeveloped; their towns still beg for roads that stop at emirate borders. But the tragedy did not stop there — the pattern has replicated everywhere. Across Nigeria, every region has found its underclass: minorities trapped beneath dominant ethnicities, riverine communities swallowed by oil fields, urban poor fenced out of power by language and lineage.

We have all learned from our former masters. The north perfected subservience; the south perfected exclusion. We call it culture. It is hierarchy reincarnated.

Until Nigeria confronts this architecture of inequality — not just by redistributing wealth, but by dismantling the idea that some groups are born to rule — we will keep producing new Caliphates in new costumes.

The Border as a Wound

A border is supposed to be a promise: a line that protects, defines, and reassures. Nigeria’s borders are instead an open wound — raw, bleeding, and unattended.

From Sokoto to Borno, the frontier is not a wall but a rumour. Bandits, arms dealers, and jihadists ride motorcycles across with no passport, no scrutiny, no resistance. In Katsina, you can cross into Niger Republic and back before the governor finishes a press conference. In Zamfara, entire convoys of criminals move freely between forest camps, paying bribes at military checkpoints like commuters at a toll gate.

This porosity did not happen by accident. It is the direct result of a political culture that values ceremony in Abuja over security in Ngala, or Kamba. We have border posts where the only functioning infrastructure is the prayer mat. The Nigerian Customs Service must function properly. The Immigration Service spends more time stamping tourist visas in Lagos airports than policing the 4,000 kilometres of unguarded frontier.

A serious country would treat border security as national survival, not regional decoration. It would invest in joint patrols with Niger and Chad, supported by real-time intelligence sharing. It would deploy drones and community-based early-warning networks along known smuggling corridors. It would stop using the army as a ceremonial Swiss knife and instead build a frontier guard trained for terrain, language, and counter-insurgency.

We cannot keep pretending that our enemies materialise out of thin air. They ride in through borders we refuse to see.

The Rural Abyss

Every Nigerian crisis begins where the road ends. Drive two hours out of any state capital and governance disappears. No roads, no schools, no police, no electricity — just the private government of the machete and the charm. Rural Nigeria is a republic of self-help where citizens must build their own bridges, hire their own guards, and negotiate with their own killers.

The governors treat it as local problem. The federal government calls it “state matter.” Between them, the villages die silently.

It is in these ungoverned spaces that banditry and extremism bloom. Young men, abandoned by education and employment, are recruited by whichever warlord offers them a motorcycle and a meal. When the state is absent, the gun becomes citizenship.

Citizens must therefore redirect their anger — not just at Abuja’s abstraction but at the governors and local governments who preside over this daily collapse. Demand rural accountability. Every state budget that allocates billions to “rural development” should be audited in the very villages it claims to serve. If a governor cannot point to functioning schools, accessible health centres, tarred roads outside the capital, s/he has no moral right to sit in that office.

Without rural Nigeria, there is no Nigeria. The hamlet is the heartbeat; the capital only the echo.

If we continue to abandon the periphery, the periphery will come for the centre — and it already has.

The Question of Citizenship

No one knows who belongs in Nigeria. It is a nation of passports without clear identities.

The Constitution says anyone born or resident in a state can contest elections there, but the Constitution does not control hearts. The average Nigerian understands belonging as inheritance, not residence. You are “from” wherever your great-grandfather is from — not where you were born, not where you have lived, not where you pay taxes. This is how a child born in Lagos to a Yoruba father and an Igbo mother can be told he has tainted blood and should not become governor of the state. This is how as mentioned earlier, Bayo Onanuga can still work for the president after obscenely remarking: “Let 2023 be the last time of Igbo interference in Lagos politics.”

If citizenship is to mean anything, it must be equal everywhere. Is a person of Igbo heritage born, living and paying taxes in Lagos a Lagosian? Can he run for Governor? Can a non muslim run for Governor in Kano? Or a non Christian in Plateau? Can a Hausa trader in Port Harcourt be as free in Rivers as in Jigawa? Can a Tiv woman married in Sokoto be permitted to belong? Until we legislate and enforce this equality, we will keep running a federation of landlords and tenants, not citizens.

We must decide: is Nigeria a nation of people, or a dusty museum of tribes?

