The war Nigeria must fight

Guest Columnist By Sam Agogo

When former President and former military Head of State Chief Olusegun Obasanjo rises to speak at a public gathering, Nigeria listens. Not merely out of deference to age or the weight of his decades in public life, but because the man has a habit — sometimes uncomfortable, always deliberate — of saying precisely what the moment demands, regardless of whose sensibilities it disturbs. At the second edition of the Plateau State Unity Christmas Carol and Praise Festival, held at the Ten Commandments Prayer Altar in Dwei-Du, Jos South Local Government Area, before an audience that included former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon, Governor Caleb Mutfwang, gospel artistes, clerics, traditional rulers, and thousands of worshippers gathered in the spirit of faith and national unity, Chief Obasanjo did not disappoint. He delivered what has since reverberated across the country as one of the most candid, unsparing, and operationally precise security addresses by a former Nigerian leader in recent memory. The setting was a carol festival. The message was a declaration of war.

The country that assembled in Jos that evening had come to the worship ground wounded. Nigeria, in the weeks leading to the festival, had experienced some of the most heartbreaking security atrocities in its post-independence history, and the grief of communities across the north was the uninvited guest at every gathering, secular or sacred.

Armed men had stormed the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Danko-Wasagu Local Government Area of Kebbi State, kidnapping 25 schoolgirls from their dormitory in the early hours of the morning. Just three days later, gunmen struck again — this time seizing 303 students and 12 teachers from St Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State. The audacity of the attacks — back-to-back, days apart, across separate states — signalled not a security challenge but a security collapse.

The Kebbi assault followed a now-familiar script. Residents said the assailants scaled the school fence undetected, exploiting the absence of perimeter lighting and limited night patrols. Bandits had moved through the Kuyambana-Kamuku forest axis, a notorious corridor long used for raids, retreats, and ransom negotiations. “They knew the terrain, they knew when to strike,” a community source recounted. “There was no power, no local watch, and only few guards.”

These were not random outrages. They were part of a terrible continuum that has now spread well beyond the north. Nigeria’s record of mass school kidnappings stretches from the abduction of 344 boys from a Katsina boarding school in December 2020, through the seizure of hundreds of girls in Zamfara in February 2021, multiple incidents in Kaduna, and the kidnapping of over 200 students in Kaduna again in March 2024. Each episode triggers national outrage. Each outrage fades into the news cycle. And then the gunmen come again. Even Oyo State, long regarded as relatively insulated from the kind of mass abductions ravaging the north, has not been spared. The kidnapping of children in Oyo served as a grim reminder that insecurity in Nigeria recognises no geographical boundary, no regional exemption, and no political safe haven. The crisis is national. The emergency is total.

Between July 2024 and June 2025 alone, 2,938 people were kidnapped in Nigeria’s Northwest region — over sixty percent of reported incidents nationwide. Zamfara State, the epicentre of the banditry crisis, recorded 1,203 abductions in that period. Katsina recorded 566. Kaduna 629. These are not statistics to be filed in government reports. They are names. They are children. They are farmers, teachers, and traders whose only crime was to live in their ancestral homeland.

It was against this background — this grim, accumulated weight of national failure — that Chief Obasanjo took the microphone and spoke.

He addressed the nation’s security condition with characteristic bluntness, warning that Nigeria faced a deepening crisis that predated the current administration. “In this country today, one trouble we have, one problem we have, is insecurity. And it has been with us. It did not begin with this administration,” he said, making clear from the outset that his indictment was institutional rather than partisan.

But it was what he said next that cut through the harmattan air of that Jos night like a command.

Drawing on his own tenure as Commander-in-Chief, the former president acknowledged the intelligence capabilities Nigeria had built over the years — and indicted the failure to fully weaponise them against criminal networks that have held entire communities in terror. “Before I left government, I knew we had the capacity to pick up anybody in Nigeria. The capacity we didn’t have then was that, after we had identified and located such a criminal, we didn’t have the capacity to pick him up without moving on land or by air. Now we have that capacity. With drones, you can take them out. Why are we not doing that? Why are we negotiating? And after government has paid these criminals, government denies!”

The congregation fell quiet in a way that no carol can produce. It was the silence of recognition.

And then the old general went further. He issued what amounted to a three-word doctrine for a government that has for too long confused weakness with wisdom — stop pleading, stop negotiating, stop apologising. These were not the words of a bitter opposition voice. They were the words of a man who once sat at the very apex of Nigerian power, who knows what instruments that power commands, and who is watching with undisguised anguish as those instruments are left to rust while children are marched into forests at gunpoint. Obasanjo’s argument was plain: you do not plead with men who have no regard for the lives of the innocent. You do not negotiate with those who have turned abduction into a commercial enterprise. You do not apologise for deploying the full force of a sovereign state against those who have declared war on its people. You act.

