News
We’re now homeless, 200 families displaced by NAF cry out
More than 200 families who resided in Nuwalege, a rural community along the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport Road in reportedly rendered homeless, following the demolition of their homes to accommodate an extension of the Presidential Air Fleet, have now cried out over their present woes.
The PUNCH reports that as a result of the demolition, which was carried out by the Federal Capital Development Authority, at the request of the Nigerian Air Force (NAF), the displaced residents were forced to seek shelter in nearby communities, including Zamani, Sauka, Giri, Iddo, Gwagwalada, and others, adding that though the PAF project and its funding were not available but there are indications the project would commence soon as NAF personnel had been mobilised to the project site ahead of construction activities.
The affected families, said they had not received compensation from the Nyesom Wike-led Federal Capital Territory Administration, the Nigeria Air Force and the Ministry of Aviation, the report also said, adding that its reporter, was prevented from accessing the community by heavily armed Air Force personnel guarding the site.
The report, quoted Muktar Galadima, Director of the FCT Department of Development Control, as saying during an engagement with the community, last December that the Air Force had written to the FCT minister giving notice of the plan to relocate the residents, noting, however, that the status of compensation for the people was uncertain.
“We will discuss with the Air Force because obviously, discussions behind the scenes indicate that some forms of compensation were paid. We are going to conduct further investigation by engaging the FCT Department of Resettlement and Compensation as well as the Nigerian Air Force and find out if compensation has been paid, to whom, and when,” Galadima said.
The same Galadima, was also quoted as saying after the demolition in January, that the residents were given a two-month notice before the exercise, adding that his office had informed the Air Force of the administration’s policy on relocating indigenous communities.
His words: “We informed the residents residing on the Nigeria Air Force land about the impending action and granted them a two-month window to pack their belongings. When the Air Force approached us, we told them about the FCTA policy on relocation and resettlement of indigenous communities.
“However, other non-indigenes are to be moved out of the location so that the Air Force can take over their land. The structures belonging to indigenes were left out because statutorily they have to be relocated and compensated, that’s why we are not touching their properties.”
In contradiction, however, residents of the community, were quoted as denying that they were notified of the demolition beforehand or paid any form of compensation, adding that no house was spared in the community during the demolition exercise.
Wisdom James, an artisan while introducing another perspective altogether said the notification showed that the demolition would start in the next two years, only for the bulldozers to arrive not long after, adding: “I live in Zamani now, but I’m from Nuwalege. They demolished our house in January. There was no information (prior to the demolition). The place they marked for demolition is not the place they demolished.
“They didn’t tell us when they would be coming. At a time, they told us they had shifted the demolition until the next two years. But in two days, they were there with bulldozers and started work. They didn’t pay us anything.
“We made some contributions to take the issue to court. I paid N2,500. We were meeting in Sauka. After meeting about six times, there was nothing like that again. The money we gathered, we don’t know where they took it to, and we weren’t paid back.”
Obadiah Tanko, an indigene of the community, echoing the same sentiments, was also quoted as saying that the natives had lived there long before the Air Force base was built next to it, pointing out that some of their ancestors were buried in the site that now belonged to the NAF.
“I’ve been living in Nuwalege for 15 years, though I am an indigene. When they (FCDA) first came, they used beacons to mark some places. That was years ago. So, we took the issue to court, because before the (Air Force) base was built, we used to farm there. But they shifted us towards the river. Some of our grandfathers were buried where the base is now.
“They did an initial demolition in 2007. When they came, they told us only part of the place would be demolished. Before we knew it, we were told it would be the whole thing, although they didn’t demolish mine because I’m an indigene. Some people who are Bassa and Gbagyi are still there. None of the victims were told they would be paid anything, and none of them has received any payment,” he added.
Folashade Olatunde, mother of five, and former resident, who recounted her ordeal, stating that she slept in a classroom for two weeks after her home was demolished, before she eventually found an apartment in the Zamani community, lamented that her family was no longer staying together since the forceful eviction and demolition, adding that the FCDA destroyed more than 200 houses in Nuwalege.
She said: “We left the community on January 15, 2024. They didn’t pay us any compensation, nothing at all. They just pursued everybody. I found money to rent a one-room apartment in Zamani after two weeks of sleeping in a primary school in the harsh cold.
