The mood of siege in Nigeria is palpable. It became very clear as I traveled across parts of Nigeria, testing the mood, and gathering insight over the last month. The Nigerian nation seems to be in the very last throes of death.

I mean this literally.

It also feels like nothing seems likely to save it in time before the looming catastrophe topples the state.

85 percent of Nigerians, by my own calculations, have given up.

A great sense of disenchantment and disengagement hangs thickly in the air. People are listless; surviving on their wits; and at their wits end.

They feel no sense of care or love for the nation.

A majority of Nigerians no longer feel interested in the survival of Nigeria as an entity.

That is because an entire generation sees that Nigeria has never offered them anything.

They hate Nigeria and feel nothing for it.

This is the most dangerous reality that folks who go about driving in Rolls Royce on broken streets are unaware about. The nation no longer belongs to Nigerians.

They do not feel like they have a share in its opportunities.

There is a massive loss of buy-in.

The symbolic order has collapsed.

The Chelsea and Liverpool escape

One simple way to gauge this mood is just to listen to Nigerians discussing

Chelsea and Liverpool totally disconnected from their own reality. It is a form of escape.

It’s been a long time since Nigerians gathered around their radios on weekends to fiercely discuss the great Spartans FC of Owerri playing against the Raccah Rovers of Kano, and betting on the outcome.

Nigerians are suffering from stress syndromes.

There is a very general malaise; a mental collapse among the general population, a massive psychiatric crisis to which no one is paying attention.

Deep national trauma is real.

People, including children, are not sleeping.

They lie awake either from fear, religious crusades on loud speakers, or from the deadly tropical heat, which has increased with the loss of trees, and with no electricity to power cooling equipment.

Hell on earth

Nigeria feels like a literal hell on earth.

It is a dark somnolent place.

Nigerians are basically in a psychosomatic trap.

I used to gauge Nigeria by the light in the eyes of people, the bright, smiling, gift-giving and generous faces.

But, today, the strain on the Nigerian face is telling.

You see dignified people struggling to hold together their long earned sense of dignity, but quietly begging for help, any little help; the kind of help that a well-conceived nation offers to its people through social services and social security policies that honor their humanity.  But not in Nigeria.

The humanity of Nigerians is not the concern of the ruling class.

The APC-led government, especially, has finally, fully, turned Nigeria and Nigerians into the “Almajiri.”

The policy of this governing party is equal-opportunity at further impoverishing the people.

They set out to pulverize Nigeria, in order to master it.

It is the creative use of chaos as a means of overwhelming the population into dysfunction.

I should recommend Naomi Klein’s very compelling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, so that Nigerians would see the exact model of policies used by these folks, and introduced into Nigeria in order to advance the shallow interests of a few, really deadly men, whose goals is to turn Nigerians into listless, powerless, economic slaves.

They use what Klein calls “the shock therapy.”

Nigeria is in a very dangerous state of siege.

This situation of siege currently seems like it is invented and sustained by forces within the Nigerian security apparatus. There is nothing else, and no way else to explain this.

Evidence

I would like here to repeat, as evidence, that pithy statement by the late Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha, who did say that if an insurgency lasts more than 24 hours, the government of the day is involved.

I think this is true of this government.

I think the incompetent and inhumane government of profiteers, puppeteers, and blind capitalists who have taken over this country as politicians have deliberately created a pressure-cooker situation in Nigeria, in collaboration with their international partners and foreign collaborators with whom they extract the natural resources of this woe-begone nation, in order to keep the citizens confused, restless, and dependent.

I will come back to this statement, but Nigerians must now understand that insecurity in Nigeria is a project.

It is a highly crafted, carefully created form of containment.

Its long term goal is to weaken social cohesion, divide and conquer Nigerians, weaken communities, and make them afraid, displaced, and malleable.

Only settled communities, after all, have the capacity to create civil societies, and when the need arises, civil disobedience. I insist that there is now evidence to suggest that Boko Haram, the herdsmen violence, and all the kidnappings and invasions going on across Nigeria is a highly directed operation intended for two purposes: One is to keep Nigerians restless, afraid, divided, unsettled, and overwhelmed in order to purse and support a highly deadly laissez-faire economic policy of privatization, extreme deregulation, and other terrible “free market” reforms.

These folks have stolen Nigeria and gouged out its economic soul.

They have created a small category of people – beneficiaries of this disastrous policy – who live in mindless and extreme luxury and wealth, in exclusive “gated communities,” while a vast multitude now beg for a little cornmeal, in vast slums across the land.

The second factor is more direct.

With the collaboration and complicity of the elite, the aim is to milk the “national security” scenario by intensifying the crisis.

Budget

Nigerians need to note that Nigeria’s national security and defence budget has grown ten-fold since 1999.

Yet, Nigeria conducted the ECOMOG operations that brought peace to West Africa with far less, and with greater sophistication and efficiency, prior.

But, year by year, particularly since 2003, Nigeria has moved from crisis to crisis.

Under Obasanjo, it was the rash of high profile assassinations across Nigeria, of highly visible political opponents of the regime; then there were the kidnappings and the stage-managed insurgencies in the Niger Delta which characterized the locale of early national security concerns.

Then came the emergence of Boko Haram, which was first created by a league of northern politicians backed by their international collaborators, which modeled the Janjaweed insurgency flowing from the Sudan, through the Sahel.

A new phenomenon

A new phenomenon of the militia which came with Buhari, and the kidnappings in the East of Nigeria, were first staged by the Buhari administration in order to introduce the disaster doctrine or the “shock therapy” to a then very relatively peaceful and prosperous East.

As the national security apparatchiks grow stupendously wealthy with security contracts and operational spending, Nigerians grow more insecure.

There is no insecurity in a sovereign state with a well-built Army, an operational Navy, an Airforce, and a National Police system, unless the governing administration creates and directs it.

Abacha was right.

Traveling through the federal highway between Owerri and Port Harcourt supports this logic.

The traveler will see about 60 military checkpoints, each one just within a mile or even shorter from the other.

The only place any one sees that kind of show is in an active war situation.

But it supports my theory that the government manufactures this crisis to “shock” and “awe” the people.

They have basically stopped exchange between two major cities of the East, and stopped the economic activity created by movement and exchange of goods.

This is just one example. We have the evidence that in all these crises, no high government official has been kidnapped or assassinated.

The rulers are safe.

We have seen evidence that when communities rally to counter and arrest these so-called “bandits” and “terrorists,” higher authority has often forced their release. Why?

We have seen evidence that those captured as Boko Haram have been settled and absorbed into the national security system. Why?

We have seen the ambassador of an advanced country meeting with a so-called terrorist organization or herdsmen. Why?

 Sovereign crisis

What does a foreign nation have to do with the sovereign crisis of a sovereign nation?

We have allegations that many of these “foreign operators” who they pass around as “herdsmen” are shadowed by the Nigerian military. Why?

The Nigerian government needs to come clean.

And needless to say, wherever the established government of a nation fails, the citizens must as matter of course, and in aid of their own survival, arm themselves, end consent, and establish their own small governments.

This seems to be the course Nigerians are increasingly thinking about.

Ignore the government, and save themselves from their own broken, and complicit government who appear no longer represent their interests.

On this, I fully agree with T.Y. Danjuma. But once this happens, it will be the end of the Nigerian federation.