Tunde Odesola
Mother tongue is sweet. I know because mine is. The honey in the mother tongue oozes from its picturesque encapsulation of nature’s simplest wonders to life’s most complex pursuits, passing down wisdom from generation to, generation, like no other tongue. The sweetness of mother tongue is the reason why teaching, learning and research jump to life inside vernacular classrooms. However, when Nigerian ethnicities such as Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, etc, impose English on their mother tongue, and speak with nose-in-the-air authority, the letter ‘m’ becomes ‘emu’, ‘country’ becomes ‘kwantiri’, and ‘chair’ becomes ‘sia’, echoing regional linguistic peculiarities.
Every tongue has its limitations and strengths. What a tongue professes proficiently, another chomps terribly. The Igbo, for example, articulate the letter J properly. But this is not so with my fellow Cross River and Akwa Ibom compatriots, who often replace letter ‘J’ with ‘Y’, cosmeticising ‘Jail’ in pleasant colours to produce ‘Yale’, just like the case of a young man named Agbako Agbans, who went looking for a job in an oil company.
Impressed by the resume before him, one of the executives on the interview panel looked up and asked, “Mr Agbans, can you explain the four-year gap in your resume?” Agbans responded, “That was when I went to Yale.” “Yale!” the panellist gushed, “that’s impressive! Please, consider yourself hired immediately! Congratulations!” Smiling, Agbans wrings his hands in satisfaction, saying, “Thank you, I really need the job.”
Yet yob has its dictionary meaning. Loutish and violent, a yob is a British slang term for a roughneck. It is a word formed by spelling ‘boy’ backwards. Aside from these definitions, Google also adds that a yob is a young, aggressive, rude, or violent male, often acting as part of a group.
Nigeria had its standing army of yobs long before the return to civil rule in 1999. Nigeria’s yobs in northern Nigeria reared their heads during the Maitatsine riots of the 1980s that left over 10,000 people dead. With effective state policies, however, Britain did not allow its yobs to metamorphose into bandits, as Nigeria did. While Nigerian leaders were busy scurrying their loot into safe havens abroad like rats smuggling bread into holes, yobs in the northern part of the country graduated from harassing the populace for money and food to embracing a higher calling in the Sambisa Forest.
In 2012, President Goodluck Jonathan was honest and courageous enough to tell the world that terrorism sympathisers had infiltrated his government. In 2012, terrorism wore a mask, moved on silent feet, and held its breath. In 2026, terrorism catwalks naked. Singing. Dancing. Clapping and cheerful. In 2026, Nigeria’s security chiefs have redefined terrorism, clinking glasses with bandits, saying: the juice is not worth the squeeze if the blood of the innocent won’t make a Bloody Mary.
I recall. March 29, 2026, was Palm Sunday. Symbolically, Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. It marks the beginning of the Holy Week, signalling both the joy of His arrival and the impending sorrow of His crucifixion on Good Friday. Sadly, it was this august day that some bandits chose to kill over 40 people in the Angwa Rukuba area of Jos-North Local Government Area.
Moved by the bloodshed on the plateau, President Bola Tinubu, with a handkerchief in hand, visited Jos on April 2, 2026, to grieve with the people. But he did not visit the scene of the killings; kings do not set eyes on the dead, for the dead must bury the dead. King Tinubu stayed at the Yakubu Gowon Airport, Jos, and vowed, “This will never happen again!” In their covens, godforsaken terrorists heard the President’s boast, laughed like drunken monkeys, and responded by killing many more people across the land, setting tongues wailing and teeth gnashing as misery further engulfed the land.
After the President gave the grave words that accompany the dead to the grave, and promised renewed commitment to the war against terror, Yobe, Nasarawa, Zamfara, Borno, Benue, Kaduna, and Plateau again came under bloody attacks by terrorists, leaving more people dead. Maybe if the President had not made those empty threats, the severity of the fresh attacks would have been reduced. Maybe the faceless fugitives would not have been out to prove to the world that our President not only lacked the balls, but he also lacked the bite and the bark. Maybe some of those who died would have lived today.
Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, whose kowtowing to the Abuja presidential palace is seen as servantlike by many Nigerians, trivialised the fresh bloodletting in the North by saying Nigeria’s worsening insecurity was merely the handiwork of political enemies and that the killings would stop as soon as demi-god, Tinubu, got re-elected. What an upside-down way of thinking. Oh, bats think upside down, I remember. As bandit bullets poke holes in the heads of the innocent across Nigeria, what Akpabio sees is not the land oozing blood, it is ballot boxes filled with heavy thumbprints, as Balablu refrain echoes in the background…snatch it, grab, run away with it.
