Columns
Peter Obi: Now is the time! Nobody can stop a moving train
The late Owelle of Onitsha, Nnamdi Azikiwe, had so many things to say to Nigeria and Nigerians, before he finally exited the space after so many years of leadership roles. Many of them were admonitions on how to handle difficult situations. He once cautioned that only a fool confronts a man with a gun. In other words, no one must not do so. In times of despair, he advised adherence to doing good and being on the right side of posterity, saying history shall vindicate the just and God shall punish the wicked and confine them to the scrap-heap of unforgotten tyrants.
Yet, it was also the same Zik that reminded Nigerians that no condition is permanent, referring them to the message on the tailboard of the rickety truck struggling to climb the Milliken Hill, Enugu. For those who have been following history, not one word of the admonitions of that Nigerian sage, has been wasted. None has gone without being fulfilled before the eyes of the very Nigerians he spoke to either in his writings on speeches.
It takes those with the sense of history to follow through and juxtapose what has been happening in Nigeria with the declarations, admonitions and messages of Zik and see how much sense they can make from them and use it to either comfort themselves or move forward. For as it is said, those who fail to learn from history, keep repeating them.
Now, permit me to tell a little story. It’s about Nwakpuda, the passionate Umuahia village warrior. I’ll abridge it, because it’s a long story. The British colonial masters, in a bid to develop part of then East, had carved out a rail line that passed through his village to Port Harcourt. But, Nwakpuda, was so passionate that he swore that no train would pass through his father’s land. So, on the day the train was to be test-run, he had heard from the town-criers of the event and the brave warrior he was, he decided to enforce his vow and got ready. Apparently without further revelation of his plans, lest he be impeded, he sharpened his war cutlass and off he went to the rail track. The train driver saw him from afar as he stood with his cutlass at the ready and continued to blast his horn. But Nwakpuda laughed at the approaching “animal,” quipping derisively – I’ve not even touched you and you’re crying – stood firmly and ready to smash it with his weapon. Of course, the inevitable happened. He was crushed on the rail track.
But you know what? The white man didn’t allow it to go. Such heroism they thought! So, in the place where Nwakpuda died, they built an epitaph in his recognition. So, Nwakpuda, didn’t die in vain. He was a hero and a legend. That’s the end of the story.
Why did I recall this? Some people in Nigeria today, are playing such a heroic replication of Nwakpuda, the Umuahia legend in trying to stop a moving train with bare hands. Else, how do you situate the huffing and puffing by some political tendencies in the land over the ambition of Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) outside what the diminutive – yes, they said he was very short, but powerful – Nwakpuda, tried to do?
I wasn’t there in the first republic. So, I might not situate it correctly to say there has never been anything like it. But I could say so from the second republic that nobody, has ever conduced such a pan-Nigerian movement as the Peter Obi movement has been able to create. Else, if you knew any other Nigerian politician, who has created a similar momentum where followers, across the country, gladly contribute money to print posters, make T-shirts and hold street rallies, let the world know.
All the purveyors of this paradigm shift, he seems to beget, appear to have one message – ENOUGH! Nigeria will no longer be run by vested interests, whose only motive is to pocket the commonwealth, from whence they dish out privileges, like Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, or closer, back home, the legendary Lawrence Anini, the great armed robber, who after killing and robbing his victims, threw parts of his loot to commoners in the market for them to scramble for and thereby, creating a hero image of himself.
Yes! The resonating message through Obi is quite apparent – Don’t steal on our behalf again. Let us take our destiny in our hands. Let us build a new order. That is their battle-cry. Yet, there are naysayers, swearing that this won’t happen. The train would not pass through their father’s land, they insist. Their weapons, like Nwakpuda’s sharpened cutlass, come in different forms.
You hear that about 5,000 youths were quartered at a luxurious hotel in Abuja for a special training on the use of social media to do battle – the target – Peter Obi. They want to cut him down in the same way Nwakpuda, wanted to slice the train to pieces with his cutlass. Only this time, unlike the Umuahia hero, who used salt to sharpen his cutlass overnight, the weapons are said to have been sharpened with raw cash – some say N500,000 monthly pay. don’t even try to calculate what it amounts to. It’s chicken feed to the patrons who have procurred them. After all N2.5billion monthly revenue from a state Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), is not moi-moi. And that’s just one aspect.
