By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
​Yesterday I started this musings with a note titled: ARE WE EVEN A COUNTRY? OR JUST A SHARED SPACE OF TRAUMA?
​Today I engage us further by deepening these thoughts…
​Because in the 24 hours since I wrote that, the cracks in our walls have widened into chasms. We have moved from the shock of the news to the cold realization of our reality. We are no longer just asking if we are a country; we are watching the answer play out in real-time. From the silence of the Defence Headquarters regarding the execution of Brigadier General Uba to the rise of the Lakurawa tax collectors in the North West, and the President’s scheduled departure for the G20 summit while Kebbi burns, the evidence is mounting.
​This is no longer just a commentary. It is an autopsy of a living thing.
Below, I unpack the specific mechanics of this failure, concluding with a visual testimony—a blacked-out map—that my friend sent me.
A map that explains everything.
​There is a specific kind of heaviness that hangs over Nigeria today. It is not the sharp shock of new tragedy, because tragedy is no longer new or news to us. It is the dull, suffocating realization that the floor we thought we were standing on has given way, and we are in freefall.
​Reviewing the news from the last 72 hours—specifically from November 17th to this very morning of November 19th—it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Nigerian state is undergoing a fundamental structural failure.
We are not just “facing challenges”; we are watching the machinery of the state detach itself from the reality of its citizens.
​STILL ON THE DEAD GENERAL AND THE DEATH OF TRUTH
​The most chilling story of this week remains the fate of BRIGADIER GENERAL M. UBA. Soldiers die in war, yes. But it is HOW he died and how the state responded that keeps me awake.
​When the Commander of the 25th Brigade can be ambushed, captured alive, humiliated on camera by ISWAP, and executed, it sends a message that no amount of propaganda can silence: The enemy has evolved, but our strategy has not.
​But deeper than the security failure is the moral failure. When the news of his capture first broke, the official response was to label it a “fake narrative.” This reflex—to deny, to deflect, to gaslight—is the cancer eating the heart of Nigeria.
The state is more terrified of LOOKING weak than it is of BEING weak. By prioritizing optics over the life of a General, the leadership has broken the sacred covenant between the soldier and the state. If a General is expendable, who are we?
​KEBBI AND THE RISE OF “LAKURAWA”
​While we mourned Borno, the abduction of 25 SCHOOLGIRLS FROM MAGA, KEBBI STATE, ripped open a new wound. But we must look closer. This is not just “bandits.” Security analysts and reports are now pointing to a new, more organized threat in the North West: the LAKURAWA group.
​We are watching the birth of a new insurgency in real-time. We saw this with Boko Haram in 2009. We ignored it. We called them “miscreants.”
Now, history is repeating itself in Kebbi and Sokoto. We are treating a cancer like a rash, applying ointment while the cells metastasize.
The abduction in Maga is not an isolated crime; it is an announcement of territory.
THE ABSENTEE CAPTAIN
​Perhaps the most painful contrast of this week is the itinerary of our leadership.
​While Kebbi hunts for its daughters and the Army mourns a General, the news confirms that PRESIDENT TINUBU IS SCHEDULED TO DEPART ABUJA TODAY, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, FOR SOUTH AFRICA (G20 SUMMIT) AND THEN ANGOLA.
​This is the crux of our national despair. We have a government that is technically legal but emotionally and physically absent.
Diplomacy is important, yes. But when your house is on fire, you do not fly to a neighborhood association meeting to discuss “solidarity.” You grab a bucket.
The optics of a President jetting out while parents in Maga are wailing in the dust are devastating.
​A MAP OF DARKNESS AND THE ILLUSION OF LIFE
​This morning, I spoke at length with my friend, GA, who travelled yesterday night on a business trip to East Africa. Even as he moved away from our borders, he could not escape the shadow. We spoke about the death of the General—the brutal act itself, the deafening silence that followed, and the fragmented intelligence seeping out from the cracks.
​We came to a terrifying conclusion: If a Brigadier General—a man surrounded by a battalion, armed with the state’s finest iron—can be so easily picked, humiliated, and murdered with nothing but prevarications and empty words from the High Command, what is the fate of the ordinary citizen? What is the fate of the teacher in Kebbi? What is the fate of the market woman in Jos? If the lion is eaten by the hyena, what happens to the goat?
​There is nowhere you look today in this country that is not frayed. The fabric is tearing.
​Yesterday, another friend, NWABS, after reading one of my pieces, sent me a strange image. It was a map of Nigeria, but it was completely blacked out. It was a void. I gazed upon that image for a long time, straining my eyes, seeking to find even a singular small white dot—a pinprick of hope, a safe haven, a functioning sector.
​I couldn’t. I really couldn’t.
​And that is when the fear truly settled in. I fear for us. I fear that the darkness on that map is not just metaphorical; it is our encroaching reality.
