Serving Overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, Tunde Bakare, has challenged President Bola Tinubu to confront Nigeria’s worsening insecurity head-on, accusing the federal government of “playing the ostrich” as terrorists expand their attacks across the country.
Speaking in Lagos during his state of the nation address titled “The Darkness Before Dawn,” Bakare warned that Nigeria is “in the centre of an unfolding storm,” saying the spike in violence coincides with renewed global scrutiny following U.S. President Donald Trump’s redesignation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern over alleged government-tolerated killings of Christians.
“The level of insecurity seems to have worsened… terrorists and bandits brazenly dare the Nigerian state,” he said.
Bakare urged Tinubu to resist the temptation to shape policy around the 2027 elections and instead “embark on the holistic reform of the security and governance framework” he once championed as an advocate of restructuring.
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“President Bola Tinubu stands at the threshold of history,” Bakare said. “He can either take the bull by the horns or, like his predecessors, prioritise politics, resort to piecemeal interventions, and approach the situation in fits and starts.”
While acknowledging ongoing federal efforts — including the security emergency declaration and mass police recruitment — he insisted the country’s security architecture requires deeper restructuring.
‘The Nigeria Question’
Bakare said Tinubu must confront what he called the Nigeria Question — unresolved national identity and governance issues that have shaped the country’s tensions since independence.
“Who is a Nigerian? What minimum dignity must every Nigerian be guaranteed? Under what terms should groups coexist?” he asked, adding that the political imbalance between North and South, economic disparities, resource control debates and ethnic grievances continue to fuel instability.
He said decades-long failures to resolve disputes between Hausa farmers and Fulani pastoralists allowed local tensions to evolve into “a sophisticated and deeply entrenched network of terror.”
‘Stop masking terrorism as farmer-herder clashes’
Bakare accused the government of downplaying coordinated armed attacks, particularly in the Middle Belt, by describing them as mere farmer-herder clashes.
“It is a shame on the Nigerian government that these communities would resort to calling on the American government to help because their own government has failed them,” he said.
He urged the federal government to directly dismantle the camps of “armed marauders who hide under the cloak of herdsmen of whatever ethnicity” and continue to massacre civilians.
