President Bola Tinubu, in his June 12 broadcast, condemned terrorists and their work but told us not to “assign blame or point fingers” because “crime has no ethnicity.” Crime may indeed have no ethnicity, but that does not relieve us of the duty to identify the environment that breeds and sustains it. A desert does not cease to be a desert because it contains a few oases.
As I write this, Yoruba schoolchildren and their teachers have spent one full month in captivity, held in the bush by badly brought up boys from northern Nigeria. Exposed to the rain, exposed to the sun, the abducted remain bargaining chips in a conflict they knew nothing of. Their captors reportedly demand the release of northern terrorist commanders in northern detention centres.
The president says fingers should not be pointed. They will be pointed. Every wound points to the object that inflicted it. Every crime points to its perpetrator. Every nation seeking a cure must first locate the source of its affliction.
A friend heard the president and said this president is as afraid of the North as all those before him. The fear of the North is regularly reflected in our reluctance to “point fingers” and confront uncomfortable truths about the sources and scale of the country’s insecurity and crises of development.
ALSO READ: How We Planned Adelabu’s Sister, Twins — Kidnap Suspects Reveal
No harm seems too grievous to excuse when it comes from the North. A General from the North died in the captivity of terrorists birthed by the North, yet his state government announced that he died “a natural death.” The terrorists reciprocated the courtesy and graciously released his corpse for burial.
At his burial, there was no loud clerical revolt against the murderers, no moral earthquake, no national reckoning; no thunderous fatwa was pronounced against the killers. There was no collective outrage strong enough to shake the land. It was simply another distinguished star extinguished.
Only the North understands the North and its strange, opaque ways.
If you think the North is well, read what Ishaka Rabe Abubakar, son of the murdered General, said about the mysterious return of his father’s corpse:
“Many people saw the announcement that the funeral prayer would be held at six o’clock. People then asked me, ‘How was the corpse brought back?’ I replied that I cannot answer that question. Rather, the government should be asked about it. Even I myself would like to know how the corpse was brought.”
Read that again.
A General was abducted. A General died in captivity. His corpse was returned. Yet his own son says he does not know how the body came back and would like the government to explain.
Should we not ask: What kind of country is this? How does the family of a murdered General not know how his remains were recovered? Who brought the corpse from the forest to the city? The bandits? The state? Some intermediary? Who, and how? What does this say about the authority of the state and the depth of the crisis consuming Northern Nigeria?
ALSO READ: Council of Obas Chairmanship Rotation: Ibadan is Oyo || By Lasisi Olagunju
With the General’s death, we should finally say: enough. But we will not. We will not because saying so would mean confronting uncomfortable truths about the North, and we have convinced ourselves that the North must never be offended. But is it not in the interest of the North – and of Nigeria – for this kind of death to die with the General?
Northern Nigeria has for decades incubated much of the violence, extremism, and instability that continue to threaten national cohesion, yet public discourse by our leaders often avoids naming this reality directly. Until we are willing to define the problem honestly and acknowledge the region’s central role in the crisis, meaningful solutions will remain elusive.
The bandits who would not release General Rabe Abubakar alive eventually released his corpse for burial without arrests. If that does not tell the story of what and who controls Northern Nigeria today, nothing will.
The problem called Northern Nigeria should have a solution. What that solution is I do not know. What I know is that the solution cannot lie in denying the problematic choices and realities that have brought us to this shore of unremitting insecurity.
ALSO READ: 2027: Senator Sharafadeen Alli Engages Oke-Ogun APC Leaders in Iseyin
We are in a mess; what (or where) is the way out? Someone did an experiment in 1898:
A cat is locked inside a wooden cage. The door can be opened by pulling a string, but the cat has never seen such a mechanism before and has no idea how it works.
Wanting to get out, the cat tries everything. It squeezes against the bars, scratches them, bites them and paws around frantically. By sheer accident, it hits the string and pulls it. The door opens and the cat escapes.
The cat is then put back into the cage. Again, it scratches, bites and struggles until it accidentally pulls the string and gets out.
