I read the response from Defence Headquarters (dated 9. 7. 2022) to my video about the insecurity in the country and the attack on Kuje prison and I was utterly amused. Given the gravity and seriousness of the deteriorating security situation in our country I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I read through it. I would advise strongly that the military High Command and Defence Headquarters spends its time facing up to and fighting the terrorists that have turned our nation into a functional killing field and horrendous bloodbath and abattoir over the last few years…

In the book titled the ‘protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’ the German sociologist, Max Weber attributed the development of capitalism to the protestant ethic (protestantism is a form of christianity that originated with the 16th-century reformation, a movement against what its followers perceived to be errors in the Catholic Church). What then is the protestant ethic? Inclusively it consists of of the dynamic interaction of the the following elements, asceticism, discipline, virtue and the doctrine of predestination-as amended. Of all these elements, Weber argued, the reconceptualisation of the doctrine of predestination is the most decisive determinant in the…

In January 2019, the Daily Trust newspaper had its Maiduguri office shut down by the military over its reportage on the fight against insurgency. This made me think about governments and the failure of leadership, or, aptly, the king whose subjects saw through him. And so on January 14, 2019, on this page, under the title “The Military, Press and War Against Insurgency,” I gave that brief story. There is this fable of a king who, together with his palace courtiers and subjects, was scammed by a con artist who knew that people, rather than acknowledging the truth, would always…

For those who watch the complicated Nigerian security mess from afar, the killing of Japanese ex-Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe in Nara, Japan last Thursday and the ambushing, two days earlier, of President Muhammadu Buhari’s advance convoy in Dutsinma, about 152 kilometres from his hometown of Daura, Katsina State, both speak to rising global insecurity. A few hours after on that same Tuesday, that joke went burst. Approximately three hours after shelling the president’s advance convoy with an assortment of bullets, killing two people in the process, around 10pm, terrorists stormed the Kuje Custodial Centre in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT)…