Naming and Knowing: The Fulani Identity

Every time a massacre happens, the word Fulani trends. Yet very few Nigerians can tell you who the Fulani are.

The Fulani are not a single story. Some are pastoralists who have grazed cattle for centuries; others are urban professionals, teachers, and civil servants. Some are settled farmers in Adamawa or Gombe. A fraction are deadly bandits, warlords and kidnappers. But public discourse flattens them into one monstrous shape. “Fulani” becomes shorthand for fear.

This confusion is not innocent; it is convenient. Politicians find it easier to demonise than to govern. Every unresolved murder becomes “Fulani herdsmen.” Every rustled cow becomes “ethnic cleansing.” And in that fog of outrage, the real criminals thrive.
To restore clarity — and fairness — Nigeria must begin with facts. We need a national livestock audit: who owns the cattle, where do they graze, how do they move, who profits? We cannot fight a crisis we refuse to count.

If we know whose cows are whose, and where they come from, we can finally separate herders from raiders, nomads from criminals.

Technology can help. Countries like Kenya and Brazil use cattle tagging and digital traceability systems that track ownership and movement. Nigeria can do the same, with cooperation from herders’ associations, local chiefs, and security agencies.
It is time to name things properly. Every “Fulani attack” not investigated is an invitation to collective punishment. Every rumour unchallenged is a rehearsal for genocide.

Miyetti Allah and the Burden of Accountability

The Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria — MACBAN — could have been a bridge between herders and government. Instead, it has become a lightning rod.
As I once wrote in my thread, “MACBAN is a terrible communicator. Poor media engagement and negotiation… has destroyed the image of the organisation.” Its leadership speaks in riddles, alternating between defensiveness and denial. Some local chapters sound less like civil associations and more like militias with letterheads.
If Miyetti Allah wishes to be seen as legitimate, it must embrace sunlight. Publish its structure, its finances, its membership. Work publicly with security agencies and local communities to isolate criminal herders and bandits. Condemn violence in clear language, not theological riddles.
The government must also stop pretending it can fix this crisis without them. Partnership, not patronage. Let MACBAN sit at the table with state governors, farmers’ unions, and traditional rulers to design conflict-resolution mechanisms that actually reach the villages.
Transparency is not just public relations; it is survival. Because if resentment continues to grow — if people continue to see every Fulani man as a murderer-in-waiting — the violence will metastasise. What begins as reprisal will become ethnic cleansing. And when that begins, the real bandits will have already fled. It is the herders’ families, the traders, the innocent villagers — the ones who never saw a gun — who will burn.
The choice is stark: Miyetti Allah can help save the Fulani name, or history will remember it as the match that lit the fire.

From Open Grazing to Open Sense

Every few months a governor somewhere announces a ban on open grazing. The headlines cheer, hashtags bloom, and then nothing happens. The cows keep walking. The farms keep burning. The dead keep multiplying.
The problem is not law; it is logistics. You cannot legislate the impossible. You cannot ask a herder with 150 cattle to conjure a ranch out of air when there is no water, no veterinary service, no compensation, no credit facility. Outlawing open grazing without building the alternative is like spitting words into the air and expecting rainfall.
If we are serious, the federal government must work with states, not against them, to support ranching and grazing reserves that are modern, transparent, and voluntary. Pilot schemes can begin in states willing to host them — Kaduna, Nasarawa, Taraba, Adamawa — where both farmers and herders understand that coexistence is cheaper than funerals.
Ranching is not an ethnic concession; it is agricultural policy. It is science. It produces healthier cattle, better beef, more milk. It makes taxation possible. It curtails rustling and eliminates the need for deadly migration routes. Countries far poorer than Nigeria have done this successfully.
But the real reform must be moral. We must stop mistaking stubbornness for tradition. Our ancestors walked because they had no choice. We, with satellite data and veterinary institutes, have no excuse.