By his demeanour, Akpabio does not look like an alcoholic. If he takes alcohol at all, I wager he drinks responsibly. An alcoholic is a person suffering from Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). Apart from uncontrollable drinking, another side effect of alcoholism is neglecting responsibilities. Akpabio has not reneged on his duties when it comes to sharing his thoughts; he has often not said the right things when they mattered most, like 99% of the time. And if terrorism were to just die off after Tinubu’s re-election, why did it not die off when he got elected in 2023?
Akpabio sits on the third rung of Nigeria’s political hierarchy. The man who occupies the second position, Vice President Kashim Shettima, was once a governor. While he governed Borno State, Shettima, in 2017, said over 100,000 Nigerians were killed, with over 2 million displaced. That was in 2017.
Since Boko Haram unleashed terror in the northeast in 2009, over 2.2 million Nigerians have been kidnapped, with more than N2 trillion paid as ransom just between 2024 and 2025, according to The PUNCH editorial published on April 23, 2026. To locate the cure to this monster in the re-election of President Tinubu is, to say the least, callous, sinful, and most absurd.
Akpabio’s belittling of lives and labour lost to terrorism across Nigeria is the reason why some whites look down on black and wonder if they have brains in the domes that sit on their necks. Communities, families, and businesses have been wiped out by terrorism in Nigeria. Commissioned officers and junior officers have lost their precious lives. Schoolchildren have been kidnapped. Pregnant women, children, the young, and the old have been buried, yet the only thing Akpabio sees is Tinubu’s victory.
Akpabio is not the only kitchen cabinet member of the Tinubu administration involved in palongo dance to terrorism blues. The National Security Adviser, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, hangs his hands on a stick across his neck, ‘Fulanily’, lifting one leg at a time, dancing to flute and drumming filtering from the Sambisa Forest, calling terrorists “our brothers”. Is it not written that by their fruits, ye shall know them? As for me and my household, terrorists are not my brothers; they could be Ribadu’s; ka gane?
Speaking in a Hausa radio interview last month, Ribadu had described terrorists as “our brothers”, igniting a backlash from Nigerians across the socio-political divide. A cross-section of angry Nigerians said emissions from the rhetoric of the NSA were inimical to the fight against terrorism as it was capable of confusing and discouraging soldiers at the theatre of war, just as it could demotivate the citizenry from giving unalloyed support.
I do not take Ribadu’s statement as a Freudian slip. It came from the heart. It came from a place of love; love for fiends, brutes, killers, one-ball fraternal savages. Sadly, a man who should be at the forefront of the fight against terror is the one seeking to serve them tuwo and fura da nunu while their guns still billow smoke. Ogbeni Ribadu, so terrorists are your brothers? Nkan de o.
Ribadu is not alone in this brotherhood dance. In the same month of March, 2026, Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, Olufemi Oluyede, described terrorists as the biblical prodigal son. Speech, the wise say, is silver; silence is golden. This wise saying is most applicable when the speaker has nothing good to say. How on earth could the chief of defence staff compare the prodigal son to terrorists? Did the prodigal son kill? Did he maim? Did he rape? Did he plunder? It’s high time the President began to rethink the nation’s security architecture with a view to checking if there was sabotage in the fight against terror.
Many generals and high-ranking soldiers have lost their lives in the terror war. Many junior officers have died, too. Can Oluyede look at the widows of his slain men in the eye and say their husbands were killed by prodigal sons? The unfortunate statements by Ribadu and Oluyede are potent enough to dissuade collaboration by foreign partners and whittle funding and arms support. What Ribadu and Oluyede are saying, in essence, is that terrorists should be treated with kid gloves. To think that these two men head the security agencies of a country that loses billions of dollars to terrorism yearly, God!
The placatory remarks of Ribadu and Oluyede run in contrast to the fire-spitting charge of the Minister of Defence, Christopher Musa, who ordered troops to shoot terrorists on sight without waiting for further directives. Musa probably knows that there are some ‘ogas’ who would give counter orders to spare the lives of captured terrorists, hence his directive. If President Tinubu is not constrained or complicit, he needs no soothsayer to tell him who and who to sack among his ministers.
Talking about constraint and complicity, why is it that Nigeria always lists financiers of terror, but nobody is ever prosecuted? In March 2024, Nigerian authorities named 21 individuals and six entities as suspected terror financiers. Many of those on the latest list were flagged between 2020 and 2025. Why does Nigeria keep naming alleged financiers of terror without prosecuting them, while some on the list the country bandies about have since been jailed abroad?
Lions are clever enough to understand that unity of purpose is essential in hunting. Those are animals. In fact, beasts. But our own security heads do not understand the need for a communication strategy and unity in the fight against terror. O ma se o. May God bless Daddy Showky. His song, “Somebody tun lese, somebody dale ru,” just came to mind. Some people cannot be building while some people are demolishing. Nigeria needs all hands on deck to fight terror.
