By Otunba Segun Showunmi,
The Alternative Movement.
For twenty-five years, Nigeria has allowed a slow, lethal metastasis to take root.
What began with the Sharia riots in Kaduna in February 2000, when hundreds were killed, did not remain a regional quarrel. It became a test of what kind of nation we would be.
When that poisonous growth hardened into Boko Haram, the extremist group that emerged around 2002 and launched its insurgency in 2009, and when schoolgirls were abducted from Chibok in 2014, among them Leah Sharibu, who remains in captivity after refusing to renounce her Christian faith, we should have responded with ruthless clarity. We did not.
We called things by polite names: insurgency, herder-farmer clashes, communal violence, as if careful language could paper over the open wound. When violence spread across the Middle Belt and southern Kaduna into Benue, Plateau, Taraba, and Kogi States, we gave it bureaucratic labels and budget lines instead of a national mobilization.
We accepted platitudes from leaders more concerned with comfort and preservation than with protection. That is not leadership. It is cowardice.
The killing continued. Towns were emptied, farmers stopped tending their fields, and a global debate arose about whether parts of Nigeria were facing religiously targeted attacks.
The world wondered how such atrocities could persist in Africa’s most populous nation while those responsible remained untouched.
If any foreign power, including the United States, ever contemplates assisting Nigeria to end this humanitarian disaster, our answer should be: thank you, provided that such help respects Nigeria’s sovereignty and contributes to genuine capacity-building.
We must be honest: we have been unable to stop this for a quarter century. External help may provide expertise and resources, but it cannot substitute for political will at home.
What must change immediately
- Professional policing as first response.A country of more than 220 million people needs a modern, well-trained, and properly equipped police force that can respond quickly to local security threats. Recruitment, logistics, intelligence, and accountability must be funded and prioritized.
- Follow the money, dismantle the networks.Extremist groups survive through funding and protection. Nigeria’s security agencies, with international partners, should trace and prosecute financiers, arms suppliers, and political collaborators, no matter their status.
- Education in vulnerable regions.
Denying education fuels extremism. Federal and state authorities must guarantee universal basic education, especially in the North, supported by safe-school programs and teacher incentives. - Access to infrastructure finance.
Expanding access to legitimate capital markets for infrastructure investment in power, transport, and agriculture will create jobs and slow destructive migration to cities. - Accountability and justice.
Those who incite or perpetrate mass killings must face domestic or international justice. Impunity remains the fertilizer in which violence grows.
We must also recognize how the collapse of Libya in 2011 destabilized the Sahel, flooding the region with weapons and trained fighters.
That international chain reaction contributed to Nigeria’s insecurity.
But pointing outward cannot replace action at home.
Nigeria must choose a different path: decisive, coordinated, and uncompromising in its protection of life.
Democracy is messy and costly, but it must deliver safety and opportunity for citizens. If our system fails that test, it must be reformed, not abandoned.
To foreign governments willing to help: cooperate transparently, insist on accountability, and invest in long-term capacity building.
To Nigerians: demand better from those in power.
To our leaders: stop choosing comfort over courage.
Come get them.
Ordinary Nigerians want these killings to stop immediately.
Otunba Segun Showunmi
The Alternative Movement