So, you see all manner of ugly narratives and campaigns of calumny in the social media. It doesn’t matter how infantile or obtuse – they don’t need to be factual or make sense – just write anything and get paid. So, they go to work. Completely for the pay. It doesn’t matter what happens thereafter as long as the pay keeps coming. Ironically, the same people even those that associate him with the damning imagery – Obituary, turn around to harass for the same offence, even when, like the biblical lamb going to the slaughterhouse, he replies not as much as whimper.
If Obi sneezes, it would be fact-checked to test the quality or decibel of the sound. He farts like any other human being, they’ll ask google how pungent the smell is. Someone speaks for hours, reeling out tens and scores of figures ad-lib and just one – they go to town with the singsong – he lies! As if lies have assumed a different meaning. Yet, it doesn’t matter that their patrons never even appear in public, let alone attempt what Obi does, even with prepared paper without disgracing themselves.
We all saw how far they could go in asking Edo people to vote out Godwin Obaseki and how Nigerians were asked to tweet on WhatsAPP and how 50million Nigerians recruited into the army would be fed with agbado, corns and cassava in the morning and yams in the evening. That’s what they want to compare.
Even heroes of the pen -professionals whose works had hitherto excited their audience, now fair no better. The have decided to lower their God-given talents and skills in their attempt to serve as Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) to the dis-ennobling project of keeping Nigerians permanently in Egypt. For such people, it doesn’t matter whatever happens to their brothers and sisters across the land and even beyond. It doesn’t matter whether Nigeria lives or dies as long as they repay the loans of loyalty which they believe they owe or pave the way for new inroads.
I’ve just finished reading Segun Ayobolu. A fantastic writer any day. Apparently soberer. But here he has fallen into the same meanspirited penchant to serve his master. I had thought that after Sam Omatseye, there would be lessons learnt. But no! It’s a project. So, he travels the same route – throwing his poisoned spear, not only at Peter Obi, but the Igbo – because, to him and his possible sponsors, outside the 2023 election, there will be no Nigeria again.
Taking off from where Sam stopped, he begins to trumpet and wrap Obi’s ambition into the straightjacket of the Igbo quest to produce the President of Nigeria. Like it is such an anathema. Now, what if it were so? Why not not if not? Like any other part of Nigeria, Ndigbo have not hidden their desire to that ambition. The argument has already been made that it needs no further stretching. Even Ayo Adebanjo, the President of Afenifere, the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organisation, who ought to represent all the Yoruba people, is sold to that argument that the Igbo should be allowed to take the job. If by virtue of rotation, the governors of the All Progressives Congress (APC), decided to zone the position to the South, why not allow the South East to take the position? Simple argument! But, my colleague, Segun doesn’t see the merit – clinging to the convenient argument of democracy as in numbers, an argument he handily ignored when the Southern governors first pitched for the nation’s number one job and thereafter, South West politicians. If democracy as in numbers didn’t count then, it had to count when the Igbo make the same pitch. Well, because it’s politics, double-speak and hypocrisy is allowed.
But then, Obi even disowns that route. He tells anyone that cares to listen that he doesn’t want anyone to vote for him because he’s Igbo. He wants to be seen as a Nigerian President and not an Igbo President. Of course that is conveniently ignored. He must be cloaked with the ethnic garb.
Not satisfied, Ayobolu moves from there to bespatter him with the paintbrush of IPOB (Indigenous People of Biafra), which has become the most dangerous group in Nigeria more than Boko Haram, Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP) and bandits put together. But he conveniently forgets to mention that there are also ethnic Yoruba groups, agitating self-government, such as O’odua Nation. He forgets that Mazi Nnamdi Kanu wears the same garb as Sunday Igboho. No, Obi’s ambition is fired by IPOB, while the ambition of his patron, Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a Nigerian project.
He conveniently forgets that the alter ego of Biafra, the main symbol of that effort, the late Ikemba Nnewi, Chief Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, actually ran for the same position Obi is seeking today, without as much as passive interest by Ndigbo, not to talk about Nigerians. But what do you say, when disinformation becomes the strategy? Keep shouting IPOB and sooner or later, the tag will stick. Unfortunately, very few seem to be listening.