​Yet, the most confusing part is the sound. Just behind my house gate, I hear the familiar sounds of morning. I hear the vendors shouting their wares. I hear children laughing as they walk to the school nearby. I hear the indistinct hum of conversations from the streets. Life, in its stubborn refusal to stop, continues.
​But I wonder… is this resilience, or is it denial? I wonder for how long still? How long before the chaos on the map breaches the gate? How long before the silence of the General becomes the silence of the street? How long before the grim reaper, having finished with the frontline, gets to us?
​It is sad. It is really, truly sad.
​THE NORTH: A SELF-MADE ABYSS?
​I must pause here to ask a question that pains me deeply: Why is the only news coming out of the North, all bad? Death, killings, and displacements?
​I ask this sincerely, not to mock, but out of deep worry.
​A lot of things could have led to this, but I strongly believe that years of playing politics with the lives of the citizens by the political class across the North has brought us to where we are. For decades, poverty and backwardness were treated with kid gloves.
The Almajiri system was romanticized instead of reformed. Education was treated as a luxury, not a right.
​Meanwhile, generations of politicians and their civilian supporters went on to amass unimaginable wealth, building mansions in the midst of squalor. They thought they could build islands of prosperity in a sea of misery. They forgot that eventually, the sea rises.
​What we have now is the result. It is the rebound.
​For years, the political and religious class in the North has sought for “enemies” in all the wrong places.
They told their people the enemy was the Southerner, or the “Westerner,” or the person of a different faith. They pointed fingers outward while the rot was spreading inward.
​All the while, the enemies were living in and with them. The enemy was the neglect. The enemy was the corruption. The enemy was the deliberate weaponization of poverty to keep the masses dependent.
​Now, the genie has been let out of the bottle. The children who were denied books have picked up guns. The communities that were neglected have become incubators for terror. Sanity is gone. Peace has been murdered.
​If it is still possible—and I pray it is—the North and its leaders must step back from this self-made abyss. They must stop looking for scapegoats and start looking in the mirror. They must rescue what is left before the fire they kindled burns the entire house down.
​THE VISUAL TESTIMONY: A PORTRAIT OF THE VOID
​I ask you to look at the map of Nigeria. Not the one in your geography textbooks, painted in vibrant green and white. Not the one on the wall of the Presidential Villa, marked with pins of proposed projects.
​I mean THIS map.
THE ONE I SHARED WITH THIS NOTES.
The one my friend NWABS sent. The one that mirrors our reality.
​Look at it closely.
​What do you see? I don’t know…
BUT I SEE…
​ THE ABSENCE OF DISTINCTION
Notice that there are no state lines. There is no difference between Borno and Lagos, between Kebbi and Rivers. The darkness has unified us in a way that “federal character” never could. In this void, your ethnicity does not save you. Your religion does not illuminate the path. Whether you are in the North facing the Lakurawa or in the South facing economic strangulation, the view is the same: absolute blackness.
​THE DEATH OF GREEN AND WHITE
Our flag was designed to tell a story: Green for agriculture, White for peace.
But this map tells the truth of 2025.
Where is the Green? The farmers in Sokoto are paying taxes to warlords to harvest their onions. The fields in Benue are graveyards. The land is not yielding wealth; it is drinking blood.
Where is the White? Peace has been murdered. When a General is executed and children are stolen, “peace” is just a word in the national anthem, not a reality in our streets.
This map is what remains when you strip away the lies. It is the color of a power grid that has collapsed eight times in a month. It is the color of the blindfold placed on the eyes of the Kebbi 25.
​THE INKBLOT TEST OF A NATION
This image is a psychological test for every Nigerian.
The Optimist looks for a tiny speck of light—a star, a candle, a way out.
The Realist sees the “ungoverned spaces” spreading until they have swallowed the capital.
The Government sees nothing—because to acknowledge this map is to admit that the country they claim to rule has technically ceased to exist under their watch.
​THE QUESTION IT ASKS
This silhouette does not scream; it whispers the most terrifying question of all:
If we are all in the dark, who is holding the torch?
​We are drifting in this void. And unless we strike the match of truth—unless we light the fire of accountability—this black shape is not just a map of where we are. It is a tombstone of who we used to be.
​WHERE TO FROM HERE?
​Nigeria is at a T-junction.
​The Road to Mogadishu: If we continue this path—where warlords like the Lakurawa group control territory, where the military lies to itself, and where the elite live in the sky while the poor die on the ground—we cease to be a state. We become a geographical expression where the strong take what they want and the weak endure what they must.
​The Road to Redemption:
The alternative requires something painful. It requires the truth. It requires the President to cancel his trip today. To say, “My house is burning, I cannot come.” It requires us to stop accepting “condemnations” as policy.
​”Nigeria, oh Nigeria.” We used to sing it with hope.
Now we whisper it with fear.
​We are drifting.
The anchor has snapped. The question “Where to from here?” is no longer rhetorical. It is an emergency.
If we do not find the brakes now, we will not just crash; we will disintegrate.
