The Concourse
By Soney Antai, serial awards-winning columnist
When silence is suicidal
It was Martin Luther King Jr, that extra-cerebral-cum-courageous African- American preacher and civil rights crusader, who said, “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” He had a valid point, if you ask me.
Let’s be clear: almost anybody can mouth bravery, love, kindness, courage or integrity when they are under no threats because of those virtues they profess. Almost everybody can join and sing along any song in the midst a throng where their individuality and vulnerability are not exposed to scrutiny or serious consequences. But flip the page, and you read an entirely different script. Those on this side of the divide can’t confess publicly what they profess privately. They are brave tigers in the night who become craven cats in the day. They lack the capacity to convey their professed convictions. These are those the Biblical Prophet Elijah of Tishbe would challenge to take a stand.
Accordingly, apostles and disciples of ‘political correctness’ would find King’s remarks unsettling and discomfiting, and that, because to be politically correct, you have to follow the current, the majority, the crowd, even if it means playing the oil floating on top of water. You are with them, but don’t belong with them. You ask why? It is because it is lonesome to be alone. It takes courage to take a stand with water that is not part of the ocean of popular assertions and exertions. That apparently explains the reason Rudyard Kipling’s assertion that truth is seldom a friend in a crowd, is an inconvenient truth. Yet, the truth that liberates people is one they often don’t like to listen to.
For too long, mass killings and abductions for ransom have crippled households, disrupted the educational system in the North, orphaned children, widowed couples and halted farming activities. Soldiers and other security personnel have been maimed or killed, at times by fifth columnists. The epicentre, once North East has stretched to the Benue-Plateau-Niger axis of the Middle Belt. Since about 2009, we have had issues of Boko Haram, ISWAP, Ansaru, and lately Lakurawa. Nigeria has become a killing field.
All of these terror gangs are linked to Islamism, which is why Sheikh Gumi could brazenly, during Buhari’s presidency, tell terrorists whom Buhari preferred to call ‘bandits,’ that soldiers killing them were those of the Christian faith; yet Buhari failed to pick up Gumi for such corrosive, divisive and incendiary utterance. Rather, he unleased security operatives on Nnamdi Kanu, Sunday Igboho and Obadiah Mailafia, who didn’t do half the damage Miyetti Allah and killer Fulani herdsmen were doing to Nigerians and the national economy. This is an inconvenient truth that Islamists financing the blood cults do not want many to know. But beyond these terrorists is the deep complicity of some people in government. They have, in their ‘evilphilia,’ framed the killings as the work of misguided youths who need to be listened to, deradicalised, and reintegrated into society; yet they are the sponsors of all the violence. The fellows who take orders from them don’t ask about the whereabouts of the children of their financiers. Why are those ones not in the bush fighting for their religion too?
These wretches who finance the bloodletting have laboured to draw a pararallel between their leeches’ activities and those of former militants in the Niger Delta. They have coloured their evil as farmer-herder clashes. If you mention that most of these terrorists are Fulani, they accuse you of stereotyping a group, just to characterise it as hate speech and use the law to cover up their evil. But if this is not true why are their defenders mostly those from that ethnicity? Where is the government with all its military might in all of this?
Just last Sunday, 18 January, 2026, terrorists attacked three churches in Kurmin Wali, Kaduna State, seizing about 170 Christian worshippers. Both Kaduna State government and the police initially denied that anything like that ever happened and even threatened those who told the world that the attack did occur. It took the insistence of the community and Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) for these authorities to make a U-turn two days later to admit the obvious. One week after, some 163 abductees are still in captivity, even as there is in place, according to the Federal Government, a state of emergency on insecurity.
I have said it before, and I am repeating it, the Nigerian security apparatus, especially the military, cleansed of sectarian and political pollution, is capable of ending the violence in the land in less than a year. Our soldiers, in spite of fifth columnists, have the capacity to do that. But why isn’t that happening after all these years?
Those of us who go around with security escorts may assume that they are safe and secure. However, the strongest part of a chain is its weakest unit. Therefore, if we allow this madness to continue much longer, our silence may become suicidal. Nigerians should hold the central government accountable for the insecurity in the land and pressure them to stop this eddy of fear, killings, rapes, and dislocation of our people. The government knows the sponsors of this evil and should go after them without further delay.