Beyond being an act of defiance, the terrorist attack on Ahoro-Esinele and Yawota communities in the Orire LGA of Ogbomoso, was a clear message to the Yoruba that they are not immune to the murderous antics of the invaders that have turned different parts of the north and Middlebelt of Nigeria into killing fields.

These attacks have been coming nearer home to the south-west since the June 2022 invasion of the St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo. That attack strengthened the resolve of late Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu, then Governor of Ondo State, to take the lead in the activities of the South-west regional security outfit, Amotekun. His action incurred the anger of the Muhammadu Buhari-led government that dismantled the military checkpoints around the state, thereby denying the people federal security cover. All of this was because a state governor chose to protect his people from the invading force of an ethnic army.

It is important that we all remember these little acts of appeasement that have brought us to this point, where ethnic soldiers from one part of a so-called federation now invade different parts of the country. In the last few years, since that southward incursion into the heartland of the Yoruba country, the northern invaders have retreated to the north-central fringes, where they have continued their attacks on Yoruba communities in Kwara and Kogi states.

The latest attack on Ogbomoso has caused much alarm and drawn the ire of people of the south-west, both for the coordinated manner of the attack and its proximity to the heartland of Yorubaland.  Ogbomoso may be on the northern fringes of Yorubaland, but it is far from Chibok, Dapchi, Chikun or any other far-flung community of Northern Nigeria from where school children and villagers are frequently herded in their hundreds into Sambisa forest.

Ogbomoso is by any standard a major and an urban Nigerian town. It is not far from civilisation, and whatever can happen to Ogbomoso can happen to any other major Yoruba town. That is the message from the terrorists. It is loud and clear: You are not safe, and we will get you wherever you are, whenever we want. That message may be directed at the Nigerian government that is presently led by a Yoruba man but it is specific to the Yoruba. Let’s be clear.

The Yoruba south-west has been relatively peaceful, the most peaceful region of Nigeria, in the many years since the sectarian terrorism of the Kanuri Boko Haram in the north-east, Hausa banditry in the north-west, Fulani terrorists, so-called herders, in the Middlebelt and Igbo-IPOB separatists of the south-east started the low-grade civil wars that have ravaged different parts of Nigeria and made peace elusive. The Sunday Igboho agitation that could have been the Yoruba version of these terrorist criminalities was not allowed to take hold by the Yoruba themselves.

I have been particular about the right of the Yoruba to self-protect, given the activities of some state and non-state actors that have appropriated the powers of the state to mobilise and deploy violence in furtherance of regional, religious and ethnic interests. The very character and operation of the Nigerian state, right from the incursion of the military into governance, has rendered our federalism both otiose and untenable.

This is not a problem of who leads the country; it is a problem of how the country was configured to operate, not as a federation of states with equal stakes in the assets and liabilities of governance but as gerrymandered enclaves of hierarchised ethnicities where some are more equal or demand a higher stake than others. It is a place where violence is being leveraged as an instrument of negotiation on the eve of an election.

What is happening and has been happening, I restate, is not about who is in charge of the government at this time. Turning the heat on and pointing fingers at President Bola Tinubu is the wrong diagnosis. The disease ailing the Nigerian state is at the very root of its emergence as a formal entity. That disease is original to its conception, and it will not be cured by a regime change.

While Nigeria has not enjoyed the benefit of good leaders, this present problem is not just about leadership. It is about the structure of the Nigerian state. It is not a Tinubu problem, as it was not an Olusegun Obasanjo, an Umar Yar’Adua, a Goodluck Jonathan or a Muhammadu Buhari problem, even if each of these leaders had/have their personal shortcomings and could have done better to cure our congenital ailment. Concerning local terrorism, the right direction is towards the securitisation of Nigeria at the sub-national level. This is not a cure-all medicine but it is a necessary move to checkmate the deliberate sabotage at the heart of our security arrangement.

This is what advocates of centralised policing, especially the Fulani political and ethnic elite, oppose. Yet, they are the worst affected by the security situation, one they mostly originated and have sustained. Like Sheik Ahmad Gumi who smarts at the involvement of America in the present fight against terrorism, they have turned the (in)security discourse into a hammer with which they bludgeon past and present rulers of non-Fulani origin. It is the same weapon they are using against Tinubu, as they used against Obasanjo and Jonathan with varying success, in hopes of ousting him from office and replacing him with, presumably, another Fulani president.

By all means, let them campaign and support whoever they are inclined to in the next election for as long as that individual is from the south. The worst mistake the Fulani north can make at this time, given the rotatory presidential arrangement still in place, is to truncate the term of a southerner and seek the installation of a Fulani soon after Buhari. That would be hastening the disintegration of Nigeria as foretold by a lunatic segment of foreign experts and their local hypemen who cannot see anything good about Nigeria.

The anger fuelled by the Tinubu economic reforms will disappear like a cloud to be replaced with something worse than the disgust that followed the attempt by another northerner to rule after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election. Even an Abubakar Atiku presidency in 2027 will only lead to the same reaction. This is the point those promoting violence must understand.

The attack in Ogbomoso is heart-wrenching, and its outcome, with children, even infants and their mothers, school children and their teachers being held in insect-infested forest environments; the brutal murder of Mr. Michael Oyedokun, a Mathematics teacher, all make any plea for the terrorists an act of complicity. The fight against terrorism must be decisively won, and with appropriate sanctions against the terrorists, their apologists and other enablers.