The nation that fights itself — by Abayomi Ishola

There is a peculiar arrogance in the way we speak about terrorism in Nigeria as though it is an external storm, a foreign wind that blew in from the desert and refused to leave. We discuss insurgents as if they are strangers to our soil, anomalies in our story, villains in a national tragedy where the rest of us are merely frightened spectators.

But what if the story is more disturbing than that?

What if the terrorist is not only in the forest, but also in the office?

What if insurgency does not begin with gunpowder, but with greed?

What if the line between the bandit and the citizen is not a wall, but a thread—thin, fragile, and shamefully easy to cross?

“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it. With guns you can kill terrorists, with education you can kill terrorism.”

That statement does not comfort; it convicts.

It points no fingers outward before first turning the mirror inward. It suggests that terrorism is not merely an explosion in Sambisa, or a kidnapping on Kaduna Road. It is a philosophy, a culture of predation, sustained not only by men with rifles, but by men with files, stamps, convoys, immunity, and polished English.

The insurgent in the bush believes in power without morality.

The corrupt official in government practises the same religion.

The citizen who bends the rules to survive becomes its silent disciple.

The difference is often not principle, but costume.

We have been trained to fear the man with the gun, and rightly so. He kidnaps children, sacks villages, burns farms, and turns roads into funeral processions. But before he ever picked up that rifle, the nation had already taught him its oldest lesson: that power belongs to whoever can seize it.

Before the gun was raised in the forest, the pen had already been weaponised in the office.

Before villages were raided, budgets were looted.

Before blood stained the soil, conscience had already been buried beneath contracts and committee reports.

This is why insecurity in Nigeria refuses to die. We are trying to kill the smoke while feeding the fire.

Take healthcare.

When President Goodluck Jonathan signed the National Health Act, it was supposed to be a moral turning point, a legal declaration that health is not a privilege but a right, that primary healthcare must be funded, that the poor should not die because they are poor. It promised structure, accountability, and the Basic Health Care Provision Fund.

Yet what followed was the familiar Nigerian ritual: implementation became a ghost.

Hospitals remained prayer houses with stethoscopes. Pregnant women still arrived at emergency wards only to be asked for deposits before treatment. Children still died from illnesses cheaper to prevent than to bury. Doctors learned to survive inside dysfunction. Citizens learned to normalise abandonment.

A doctor demanding payment before emergency treatment is not merely insensitive; it is administrative banditry. A government that passes health laws and refuses to enforce them is practising terrorism by neglect.

Because death caused by indifference is still death.

What is terrorism if not the deliberate creation of fear and helplessness?

What greater helplessness exists than watching your child die because policy exists only on paper?

Then there is accountability, the national orphan.

In a functioning republic, theft of public funds should produce shame, prosecution, and exclusion from public life. In Nigeria, it often produces re-election, committee appointments, and new agbadas.

Men accused of looting billions stroll through the Senate chambers with the confidence of landlords inspecting their property. Some who should be defending themselves in court are instead defending motions on the Senate floor. Public memory is short; political immunity is long.

Scandals arrive like seasonal rain and disappear with the same predictability.

Pension funds vanish.

Defence budgets evaporate.

Humanitarian intervention money meant for displaced persons develops wings.

Yet the accused remain not in exile, but in power, rewriting laws, granting interviews, and lecturing the nation on patriotism.

The legislature, meant to be the people’s watchdog, often behaves like a well-dressed syndicate of selective outrage.

Constituency projects are announced with fanfare and vanish with silence. Billions are allocated for boreholes that never produce water, classrooms without roofs, health centres without nurses, and roads that exist only in budget speeches. Audits become ceremonial. Oversight becomes tourism.

Many lawmakers collect salaries, allowances, and moral applause, while some do not even maintain a functioning constituency office in the wards they claim to represent. Their people know them only from campaign posters and funeral donations.

Representation becomes performance.

Governance becomes fiction.

And we, the audience, clap between blackouts.

Retired generals and military officials have at different times admitted, sometimes cautiously, sometimes bluntly, that they know the sponsors of terror. They imply that the merchants of blood are not nameless spirits in forests but men with names, titles, influence, and dinner invitations.

Yet the knowledge sits there like an abandoned file.

“It is not our responsibility,” they say.

But if those who know remain silent, and those who should act remain comfortable, what then is innocence?

What does it mean when those closest to the machinery of violence choose distance over disruption?

Does silence become neutrality or partnership?

And what of us, the citizens, who hear these confessions, sigh, and move on to the next scandal like people changing television channels?

Does passive acceptance absolve us?

Or does it simply make us better-dressed accomplices?

Because terrorism is not sustained only by bullets.

It is sustained by tolerated lies.

By stolen funds.

By selective outrage.

By tribal excuses.

By exam malpractice.

By bribing police officers.

By voters collecting rice and selling tomorrow for a meal that will not last the week.

By employing cousins instead of competence.

By military officers influencing postings for comfort instead of duty.

By civil servants turning files into hostages.

By citizens who condemn corruption loudly but negotiate it privately.

Each act may seem too small to deserve the word terrorism, yet together they create the architecture in which terrorism thrives.

A society that normalises small injustices will eventually suffer large-scale violence.

A child who learns that cheating leads to success is not merely learning dishonesty; he is being initiated into a philosophy that rules are obstacles, not principles; that fairness is for fools; that integrity is decorative.

What happens when thousands of such children inherit institutions?

You do not merely get corruption.

You get collapse.

You get a republic where trust evaporates, where institutions become stage props, where law becomes negotiable, and where violence begins to look like the only honest language left.

And from that soil, insurgency grows, not as an accident, but as a harvest.

This is the truth we resist: the insurgent and the system he fights often resemble each other. Both believe in power without accountability. Both exploit weakness. Both justify themselves through survival, entitlement, or revenge.

They are enemies.

But they are also reflections.

And so the question is no longer how to stop terrorism.

The question is whether we are willing to stop participating in it.

Because you cannot condemn violence while profiting from injustice.

You cannot demand accountability from leaders while evading it in your own life.

You cannot kill terrorism with guns while feeding it with hypocrisy.

Education, then, is not merely schooling. It is moral awakening. It is teaching a generation that systems are not to be gamed but guarded, that integrity is not stupidity, that public office is stewardship, not licensed robbery.

Until that happens, soldiers will keep chasing shadows.

They will kill terrorists, yes, but terrorism will remain, reborn each time injustice is rewarded and conscience is postponed.

Because the most dangerous insurgency is not the one in the forest.

It is the one we have legalised in offices, normalised in homes, and excused in ourselves.

And that is why the most unsettling truth of all is this:

We are not merely victims of banditry.

We are participants in its ecosystem.

Not equally. Not in the same measure. But enough to matter.

The bandit in the forest, the senator in Abuja, the contractor with ghost projects, the doctor demanding deposits, the voter selling conscience, the citizen offering bribes, we are connected by one shared moral weakness: the willingness to bend what should never be bent.

Until we confront that truth, insecurity will remain a national anthem sung in gunshots.

Because in the end, we are all, in one way or another, insurgents.

We are all bandits