Nigeria is again flirting with a dangerous idea, the kind that has ruined nations before us while their elites congratulated themselves for being “pragmatic”. The idea is simple and seductive. Since insecurity persists, since banditry embarrasses the state, since citizens are bleeding in villages and highways, let us outsource violence control to foreign powers. Let us invite external air strikes, foreign advisers, foreign boots disguised as partners. Let us lean on Uncle Sam and his yesmaniac bootlickers, because surely they know how to fix these things.
History says otherwise. History screams otherwise.
This is not an ideological position. It is not anti West sloganeering. It is not romantic nationalism. It is empirical observation. Wherever foreign military power lands under the banner of rescue, what follows is rarely rescue. Iraq did not become safer. Libya did not become stable. Afghanistan did not become sovereign. Syria did not become whole. Yemen did not become humane. Sudan did not become peaceful. These countries did not fall because they lacked courage or culture. They fell because weak domestic leadership surrendered agency, mistaking foreign interest for foreign goodwill.
Nigeria must not repeat this mistake.
Let us be clear. The problem confronting Nigeria today is not the existence of criminals like Turji. Criminals exist in every society. What distinguishes a functioning state from a failing one is not the absence of violent men, but the capacity of institutions to contain, defeat, and delegitimize them. A thousand Turjis cannot overwhelm a serious, disciplined, well led Nigerian Armed Forces. What overwhelms Nigeria is not firepower. It is rot.
Rot in command structures. Rot in intelligence coordination. Rot in procurement. Rot in accountability. Rot in political will. Rot in a system where some people profit from chaos while others bury their dead.
To suggest that Nigeria needs foreign air strikes to defeat banditry is to confess something far more damning than military weakness. It is to admit state capture. It is to admit that those entrusted with sovereignty have either lost faith in their own institutions or are deliberately sabotaging them. Either way, such leaders have forfeited moral authority.
No serious student of international diplomacy believes foreign military intervention is altruistic. States do not project power for charity. They intervene to secure interests. Sometimes those interests align temporarily with local needs. Most often they do not. But even when alignment exists, it is conditional and transactional. Intelligence access is demanded. Airspace is negotiated. Strategic concessions are extracted. Economic leverage follows. Security dependence bleeds into policy dependence.
The bill always comes due.
Nigeria must ask itself an uncomfortable question. If foreign air power enters today to target bandits, what prevents its mission from expanding tomorrow? What prevents mission creep? What prevents intelligence networks from embedding permanently? What prevents security cooperation from morphing into quiet supervision? What prevents economic pressure from following military presence?
Sovereignty is not lost in one dramatic moment. It is leased gradually, under pressure, with applause from compromised elites and silence from exhausted and disoriented citizens.
The tragedy is that Nigeria does not lack capacity. It lacks leadership. Nigeria does not lack men and women willing to defend the republic. It lacks a political class worthy of their sacrifice. Nigeria does not lack resources. It lacks integrity in how those resources are deployed.
This is why externalizing blame is dangerous. Yes, foreign powers exploit weak states. They always have. But they do not create weakness out of thin air. They feed on fractures already opened by local actors. When politicians weaponize ethnicity, protect criminal allies, hollow out institutions, and treat governance as a loot cycle, they prepare the ground for external manipulation. The first betrayal of sovereignty happens at home.
What we are witnessing today is not merely insecurity. It is the early symptoms of state failure. When citizens no longer trust the state to protect them. When communities resort to self help militias. When highways become hunting grounds. When uniformed men are feared rather than trusted. When public office becomes a shield against accountability. These are not isolated incidents. They are patterns.
Failed states do not announce themselves. They drift.
And drift is exactly what Nigeria is doing.
Those currently managing the affairs of government must understand the gravity of this moment. Leadership is not about occupying office. It is about discharging responsibility. If you cannot protect citizens, if you cannot secure territory, if you cannot discipline those under your command, if you cannot reform a broken system, then the honorable thing to do is to step aside. Get lost! Allow those who can do the job to do it.
Power is not an entitlement. It is a trust.
The downward spiral can still be halted, but only through reform. Not cosmetic reform. Not press conference reform. Not committee reform. Structural reform. A paradigm shift. Security sector reform that dismantles corruption networks and restores merit. Political reform that breaks the link between violence and power. Economic reform that removes incentives for chaos. Judicial reform that ends selective justice.
This requires those at the helm to slam the brakes on ineptitude, cluelessness, and recklessness. It requires courage. It requires sacrifice. It requires leaders who understand that the state exists to serve citizens, not to manage decay.
If this does not happen, then another reality stares us in the face. Mass action.
No serious analyst romanticises mass action. It is not a picnic. It is not clean. It is not predictable. It comes at a very high cost. Blood is spilled. Economies suffer. Innocents are caught in the crossfire. And even then, there is no guarantee of arrival at the promised land. Revolutions with very very few exceptions, often replace one set of failures with another. Outcomes depend on leadership, organization, and clarity of purpose.
History is littered with examples. At such moments, internal fractures emerge. Competing visions clash. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks appear in different forms. I have no time to elaborate on that here. Those interested should return to history. It is a cruel but honest teacher.
The point is not to threaten. The point is to warn.
Nigeria is approaching a fork in the road. One path leads to reform, painful but necessary. The other leads to fragmentation, foreign entanglement, and managed collapse. There is no neutral option. Drift is a decision.
Yet hope is not lost.
History also shows that moments of deep crisis often precede the emergence of transformative leadership. The appearance of a living moral authority, a leader whose legitimacy is rooted not in propaganda but in example, can change the trajectory of a nation. Such figures do not announce themselves with noise. They are recognized by clarity, discipline, and sacrifice.
If you want to be on the right side of history, do not wait passively. Strive. Build competence. Cultivate integrity. Reach a critical mass of excellence in your work, your thought, your conduct. All day. Every day. Nations are not saved by slogans. They are rebuilt by citizens who refuse to normalize decay.
Nigeria does not need foreign saviors. It needs domestic courage. It does not need borrowed firepower. It needs honest leadership. The window for reform is narrowing. If it closes, history will not be kind to those who chose comfort over responsibility.
And when the reckoning comes, no office, no title, no foreign ally will stand between the guilty and their record.
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