By Seun Sobola
In watching the flow of events over the last few years, particularly in the Northwest Nigeria and beyond, it is hard to avoid the statement that something very fundamental is happening to the nation as a whole.
The past two decades in Nigeria has come to the obvious politics of the Islamist terrorist groups like Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), Boko Haram, Herdsmen attacks, and Fulani terrorists, who have made the country an ocean of bloodbaths, displacement, and a collapse of international effort.
In Nigeria today, the catechism of Islam has gone beyond “peace” to miscellaneous attacks on government officials, citizens, and the mass killings of Christians. One grievous and latest attack may be, in April 2025, when some bandits killed at least 52 people and displaced 2,000 others in a village in Plateau state, Nigeria. Reports evidenced that just yesterday, multiple violent attacks occurred on Palm Sunday in Angwan Rukuba community of Jos North Local Government Area in Plateau State, Nigeria, resulting in over 40 deaths of people.
To kill people of such magnitude on such a holy occasion is a moral collapse! It is fratricide! It is blasphemy! Even as the 74th birthday in March 2026 of President Ahmed Tinubu came in handy, it belies the justification of the policy of not having major celebrations during these periods of national grief and mourning.
The triumph of terrorist groups in Nigeria is evident first of all in the hues and cries of the public. The concerns of the people stress that certain factors inform the country’s criminal attacks, which include poor governance, oil-produce disparities, land disputes, unemployment, poverty, ethnic diversity, and unresolved conflicts. Yet, multiple violent campaigns targeted towards mosques, churches, schools, markets, and other public spaces, resulting in immense human and material losses remain in full force till today.
The failure of the Nigerian government to curb the persistent and growing strength of violent extremist attacks by the Islamist groups in the country have also lent credence to interventions from the United States, particularly. Many Nigerians on social media are also saying that the Nigerian government should step up its fight against Islamist groups to avoid a situation where U.S. troops are sent into the country. According to Samuel, a researcher, “The lack of political will is what has made insecurity drag [on] for this long. The first responsibility of the government is [the] protection of lives and properties” (Aljazeera). And it becomes necessary for the Nigerian government to take necessary measures to curb these growing terrorist attacks.
However, what we may be witnessing in Nigeria today is not just about internal disparities, but indicators of ecological imperative as such: that is, the impact of globalization on ecology, a cliché that may not be easy to plumb in retrospect, the world over.
Benjamin Barber (1996) is a leading authority on the place of wars as a tool for regulating and redrawing boundaries which eventually leads to the collapse of states and rescue insular identities. The thrust of emphasis on ecological imperative, according to Barber (1996) is the desire and hunger like that of Jihad where “war is not as an instrument of policy but as an emblem of identity, an expression of community, an end in itself” (60).
Yes, copious facts revealed that Boko Haram, particularly in its early ideology, intended to revive the historical Kanem-Bornu Empire, stressing the present land was an Islamic state before they become the supposedly “land of infidels”. They wanted to change the Nigerian state with an Islamic empire, recasting their version of Sharia law over community they lost to the military during Civil War.
Therefore, the reference to a “killing idea” by terrorist groups in Nigeria today should not be divorced from the inhibitions it placed on the evolution of identity. Yet the motionless of the term should be construed through ecological consciousness, which has produced a greater awareness and also greater inequality, as the developing Nigeria continues to slam the door behind the terrorist groups, saying to them, “The world cannot afford your modernization; ours has wrung it dry!” (Barber, 59).
When shall Nigerian government fully give back to what belongs to the terrorist groups?
Works Cited
Barber, Benjamin R. Jihad vs. McWorld. New York :Ballantine Books, 1996.
Global Christian Relief. “Nigeria: Violence in Plateau State Leaves 52 Dead.” Global Christian Relief, n.d., www.globalchristianrelief.org. Accessed 30 Nov. 2025.
Seun Sobola writes from the United States of America