Thus, the seeming exasperation and change of tactics. Go after Obi’s supporters – depict them as dangerous – hang anything negative on their necks and make Obi bear the consequences. How ingenious! Yet, Obi’s supporters are not on the ballot. Obi had even come out publicly to admonish his supporters to keep it clean and not insult anyone. But no! That’s not enough! He must pay the ultimate price of having his neck in the guillotine.
Come to think of it, what do you say of angry youths, whose father’s today was eaten yesterday, beholding their future being eaten today by vested interests? Shouldn’t they be sufficiently angry on their own and go against the culprit(s)? So, when members of the Pyrates Confraternity rendered their frustration in a song, what does the likes of Segun think fired their imagination? How could that be pinned on Obi?
Of course, it is convenient for Segun to travel the road of history and remind his audience about the ingredients of the first coup in the land, in his well-choreographed attempt to open old wounds, by informing his target – the North that it was an Igbo project. Of course, outside the fact that the people driving Obi’s project are beset by a far more fundamental existential threats right now to continue to dwell in the past, especially when the Northern region is virtually bearing the brunt of bad leadership over the decades, he failed to remind the same audience that the coup plotters, actually wanted to make the late Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba man the Prime Minister – at least, that was part of the narrative, attested to by some of the participants who are not Igbo.
Segun also failed to remind his audience that a Yoruba man, Adekunle Fajuyi, sacrificed his own life for an Igbo, Aguiyi Ironsi. He perhaps, conveniently forgets the millions of Ndigbo that have died as a result of the reprisal attacks and the civil war that followed. Obviously, that’s the path he wants to rekindle in the present generation, even when it appears that, that part of history, is fast receding from the memory of today’s Nigerians.
Just imagine Segun trying to pin the #EndSars protests on the Igbo. Haba! Something as fresh as yesterday! Despite the comments of Nnamdi Kanu, whose statement went into no issue and made as less impact as the incitement of Adeyinka Grandson for the Yoruba to kill all Igbo in Lagos, could Segun tell the world the identities of those eventually arrested for the acts of destruction? How many Igbo were found among those who invaded the palace of the Oba of Lagos, including those who stole his foreign currencies, swam in his pool and even wore his royal attires. How many?
Another point he laboured to make was to impute the oft-trumpeted line that Ndigbo got the meat during the government of Goodluck Jonathan, while the Yoruba were left with the skeleton. Well, the jury is out on that, my brother. The only thing that happened was that for the first time, it appeared that Ndigbo were given a pride of place in the affairs of the country as major stakeholders. That’s what the naysayers couldn’t bear to see.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala did not come into government during Jonathan’s time. It was President Olusegun Obasajo that discovered her. Jonathan only continued where the former President stopped, even though with a bigger mandate, because the reward for good job is more work.
Under Obasanjo, an Igbo man was the Senate President – the third Nigerian citizen. But they lost that position under Jonathan. They never headed any arm of government till date. So, which special favour did the Igbo enjoy that Yoruba didn’t get? Even the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) position, which an Igbo man held then, was taken away when the din became so deafening and it appeared that the heavens would fall.
Please Segun, tell us how Mulikat Akande lost the position of Speaker of House of Representatives. Was it Jonathan or your patron that blocked it? I’m sure, now the entire South East, one of the legs of the Nigerian tripod has been stripped of everything, Segun would be happy. That’s the position he wants Ndigbo to maintain for there to be peace. That’s the only way they won’t be seen as troublemakers.
Yes, I’m one of those who lay claims to Lagos. I wish to be identified as a Lagos boy than Anambra, the same way a Yoruba from Ogbomoso or Iragbiji, ought to claim Coal City boy, if he were born in Enugu and grew up there. I couldn’t be happier watching Ademola Adeleke, the governor-elect of Osun State, speaking undiluted Igbo the other day. I want to see the day a Yoruba man would pick up the ticket of a political party and contest for governorship of Anambra State, where I come from, just like I know it would happen in Lagos, one day, as was the case when an Hausa became the first Mayor of Enugu. That may be years after my bones and those of Segun must have become dust. That’s the Nigerian I want to be. I say so, proudly. I don’t want to hear anyone telling me about Lagos giving me “privileges” or “accommodating” me. Sounds so archaic, primitive and unproductive.
