Dear Mr. Olagunju,
I write not as an adversary, but as a reader committed to the discipline of clarity in a moment when Nigeria’s insecurity demands less emotional condensation and more analytical precision. Your two recent columns, “Boko Haram comes south” and “Northern Nigeria will soon kill Nigeria,” published in the Nigerian Tribune are powerful works of journalism. But power is not the same as correctness, and urgency is not the same as explanation. From the combined lenses of history, security studies, and political economy, I believe your conclusions require serious recalibration.
Let me begin with history, because your argument is deeply historical in structure, even when it is not explicitly so. You invoke Samuel Johnson’s ‘History of the Yorubas’, the severing of Edun of Gbogun’s head, and the Ilorin frontier wars as analogies for contemporary insecurity. But here lies the first analytical tension. Precolonial warfare in the nineteenth century Yoruba–Ilorin theatre was not driven by the same logic as modern insurgency. It was embedded in state fragmentation, succession crises after the collapse of Oyo, and competing imperial formations. Violence was territorial and political in a pre-Westphalian sense, not ideological or transnational in the way Boko Haram or ISWAP operate today.
History, when used carefully, clarifies. When used analogically without constraint, it compresses time periods that do not share the same causal architecture. What you describe as continuity is, in historical terms, discontinuity with symbolic echoes. That distinction matters because it determines whether we diagnose repetition or transformation.
From a security studies perspective, your central claim that “Boko Haram has come south” requires more precision than narrative instinct allows. Security scholarship distinguishes between insurgent organisations, criminal networks, and hybridised violence systems. Boko Haram and its factions, including JAS and ISWAP, remain structurally anchored in the North East insurgency theatre, with cross-border Lake Chad Basin dynamics involving Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. What has expanded across Nigeria is not insurgent relocation but tactical diffusion.
Kidnapping-for-ransom, for instance, has become a rational economic model for loosely organised armed groups across multiple regions. This is not ideological expansion; it is market replication. The same can be said of banditry in the North West and kidnapping networks in the South West. To collapse these into “Boko Haram arriving in Yorubaland” is to confuse organisational identity with tactical similarity.
Security studies also warns against what is called “threat convergence bias,” where different forms of violence are interpreted as manifestations of a single expanding enemy. In reality, Nigeria’s insecurity is polycentric. It is not one fire spreading outward; it is multiple fires igniting in structurally similar dry forests of governance failure.
This brings me to political economy, where the most important explanatory variables lie. Across Nigeria, armed violence correlates strongly with three structural conditions: weak local governance capacity, youth unemployment in rural and peri-urban zones, and the monetisation of insecurity through ransom economies. In the North West, banditry evolved from cattle rustling economies exacerbated by climate stress and weak state presence. In the South West, kidnapping networks have emerged along forest corridors and interstate highways where policing density is low and response time is slow.
None of these variables are geographically deterministic in the way your framing implies. They are institutional and economic. To say “Northern Nigeria will kill Nigeria” is therefore not a political economy argument; it is a geographic essentialism that obscures more than it reveals. It substitutes region for structure, and identity for incentive systems.
You also cite the reluctance of political leaders to “name” the North as evidence of fear or complicity. But from a statecraft perspective, Nigeria’s ruling elite operates within a fragile federation where identity framing can escalate violence rapidly. This is not fear of a region; it is risk management in a multi-ethnic state with weak coercive uniformity. The logic is closer to containment than avoidance.
Your reference to General Gowon’s memoir and the influence of marabouts and spiritual advisers is historically interesting but analytically overstated. Political anthropology does confirm the presence of spiritual intermediaries in African governance systems, including Nigeria’s military regimes. But there is no credible evidence that such actors constitute drivers of contemporary insurgency dynamics. At most, they reflect elite belief systems, not structural causation. Conflating the two leads to what political scientists call “explanatory inflation,” where cultural observations are elevated into causal frameworks they cannot support.
There is also a pattern in your argument that deserves gentle interrogation. Violence in the North is treated as systemic and civilisational, while violence in the South is treated as intrusion or spillover. This asymmetry is not supported by empirical security data. Cultism, kidnapping, communal clashes, and organised crime exist across all zones of Nigeria. The spatial distribution differs, but the structural logic is shared. Where state presence is weak, violence becomes economically rational.
A comparative historical lens may help here. Yugoslavia did not collapse because one region uniquely “embodied violence,” nor did the Soviet Union disintegrate due to the moral failure of a geographic bloc. In both cases, institutional breakdown, elite fragmentation, and economic strain produced decentralised violence. Nigeria’s trajectory aligns more closely with these structural explanations than with regional moral diagnosis.
None of this is to dismiss your central concern. You are correct that Nigeria is facing an escalating security crisis. You are correct that state response is often slow, fragmented, and insufficient. You are correct that communities increasingly feel unprotected, and that this creates space for self-help logics that are dangerous for any federation.
Where we differ is in the explanatory pathway. You move from violence to region. I argue for movement from violence to institutions, incentives, and state capacity.
The difference is not academic. It is consequential. If insecurity is regional in origin, then the solution is suspicion, segregation, and political hardening. If insecurity is institutional in origin, then the solution is reform, capacity building, and governance restructuring.
One path fractures the federation further. The other attempts to repair it.
As the African political thinker Achille Mbembe has argued, postcolonial states often oscillate between “commandment” and “collapse,” but the deeper issue is not identity, it is administrative fragility and uneven sovereignty across space. Nigeria is not being undone by a region. It is being strained by uneven state presence across its entire territory.
Let me close with a classical reminder from Aristotle in ‘Politics’: “The city-state exists for the sake of a good life, not merely for life.” The implication is clear. A polity that misdiagnoses its ailments will struggle not only to survive, but to live well.
Your writings are a powerful alarm. But alarms must eventually be matched with diagnosis. Otherwise, they risk becoming permanent noise in a system already overwhelmed by uncertainty.
And in such moments, the greatest responsibility of the analyst is not to amplify fear, but to refine understanding.
