THE SEAT OF POWERLESS POWER – A Case For Declaring A State Of Emergency On Aso Rock

 

By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.” – Nnedi Okorafor [From Who Fears Death]

“Chaos is come again… When majesty falls to folly.” – William Shakespeare – Othello (Act III, Scene 3) & King Lear (Act I, Scene 1)

FOREWORD
I never imagined that my own life could carry the weight of a story worth telling. Yet, when the ground beneath your feet shifts so violently that home itself becomes alien – when you speak the language but the logic of your country’s cruelty escapes you – silence is no longer an option, but a form of complicity. What compels me to write is not the urge to center myself, but the unbearable necessity of bearing witness. I am, at best, a chronicler: holding a flickering lantern to Nigeria’s open wounds, arranging the fragments of our collective shipwreck into a narrative that is not mine alone, but belongs to all who have survived the unmaking of our nation.

I was born in Nigeria in the twilight of its promise, a few years after independence, when oil wealth shimmered and universities still inspired hope. My earliest memories are rooted in the resilience of my family – my father and uncles, who ran thriving businesses in Aba’s post civil war city. Their textile shops and dealerships embodied the entrepreneurial grit of Ndigbo, but history’s cruelty was swift and unyielding. After the Civil War, their assets were obliterated by the infamous £20 Compensation Policy: a state-sanctioned dispossession that reduced the life savings of entire families to a pittance. Yet, with calloused hands and relentless will, they rebuilt from the ashes. By the late 1970s, their shops and warehouses hummed with commerce once more, a quiet defiance against a system engineered to break them.

From 1973 to 1983 I lived with my uncles in Enugu’s Uwani, a neighborhood fragrant with dust, life and ambition. After years lecturing in Pharmacology at UNN’s Nsukka campus, he retired – not to rest, but to reinvent himself. In 1974 or 75, he alongside family and brothers founded Kami Laboratories in coal camp, a modest laboratory where he compounded medicines and supplied chemicals to companies, industries and schools. The scent of antiseptic hope mingled with ground herbs, and the percussion of mortar and pestle echoed the conviction that academia must serve the people. His life influenced by Marxist philosophy was a manifesto: restitution is seized, not given.

Three ruptures define my exile within my own country. The first was the Soviet interlude: from 1987 to 2000, I studied in Voronezh and Krasnodar as communism collapsed. I saw how ideology curdles into farce, yet even in scarcity, their metros ran on time. Returning to Nigeria, I found a different decay: airports crumbling, roads resembling war trenches, governance and politics reduced to a carnival of looting. Hope itself became a currency, devalued faster than the naira. The second rupture came as I watched the deliberate strangulation of Igboland’s economy from the advocacy trenches of Ohanaeze Ndigbo. As personal secretary to the President-General Justice Ezebuilo Ozobu, I observed and documented how policy decisions – never accidental, always intentional – turned the Southeast into an industrial graveyard. The Enugu coal mines, railway, industrial layout; and the Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi industrial hubs, once sites of promise, drowned in toxic floods, decay and abandonment. Then closer home, Abiriba’s famed blacksmiths, importers, and Buisnesses, once the pride of our people, now hawked Chinese imports in markets that had lost their soul. The third rupture is the present unraveling: when bandits, kidnappers and terrorists sacked whole villages and communities, some closer home others in areas farflung but all linked together by shared grief and sense of abandonment; with factories everywhere – businesses built with seed monies, saved from hard work and perseverance – the police demanding bribes to file a report. We are told to be resilient, even as Aso Rock imports luxury goods.

THE SEAT OF POWERLESS POWER – A CASE FOR DECLARING A STATE OF EMERGENCY ON ASO ROCK

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

Follow
18 min read·
12 hours ago

Listen
Share
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.” – Nnedi Okorafor [From Who Fears Death]

“Chaos is come again… When majesty falls to folly.” – William Shakespeare – Othello (Act III, Scene 3) & King Lear (Act I, Scene 1)

FOREWORD
I never imagined that my own life could carry the weight of a story worth telling. Yet, when the ground beneath your feet shifts so violently that home itself becomes alien – when you speak the language but the logic of your country’s cruelty escapes you – silence is no longer an option, but a form of complicity. What compels me to write is not the urge to center myself, but the unbearable necessity of bearing witness. I am, at best, a chronicler: holding a flickering lantern to Nigeria’s open wounds, arranging the fragments of our collective shipwreck into a narrative that is not mine alone, but belongs to all who have survived the unmaking of our nation.