“My family and I are separated, and I had to take some of our property back home. I have been staying here since then. I stay here with my husband and my two youngest children. My oldest son and the one immediately after him sleep in a nearby church, while my daughter is in Ekiti with my family. They scattered my family.
“The houses demolished are more than 200. Every house was demolished. None was left standing. The leader of those of us who are Yoruba also lives down the road here in a self-contained apartment. We paid N20,000 and at another time N15,000 for a petition against the way the houses were demolished. They gave us a receipt with the promise to pay some money into our accounts and since then, nothing has happened.”
Elizabeth Olushola, another victim, who was quoted as saying her home and a block of four classrooms she built were demolished in the exercise, also stating that she had not been compensated by the government, added: “I lived in Nuwalege for seven years. They did not tell us that they were going to demolish our community. But we saw them in 2023 when the FCDA came to mark some houses there.
“They said that was the only part they would demolish. Eventually, we saw that they had gone beyond where they marked, and they started demolishing everywhere and people had to start rushing out. There was no information, we just saw their bulldozers on January 15, 2024, and they started demolishing. I had a school there, a block of four classrooms; I also had a shop and everything was cleared off. We opened the school on January 9 and by January 15, they had demolished it. We had our own house, a two-bedroom flat, and a shop. They were both demolished too.
“They didn’t give us any money, nobody even approached us. They didn’t resettle us here (new residence) either, we moved here and we rented an apartment here.”
Columns
The Three-Month Sprint (1): Philosophical Architecture of an Intellectual Trilogy of State Decay
Last week on The Sunday Stew, we unveiled the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a quantitative metric I developed as an extension of the Trinity of State Decay. It is meant to be a mathematical instrument for measuring the degree of separation between a state’s juridical sovereignty and its lived reality. I had planned to follow up today with the first instalment of a three-part series on the methodology and indicators of the DSI.
Then, from the middle of last week, there was a development that sent me into a sustained period of reflection.
On Wednesday, Zenodo — the open-access repository developed by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the European Commission — published my 16,315-word theoretical treatise, ‘The Trinity of State Decay (Part 1): Sovereign Decoupling and Rival Sovereignty — A Theoretical Statement.’ On Thursday, Harvard Dataverse, owned and operated by Harvard University, published the same work. On Friday morning, an email arrived from the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), operated by GESIS — the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany — confirming that they too had accepted, published, and archived the paper.
Late Prof. Edward Said
I sat with that for a while. It is exactly three months since The Sunday Stew made its debut. In those three short months, we have produced an original analytical framework (The Insecurity Triad), a comprehensive theoretical formulation (the Trinity of State Decay), and a quantitative index (DSI). Within the same period, the framework entered global scholarly circulation, and now the theoretical paper has been published by three of the world’s most respected scholarly repositories within seventy-two hours of each other. I found myself thinking about the symmetry of it: three months. A trilogy of original contributions. A triple publication in a single week.
Numbers sometimes carry meaning far beyond arithmetic. This one felt like it was trying to tell me something.
I. The Seed Planted in a Library
When The Sunday Stew was conceived, I did not set out to become a framework architect, a theorist, or an index creator. But looking back, I think the seed was planted much earlier — by accident, in the history section of the University of Calabar library.
I was preparing a term paper on Nigerian history. Our lecturer was the late Dr. Erim O. Erim — a man you had to do your absolute best to satisfy. I was moving along the shelves when I stopped. What arrested me was a name on a spine: Sigmund Freud. His biography. I could not understand what such a book was doing in the history section. I took it anyway, borrowed it, and in one week read it cover to cover.
Of everything I read about Freud’s life, one idea lodged itself in my subconscious and has never left: Freud’s concept of immortality. He defined it simply but profoundly: immortality is being known by many anonymous people. Not a mystical phenomenon, but a psychological and systemic one. It is the act of leaving behind an intellectual footprint so distinct that your ideas are absorbed by millions of people who may never meet you, but who must use your language to understand their own reality.
Freud did not merely write a theory. He changed the global vocabulary. Because of Freud, anonymous people who have never read a page of psychoanalysis use the words ego, subconscious, projection, and defence mechanism every single day. They are operating within his architecture without ever knowing it. That, he argued, was immortality.