This is repeated many times. Gradually, the cat learns. It takes less time to find the string on each attempt. Eventually, the moment it is placed in the cage, it goes straight to the string, pulls it, and frees itself.
From this experiment conducted in 1898, American psychologist, Edward Lee Thorndike, concluded that problem-solving often happens when we try different approaches, when we discard what does not work, and repeat what does until a solution is found.
Nigeria lacks the wisdom in that story in its handling of insecurity and the denial of its causes. Thorndike’s cat did not solve its problem by surrendering to the cage or pretending there was no cage. It solved it by confronting reality until it found the string that opened the door.
Can we ever get out of our security mess without getting the North to redefine its goals and choices? Can a man turn his back on civilisation and not become a threat to himself and his neighbours? Is it possible for us to encourage the North to undergo a change of direction and gain insight into the roots of its challenges? If it persists in choices that are unhelpful and harmful, what options remain open to its neighbours? Is accommodative denial one of those options?
The cause is the solution. To deny the truth about our North is to say that the Kalahari is not a desert because it receives enough rainfall.
Geography is diligent in paying attention to details: The Kalahari stretches across about 930,000 square kilometres of Southern Africa, covering parts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. Its very name evokes hardship. Derived from the Tswana words Kgala (‘great thirst’) or Kgalagadi (‘waterless place’), it is a land defined by scarcity. Yet, geographers tell us that the Kalahari, unlike the Sahara, receives too much rainfall to qualify as a desert. But that fact does not alter the Kalahari’s fundamental character. Rain falls there, sometimes in surprising quantities, yet its water disappears almost as soon as it arrives, swallowed by the sand. Water comes, but it does not stay; it does not nourish the land or transform its condition. The surface remains dry, harsh and thirsty. To insist that the Kalahari is not a desert because rain falls there is to mistake an incidental fact for an essential truth.
That is the error we often commit when discussing Northern Nigeria. Whenever anyone points to the region’s central role in the country’s security crisis, there is an immediate rush to denial. We are told not to criminalise a whole region; we are told that millions of northerners are peaceful and law-abiding. We are reminded that the North has a huge population, and a land mass that feeds the nation. We are told that the far north has produced brilliant scholars; just judges; brave, courageous soldiers, statesmen and patriots. All that is true. But it is as true as saying that rain falls in the Kalahari.
The uncomfortable fact remains that the overwhelming concentration of poverty, hunger, banditry, insurgency, mass abductions, cattle rustling, extremist violence and ungoverned spaces is located in the North. The major terrorist groups emerged there. The vast armies of out-of-school children that provide fertile ground for terror recruitment are there. The forests that have become sanctuaries for criminal empires are there. The decades of neglect, elite manipulation, educational backwardness and governance failures that nourished these crises are largely there.
Acknowledging these facts is not an attack on the North. It is the beginning of wisdom. A physician who refuses to diagnose a disease because he fears offending the patient condemns both himself and the patient to disaster.
Every society has problems. The South has its own. But the scale and persistence of insecurity emanating from the North have transformed a regional challenge into a national emergency. The first step towards solving any problem is to admit that it exists and to understand its roots.
Nigeria needs a president who would tell the North that it is Nigeria’s implacable enemy. Northern Nigeria does not need defenders who explain away its crises. It needs reformers who confront them. It needs leaders who can tell hard truths. It needs an educational revolution, economic renewal, community accountability and a sustained campaign against the culture of bad choices that has allowed violence to flourish.
The Kalahari receives rain, yet remains thirsty because the water sinks into the sand before it can nourish the land. Northern Nigeria has continued to receive resources, power, sympathy and countless interventions. Yet insecurity persists because the deeper structural problems remain unresolved. Governments have poured money into programmes, development commissions, agencies and military operations, but much of that effort vanishes into the same barren terrain of denial, elite failure and institutional decay. Pouring more and more money into the crisis without confronting those underlying defects is like a rainmaker expending all his energy on the desert. “Not one spring, not thirty, not a thousand springs will change the desert…” The rain falls; the desert remains unchanged. As Ayi Kwei Armah wrote: “The desert takes. The desert knows no giving;…it is not in the nature of the desert to return anything but destruction.”