He argued that criminals now operate freely because they believe themselves untouchable, and that the right deployment of modern technology would send a powerful, irreversible message that crime no longer pays. If the state has located a criminal, confirmed his coordinates, and documented his atrocities, the question of what to do next should not require a committee, a negotiator, or a press denial. It should require a drone.

He then extended his prescription into the arena of international obligation, delivering a line that no sitting government official would dare speak but that millions of Nigerians have long felt in their bones. “If our government cannot do it, we have the right to call on the international community to do for us what our government cannot do, and we should have no apology for that,” he declared. “We Nigerians, no matter what religion you belong to, no matter where you come from, no matter your profession, we Nigerians are being killed, and our government seems to be incapable of protecting us. We are part of the world community. If our government cannot do it, we have the right to call on the international community to do for us what our government cannot do for us. If we are being killed, it is the responsibility of government to do something about it.”

Obasanjo’s Jos declaration must not be received merely as the lamentation of an elder statesman seeking relevance from a festival podium. It must be read as an operational prescription — from a man who commanded Nigeria’s armed forces through a civil war, who governed this republic across two separate administrations, and who understands, perhaps more intimately than any living Nigerian, the true cost of a state losing control of its own territory. His argument for drone deployment is not abstract or decorative. It is the same doctrine applied with measurable success across counterterrorism theatres from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa and beyond. The technology exists. The intelligence frameworks can be built and strengthened. What has been missing is the political will to match military courage with strategic innovation.

Nigeria’s military deserves the nation’s highest commendation. The soldiers and officers deployed to Zamfara, Katsina, Niger, Kogi, Kwara, and the northeast — grinding through difficult terrain, facing adversaries who know every forest path and river crossing — are performing their duty at extraordinary personal cost. They are not the problem. The gap lies at the level of strategic decision-making: the reluctance to fully weaponise available technology, the entrenched preference for negotiation over enforcement, and the absence of a clear, publicly stated doctrine for the elimination of criminal enterprise rather than its mere management. Soldiers cannot do with their boots what a drone can accomplish from altitude. The men on the ground have the courage. They need the tools, the intelligence support, and the unambiguous political mandate to finish the job.

The most urgent application of Chief Obasanjo’s prescription is not abstract security doctrine. It is the rescue of Nigerian children still held in captivity across bandit-controlled territories. The forests straddling Niger, Kebbi, and Zamfara hold captives. The ungoverned corridors of Kogi and Kwara hold captives. And now, even Oyo State — the heartland of Yoruba civilisation, a state with its own proud history of organised governance and communal order — has been forced to confront the trauma of abducted children within its borders. No zone is immune. No governor can claim his people are safe. The crisis has travelled south, and it will continue to travel unless the state responds with the kind of decisive, technology-driven force that Chief Obasanjo prescribed from the Jos altar. Drone technology, deployed with real-time intelligence-gathering and precision coordination, can locate and monitor armed camps in terrain where conventional ground forces face ambush and attrition. Where boots cannot safely advance, the eye in the sky must lead the operation. Where roads are death traps, the air must be commandeered in the service of justice.

Obasanjo urged leaders at all levels to rise above politics and personal interest and focus on restoring peace, insisting that only firm action and accountability can bring lasting security to the country. That is a summons, not a suggestion. It is the voice of a man who carried the weight of this nation telling those who carry it now that the lives of Nigerians are not negotiating chips, not public relations problems, and not inconvenient news cycles to be managed until the next election. They are lives. And they are being lost while the carols play.

Nigeria is not a helpless country. It has a military that has demonstrated its resilience and patriotism across decades of the most demanding security conditions. What it needs is a political leadership that honours that resilience — by giving its fighters the tools they deserve, the technology that the modern battlefield demands, and the firm national resolve that has been, for too long, conspicuously absent. Stop pleading. Stop negotiating. Stop apologising. Deploy the drones. Rescue the children — in Niger, in Kebbi, in Zamfara, in Kogi, in Kwara, and in Oyo. Protect the people.

Chief Obasanjo spoke at the Plateau Unity Christmas Carol and Praise Festival in Jos. The music was beautiful. The message was urgent. Nigeria must now decide which of the two it truly heard.

Agogo, a public affairs analyst, can be reached at

 samuelagogo4one@yahoo.com