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Natasha-Akpabio: What Senate integrity is Ned Nwoko talking about?

Published

1 year ago

April 7, 2025

Only someone who has not met Godswill Akpabio, former Governor of Akwa Ibom State and now Nigerian Senate President and Chairman of the National Assembly, would fail to feel a sense of loss at what is happening today within his circle. Anyone who has, especially at close quarters would be touched deeply about the turn of events.

I have had the privilege of meeting him at such quarters many times, enough for me to place him where I believe he reasonably belongs in the political history of Nigeria. That leads me to the conclusion that there are very few, if anybody in that Senate, as presently constituted that could best him for that prime seat of primus inter pares. He is completely fit for purpose as POTS.

I dare say, as governor, Akpabio reflected some of the enchanting qualities of politicians of old – the flamboyance of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Abubakar Rimi, the debonair presence of Joseph Wayas, the wittiness of Chuba Okadigbo, the eloquence of Bola Ige, the vision and transformation skills of Obafemi Awolowo. See what he did with Akwa Ibom for starters. The sudden transformation of that hitherto nondescript and unknown space is ample evidence, of what I’m talking about.

How many Nigerians knew of that state before the arrival of Akpabio? For those who might think it was about the sudden huge wealth the state came into by acquiring some big oil wells, the question might be, how many of what Akwa Ibom was in Akpabio’s time is left today after his departure?

When he was there the state was arguably the Nigerian destination of choice for local and international events. Akwa Ibom not only found special place in the hearts of Nigerians but even elevated to the global map.

Is it still the same today? Hasn’t the state returned to its former status obscurity and ordinariness regardless of the wealth? Yes, those who came after him may have achieved some mind-blowing landmarks as well, but without the Akpabio shine, those efforts only revert to the biblical construct of lighting a candle and covering it with a vessel instead of putting it on a candlestand.

Elsewhere, he was clearly to then PDP what Nyesom Wike is today to the APC government without the brusqueness and obtrusiveness, even after office. Yes, there was the loudness, but not the rash, brash, impertinence, associated with the Minister of the FCT. Akpabio obviously didn’t talk down on Nigerians, he rather wooed them like a love-struck suitor and that left a different mark, more positive than negative, as in today’s switch of places.

Not that he did not have his fair share of scandals and nasty stories – who didn’t as a politician? Even Zik and Awo, in their primal attainment, had. But all those were subsumed in the hollows of the flowing gowns. That was also true of Akpabio.

That was before the APC came calling. No doubt that evil hand, made manifest under Muhammadu Buhari has obviously touched the man with uncommon phenomenon. He seems to have been tinkered to shape into the APC structure.

Imagining Akpabio sitting at the Senate today as the primus inter pares under the PDP, and the picture he depicts otherwise, leaves me with a dose of pity and sour taste, knowing what Nigeria must have missed. It confirms how anything and everything APC hammer touches, turns around from smooth and straight to rough and crooked.

So, when Ned Nwoko, Senator representing Delta North came a few days ago with his own version of Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan in what some people have termed the Akpabiogate, and chose to go after the female Senator for, in his estimation, injuring the “integrity” and “reputation” of the Senate, the question is what integrity? What reputation?

In a piece I just read from the Senator, titled: Defending the Senate’s Integrity Against Emotional Manipulation and Misrepresentation, Nwoko, argued: “The recent outcry over the suspension of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan has been twisted into a false narrative of victimisation and suppression. Let it be clear: what was before the Senate was not her petition – something she herself has confirmed – but her conduct on the Senate floor, which violated the decorum expected of lawmakers.”

After making a song and dance about the Senate rules and why they must be respected, he not only implied that it was appropriate that the neck of the Kogi Senator was put on the guillotine, for offending those rules, but emphasised why the allegation of sexual harassment must be concerned to the dustbin.

He even blamed the husband of the Senator for not hushing her up, stressing that he would have done exactly that if it were any of his wives that was involved. But where he seemed to have scraped the wounds of Nigerians was when he began to stress the importance of strong institutions. Instructively, he recognised it as the bulwark of strong democracies across the world.