I was born in Nigeria in the twilight of its promise, a few years after independence, when oil wealth shimmered and universities still inspired hope. My earliest memories are rooted in the resilience of my family – my father and uncles, who ran thriving businesses in Aba’s post civil war city. Their textile shops and dealerships embodied the entrepreneurial grit of Ndigbo, but history’s cruelty was swift and unyielding. After the Civil War, their assets were obliterated by the infamous £20 Compensation Policy: a state-sanctioned dispossession that reduced the life savings of entire families to a pittance. Yet, with calloused hands and relentless will, they rebuilt from the ashes. By the late 1970s, their shops and warehouses hummed with commerce once more, a quiet defiance against a system engineered to break them.

From 1973 to 1983 I lived with my uncles in Enugu’s Uwani, a neighborhood fragrant with dust, life and ambition. After years lecturing in Pharmacology at UNN’s Nsukka campus, he retired – not to rest, but to reinvent himself. In 1974 or 75, he alongside family and brothers founded Kami Laboratories in coal camp, a modest laboratory where he compounded medicines and supplied chemicals to companies, industries and schools. The scent of antiseptic hope mingled with ground herbs, and the percussion of mortar and pestle echoed the conviction that academia must serve the people. His life influenced by Marxist philosophy was a manifesto: restitution is seized, not given.

Three ruptures define my exile within my own country. The first was the Soviet interlude: from 1987 to 2000, I studied in Voronezh and Krasnodar as communism collapsed. I saw how ideology curdles into farce, yet even in scarcity, their metros ran on time. Returning to Nigeria, I found a different decay: airports crumbling, roads resembling war trenches, governance and politics reduced to a carnival of looting. Hope itself became a currency, devalued faster than the naira. The second rupture came as I watched the deliberate strangulation of Igboland’s economy from the advocacy trenches of Ohanaeze Ndigbo. As personal secretary to the President-General Justice Ezebuilo Ozobu, I observed and documented how policy decisions – never accidental, always intentional – turned the Southeast into an industrial graveyard. The Enugu coal mines, railway, industrial layout; and the Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi industrial hubs, once sites of promise, drowned in toxic floods, decay and abandonment. Then closer home, Abiriba’s famed blacksmiths, importers, and Buisnesses, once the pride of our people, now hawked Chinese imports in markets that had lost their soul. The third rupture is the present unraveling: when bandits, kidnappers and terrorists sacked whole villages and communities, some closer home others in areas farflung but all linked together by shared grief and sense of abandonment; with factories everywhere – businesses built with seed monies, saved from hard work and perseverance – the police demanding bribes to file a report. We are told to be resilient, even as Aso Rock imports luxury goods.

My vantage is not from the ivory tower, but from the trenches of advocacy and lived experience. At Ohanaeze gatherings, I have watched governors report about begging for federal roads while Abuja allocates billions for the trivial comforts of power. I have seen policy papers on industrial revival – meticulous and data-rich – drowned by the cacophony of crude oil politics. The bitterest lesson is this: marginalization is not an accident, but an architecture. We all saw how the 2nd Niger Bridge became a 20-year extortion scheme, how billions intended for Southeast development were redirected elsewhere, how security votes evaporated into private coffers. The betrayal is intimate, because I have seen some memos that traded our infrastructure for kickbacks, and I know precisely which clauses in which bills gutted our potential. When the youth chant “we want a Sovereign National Conference and we want a referendum” on burnt streets, I hear the echo of my uncle’s lament from 1983: “They’ve made revolutionaries of our children by denying them factories.”