But is that true of all deserts? Las Vegas in the United States; Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and Doha in Qatar are desert cities. Add to that list Riyadh and Mecca and Medina. They are all rich and safe because they do not do what Northern Nigeria does. Climate does not manufacture kidnappers. Those are products of human choices and human failures.
So, the way out? Students of societal decline insist that every enduring crisis carries within itself the clue to its resolution. The cure for mass abductions, mass killings and the industrial-scale production of insecurity will not be found in denial. It lies where the disease originates. If the roots of the problem are in the North, then that is where the nation must direct its most rigorous diagnosis and its boldest remedies.
A people cannot solve a problem by running away from its source. The answer to insecurity lies in understanding the conditions that produce it. The cure is often hidden in the cause.
Educate the children of the North. Equip them with modern knowledge and marketable skills. Open classrooms where there are now recruitment grounds for banditry and terrorism. Create opportunities beyond the motorcycle, the cart, the illegal mine and the gun. A society that leaves millions of its young people without education, hope or productive employment should not weep when millions of them become instruments of violence.
If the North has become the principal incubator of the forces driving banditry, terrorism, kidnapping and communal violence, then the North must also become the primary theatre of reform, introspection and reconstruction. The problem cannot be solved elsewhere. The cure must begin where the disease is most deeply rooted.
That is the lesson of every serious inquiry into human failure. The physician does not treat symptoms while ignoring the infection. The engineer does not rebuild a collapsed bridge without first investigating why it fell. Thorndike’s cat did not escape its cage by denying the existence of the cage. It escaped by confronting the obstacle until it found the string that opened the door.
Nigeria’s northern crisis cannot be cured by sentiment, slogans or political correctness. It requires the courage to identify the social, educational, economic, religious and political conditions that sustain violence and to reform them without fear or favour. A nation that fears to name the source of its affliction condemns itself to endless treatment without recovery.
The danger confronting Nigeria has an address. Our tragedy is that we are afraid to read it aloud. Even when confronted with the consequences of insecurity, we often reach for words that blur reality rather than illuminate it. The recent death of Major General Rabe Abubakar in bandits’ captivity illustrates this tendency.
Read the Katsina State government’s statement announcing the death of the General. How did the government conclude that the General “died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension”? Who made that diagnosis?
The tragic mess got worse on Sunday. The family countered in media interviews that the deceased was not diabetic and was not hypertensive. So, why did the state invent those bad ailments for the dead?
The General was murdered by those who abducted him. To describe his death as “natural” is to excuse the crime that caused it. If the state in habitual denial insists on baptising that tragedy as a natural death, it kills the man twice: The first death occurred in captivity; the second occurred in the language that sought to make sense of it.
Nigeria is afraid of the North. The North, in turn, appears very afraid of the bandits and terrorists it has bred and failed to tame. It is a dangerous situation. A nation that fears to confront the source of its insecurity courts a grim future.
If you doubt this, read General Tukur Buratai’s warning issued yesterday. He said that unless we confront the evil ravaging the land head-on, future headlines may be about abducted ministers, governors and other high-profile victims. Buratai is a former Chief of Army Staff. His warning should trouble us all.
The evidence is already before us. Forty-six Yoruba schoolchildren and their teachers were abducted on May 15, 2026. By today, June 15, they have spent a full month in captivity. Thirty-one days is a very long time to be cut off from family, school and the ordinary rhythms of life.
The death of General Rabe in captivity, and the continued ordeal of those schoolchildren and their teachers, have left the country—especially the South—deeply anxious and increasingly impatient.
If the present trajectory continues, the North may yet wheel Nigeria itself into the mortuary alongside its countless victims—and that day may come sooner than many imagine.
(Published in the Nigerian Tribune on Monday 15 June, 2026)
