By OLABODE OPESEITAN
“When the nation girds for conquest over terrorism and banditry, some leaders choose to philosophize from the sidelines.”
In the last month, Nigeria has endured a coordinated blitz of terror. From the bloodied pews of Christ Apostolic Church in Kwara to the haunted silence of classrooms in Niger and Kebbi, bandits have struck with chilling spread. Over 300 children were abducted from a Catholic school in Niger State. In Kebbi, 25 schoolgirls vanished. In Kwara, worshippers were gunned down mid-service. In Zamfara, 25 women and children were rescued after a night raid. The scale and simultaneity of these attacks suggest more than opportunistic crime. It reeks of orchestration.
President Bola Tinubu, visibly alarmed, responded with a suite of decisive measures: a nationwide security emergency, the recruitment of 50,000 new police officers, and the redeployment of over 11,000 VIP-attached police back to core security duties. He urged states to halt the construction of boarding schools in remote, poorly secured areas, an interim safeguard, not a policy of surrender.
The public, long fatigued by the reign of terror, largely welcomed the shift. Even critics conceded: the president has shown everyone he’s the commander-in-chief.
Then came Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed.
The former vice-presidential candidate of the Labour Party, in a baffling display of contrarianism, dismissed every plank of the President’s plan. No to emergency powers. No to recruiting more security personnel. No to pausing rural boarding schools. His prescription? Let the police, yes, the same overstretched, under-equipped, and underwhelming force, handle it all. “Remove the Nigerian armed forces,” he said. “The Nigerian police alone can wipe out insecurity and banditry in two months.”
One wonders what alternate Nigeria he speaks of.
Let’s talk numbers. Nigeria, with a population of roughly 231 million, has about 230,000 active‑duty military personnel, around 0.1 per cent of its population, with no formal military reserves. Egypt, with less than half Nigeria’s population (about 110 million), fields roughly 440,000 active‑duty troops and 480,000 reservists, totalling about 1 million under arms. The United States, at about 342 million people, maintains roughly 1.3 million active‑duty troops and over 790,000 in reserve components. In per‑capita terms, Nigeria carries a significantly smaller active force burden than either Egypt or the US while confronting an internal war that stretches from the North‑West to the North‑Central and into parts of the South. Rejecting additional recruitment in this context is like telling an overstretched fire service battling multiple infernos with one truck that the real issue is not in acquiring more trucks but only how they use their diesel.
Yes, corruption is a cancer. But to argue that corruption alone explains our security stretch is to ignore the sheer scale of the threat. Bandits now operate with military-grade weapons, cross-border logistics, and ideological cover. The idea that the police, without military support, can repel such forces is not just naïve; it’s reckless. His prognosis belongs more in campaign poetry than in any serious security architecture. It is the counsel of a surgeon who proposes to remove a tumour with a motivational speech and a stethoscope.
Nigeria does not need finely worded excuses for standing still in the face of marauders. It needs leaders whose logic, when held against the grief of abducted families and fallen soldiers, does not read like a brief for the bandits.
And then there’s the matter of rural boarding schools. The President’s advisory on boarding schools is explicitly framed as a temporary, context‑specific response: stabilize the environment first, then expand educational access with better protection, not as an ideological retreat from rural education. Baba-Ahmed insists that halting their expansion is “deadly” and “wrong.” But what’s truly deadly is sending children into unguarded remote schools when bandits are on the prowl. It reads less like concern for children in vulnerable communities and more like an oddly principled defense of the bandits’ operational convenience.
In moments like this, one is tempted to ask: whose side are you on?
One-by-one, the bandits have emerged from the shadows. Now, one-by-one, their apologists are stepping into the light. We see them. And we must say so.
A Modest Advisory to the Adviser
The country needs serious opposition voices, those who can interrogate budgets, expose inadequacies, and insist that every naira allocated to security finds its way to the trenches. But seriousness demands discipline: before going on air to deride an emergency that most citizens greeted with resigned relief, convene a quiet “mood board” of people who understand force structure, rural education, and conflict geography. Let them stress‑test the talking points, strip away the applause lines, and see whether, beneath the grandstanding, there is anything that would actually make Nigerians sleep with both eyes closed.
Nigeria does not need finely worded excuses for standing still in the face of marauders. It needs leaders whose logic, when held against the grief of abducted families and fallen soldiers, does not read like a brief for the bandits.
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