Editorial: Nigeria’s War Without Honour — The Crisis of Truth, Power, and Conscience

 

When the President of the United States warned that America could intervene directly in Nigeria to confront Islamic extremism, the reaction from Nigeria’s corridors of power was swift, defensive, and predictably dishonest. Rather than reflect on the accusation, the government dismissed it as interference. Rather than address the horror it exposed, they denied its truth. Once again, we reached for national pride instead of national introspection.

But the world is not fooled. The world sees what Nigeria refuses to acknowledge: that our so-called “war on terror” has become an enterprise of deceit a billion-dollar economy of blood, deception, and institutional profit.

For more than a decade, Nigeria has been fighting insurgents without fighting the corruption that sustains them. The military hierarchy those entrusted to protect the Republic have profited immensely from the chaos. They have turned tragedy into trade, crisis into currency. The blood of the innocent has become the budget line of impunity. Procurement scandals, falsified troop counts, and phantom equipment purchases have become the silent architecture of our national defense.

Our political leaders are no better. Their weakness is their complicity. They call for prayers when what the nation needs is accountability. They form committees when what the victims deserve is justice. They console the bereaved in front of cameras, while shielding those who profit from the killings behind closed doors. No single officer, no single commander, no single official has been truly brought to book for the years of mass murder, internal displacement, and systemic failure.

Today, Nigeria has become a republic of excuses — a state where death is routine, displacement is normal, and denial is policy. Villages are erased in the night, children are slaughtered in their sleep, and citizens live as refugees in their own homeland. Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps have become the permanent homes of forgotten Nigerians citizens stripped of dignity, waiting for a nation that has moved on without them.

Yet when confronted with these facts, we lie. We lie to the world, to the international community, and most tragically, to ourselves. We deny massacres that are documented. We downplay deaths as “incidents.” We erase the memory of the dead from the national conscience. The Nigerian state does not honor its dead; it silences them.

This editorial is not written to provoke pity. It is written to provoke truth. For too long, Nigerians have prayed for deliverance from the very institutions responsible for their suffering the military, the politicians, the bureaucracy systems so rotten that redemption is no longer an option. These are not systems in need of reform; they are systems that must be dismantled.

 

When institutions exist only to feed on the fear of the people, they lose their legitimacy. When leaders defend incompetence with propaganda, they forfeit their right to lead. When the army profits from insecurity, it ceases to be an army it becomes a syndicate.

 

The United States President’s threat may have been provocative, but it exposed a deeper humiliation: Nigeria no longer controls its own moral narrative. The world knows what we pretend not to see that a country that cannot protect its citizens has already surrendered its sovereignty to decay.

 

The real tragedy is not that people die in Nigeria; it is that their deaths no longer shock us. The real threat is not terrorism itself, but the normalization of failure in a nation that prays instead of reforms.

The time for denial is over. We must face the uncomfortable truth: Nigeria is not under attack by extremists alone it is under attack by the very system that claims to defend it. Until we dismantle that system, no amount of prayer, denial, or propaganda will save us.