A demand for accuracy, not scapegoats for a crisis we created, by Gimba Kakanda
The only caution we must all preach in confronting the Frankenstein’s monster that Nigeria’s security crisis has become is the need to tone down the growing conspiracy theories that foreigners masterminded our descent into this chaos. We are not here because of some CIA or Mossad agenda. My point is not to deny that there are agendas designed to widen our divides. Rather, it is to reject the false comfort of outsourcing blame for a crisis whose roots were watered by our own history, our own choices, and our own unresolved grievances.
I say this not as an observer from the sidelines but as someone who has lived in the North all my life and watched its disintegration into an unrecognisable habitat. I lived in Jos for years during one of the most perilous periods to do so, and I saw up close how a wounded community can pass resentment from one generation to the next, each side convinced it is the eternal victim. I saw how a single narrative of injustice, left to fester, becomes a story parents pass to their children, and those children, when grown, retell as truth. That tragedy is the perfect metaphor for Nigeria’s ethno-religious and resource-based tensions today, misunderstandings born from the absence of justice and repeated until they become inherited memory. It is this pattern, not foreigners, that animates so much of the suspicion and hostility that now colours our daily interactions.
We did not get here by accident. Cracks in governance allowed small time criminals to evolve into threats that required military deployment. Those were cockroaches who once barely survived the attention of even a rural police post. So foreign actors did not light this fire. We did. They only took advantage of the fault lines we created over generations.
We may seem like a peculiar study for anthropologists, but there is no grievance we experience in Nigeria now that has not been experienced and managed elsewhere in even worse scales. Boko Haram did not emerge from a vacuum. It was an ideology left to fester until it was too late. Yet its earliest casualties included both the Muslim clerical establishment, political and traditional rulers, from the Sheikh Jaafar Mahmud Adam, down through Major General Mohammed Shuwa, to the Emir of Gwoza, Alhaji Idrissa Timta. All of them were assassinated by those we are expected to believe share a common faith with them.
So no, foreigners are not the masterminds of our dysfunction as a nation. We can resist their attempts to manipulate our narrative without crediting them with a chaos they did not create. The tragedy we face is one of our own making, and no politician, no matter how adored, is insulated from its consequences. The only true profiteers are those hiding in the forests and those who weaponise, finance, and launder money for them.
Our healing begins not with conspiracies but with confronting our own invention and whatever support that comes with it should be accepted. There is no world in which telling a distorted narrative of a crisis that consumes all as one against just one group is a sensible advocacy for solution. That is an invitation for a new layer of chaos.