The Coming Storm

If nothing changes, what lies ahead is not simply continued violence — it is mass vengeance.
I said it before, and I will say it again: the rhetoric of resentment has ripened. Each killing in Plateau, each abduction in Niger, each burnt village in Benue hardens the conviction that someone must pay. But anger is never accurate. When reprisals begin, they will not distinguish between a bandit in the forest and a herder in the market.
The Fulani will be hunted in regions where they have lived peacefully for decades. The Hausa, by proximity of language and dress, will be mistaken for them. Even Muslim northerners living in southern cities will feel the recoil.
This is not a prophecy of doom; it is a diagnosis. We have seen this movie before — in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Sudan. It begins with abstraction and ends with ashes.
The only vaccine is justice: arrest, prosecution, transparency, consequence. As long as killers are rewarded with negotiations, and victims are pacified with condolences, Nigeria will continue to dig its own mass graves.

The Duty of the Citizen

It is easy to say “the government has failed.” It is harder to ask: have the citizens even tried?
We vote for thieves because they speak our language. We excuse murderers because they worship our God. We accept poverty because someone from our village holds office. This is not patriotism; it is collective suicide.
The change we need will not come from Abuja; it will come from the reading public, the thinking citizen, the person who refuses to inherit hatred as identity.
Read your history. Understand the roots of these conflicts. Reject the preachers who sell ethnic pride as survival. Demand rural budgets from your governor. Attend local government meetings. Insist that your police officers actually patrol. Stop calling the state “they.” The state is “us.”
When you hear someone speak casually about wiping out a tribe, do not nod. Argue. Correct. Refuse to let lies become common sense.
If enough citizens behave like a republic, the government will eventually have no choice but to follow.

No Country to Run To

Some of us have escaped. We teach in Berlin, drive Ubers in London, queue for visas in Toronto. We tell ourselves we are safe. But the truth is that exile is only comfort, not salvation. The world is closing its doors; populism rises; boats sink in the Mediterranean. No country has room for the 200 million plus Nigerians its leaders are trying to make homeless.
There is no ark coming to save us. We must build our own dry land.
Nigeria must work — not because it is deserving, but because there is nowhere else to go. We cannot keep fleeing every generation. We must repair what we have broken: our borders, our schools, our idea of belonging.
If we fail, the collapse will not stop at Kano or Benue or Lagos. It will travel with us — into our diaspora, into our children’s passports, into our sleep.
So this is my challenge, to every Nigerian who can still read without flinching: Read. Remember. Rebuild.
Reject the bigots. Reject the cynics. Dare to imagine a nation large enough for everyone’s shadow.
Because when the dust finally settles — and it always does — it will not matter who was right. It will matter who is left.

A Prayer for the Living

I do not pray for miracles. I pray for memory. I pray for citizens who will stop outsourcing their destiny to heaven or to sick politicians. I pray that one day we will teach our children that their inheritance is not chaos but choice.

So read. Remember. Resist.

And dare — even now — to imagine Nigeria whole.

POSTSCRIPT

When I first began researching Ningi and the rebellion to the Sokoto Caliphate many years ago, my curiosity about history of the rebel Hamza and his wife, Atta quickly turned to fascination. I reached out to Dr. Adell Patton Jr., an important scholar on the Ningi area, who I realised was cited in quite a few of the academic texts on Ningi I had laid my hands on. He responded with extraordinary generosity. He shared with me some materials from his research which began in 1972. (He also advised on where I could find materials that were not in his possession). Dr. Patton spent years in Ningi and the surrounding areas, hand-drawing maps, conducting oral interviews and gathering oral histories from Ningawa and others alike. Dr. Patton sadly passed away on September 25, 2017, in Clayton, Missouri. I remain deeply grateful for his work, which in part inspired and informed a novel I completed recently.

I'm dating myself, but the easiest way to get me to make a fool of myself is to play Caribbean Queen by Billy Ocean. It's like kryptonite to me. By the time the chorus comes around, I'm no longer acting, I have become an actual fool.

I mean Michael Jackson and Prince especially made major moves that year but Billy Ocean essentially won 1984 with just that song. The rest of the album was a bonus.

I just can't resist the groove, it makes me happy, I want to dance, I want to sing (loudly), and act the fool. They say Dionysus was a Greek god but the scribes out of discretion didn't disclose his infatuation with the siren song of a Caribbean queen.

I'm pretty sure Liberian Girl was MJ's belated response to homie for stealing his thunder, despite what the biographers may say. The gloved one with the golden voice always knew a winner (see lifting the synths from 1999).

Incidentally, many sincere apologies to the women I've stepped to while singing that song or variations of it - I'm an equal opportunity prospective lover, and, as I've said, I'm a fool.