In fact it is new in the Lagos I know. Yes, as a student of Awori College Ojo, I got all the privileges like Lanre my classmate – free books (exercise and textbooks), pencils, erasers, maths sets, free lunch throughout my secondary school under the late Lateef Jakande, without anyone threatening my parents that they must vote for him or leave Lagos. Between Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Shehu Shagari, people chose who to vote freely. Nobody ever told the Igbo that it was not “respecting the people that accommodated them” by not voting Awo or Jakande. I saw Igbo people win Jakande houses in Lagos, where many of them live till date. What’s this strange politics of either you vote for a particular candidate or be pushed into the lagoon or respecting the culture of the people? In Nigeria? Haba!
Segun, did Kemi Badnoch contest for British Prime Minister, one of the powerful jobs in the world, because Yoruba people wanted to take over the United Kingdom? What then is giving you the impetus to restrict Ndigbo from aspiring or voting the candidate of their choice? What would you say if Yoruba in Kano or Akwa Ibom are asked not to vote or support a particular candidate, else they’d be run out of town?
We hear that outside the other measures being put in place, stopping Ndigbo, as has been tried in the past and as seen when some hoodlums tried to stop them from registering with INEC, is part of the game-plan of your patrons to win in 2023. Well, let’s see how that pans out. But before then, just know that not a single person can tell Ndigbo what to do. Dem neva born the person. Not in Igboland, not anywhere! So, go ahead and incite those who would accede to this strange, but dangerous trend in Lagos. But, remember, whoever strikes a machete on a rock, should be wary of the specks piercing his eyes.
As for Peter Obi. There are thousands, if not millions of Yoruba supporting him, just as there are thousands, if not millions supporting Tinubu, including two well-know South East governors. I’m sure nobody has forgotten the yeoman’s job of my brother and friend, Joe Igbokwe is doing in this regard. So, much as you try to pigeonhole Obi into an ethnic closet, it will fail. Nigerians know better.
“Nowadays, when a man cannot get an erection, or impregnate his wife, he blames it on NADECO.” I think that was Abraham Adesanya, one of the heroes of the June 12 era, who birthed what you and I are enjoying today who made that statement.
I still remember how it came about. It was to the effect that NADECO was blamed for everything including the bombings in Lagos, in the same manner you and your gang are now blaming Ndigbo. You know the outcome, don’t you?!
As a reporter in Enugu then, I not only bore the imprimatur of the much-advertised Lagos-Ibadan axis of the press of that era, I bore and still bear the scars of military koboko and the memories of my police detention. One of them was that by the time I came back from the proscription of The Guardian, my fiance was pregnant and about to wed another man! Go figure!
So, continue. But don’t forget the story of Nwakpuda. If you know, you know!
I will always refer to the encounter I once had with Kenneth Idiodi. He was then the leader of the Rosicrucian Society in Nigeria, otherwise known as Amok. It was a sit-down at Zodiac Hotel Enugu. Then, I was the reporter of The Guardian in the Coal City.
You know the Amok faith bases its philosophy or belief on the law of Retributive Justice – the law of Karma. That is to say, everything you do in life has its rewards or punishment in equal measure – much like the measure you give, the measure you receive.
I don’t know how much this society draws or links this belief from or with the Bible, but I do recall Jesus Christ warning Simon Peter – return your sword to the scabbard – for he who kills by the sword, dies by the sword.
As a child growing up I listened to one of the epics of Oriental Brothers with the lyrics – ogbu mma ga-esi n’mma na, ogba egbe ga-esi n’egbe na ooo! Translated – he who kills by the sword will die by the sword, he who kills by the gun will die by the nozzle of the gun.
Now, here is where this is relevant in present Nigerian reality – the reason I’m putting details of that encounter out publicly once again, having done so previously.
During that encounter, Idiodi used one event in Nigeria to illustrate his point. He told me of a Nigerian leader who commanded the troop that carried out the Asaba massacre in the heat of the Nigerian civil war – an episode, said to have claimed over 2,000 able-bodied men who had come out to welcome the Nigerian soldiers with songs and dances only to fall in the hail of bullets that descended on them like rainstorms – was not spared by fate.
That commander was to meet his own death in a hail of bullets even as a Head of State. He never mentioned the name of the military top brass. But I used my tongue to count my teeth to come to the answer. You could also do same – use your tongue.
