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That Mr. Reno Omokri, a social media commentator is often speaking for the government on internal issues more than the Internal Affairs Minister and on External Affairs more than the Foreign Affairs Minister shows how degenerated Nigeria has become. By the way, Ministers hardly speak for their ministries, except perhaps, the Works Minister, Mr. David Umahi. As much as the Minister in charge of the Federal Capital Territory is always in the news, he hardly evokes hope on the transformation of Abuja and environs, which he oversees, but what makes him speak is his successful attempt to unsettle and destabilize the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. He takes so much joy in that assignment as though to kill that opposition party is his ministerial duty and an aim of the Tinubu administration.

For two years, the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration has elevated propaganda over wholesome administration. Its operatives have been committing the greatest sin identified in the late Harvard Professor Barbara Tuchman’s great book; “The March of Folly”, which pointed out the mistakes governments have been making for 3,000 years from Troy to Vietnam. That terrible mistake is the assumption that the leader knows it all. Every other ill that could beset an administration grows from that.

For two years Nigerians have watched the Tinubu administration foul behavior- acting like it could do no wrong and that every critic of its ways must be deluded. Tell them that Nigerians are suffering and Tinubu’s spin doctors would take the person to the cleaners. They would justify their acts, tell Nigerians that such a problem existed before Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden, that their policies would in a future date bear fruit in the long run. They just tend to forget that in the long run a lot of Nigerians would be dead, done in by the policies the spin doctors have been defending.

Then, recently, something changed. That change came from outside our shores; the United States of America. And here, I have to remind the Tinubu administration of two surprising dictums; “pray that not all your prayers are answered” and “there is something called trying too hard”.

The first dictum came from St. Francis of Assisi, the Catholic layman who founded the Franciscan Order of Priests, Nuns and lay people. Looking back, the American President might never have thought about intervening in the internal affairs of Nigeria if a top-heavy delegation of Nigerian politicians including the later President Mohammadu Buhari and his immediate successor, had not come to the Trump White House, 2014, to plead with Trump to intervene because the then Goodluck Jonathan administration was doing poorly in checking the national insecurity that had hobbled Nigeria by then. Then, Buhari was President for eight years, a period he spent sleep-walking, galivanting the globe on health tourism and resting in between trips, talking about RUGA while insecurity became the order of the day.

Then Tinubu succeeded Buhari in office and the national insecurity infested every state in Nigeria. Unfortunately, just as the Tinubu administration has raised propaganda over reality, though it would have made real progress had it put half the effort it expends on propaganda into real leadership struggles on Nigeria’s behalf, so too, did the National Security Adviser, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu embrace propaganda. Just a few years into this administration’s life, Ribadu fluffed away the chance to keep the military on its toes in the fight against terrorism. He hailed the military instead. The newspaper reports reflected the fact that the NSA “The National Security Adviser (NSA), Malam Nuhu Ribadu, lauded the Armed Forces of Nigeria for the successes being recorded in the ongoing fight against insecurity across the country.

Ribadu made the remark at the Chief of Defence Intelligence Annual Conference 2023 with the theme: “Leveraging Defence Diplomacy, and Effective Regional Collaboration for Enhanced National Security”, on Monday in Abuja. He said the armed forces under the current leadership had shown serious commitment in addressing the prevailing security challenges bedeviling the country. The NSA said that there were positive changes and improvements both in and outside Nigeria. According to him, many things have changed since the appointment of the current team of leaders in the security sector. They have done an amazingly good job without talking and I believe that with the support and the resolve of the leadership we have today in our country; things will only be better. We are just four or five months old, but certainly things have changed and we believe that what they are doing, they are doing it right”.

So, on which indices did Ribadu base his thesis? He supplied the answer when he said that the “improved security in the Niger Delta region had led to an increase in oil production from 900,000 barrels per day about a year ago, to about 1.7 million barrels per day presently”. Finish!

Really? Pray, didn’t Ribadu, the NSA and anybody in his office remember that the late President Umaru Yar’Adua granted an amnesty to the Niger Delta militants and that since then Nigeria’s oil production had creeped upwards? And didn’t he or anybody in the NSA’s office realize that the real national security challenge was of religious terrorist type that had hobbled the entire Northern Nigeria and had been making the Christians, they especially, bleed?

