By Prince Bolade Olukokun
“In a state of lawlessness, it is illegal to be law-abiding.” (Fidel Castro)
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” (John F. Kennedy)
“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” (Exodus 21:24)
The forest does not respect the Queensberry Rules.
For over a decade, Nigeria has attempted to fight a deeply unconventional, asymmetric war using a textbook written in the air-conditioned offices of Geneva and Washington.
We have deployed billions of Naira in military hardware, issued endless press statements of “deep concern,” and sent highly trained soldiers into dense, unforgiving canopies to fight an enemy that wears no uniform, respects no law, and melts into the civilian population like mist.
And yet, the kidnappings continued.
The highway ambushes multiplied. The tragic, senseless executions of innocent citizens—like Michael Oyedokun and Deacon John Olaleye during the May 2026 Oriire crisis—became almost routine.
Until something shifted.
The dramatic, voluntary release of the surviving captives from the Oriire school abductions didn’t happen because the bandits suddenly found their conscience.
It didn’t happen because a ransom was paid, or because a Western-style drone strike took out a coordinate in the forest.
It happened because the Nigerian military did the unthinkable: they went after what the terrorists cherished most. They arrested their families.
It is a strategy that makes human rights organizations shudder.
It is a method that Western military attachés in Abuja will never publicly approve.
BUT in the brutal, uncompromising theater of Nigerian asymmetric warfare, the Oriire precedent has proven a stark, undeniable truth: to defeat an enemy who has discarded all rules of humanity, you must leverage the only currency they understand.
To understand why the “Oyo Strategy” is a turning point, we must first dissect why the Western approach to counter-terrorism has failed spectacularly in the Sahel and the forests of Nigeria.
The Western doctrine is built on the assumption of symmetry—or at least, the enforcement of it. It relies on high-tech surveillance, precise surgical strikes, strict legal frameworks, and the absolute separation of combatants from non-combatants.
In a traditional conflict, this makes moral and strategic sense.
But the bandits terrorizing Nigeria do not operate in a traditional conflict.
They are ghost warriors. They use the deep forests of the North and West as sovereign kingdoms. They use innocent children as human shields, and they use the legal restraint of the Nigerian state as a tactical shield.
They know the military cannot carpet-bomb a forest camp if fifty school children are chained inside.
In asymmetric warfare, the weaker side exploits the morality of the stronger side. Every time we play by the “civilized” rules of engagement, we hand the bandits a structural advantage.
They are allowed to have families, wives, and children resting safely in villages and towns, living off the proceeds of blood money, while our families are torn apart.
By refusing to fight back with equal leverage, the state essentially subsidized the bandits’ risk.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; There Is Nothing New Under the Sun( Ecclesiastes 1:9)
There is a historical precedent for this level of ruthless pragmatism, and it takes us back to the height of the Cold War.
In September 1985, four Soviet diplomats were abducted in Beirut, Lebanon, by an extremist group linked to the early stages of Hezbollah.
The kidnappers demanded that Syria halt its military operations against leftist militias in northern Lebanon. To show they meant business, they executed one of the diplomats, Arkady Katkov.
The United States, facing similar hostage crises at the time, responded with diplomatic backchannels, freezing assets, and delicate negotiations.
The Soviets took a vastly different path.
The KGB dispatched its elite, ultra-secretive Alpha Group to Beirut.
The operatives did not seek out the heavily fortified hostage camps. Instead, they used local intelligence to identify and abduct the close relatives of the hostage-takers’ leaders.
In the most infamous—and highly debated—account of the operation, the KGB operatives castrated one of the relatives, sent the severed body parts to the terrorist leader in an envelope, and added a simple, chilling note: the rest of your family is next if our men are not returned.
Within days, the three remaining Soviet diplomats were released unharmed. For the next two decades, Soviet (and later Russian) citizens were virtually untouched by kidnappers in the Middle East.
The lesson of Beirut was brutal but enduring: deterrence is not established by superior firepower; it is established by demonstrating a willingness to match your enemy’s ruthlessness.
What happened in the forests of Oyo in 2026 was our own modern, localized adaptation of the Beirut doctrine.
The survivor accounts are harrowing. The bandits were merciless—beating captives for praying, executing a school teacher for the “crime” of keeping his phone, and keeping human beings in chains for 56 days.
They felt entirely untouchable.
But the atmosphere in the camp changed dramatically the moment word reached the commanders that the military had rounded up their own family members.
Suddenly, the power dynamic flipped. The bandits were no longer holding all the cards. Their safe havens were compromised. The families they sought to enrich with ransom money were now in state custody.
The cruelty stopped.
The red oil and rice began to appear. And ultimately, the captives were guided to the streams and set free—not because of a tactical raid, but because of a hostage-matching reality.
In the harsh reality of Nigerian security, this was not a breakdown of law; it was the restoration of balance.
It is an eye for an eye born out of asymmetric war. If you steal our children from their schools, we will take your wives and brothers from their beds.
If this grim, leverage-based pragmatism can tame the most ruthless forest bandits, it raises an incredibly provocative question:
Could the same underlying logic be used to curb the excesses of our political elite and stop the “made in Nigeria” self centeredness fuelled by “Bamubamu ni mo yo” mentality?