Now, how does this relate? You may have followed the outing of General Yakubu Gowon at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre, Abuja, where he presented his autobiography titled: My Life of Duty and Allegiance, that contained what seemed his memoir on the Nigerian civil war, which he prosecuted as Head of State.
I’m sure you must have been observing the debate therefrom that event. Now, I’m not so much enamoured of the debate as I’m of the nuances surrounding that unfortunate episode and the role of Gowon in it, given my takeaway from that Idiodi encounter some two decades ago.
Does Gowon, now a nonagenarian really believe that presenting a pious, if not saintly account of himself to the world as snippets of his book, which I picked up here and there suggests, truly suffices for the atrocities of that period?
Take the Asaba massacre for example. Was that the handiwork of Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, whom the former Head of State seems to blame for everything that went wrong. Was he also the one that commanded that mass slaughtering of innocent men?
Under your nose as Head of State, you watched citizens slaughtered mercilessly like infested herds in the streets – you watched young girls corralled into leprosy colonies and wantonly raped before being wasted – you watched as train coaches bearing people fleeing the scene were stopped and their human cargoes thrown alive into River Benue like rotten goods for fishes to feast on – you watched all these and didn’t lift a finger.
Then as Head of State, you not only supervised but watched millions of children with distended stomachs, tiny feet, glazy eyes, heavy heads on ropelike necks, practically begging for death to come quickly and save them from further punishment.
You supervised and watched the cataclysmic eruptions from the blitzkrieg on churches, markets and hospitals – all to keep Nigeria together. In your mind the brutal and merciless butchery of innocent people who were not soldiers and had nothing to do with the war could be explained away just like that?
O! It was Ojukwu that caused it. Ojukwu was the one who released the bombs, caused the blockades that led to the kwashiorkor that killed millions or other atrocities thereof? What a pity!
Now, I return to Idiodi. How else could anyone interpret today’s Nigeria without introducing the law of retributive justice that the Amok leader spoke of? How do you fault the link of the commander who massacred over 2,000 souls dying by the barrel of the same gun, even as Head of State?
How could anyone fail to relate what is happening to our Gowon today with the past? This is a Geneal that wakes up to see hundreds of his brothers and sisters being buried in mass graves as was done during the onslaught he supervised against another people and he still thinks it has nothing to do with him?
Now, the story you told at that event in Abuja on Tuesday, is not new. You simply repeated yourself. My interpretation of that event is that you’re a man undergoing daily torture. You wouldn’t be a human being otherwise, given what is before you, which didn’t start today.
You’re probably trying to escape your fate by appealing to public sympathy. How helpful could that be in the face of the clear evidence of your culpability in the deliberate wasting of more than three million souls? Nobody would believe you.
Yes! They could humour you. But that’s the best anyone could do for you. I hear money rained like a fountain and that you left the scene with billions of naira in your kitty. At 90? Haba General!
Now, here is the thing General. None of these would help.
None would work. You have tried prayers. But you forget that the prayer of sinner is an abomination and a reproach before God, unless he repents. You have also written the book. Surely, this too would end up in the trashcan of history – meaningless piece of conjectures, propaganda, half-truths and outright lies – perhaps!
But, why don’t you try the one thing you have been running away from, for more than five decades – go on your knees in total supplication and surrender, repentance and penance – then rise, call all Nigerians and empty yourself with the truth.
Thereafter openly apologise to the millions of souls whose tormenting wailing you probably hear every day during your disturbed sleep and in your quiet moments, but choose to suppress with these baby tales. Ask them for forgiveness, genuinely and see. There may lie the answer you seek.
Try that and see if it wouldn’t be a more efficacious cure for this decades-old wound than this Ojukwu-bashing and those wasted prayer sessions. You might not only have atoned for the past, but saved the future. May God guide you.
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m The Tiny Voice
By MAX AMUCHIE | The Sunday Stew
In the last two weeks, Parts One and Two diagnosed a structural mutation in the Nigerian state: a dual sovereignty system in which the Institutional Mirage performs authority while the Shadow Order exercises it, sustained by The Insecurity Triad as a mechanism of mutual reproduction.
What remains is the hardest question in political theory: not what is happening, but whether it can be reversed.
The answer is yes—but not through reform.