The geography of my loss is layered like Russian nesting dolls of displacement. Enugu, in the 1970s, was like a city slowing waking up from stupor, where trains still sang through the night [We lived in 1a Niger Close then, last house just by the rail tracks]. Today, its streets, though having signs of renewal, still feel like museums of decay. My uncle’s pharmacy, like other enterprises like the FGN Okoye, Nwankwu, Tabansi, C to C, the Udoye’s and many others are either gone or look like looted shells. Our ancestral villages gather dust as relics, the values that birthed them gone. Lagos, where I now reside, is not the city of lagoons, but a suffocating large expanse of concrete suburbs where generators drone like dirges. My house, where I live now, overlooks both a gated estate and a slum – a diorama of Nigeria’s inequality. When I say “my country,” I mean none of these places. I mean the corpse of what should have been.

Statistics cannot capture the shame in the many eyes I saw at LUTH, when my sister passed away, when the power is unavailable sometimes for eighteen hours, mostly during serious operations. GDP figures do not convey the stench of hopelessness in Nigeria’s abandoned factories, nor the humiliation of queuing for hours to withdraw a pittance while the state’s kitchen budget could feed a whole community. The reality is a schism so profound that when I mention “life before Buhari” to undergraduates, I am met with blank stares. Their Nigeria has only ever been carcass and crow.

My father’s generation knew stability: civil service jobs that spanned decades, pensions that retained value, the dignity of burying parents in ancestral soil. My inheritance is mass graves in Plateau, Benue, Nsukka, Abakiliki, Maiduguri and several other places, a national debt that mortgages the future, and a passport that brands me a global pariah. The bridges between past and present were never built. We are all displaced now – millions scattered like chaff, children denied the schools that once promised deliverance. The homeless are both free and damned: unshackled from the illusions of patriotism, yet condemned to wander the purgatory created by our leaders.

I write not as a victim, but as a scribe of our shared damnation. My only credentials are those of a Nigerian, educated, affected, a Christian whose fellow Christians in church across the North are firebombed almost every Sunday, and above all, a humanist watching reason die beneath the boots of kleptocracy. This grants me no special insight – only the cruel clarity of one standing where the lava flows hottest. I have sat where the levers of power are pulled, and I have seen how arrogance turns our “zones of peace” into killing fields.

When my friend and comrade, Mazi Ndubuisi, whispered, “Why not declare emergency on Aso Rock?” he distilled the plea of our generation. For our tragedy is not simply that Nigeria has fallen, but that those who orchestrated its collapse still dine in the villa, picking their teeth with the bones of the very future they were sworn to protect. The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.

What follows is not prophecy, but autopsy – a forensic accounting of ruin, an attempt to document the anatomy of a state that chose to eat its young. If there is any redemption to be found, it lies in the act of bearing witness, in refusing to let the architects of our disaster write the final word. This is the proof.

THE SEAT OF POWERLESS POWER – A CASE FOR DECLARING A STATE OF EMERGENCY ON ASO ROCK

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

Follow
18 min read·
12 hours ago

Listen
Share
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.” – Nnedi Okorafor [From Who Fears Death]

“Chaos is come again… When majesty falls to folly.” – William Shakespeare – Othello (Act III, Scene 3) & King Lear (Act I, Scene 1)

FOREWORD
I never imagined that my own life could carry the weight of a story worth telling. Yet, when the ground beneath your feet shifts so violently that home itself becomes alien – when you speak the language but the logic of your country’s cruelty escapes you – silence is no longer an option, but a form of complicity. What compels me to write is not the urge to center myself, but the unbearable necessity of bearing witness. I am, at best, a chronicler: holding a flickering lantern to Nigeria’s open wounds, arranging the fragments of our collective shipwreck into a narrative that is not mine alone, but belongs to all who have survived the unmaking of our nation.

I was born in Nigeria in the twilight of its promise, a few years after independence, when oil wealth shimmered and universities still inspired hope. My earliest memories are rooted in the resilience of my family – my father and uncles, who ran thriving businesses in Aba’s post civil war city. Their textile shops and dealerships embodied the entrepreneurial grit of Ndigbo, but history’s cruelty was swift and unyielding. After the Civil War, their assets were obliterated by the infamous £20 Compensation Policy: a state-sanctioned dispossession that reduced the life savings of entire families to a pittance. Yet, with calloused hands and relentless will, they rebuilt from the ashes. By the late 1970s, their shops and warehouses hummed with commerce once more, a quiet defiance against a system engineered to break them.