I was a young man in a university library who had come looking for Nigerian history and stumbled into a philosophy of intellectual legacy. I did not know, at the time, that I had been given a compass.
•Late Antonio Gramsci
II. The Book C.Don Handed Me
Several years later, when I lived in Lagos, I had someone who was (and still is) a friend, a big brother, and a mentor. The home of C.Don Adinuba — then at Ilupeju — was like my second home. I could walk in at any time. C.Don was the perfect host, and his wife a hostess of uncommon warmth. There was never a dull moment in that house. He knew I loved books, and he is himself one of the most intellectually deep people I have ever encountered.
On one of those days, he pulled a book from his shelf, handed it to me, and said: “Go and read this.” I looked at it. The author was unfamiliar. I asked: “Who is Edward Said?” He replied: “Just go and read the book.”
Representations of the Intellectual — which grew out of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC — turned out to be, apart from the Bible, one of the most impactful books I have ever read. In its pages I first encountered Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks has made an enduring impression on my intellectual formation and theoretical development. Said’s argument — that the intellectual’s vocation is to speak truth to power, to represent the unrepresented, and to refuse the comfort of specialisation in favour of the discomfort of genuine engagement — became a way of understanding what journalism, practised seriously, is actually for.
And from Antonio Gramsci, particularly his broad conception of the intellectual, I came to understand that intellectuals are not confined to universities, research institutes, or academic titles. Gramsci argued that intellectual activity exists wherever people help shape ideas, interpret reality, organise knowledge, and influence how society understands itself. Through that lens, I realised that journalism is not merely a profession of reporting events; it is an inherently intellectual vocation.
As a journalist, I do more than gather facts and relay information. I help frame public conversations, interrogate power, highlight social challenges, preserve collective memory, and contribute to the global marketplace of ideas. This understanding deepened my sense of responsibility to society. It reinforced the belief that journalism carries a duty not only to inform but also to enlighten, challenge assumptions, encourage critical thinking, and provide citizens with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.
Gramsci’s perspective helped me see that the journalist occupies a vital bridge in the relationship between structured knowledge and public life. The responsibility is therefore not simply to report what happens, but to pursue truth rigorously, interpret developments thoughtfully, and contribute constructively to the intellectual and moral development of society. In that sense, journalism became for me not just a career, but a pure form of public intellectual engagement.
These two books — one stumbled upon by accident, one pressed into my hands by C.Don — formed the philosophical foundation on which everything that follows in this column rests. I did not know that at the time. I know it now.
Late Sigmund Freud
III. The Question That Started Everything
When The Sunday Stew made its debut on March 8th, I initially envisioned a column anchored broadly on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context. But the second edition on March 15 inspired our current trajectory. Entitled ‘A Country Without Earthquakes — Yet Shaken by Itself’, it explored the tragic reality of Nigeria manufacturing catastrophic man-made disasters while other nations contend merely with natural ones. The insights that came from writing that piece—drawing heavily from an expansive interview a former colleague and I conducted with the late Professor Jubril Aminu in 2012—inspired the rigorous analytical direction this column ultimately took, beginning with the development of The Insecurity Triad.
At the outset, I only set out to understand why Nigeria keeps bleeding. I wanted to discover why the same communities bury the same dead in the same circumstances decade after decade, while the state issues the same predictable condemnations, commissions the same redundant reports, and recommends the same superficial reforms that are never implemented. I set out, in other words, to do journalism.
What I did not anticipate was that the honest, uncompromising pursuit of that question would eventually produce what the academy calls a macro-theoretical framework—and that this framework would, in time, find its home at Harvard and other top-tier scientific repositories.
The Trinity of State Decay did not arrive fully formed. It emerged from a profound frustration—the frustration of a scholar-journalist who has spent years watching analytical frameworks imported wholesale from external academic traditions fail to explain the immediate reality happening in front of his eyes.
Failed state theory, useful as far as it goes, describes a static outcome. It names the corpse but completely fails to trace the actual cause of death. The Fragile States Index produces superficial comparative rankings but isolates no mechanisms. What was missing was an indigenous framework that could explain the operational process—the structural logic by which sovereign authority fractures and is progressively displaced by rival formations.