Hear him: “The Senate must not bow to emotional blackmail or social media outrage fueled by half-truths. Nigeria’s democracy thrives when its institutions are strong, disciplined, and governed by rules – not when they are manipulated to serve personal or partisan interests. We must ensure that the principles of accountability, order, and respect remain the guiding forces of our legislative process. This is not about silencing anyone; it is about ensuring that the Senate remains a place of reasoned debate, not theatrical disruptions.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, Nwoko would not be the first to make the point of strong institutions being the vortex of democratic practice. On 11 July, 2009, Barack Obama, then President of the United States of America, while addressing the Ghanian Parliament, on his first visit to Africa, told his audience: “Africa doesn’t need strong men, it needs strong institutions.”

But then, where he failed, and fatally so, was in his rating of the suspension of Natasha among the ways to achieving this. No way! The issue of Natasha doesn’t even merit any reckoning considering what the situation in Nigeria and where the Senate comes in or ought to have come in, in that regard.

See what a strong institution looks like. On February 4, 2020, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, tore the State of the Union address presented by Donald Trump in the presence of the President of the United States and before global television cameras. How about that? Was she afraid that the entire roof of the capitol would collapse on her head? There was a strong bulwark to protect her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t dare.

Juxtapose that with the Ned Nwoko parliament in Abuja, where then of the PDP, he joined other opposition colleagues in singing – on your mandate we shall stand – for Bola Ahmed Tinubu in its hallowed chambers, just to lullaby and serenade the President. Imagine that! Imagine what people in sane climes would be thinking of that selfsame Senate.

Imagine too what would happen if the same Trump picked up his bag one hot afternoon in Washington, heads to Air Force One, and zooms off to Singapore and cause the White House to issue a statement telling Americans that the POTUS, would be spending the next two weeks in the country – on working visit – without prior notice and full details of the benefits to Americans. Imagine what the US congress would do.

But today, the same Tinubu is in France for 14 days on the same account. He did not even make a national broadcast to try and convince Nigerians on the raison d’etre for the trip and the critical nature of the choice. No! It was Bayo Onanuga, his spokesman that would deliver the fait accompli in the usual take-it-or-leave-it manner.

Yet, the same Senate that is craving integrity and reputation, sees no reason not to bark, even if it couldn’t bite, at least to demonstrate its presence. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time. This was just few weeks after committing the blunder of approving the State of Emergency imposed in Rivers State and the demolition of the democratic institutions that come with it, for which the entire globe is still at a loss today.

So, that Nigerians sneer at not only the Senate, but the entire National Assembly today, cannot be because it failed or was unable to curtail the excesses of Natasha, as Nwoko attempted to infer, but because they know that it is completely bereft. It is neither representative of the people nor does it care about the country as a whole. Where then are the reputation and integrity to protect?

In the first place, such a mundane issue of seating arrangement bruhaha would not have arisen. In a serious Senate Natasha wouldn’t have had the temerity to put up the act of February 20, 2025 if she believed it was home to serious business. That she did, is a demonstrable example of what that critical institution has been reduced to.

So, either way – whether Akpabio actually wanted her to warm his bed or she simply made up the story – exploiting feminism sentiments, it still ends up an adumbration of the parlous state of the NASS as a whole and its notorious image particularly.

Moreover, Nwoko’s other arguments hold no water. I’m sure that he has heard that hell hath no fury than a woman scorned. The day the whole world would hear his dark secret is when he quarrels with his delectable Regina Daniels. Nobody knew that Churchill was a one-minute-man, until the day he called it quits with Tonto Dike.

So, asking why Natasha is just coming out to reveal what happened a year ago, resembles a naïve question a child would ask. Only a rookie would fail to know that in the heart of a woman lurks millions of secrets, which only she could reveal at the time that suits her. Place a mirror in that heart and see how much the inelastic capacity of a woman to conceal.