For decades, Nigeria has suffered from a different kind of asymmetric warfare—an economic one.
A small, untouchable political class drains the treasury, under funds our hospitals, destroys our schools, and leaves the masses to decay, while they and their families live in absolute, insulated luxury.
When a Nigerian politician loots the public purse, they do not keep the money in the local community. They send their children to prestigious universities in London, Boston, and Toronto.
They fly their spouses to Dubai and Paris for medical checkups and shopping sprees. They buy mansions in Potomac and Mayfair.
Just like the forest bandits, our leaders have insulated their loved ones from the consequences of their actions.
They do not care if our public universities are shut down for months because their children do not attend them.
They do not care if the local general hospital has no oxygen because their wives do not give birth there.
What if we applied the “KGB Method” of accountability to public service?
Imagine a system where:
If a public official fails to fund the state hospitals under their care, their immediate family is legally barred from seeking medical treatment abroad and must use the very facilities they refused to fund.
If a minister of education allows public schools to rot, their children must be enrolled in public local schools.
If a governor fails to secure his state, his family’s foreign travel is suspended, forcing them to live under the same insecurity the citizens endure.
It sounds radical, perhaps even vindictive.
But it is the exact same principle of linked consequences. The moment a decision-maker’s loved ones are forced to share the risk of their actions, their behavior changes overnight.
Our major problem as a nation is not corruption . It has been wrongly diagnosed as such for decades that even a toddler echoes it but the major problem is impunity
Corruption is not a Yoruba nor Hausa nor Ibo word. The major problem is that people commits problem and there is no consequences so others are not detered
There is a billionaire kidnapper that has lovely wife and children giving them best of lives. If his children and wife has been held captive in eye for an eye approach, he’d had have a rethink to treat other people’s wives and fathers like that
The Bamubamu ni mo yo mentality makes a person wake up and decides he wants to have money then kidnap other people’s kids and behead a man he does not know from Adams just to have his own way
Honestly speaking we cannot afford the luxury of Western idealism when our house is on fire.
How many times have you heard of kidnapping of this kind of cruelty ,brutality and bestiality in the west?
Probably because maybe their criminals are more “civilised” or probably because they are more civilised or WHATEVER.
They should therefore allow us met out our jungle justice in our jungle existence for now
The Oriire rescue operation has shown us that the Nigerian state is capable of fierce, creative, and highly effective pragmatism.
By targeting the support systems and families of those who threaten our peace, we stripped them of their leverage and brought our people home.
There is nothing new under the sun. The Soviets understood it in 1985, and our military commanders understood it in 2026.
If we want to secure this nation—whether from the bandits in the forests or the suits in the legislative chambers—we must stop appealing to the conscience of people who have none.
We must find their leverage points, hold them firmly, and make them realize that whatever pain they inflict on the public will land directly on their own doorsteps.
OR at best offer them Julius Caesar’s type of ransom
In 75 BC, a 25-year-old Julius Caesar was traveling across the Aegean Sea to study oratory in Rhodes when his ship was overtaken by Cilician pirates. At the time, these pirates were the absolute terror of the Mediterranean—ruthless, bloodthirsty, and accustomed to making wealthy Romans beg for their lives.
They took Caesar hostage on the tiny island of Pharmacusa and demanded a ransom of 20 talents of silver (a massive fortune, roughly equivalent to the salary of a laborer for many years).
Instead of trembling, Caesar burst out laughing in their faces. He told them they clearly had no idea who they had captured, and that demanding a paltry 20 talents for a man of his stature was an embarrassment.
He insisted that they raise his ransom to 50 talents.
The baffled pirates, thrilled by the prospect of more money, readily agreed and sent Caesar’s associates to the local cities to raise the fortune.
Caesar stayed behind as a hostage, guarded only by a friend and two servants.
After 38 days, the 50 talents of silver arrived, the ransom was paid, and Caesar was set free at the port of Miletus.
The moment his feet touched land, Caesar did not run home. Although he held absolutely no official military or public office, he used his sheer charisma and the promise of spoils to raise a private fleet of ships and a force of armed men.
He sailed straight back to the island of Pharmacusa, caught the pirates entirely by surprise, captured almost the entire band, and took back his 50 talents of silver.
He then took them to the Roman governor of Asia to be sentenced, but when the governor hesitated—greedily eyeing the pirates’ seized wealth and suggesting they be sold as slaves instead—Caesar bypassed the bureaucracy.
He marched straight to the prison, dragged the pirates out, and crucified every single one of them.
As a small act of “mercy” for the bond they had shared, he had their throats slit first before nailing them to the crosses
Imagine bandits killing our own Army General and going Scott free!. Do they know how much it cost Nigeria to produce one General?!
Honestly speaking UNTILL these people are made to face and taste exactly what they do , kidnapping may never stop but when we hold them firm and make them realize that whatever pain they inflict will be inflicted back on them,
ONLY then will we find true peace.
(Grab Your Copy of The Prince’s Soliloquy)
✍🏻
Prince Bolade Olukokun (17/07/2026)