The insight, when it came, was disarmingly simple: states do not lose control randomly. They lose it systematically along three specific axes—Money, Land, and Mind. When the state loses its command of fiscal and economic legitimacy, when it loses territorial authority over its physical space, and when it loses ideological and psychological hold over the behavioural psyche of the population, something else moves in. Not chaos. Something far worse than chaos: a disciplined, purposeful Shadow Order, which is often more efficient at its enforcement functions than the formal state it is displacing.
This is what the Trinity of State Decay theorises. Not the mere failure of the state—but the active production of an alternative to it.
The geography of legitimate knowledge production has long maintained a centre and a periphery. The global centre produces the theoretical frameworks; the periphery receives them, submissively applies them, and occasionally pushes back against them in minor footnotes. What is happening right now with the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU)—with The Insecurity Triad already circulating in global academic repositories and the Trinity of State Decay now anchored across multiple institutions—is a clear demonstration that intellectual rigour does not possess a postal address.
The publication of the Trinity of State Decay on global scholarly platforms is not an end point. It is the formal opening of a conversation three decades in the making. If in the months, years, and decades to come, a professor at Harvard, a post-doctoral fellow in Legon, a PhD candidate in Oxford, or an undergraduate in Makerere writing a term paper finds it useful and engages with it, our purpose will have been fulfilled. None of them may ever know me personally, just as I never knew Freud, Gramsci, or Said.
Coda: The Symmetry Completes Itself
I began this reflection thinking about the symmetry of three: three months, a trilogy of contributions, a triple publication. But symmetry, I have come to understand, is not always visible at the beginning of a journey. It reveals itself exclusively in retrospect—which is, incidentally, also how Sovereignty Decoupling becomes visible to those who are living through it.
A young man borrowing a biography of Freud by accident in a university library. A mentor handing him Edward Said across a table in Ilupeju. Several years of frontline journalism asking the same stubborn questions about why our nation bleeds. A column that began as political commentary and rapidly transformed, by structural necessity, into a site of deep theoretical production. And now: Harvard, Zenodo, GESIS-SSOAR, all in a single week.
Three months. A trilogy. A triple publication. And with SSOAR’s confirmation arriving on Friday morning, our overall global archival footprint expands to seven critical institutional repositories when we include the foundational papers of The Insecurity Triad: SSRN, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SocArXiv, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. The symmetry, it appears, was not done with me yet.
The Trinity of State Decay is now available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/ZQWEM7), Zenodo (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20580627), SSOAR (nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-110533-8), ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. Read it. Push back against it. Apply it. Find its limits. That is exactly what it is there for.
Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.
•Dr. Max Amuchie is a Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO, and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). He is the architect of The Insecurity Triad framework for African security analysis, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—original, indigenous analytical frameworks for understanding, categorising, and measuring conflict, state decay, and sovereignty in the Global South. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa, and the Global South in a changing world.
X (formerly Twitter): @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
Abubakar Rabe, retired Major General former spokesman of the Nigerian Army who was abducted by bandits in Katsina State exactly two weeks ago, has died in captivity, reports coming from the state, one of the hotbeds of terrorist activities in Nigeria, confirmed on Saturday.
The retired senior military officer was kidnapped alongside his wife around the Matazu area of Katsina State while traveling to attend a wedding ceremony, was said to have died of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure in the camp of his abductors.
Nasiru Mu’azu, Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, in the state, who confirmed the incident, in a statement, said the government received the news with heavy heart and deep sense of loss.
He wrote: “It is with profound sadness that we confirm the General’s death while in bandits captivity. Despite the relentless and concerted efforts of the State Government and various Security Agencies to secure his safe release, the situation ended in this tragedy.
“The deceased Retired General died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension. His abduction and subsequent death are not only a loss to his family and Katsina State but a monumental loss to the entire country.
“His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Katsina State Malam Dikko Umaru Radda, PhD, CON, extends his deepest condolences to the family of the late General and the country at-large.
“The Governor has described this incident as a “dark moment” and a reminder of the urgent need for a collective and intensified front against the criminal elements threatening the peace of our communities.
“The Katsina State Government remains committed to working with the Federal Government and security forces to ensure that those responsible for this heinous act are brought to justice. We assure the citizens of Katsina State that our resolve to eliminate banditry and ensure the safety of all residents remains unshaken.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family during this difficult time. May the soul of the departed Retired Major General Rabe Abdulakdir rest in eternal peace.”
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