Systems that reproduce decay cannot be repaired within their own logic. They must be structurally interrupted.
The Trinity does not collapse. It is displaced.
From Ritual Governance to Peripheral Presence
The first reversal targets the geography of illusion.
The Institutional Mirage is concentrated in the symbolic centre—where governance is performed through summits, communiqués, and administrative ceremony—while dissolving at the periphery where authority is actually tested.
This produces a distorted state: visible in Abuja, absent in the borderlands.
To reverse the Trinity, the state must abandon Ritual Governance—the substitution of performance for presence—and return to the empirical occupation of territory.
This is not military occupation. It is administrative presence as sovereignty.
A state exists not when it speaks in the capital, but when:
a child attends a functioning school without paying a parallel tax of fear;
a farmer harvests without negotiating with non-state authority;
a dispute is resolved by a recognised court faster than an armed intermediary.
Governance is not restored by declaration. It is restored by continuity.
Where state presence becomes routine, the Shadow loses its monopoly on predictability.
From Pacification Bargaining to Sovereign Integrity
The second reversal confronts a deeper failure: negotiated sovereignty.
The state has increasingly drifted into a system of Negotiated Sovereignty sustained through what may be described as Pacification Bargaining—the purchase of temporary calm from rival authority structures through ransom logic, amnesty arrangements, protection payments, or informal accommodation.
This is not strategy. It is dependency disguised as pragmatism.
Every bargain strengthens The Insecurity Triad by:
monetising abduction economies;
legitimising territorial extraction;
reinforcing the Shadow’s role as a negotiating sovereign.
The result is a system of self-financing violence in which each concession funds the next cycle of coercion.
Pacification Bargaining does not resolve insecurity. It institutionalises it.
Each transaction deepens the perception that coercion is profitable, territorial pressure is negotiable, and sovereign authority is conditional rather than absolute.
Sovereign recovery therefore requires rupture in this economy.
The state must reassert a non-negotiable monopoly over:
taxation;
adjudication;
legitimate force.
Integrity, in this context, is not moral posture. It is institutional refusal to participate in markets of coercion.
A state that bargains over its coercive authority is not managing insecurity—it is outsourcing sovereignty.
The Critical Break: Dismantling the Insecurity Triad
To dismantle The Insecurity Triad is to break the loop between performed sovereignty and enforced sovereignty.
This cannot be achieved through security operations alone, though coercive force remains an essential and non-negotiable instrument of restoring empirical sovereignty. It requires something deeper: the reconstruction of institutional credibility in the very spaces the Institutional Mirage has abandoned.
It requires the state to stop performing governance and start delivering it. To stop negotiating the terms of its own authority and start enforcing them.
To recover the map—not in abstraction, but in detail: name by name, community by community—that armed actors are actively redrawing through coercion, taxation, and enforced renaming.
Dismantling the Triad is therefore not only a security task. It is a reversal of political geography itself.
The Cartographic Re-occupation of the Republic
The Shadow Order does not only occupy land. It reorganises meaning.
Through what may be understood as Constitutional Erasure, it renames territories, restructures local identity, and replaces the symbolic map through which authority is recognised.
Once this occurs, sovereignty is no longer contested physically alone—it is contested cognitively.
Cartographic Re-occupation is therefore not symbolic politics. It is structural restoration.
It requires three coordinated acts.
First, administrative re-anchoring: the immediate restoration of functioning institutions—schools, clinics, courts, and local administration—under continuous state presence.
Second, symbolic restoration: the reassertion of original geographic and civic identities through formal public renaming and constitutional recognition.
Third, cognitive consolidation: governance must cease to appear as intervention and become the default condition of life.
The state is not restored when it returns to territory. It is restored when territory returns to the state’s cognitive map.
Intellectual Closure: The State After Fragmentation
The deeper insight of this architecture is that sovereignty in Nigeria is no longer singular.
What has emerged is a fragmented order in which authority is distributed between competing logics of governance—one performed, one enforced, both partially functional, neither complete.
This is where African political thought clarifies the structure beneath the surface.
The logic of adaptive survival described by Jean-François Bayart explains why the state persists even as it weakens. Achille Mbembe explains how survival itself becomes managed rather than guaranteed.
Together, they clarify the central claim of the Trinity: this is not collapse. It is reorganisation.