The song is so versatile that, not to disclose too much, I've sang of African queens, Nigerian girls, Ghanaian ladies, various European duchesses and American queens and more, not to mention many a real life Caribbean queen.

Musical flirtation must be an occupational hazard of womanhood and it's all for the good. I've found that on occasion, some do get caught up in the rapture of a song so infectious. And even when deflected, the song breaks it down gently.

Now of course there's a long tradition of such celebratory songs. Frankie Beverly and Maze gave us Southern Girl. Earlier, Lou Perez gave us Caribbean Woman, his charanga ode to that fine Caribbean woman. They know what's up.

But to return to the song, give me the extended version. At the very least, you need the seven minute version, a radio edit wouldn't do with something so exuberant.

Even after the insistent anouncement of the opening bars (you have to signal your intentions in these things), the song takes its time to get the the point and lets the saxophone lay down the law to start things off.

There's something quite unhurried yet insistent about the groove, propelled by the synth basslines. It's a pulsing pace yet it still manages to be langorous, as if to savor the dance. Caribbean Queen is a dancefloor anthem, feelgood in four on the floor rhythms.

Start with the voice. The warmth in Billy Ocean's singing just invites you into the conversation. To my ears, there's a lilting hint of Gregory Isaacs and the velvet touch of Dennis Edwards in the voicing.

The honesty also disarms:

"I was in search of a good time
Just running my game
Love was the furthest,
Furthest from my mind"

The kicker comes from the parentheses in the title: No more love on the run. This is about being captured.

With spare lyrics, the scene sets up the drama of the relationship but he makes you wait by doing two verses and bridges, so building up the tension that the chorus is a release. But, just as soon as we're released, the groove settles back down to enjoy the dance.

The drop in the middle, and the build up, also play their part making you savor each element. The bass gets it due, the drum beats and then the synths do their bit. It's like the Soul Makossa breakdown in Wanna Be Startin' Something. By the time the chorus comes back around you want to start singing it again.

The guitar riffs. the sound effects, Keith Diamond's keyboard, synthesizer and production are inspired and really shine here but it's the saxophone solo by Jeff Smith just puts things over the top.

Infectious thy name is Caribbean Queen.

The initial release in Europe was titled European Queen but didn't get traction. Canny marketing forced a new title and Caribbean Queen struck a nerve. I've also heard an African Queen version.



Surveying the 1984 music scene, most would hand it to Prince, you can hardly argue with When Doves Cry and the Purple Rain album and movie, let alone The Time, Sheila E and Appolonia 6. It was his year in music and pop culture.

But there were others too. I mean Cherrelle (courtesy of Jam and Lewis) dropped I Didn't Mean To Turn You On, Dennis Edwards and Seidah Garret had the almighty duet Don't Look any Further.

The S.O.S. Band's Just the Way You Like It album heated up the dancefloor. And even in the midst of all this, Sade's Diamond Life had been released and Smooth Operators were moving

A digression: Billy Ocean would win the 1985 Grammy award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for Caribbean Queen. But the other nominees that year were quite mistaken. Namely, let's be frank, The Woman In Red is hardly prime Stevie Wonder.

And to pick on the thread, the Grammys have never really rewarded the soul music that moved the masses. Unforgiveably, James Brown didn't get anything after Papa's Got a Brand New Bag until Living in America in 1987.

Sexual Healing is an all-time jam but the Academy barely acknowledged Marvin Gaye's transcendent 1970s run of albums that changed music.

Teddy Riley's only Grammy was for engineering Dangerous in 1993. How are such things possible?

Anyway, the point is that Stevie Wonder kept getting sentimental votes in honor of his Seventies's streak.

It was even harder to square Stevie winning the next year 1986 for In Square Circle when Alexander O'Neal wasn't even nominated.

The same thing goes for 1996 when there was Brown Sugar by D'Angelo or say I Hate U by Prince. For Your Love is a effortless ballad from Stevie but come on, really?

In any case, the fact remains that Caribbean Queen stopped both Prince and Stevie Wonder in the charts that year which is saying something about what it means to black culture.

The song affects me the way its almost contemporaneous Somebody Else's Guy by Joycelyn Brown does - shower song fodder. I Can't Wait by Nu Shooz would disconcert me in a similar manner a couple of years later.