So, assuming, but not conceding that the Senate President actually toasted her, would it not be normal for her to keep it away from the husband in this context? And if she decided to squeal, wouldn’t it be an extra?

Even ugly women, married or single, get courted daily at the malls, markets, buses, airports and all manner of places. A woman, who comes home daily to regale her spouse of the number of men on her matter, is even more likely to be seen as flippant and unserious, especially in this clime, where women are expected to take care of themselves.

Natasha gave the impression that she had to come out because she felt the harassment was taking a toll on her job as a Senator because Akpabio, who would not take no for an answer decided to punish her for refusing his advances.

Might well be true. Might also be that she indeed sucked the attention and the munificence that came with it and might even have caved in later if the Senate President was patient enough and not have taken the said juicy committee away from her.

It might be, as many have also advanced that she was telling outright lies and simply leveraging on her endowments to hoodwink the unwary – a gambit her traducers accuse her of being adept at to make her public pitch.

Nobody knows. But what is clear is Natasha’s case would have paled to insignificance and reduced to the backwaters of national discourse if the Senate actually had a enough reputation and integrity. It is more likely to be the deficit of same that is at play.

If this were the same Senate under the NASS that displayed bribe money in its chambers or the one that killed that infamous Third Term Agenda, Natasha might not have been of any issue at all. She wouldn’t even dare.

Not only that nobody would believe her, but not a few would have derided it with the dismissive comment with which they treat everyday man-woman issue – so what?

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Columns

The Three-Month Sprint (1): Philosophical Architecture of an Intellectual Trilogy of State Decay

Published

1 day ago

June 14, 2026

Whirlwindnews

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

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Editorial

Rabe Abubakar et al: Different military, shame of a nation!

Published

1 day ago

June 14, 2026

Whirlwindnews

What does Dura community of Dura-Du area of Jos South Local of Area of Plateau State, 2018, Okporo, Ihuoma and Amaifeke communities in the Orlu Local Government Area of Imo State, 2022, and Okuama community of Ughelli South Local Government Area of Delta State 2024 have in common? Do they ring a bell?

Certainly! They are just a few of many demonstrable examples of military anger, recently on display in the Nigerian polity. Here are some details.

In September, 2018, Idris Alkali, was declared missing. The retired Major General of the Nigerian Army, was said to be travelling through Jos, Plateau State to Bauchi when he disappeared.

Reactions: The army came calling! In what they termed “search and rescue operation,” soldiers descended on communities along the route. It was a brutal exercise – the imprimatur of military operations. The youths of the communities, especially Dura-Du area in Jos, virtually disappeared into the bush or scampered out of town to escape the blitzkrieg.

Scores of the unlucky ones who fell into the wide net they cast on the entire area, meant to drag everyone in, regardless of status, were reportedly subjected to some of the most harrowing experiences they might not forget in their lifetimes.

The situation even worsened when the remains of the ex-military top brass was discovered in a disused well in one of the communities. That was when war was actually declared on the people in their bid to fish out the supposed culprits – albeit – military style.

Even after more than four years, the people of Okporo, Ihuoma and Amaifeke communities, are still nursing the physical and psychological wounds they sustained in the hands of the military who came visiting in April 2022.

Their only crime was to be the host of a hot gun battle between soldiers and elements said to be members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), during an ambush, which reportedly left casualties on both sides.

Many reportedly lost their homes and businesses in inferno, as the soldiers who descended on the communities, reportedly set many facilities on fire outside mowing down many residents, who they termed IPOB members.

What about Okuama? The case of the Delta community perhaps the freshest in mind. There, residents are still reeling in the pain inflicted on them in similar circumstances as their counterparts in Plateau and Imo, following the military operations that took place after some 16 personnel, including two officers were reportedly ambushed and killed by natives.

Tukur Gusau, then spokesman of Defence Headquarters (DHQ), Nigeria’s seat of military authorities, who reported that the troops from the 181 Amphibious Battalion were deployed in the Bomadi region and were on a peace-keeping mission in the Okuoma community when they were killed, had indicated that there would be grave consequences.