Closing Movement
Nigeria does not face a singular collapse of authority. It faces a structured competition between performed sovereignty and functional sovereignty.
The Mirage still speaks in the language of the state.
The Shadow still governs in the language of necessity.
Between them, society survives by navigating two competing logics of order.
The question is no longer who governs.
It is whether governance itself can be reassembled into a single coherent structure.
The Reversal Condition: Sequential Sovereignty Restoration
The Trinity is reversible, but only in sequence.
Protection must be restored before compliance can shift.
Compliance must shift before territorial credibility stabilises.
Territorial credibility must stabilise before institutional authority can move from performance to function.
Any inversion of this order produces relapse.
The system is not resistant to reform. It is resistant to mis-sequencing.
The Trinity reverses only when sovereignty becomes empirically enforceable again through the sequential reconstitution of protection, compliance, and territorial credibility, thereby disrupting the mutual reproduction loop between the Institutional Mirage and the Shadow Order sustained by The Insecurity Triad.
Where this sequence fails, the loop does not weaken. It adapts.
The Social Contract Is Not Broken — It Is Being Replaced
There can be no social contract in a state where the sovereign performs authority it does not possess, negotiates with rivals it cannot defeat, and watches—from the polished corridors of Abuja—as the names of its own communities are erased from the landscape it claims to govern.
The conventional framing of Nigeria’s crisis describes a broken social contract: the state has failed its obligations, and the people are paying the price.
That framing is not wrong. But it is insufficient.
A broken contract implies a single agreement that has lapsed—and the possibility, in principle, of renegotiation and restoration.
What the Trinity of State Decay reveals is something more structural.
The social contract is not merely broken. It is being replaced.
In the spaces where the Institutional Mirage does not reach—in the northwest, northeast, and Middle Belt, in renamed villages and abandoned farmlands—a rival contract is being written.
On rival terms. Under rival authority. With rival consequences for those who refuse to sign.
The Shadow Order does not offer freedom. It offers a different captivity—one organised around extraction, fear, and the brutal clarity of power that does not pretend to be something it is not.
Within its own logic, it is internally consistent and therefore predictable.
And in conditions where protection becomes uncertain and uneven, predictability itself begins to function as a substitute for legitimacy—not as consent, but as adaptation under constraint.
The Institutional Mirage, by contrast, sustains a different form of instability: the unpredictability of protection, the inconsistency of enforcement, and the performance of authority that does not reliably translate into outcomes.
It is this asymmetry—between predictable coercion and unpredictable protection—that accelerates the silent transfer of compliance from formal sovereignty to rival order.
Conventional state failure frameworks assume a linear erosion of capacity.
The Trinity departs from this by demonstrating a dual-state condition in which formal and rival sovereignties coexist, interact, and reinforce decay.
Nigeria is not a failed state.
It is a state in the grip of a Trinity.
The Definition
Drawing on the full architecture of the foregoing analysis, I now offer a formulation of the Trinity of State Decay theory:
The Trinity of State Decay is the decoupling of a state into rival sovereignties: the Institutional Mirage, which performs authority without fully possessing it, and the Shadow Order—or competing Shadow Orders—which exercises de facto authority in spaces the Mirage has vacated, both sustained by The Insecurity Triad as the mechanism of their mutual reproduction.
The Trinity intensifies where the Mirage fragments into competing centres of performed authority, accelerating the transfer of empirical sovereignty to rival structures.
The Trinity reverses only when sovereignty becomes empirically enforceable again as a stable condition of governance.
This condition is not defined by the mere presence of the state, but by the alignment of three realities: protection must be enforceable, compliance must orient toward the state, and territorial authority must remain continuous.
Where these diverge, sovereignty fragments.
Where they converge, sovereignty reconstitutes.
Recovery is not repair or return. It is the production of a new equilibrium in which the Mirage collapses into function, the Shadow is displaced, and The Insecurity Triad loses its organising role.
This condition is produced through sequence: protection must precede compliance, compliance must precede territorial credibility, and territorial credibility must precede institutional function. Any inversion produces relapse; where the sequence holds, the loop breaks.
While derived from the Nigerian case, the Trinity offers a generalisable framework for analysing state decay in contexts where formal sovereignty persists alongside entrenched systems of rival governance.