So anyway, catch me singing along with Billy Ocean: Caribbean Queen (No More Love on the Run). Meet me on the dancefloor.

Queens, a playlist

A few more songs in the vein of Billy Ocean's opus. (spotify version)

• Caribbean Queen (No More Love on the Run) by Billy Ocean
  The masterpiece
• Southern Girl by Rahzel and Erykah Badu
  Beat box meats Dallas princess
• Soul Sista by Bilal
  Raphael Saadiq's slinky production never fails
• Brotha by Angie Stone
• Southern Girl by Maze featuring Frankie Beverly
• Liberian Girl by Michael Jackson
• Soul Sister by Dexter Gordon
• The Girl from Ipanema by Stan Getz & João & Astrud Gilberto
  
• Taurus Woman by The Subterraneans
  Mystical acid jazz that never gets old
• Black Magic Woman by Dennis Brown
  Rather than Santana's involved electricity of the same title, I prefer the crown prince of reggae's musings on his muse
• Caribbean Woman by Lou Perez
  The blueprint
• Caribbean Queen (Extended Mix) by Billy Ocean
  Forgive me if I'm dancing

See previously: Janet Jackson and the importance of bubblegum and Baby me by Chaka Khan

This note is part of a series: One Track Mind

File under: music, soul, nostalgia, review, appreciation, culture, virtuosity, youth, dance, voice, groove, observation, perception, One Track Mind, toli

Writing log: April 28, 2024

"While I appreciate art, I fail to see how using 28,000 spheres, no matter how subtly lit, showcases an intersection with nature..."

— Wildflower Center Fails its Conservation Mission by Lighting Up its Landscape (Austin Chronicle, September 23, 2022)

J'accuse. Subtle lighting is no panacea
This really takes the cake, you must have no concern for nature
The ramifications of the act are serious, this is no laughing matter

Let me tell you, wrapping up a disaster, ignoring harmful effects
I'll bet that you haven't even consulted the experts
Light pollution is real, my friends, why don't you think about the birds


...

"Our goal, with any installation, is to be thoughtful and considerate of the landscape, as well as the topography, and wildlife."

— FAQs - Bruce Munro's Field of Light Comes to The Wildflower Center

And now for the rejoinder, the frequently asked questions
The artist composes a deft environmental impact statement
The obligatory show of commitment, for the field of light is sustainable

A celebration of natural topography, the stated goal is to be thoughtful
Materials highly recyclable, light sources for charitable installations
Solar powered and very durable, the aim is reuse without loss of condition


...

Art is not for everyone as the field of lights exhibit illuminates
For what to the eye of the beholder may thrill and exhilarate
May leave a mark of indifference to others or even infuriate
The thought occurs: what we have here is a failure to appreciate

Field of Light, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Light my fire by Minnie Riperton
• Turn your lights down low by Bob Marley & the Wailers
• The light by Common
• Blinded by the light by Manfred Mann's Earth Band
• Turn off the lights by Teddy Pendergrass
• Blinded by the light by The Freedub Press
• Into the light by Prince
• Bright lights by Matchbox Twenty
• Blinding lights by Victoria Voss
• Bright lights by Gary Clark Jr
• Blinding lights by The Weeknd
• Lights by Ellie Goulding
• Bright lights by Cannons
• Light my fire by Massive Attack

You can't please everyone

File under: humour, hatchet job, satire, culture, observation, art, appreciation, perception, environment, modernity, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log. October 7, 2022

The height of fulfillment for a Ghanaian woman
The measure of a life well lived
Is to be surrounded by loved ones
Sought out for consultation
And to leave a trunk of fabric
Packed almost full with cloth, new or barely worn
To be shared amongst those she leaves behind

Kente, Dutch wax prints, indigos and batiks
Some with Adinkra designs, and lace too; these are heirlooms
True, some would also cite the beads and the jewelry
Gold sovereigns as befits the site of the Gold Coast
And yes, monies and land, cars - modernity, are fitting contributions
But it is the cloth that is the prized intimate legacy

...