That reminds me; many have said that the terrorism afflicting Nigeria is not religious and directed against Christians. Please ask those who say so why Miss Leah Sharibu is still being held in Sambisa forest? She remains in captivity, one of 110 students kidnapped in 2018 by Boko Haram, and has not been released by the group, because she refused to convert to Islam. When the government paid the ransom or paid no ransom to release those kidnapped from her school, Dapchi Government Secondary School in the town of Dapchi, Yobe State, she was not released because she refused to renounce her Christian faith.

On 14 May 2025, Leah Sharibu turned 22 years old. The last time her mother, Rebecca, saw her, Leah was only 14. It is to Nigeria’s shame that, as far as the public knows, nobody in the government remembers Leah Sharibu, and not even our leaders mention her in any speech. Ah, Nigeria failed Lear Sharibu the way no other government in the entire world has failed any citizen.

Back to propaganda; in a report of 19 December 2024 Ribadu claimed that “the nation has achieved significant progress in its fight against insecurity, as the security agencies recorded 80 per cent success against kidnapping.

“Let me commend the National Coordinator and the dedicated staff of the National Counterterrorism Center for their remarkable efforts. I’m immensely proud of the progress you have made so far.

“We don’t even advertise the work we are doing yet, but I can assure you those who are working, they are making a massive difference in our country today”, he said.

Yet, on the 18th, just a day before Ribadu’s chest-beating in Jos, the BBC reported that Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Tuesday published the 2024 Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey, showing that kidnappers received about N2.2 trillion from Nigerians as ransom money between May 2023 and April 2024 – 1.41 billion US dollars or £1.16 billion pounds – and bigger than the N1.64 trillion Nigeria budgeted for Defence in 2024. But that does not tell the real story. There is something called statistics, so we should bring it into play here because only statistics can tell us if insecurity increased or decreased since Ribadu became NSA, that is when Tinubu’s administration began. So, I asked the internet this little question: “What is the terrorism rate in Nigeria?” And it gave me the answer: “Terrorism Index in Nigeria increased to 7.66 Points in 2024 from 7.58 Points in 2023”. Finish. But we must bear in mind that Ribadu spoke about kidnapping only while terrorism includes senseless and genocidal killings while including or excluding kidnapping. Yet, everyone knows that terrorism tells more of national insecurity than mere kidnapping.

Back to Mr. Omokri’s serving as pseudo-government spokesman and to the second dictum; that there is something called trying too hard, not many people have realized that it is likely that but for Omokri’s spat with a Mayor of an American small town, Mr. Mike Arnold, where he accused Omokri of deception over the killing of Nigerian Christians by Islamic terrorists, the matter could have still continued to be discussed in hushed tones. But that disagreement made the issue writ large on a global canvass. And then the matter took a life of its own, and the rest they say, is history.

I don’t know the relationship between Mr. Omokri and the government. But if he was paid for his services in that engagement he had with Mr. Arnold, or if he thought he was even helping the government and especially if he had any governmental help of any kind, then the Tinubu administration had just experienced the second dictum.

Then, I will never forgive myself for searching more about Leah Sharibu. The moment I saw the picture of her mother decorating her this year’s birthday cake, I couldn’t write anymore. Emotion took over. We failed the young lady. Nigeria failed her. There is nothing more to say about insecurity and genocide against Christians in Nigeria apart for the exact example: Leah Sharibu.

I nearly broke down on reading this about her mother, Rebekah: “Ever since the day Leah was taken, Rebecca has remained determined to trust God. She finds strength in Scripture. “Often when I think about Leah, when I am sitting or eating or doing something else, and start to think about her, there is this verse that I read, and it encourages me,” she says.

“It is from Psalm 123. It reads: ‘I lift up my eyes to you, to you who sit enthroned in heaven. As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a female slave look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till he shows us his mercy. Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy on us, for we have endured no end of contempt.’”

And that is why many Nigerians are happy when the American President, Donald Trump threatened to intervene in Nigeria’s internal affairs which Nigerian leaders have failed to handle. It shows how terribly Nigeria has degenerated. Nigeria did interfere in Liberia’s internal affairs and Sierra Leone’s internal affairs. I accompanied the late Ambassador Raph Uwechue on trips to Congo DR, to Liberia and was among a group of journalists who visited Ivory Coastin 2004. We were respected everywhere because we came from Nigeria, the Nigeria which challenged the USA in the 1970s and ‘80s because of the apartheid regime in South Africa. That Nigeria belongs to a long ago era. And that is a tragedy. That Nigeria failed Leah Sharibu! That Nigeria is now a failed state whose citizens are not appalled that a foreign potentate is threatening to invade but are rejoicing that help may come at last to save them from national insecurity.