Stay seasoned.
•Concluded
•Dr. Max Amuchie is the CEO of Sundiata Post and architect of The Insecurity Triad Analytical Framework, and the Trinity of State Decay theory. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context.
X — @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
Godwin Obaseki, former Governor of Edo State was the first to raise the alarm. He rang the bell in the most dramatic manner in that video that went viral on the heels of the 2023 presidential election. It was about the impending tsunami confronting the Nigerian political space – the Peter Obi phenomenon!
The forum the ex-governor spoke was supposed to be a family meeting – a kitchen cabinet affair, where he interacted with the inner caucus of his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in his state. But he ended up not only alerting the nation, but passing the message about the new reality in the must pungent, direct and unobtrusive manner – something new has come – Peter Obi.
Whether it was meant to be a warning, an admonition or simply a subject of amusement – as the governor seemed tickled while delivering it – Obaseki’s words in that outing hit the right spot in national consciousness across board. The young, the old, the healthy and the infirm, all heard it clearly. Now whatever they did individually remains a different kettle of fish.
In that encounter, Obaseki had told his audience how, despite being a governor and the engine room of the PDP in the state, his own family had turned against him with all children and other young members enlisting into the Obidient Movement and how that was true of every other family in Nigeria.
Now, was Obaseki’s depiction false? Didn’t it come to pass on February 25, 2023, when Nigerians went to the polls? If Yakubu Mahmoud and his INEC had not contrived that technical glitches arrangement to abjure the mandate of the people in line with the grab, snatch and run philosophy of the present beneficiary of that obvious heist, Obi certainly would have been Nigerian President.
Had that happened, Obi’s would have been not only a clean and wholesome mandate, untainted by the paintbrush of rigging or other electoral infamies bespattering previous efforts, it would have been a national mandate – delivered by the people of Nigeria – likened only to Moshood Abiola’s June 12, 1993 presidential election victory.
In fact, so pan-Nigerian was the Peter Obi effort that Nigerians of all ethnic and religious persuasions came together and on their own, in clusters, within housing estates, in villages and communities, contributed money to fund their individual campaigns to promote the project of getting him to the Aso Rock Villa for the nation’s number one job.
Nigerians abroad – Yoruba – Hausa – Ibibio – Jukun – Igala – Tiv – Kalabari – Igbo – Edo – made special arrangements to return home with the sole purpose of not only promoting the agenda, but actually making the idea a reality by casting their votes for him.
Obi was the only one out of the lot that contested the election in 2023 that secured the endorsement of virtually all the ethic organisations across Nigeria.
Afenifere – the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organisation – the Middle-Belt Forum (MBF) from the North Central – Pan-Niger Delta Forum PANDEF – for the South South region and Ohanaeze – their South East counterpart – all came together to declare their support for his presidential ambition.
Now this is the same person that some naysayers are labouring too hard, day and night to closet inside the straightjacket of ethnicity and religion. From Reno Omokri to Daniel Bwala to Bayo Onanuga and others controlling working from the Presidency to their counterparts at the Blantyre Plaza APC secretariat in Abuja – they continue to trumpet the spurious, bogus and fake narrative of Obi’s ambition being steeped in some sort of Igbo agenda.
Ironically, out of the entire lot, the selfsame Obi, is the only one who came out to boldly declare that nobody should cast a vote for him because he is Igbo, rather, they should do so because they are convinced about his ability to deliver on a new Nigeria of their dreams. No other had the courage to make such a bold declaration.
Surprisingly, even Wole Soyinka, one of Nigeria’s most iconic figures – a central voice in national and international affairs – Nigeria’s man of the century – the Kongi himself – who had hitherto shot himself to a position of a super being – of immortality – beyond reproach – without any credible reason even by his own conjecture – called the Obi ambition – an IPOB agenda.
That underscores the seriousness of the entire scenario. But interestingly, no matter how they try to trumpet it, their efforts have continued to mimic a snake striking at the shell of the tortoise with the aim of infusing its killer poison.
Their frustration not only hinges on this apparent failure but their current desperation too! The Obi brand has continued to soar beyond comprehension. So, when you hear the echoes of ethnic baiting, religious smears or other primordial sentiments, just know they are trying to increase the tempo of the din! Such a frustrating task!
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m The Tiny Voice!
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