Daa left me some fabric, my inheritance was a sleep cloth
Dark green, a GTP wax print, lightly faded
So soft after years of use that the merest touch
Transports me to happy places
Skin to skin, in contact with her quiet ways
Remembering her voice and her laughter

She left a scarf for our daughter
White lace, a welcome present
She'd held out to meet her, her great granddaughter
The yearslong campaign on her granddaughter-in-law
Had borne a delicate fruit
She carried her with joy that day
And fussed, and gave advice, we listened well
Ineffable joy, she slept well that night
Remembering the long journey, the twists and the turns
Those who had walked along with her
Those now lost, and those who still remained
The happy times - for there were many like today
The reversals, and the times of privation
Internal exile and the hunger seasons
When some had had to sell, to empty their trunks
To empty their very souls to provide for their family
But she had made it, and could pass something on
She was ready. She passed it on and carried a glow
She eased through the few weeks that remained of life

...

In this meeting of minds
The foundations of identity
Home, the veins of belonging
Sleep cloths for the children
Memories rest on the fabric itself
Pieces of intimate legacies

Intimate Legacies, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Pass it on by Omar ft. Terri Walker
• Grandma's Hands by Bill Withers
• She Gave Her Angels by Prince
• Sacrifice by Elton John
  In the same vein as the Purple One's ode, the album is fittingly titled Sleeping with the Past
• Sacrifice by Gregory Isaacs
• Grandma's Hands by Gil Scot-Heron

Let's place this under the banner of Social Living

File under: family, memory, fabric, cloth, legacy, history, culture, observation, perception, personal, sensory, Ghana, Africa, textiles, tradition, poetry, Social Living, toli

Writing log: September 22, 2022

Wrath, unlike his elder sibling Outrage,
Doesn't bear the burden of permanent necessity
Rather he presents a signal test of character
Nay a temptation, of the allures of impunity
Oblivious to consequence, the bearer gives full sway to Anger
Single-minded, he seeks the imposition of selfishness
Forcing an unseemly rush to be the sole enforcer

But for good reason, social beasts, we live in community
Beholden to the workings of the Law whose wheels turn slowly
For human life is precious and ought to have sanctity
Hence all those quaint rules and regulations that serve to protect
Wrath, in all his disguises, remains a barbed weapon against life itself

And so, like Cain, Wrath would murder Outrage
The tawdry act betraying a signal lack of courage
With misplaced righteousness and indecent haste
All too often the damage is done, an irreversible mistake

In times past, Shame would leap at the opportunity
A rebound fling with Fate to correct the catastrophe
But sometimes it was too late, and Wrath would no longer be willing
Scent of blood in the sinews - Lust, he'd become enamored of killing

The gift of free will frees us from inhibition
Yet binds us also with the shackles of discretion
Albeit neither God nor mankind's History would ever absolve
The guillotines and firing squads, the wages of Thermidor

Wrath is for the weak, shower them with kindness
Kindness, even when wounded, for it was written
The good books advise to turn the other cheek
To resist the temptation of this mortal sin

True, there's undoubtedly been an injustice
Especially as you witnessed their glib insouciance
But even if pausing may seem like a temporary inconvenience
Hindsight guarantees that your act will only worsen the situation
Instead, revel in the powerful exercise of restraint
Change the perspective, change the rules of the game

This too shall pass, do not give in to the anger
Conflicted thoughts about revenge, self-appointed avenger
For any satisfaction of the wrathful impulse is ephemeral
Regret is all, sadly that is the occasion's sole promise
Rather, lasting strength derives from considered justice

The realization of our stories is that the costs are sunk
Histories are only written after the damage is done
Mythologies that celebrate the conquerors as victors
In the moment, we are not bystanders, we can choose to be actors
But the moral lesson is that we don't need further casualties
The collateral damage notwithstanding, wrath is for the weak

Wrath, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Outrage by Joe Gibb & the Professionals
• Right and a Wrong Way by Keith Sweat
• It's a Sin by Pet Shop Boys
• Wrath of Kane by Big Daddy Kane
• Outrage by Booker T & the MG's
  Following up the adrenaline rush of Kane's braggadocio with the chaos and disorder of the MG's, spinning out of control

See previously: The Sense of Violation

File under: wrath, rage, values, anger, strategy, culture, restraint, decisions, observation, perception, humour, life, Social Living, poetry, toli

Writing log. September 25, 2022