That promise was kept to the letter, with virtually nobody escaping the wrath of the military, from the ordinary citizens, the community leaders and even the traditional institutions. Even the fishes in the river and trees in the forest of the Niger Delta community, felt the anger of the soldiers.

Now, the question: Where is that anger today? On Saturday, Nigeria and its citizens were dazed from the hangover of another celebration of Democracy Day with the news of Abubakar Rabe, a retired Major General and former spokesman of the Nigerian Army.

The ex-military boss, just retired after more than three decades of service to country, died like an infected chicken in the hands of some rag-tag ruffians, unfit to polish his military boots when he was in service, who took him hostage and detained him in the bush in the last two weeks.

Yes, for two weeks, Rabe, who was abducted alongside his wife while travelling through Katsina, a hotbed of terrorist activities in Nigeria, was kept in the bush in a decrepit condition with signs of obvious failing health quite evident.

There was even a video of him begging the authorities including the Katsina State Government to come to his rescue, all which failed to get any positive result until he eventually took a bow on Friday, the same day the same country he served were celebrating what they termed – Democracy Day. What an irony!

Neither the central government under President Bola Tinubu, Katsina or the military authorities to whom he devoted his youth, could lift a finger to help him, or his wife, whose fate even remains unknown after the sad incident. What a nation!

But Rabe Abubakar is not an isolated case. Maharazu Tsiga (rtd), a Brigadier General and former Director-General of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) was abducted by bandits from his hometown in Bakori Local Government Area of Katsina State, spent 56 days in captivity before eventually regaining his freedom, while Rabi’u Garba Yandoto, a retired colonel and two of his children were abducted along the Gusau-Tsafe road in Zamfara State, also spent 10 days in captivity before regaining freedom.

They were the lucky ones. Others who were not that lucky, never lived to tell their story. One of them was Musa Uba. The late Brigadier General, and former Commander of the 25 Task Force Brigade, was leading his men and members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) when insurgents struck.

The attack, which reportedly happened along the Damboa–Biu axis, led to the killing of four operatives: two soldiers and two CJTF members.

However, Uba, who reportedly escaped the initial ambush, was again encircled by the terrorists as he was communicating with military authorities on how to be rescued and returned to base. He was captured and subsequently killed.

Again, on April 8, 2026, Oseni Omoh Braimah, another Brigadier General Commander of the 29 Task Force Brigade, under Operation Hadin Kai, also met a fatal fate in the hands of the same Boko Haram -ISWAP fighters.

They were said to have launched a coordinated, midnight assaults on military formations in Benisheikh, a strategic town in the Kaga Local Government Area of Borno State.

Before then, Alex Bardeh, a retired Air Vice-Marshal and former Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) was killed on December 18, 2018 by hoodlums who attacked his convoy on the Keffi- Kaduna Expressway while he was returning from his farm on the border between Nasarawa State and the Federal Capital Territory.

Ironically, all these tragedies took place under the nose of the All Progressives Congress (APC), a party, which, before assuming power in 2015, had made a song and dance of how they were going to offer Nigerians a breather from what they saw then as the parlous condition of the Nigerian polity, particularly in insecurity.

Interestingly, the government of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which they heavily assailed as incompetent and clueless in arresting the situation, did not count a single case of a General being killed in such a manner.

Today, the terrorists who had hitherto seemed to be acting scared by hitting soft targets and disappearing, now appear quite frontal unfazed.

They no longer limit themselves to civilian targets. Outside kidnapping and outright carnages on civilians, which are now daily stories, they have since upped the ante – hitting even some of the highly-fortified military bases, slaughtering soldiers at will.

After Alex Bardeh, Musa Uba, Omo Braimah and now Abubakar Rabe, the question that seems quite natural now, is who is next? The other question, is where is the notorious Military Anger that kept the polity in check and the nation safe?

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News

BREAKING: Two weeks after, Rabe Abubakar, retired General, dies in kidnapper’s den!

Published

2 days ago

June 13, 2026

Whirlwindnews

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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