Terrorism is a brutal test of national cohesion. The men who behead teachers are gambling that Nigeria will fracture, that citizens will turn on each other and mistake neighbors for enemies while the real threat advances. Every politician who scores political points off a kidnapped child is betting on that same outcome.
The terrorists want Nigerians to believe the state cannot protect them. The blame game playing out in Abuja is proving their point.
Last month, mathematics teacher Michael Oyedokun went to work in Oyo State and never returned. Gunmen stormed three schools in Oriire local government area, seized dozens of pupils and teachers, and killed him. Days earlier, a thousand kilometers north, bandits in Katsina ambushed retired Major General Rabe Abubakar, once the public voice of Nigeria’s armed forces, and took him and his wife at gunpoint on an open road. In Ekiti State, sixteen worshippers, including two young boys, have now spent over a month in a kidnappers’ camp. A ransom was paid. The captors demanded more.
This is Nigeria in mid-2026. And in the days after the Oyo abduction, what did the political class offer the grieving? Not unity. A blame game.
I have spent my career studying terrorism and national security. Let me be clear about what this violence is designed to achieve. Boko Haram and Islamic State affiliates operating on Nigerian soil are not fighting a conventional war they can win. They are fighting a war of perception. Their objective is to convince ordinary Nigerians that the state cannot protect them, that soldiers and police are powerless, that the government in Abuja is a spectator to their suffering. Every beheading filmed for circulation, every general taken in daylight, every classroom emptied of children, is a message aimed not at the battlefield but at the national mind.
On that battlefield, the one that decides everything, Nigeria is losing. Not because troops are failing. Our men and women in uniform are dying in numbers the public never sees, and they deserve better than the impression that their sacrifice is in vain. We are losing because we have surrendered the narrative, and we have surrendered it to ourselves.
Consider the response to Oyo State. Former Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose went on national television and suggested the abduction had been orchestrated by the Oyo State government to embarrass President Bola Tinubu. He offered no evidence. He even hedged, saying he might be wrong. But the harm of such a claim does not lie in whether it can be proven. It lies in what it teaches a frightened country: that murdered teachers and stolen children are not a national wound to be healed together but a weapon to be used against a rival. When a public figure says that, he is not attacking the opposition. He is doing the terrorists’ work.
Sun Tzu taught that victory comes from finding the opportunity hidden inside a problem, and that leadership rests on five qualities: intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and sternness. The sternness is what is missing. A president who tolerates the politicization of dead teachers by figures close to his own government is not being magnanimous. He is being weak at the exact moment the nation needs him to be firm.
The poison is not confined to one man or one party. Finger-pointing now flows in every direction, from every camp, while captives remain in the forest. It is telling that even Nyesom Wike, the combative minister of the Federal Capital Territory, felt compelled to warn that insecurity must not become a political contest. When that warning is necessary, the disease is already advanced.
I know what unifying leadership can do, because it redirected my own life. After September 11, 2001, an American president stood in the ruins and galvanized a nation, and much of the world, around a single cause. I was one of countless people drawn in that moment to the study of homeland security, to the work of intelligence and defense. Whatever one concludes about the wars that followed, the act of galvanizing was real, and it was a choice. That same choice sits on President Tinubu’s desk today, and it is not being made.
Nigeria has watched this threat grow for fifteen years. It began in the North-East. For a time it was contained there, and even pushed back, through a mix of force and negotiation. Today it is everywhere. The South-West, long thought safe, now buries its teachers. The South-East lives under the shadow of gunmen. Banditry and kidnapping have become a national industry that empties farms, closes roads, and frightens parents away from sending children to school. A danger once regional has become national, and the longer we insist it is someone else’s region, someone else’s party, someone else’s failure, the more national it grows.
So what should the President do? Four things, and none of them can wait.
First, he must end the blame game inside his own house. A quiet word is not enough. The country must see that politicizing this bloodshed carries a cost, no matter who does it.
Second, he must pair force with accountability. When hundreds are abducted and not a single perpetrator is arrested or prosecuted, the message to every other gang is that Nigeria is open for business. Impunity is recruitment.
Third, he must build a strategy that is not merely technological. Drones and cameras will not rescue us. The decisive terrain is public trust, and trust is rebuilt by protecting people and telling them the truth, not by procurement.
Fourth, he must stop governing as though 2027 is the only prize on the table. If the country fractures, there will be no election worth winning.
Terrorism is, at bottom, a test of whether a society will hold together or come apart. The men who behead teachers are betting that Nigeria will come apart, that we will turn on one another and mistake our neighbors for our enemies, while the real enemy advances. Every politician who scores a point off a kidnapped child is placing that same bet on their behalf.
President Tinubu still has the opportunity Sun Tzu described, the one concealed inside the catastrophe. He can become the leader who united Nigerians against a common enemy, or he can preside over the slow proof that the enemy understood us better than we understood ourselves. Technology will not save us. A united Nigeria still might. The choice, Mr President, is yours, and the hour is very late.