From 1973 to 1983 I lived with my uncles in Enugu’s Uwani, a neighborhood fragrant with dust, life and ambition. After years lecturing in Pharmacology at UNN’s Nsukka campus, he retired – not to rest, but to reinvent himself. In 1974 or 75, he alongside family and brothers founded Kami Laboratories in coal camp, a modest laboratory where he compounded medicines and supplied chemicals to companies, industries and schools. The scent of antiseptic hope mingled with ground herbs, and the percussion of mortar and pestle echoed the conviction that academia must serve the people. His life influenced by Marxist philosophy was a manifesto: restitution is seized, not given.

Three ruptures define my exile within my own country. The first was the Soviet interlude: from 1987 to 2000, I studied in Voronezh and Krasnodar as communism collapsed. I saw how ideology curdles into farce, yet even in scarcity, their metros ran on time. Returning to Nigeria, I found a different decay: airports crumbling, roads resembling war trenches, governance and politics reduced to a carnival of looting. Hope itself became a currency, devalued faster than the naira. The second rupture came as I watched the deliberate strangulation of Igboland’s economy from the advocacy trenches of Ohanaeze Ndigbo. As personal secretary to the President-General Justice Ezebuilo Ozobu, I observed and documented how policy decisions – never accidental, always intentional – turned the Southeast into an industrial graveyard. The Enugu coal mines, railway, industrial layout; and the Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi industrial hubs, once sites of promise, drowned in toxic floods, decay and abandonment. Then closer home, Abiriba’s famed blacksmiths, importers, and Buisnesses, once the pride of our people, now hawked Chinese imports in markets that had lost their soul. The third rupture is the present unraveling: when bandits, kidnappers and terrorists sacked whole villages and communities, some closer home others in areas farflung but all linked together by shared grief and sense of abandonment; with factories everywhere – businesses built with seed monies, saved from hard work and perseverance – the police demanding bribes to file a report. We are told to be resilient, even as Aso Rock imports luxury goods.

My vantage is not from the ivory tower, but from the trenches of advocacy and lived experience. At Ohanaeze gatherings, I have watched governors report about begging for federal roads while Abuja allocates billions for the trivial comforts of power. I have seen policy papers on industrial revival – meticulous and data-rich – drowned by the cacophony of crude oil politics. The bitterest lesson is this: marginalization is not an accident, but an architecture. We all saw how the 2nd Niger Bridge became a 20-year extortion scheme, how billions intended for Southeast development were redirected elsewhere, how security votes evaporated into private coffers. The betrayal is intimate, because I have seen some memos that traded our infrastructure for kickbacks, and I know precisely which clauses in which bills gutted our potential. When the youth chant “we want a Sovereign National Conference and we want a referendum” on burnt streets, I hear the echo of my uncle’s lament from 1983: “They’ve made revolutionaries of our children by denying them factories.”

The geography of my loss is layered like Russian nesting dolls of displacement. Enugu, in the 1970s, was like a city slowing waking up from stupor, where trains still sang through the night [We lived in 1a Niger Close then, last house just by the rail tracks]. Today, its streets, though having signs of renewal, still feel like museums of decay. My uncle’s pharmacy, like other enterprises like the FGN Okoye, Nwankwu, Tabansi, C to C, the Udoye’s and many others are either gone or look like looted shells. Our ancestral villages gather dust as relics, the values that birthed them gone. Lagos, where I now reside, is not the city of lagoons, but a suffocating large expanse of concrete suburbs where generators drone like dirges. My house, where I live now, overlooks both a gated estate and a slum – a diorama of Nigeria’s inequality. When I say “my country,” I mean none of these places. I mean the corpse of what should have been.

Statistics cannot capture the shame in the many eyes I saw at LUTH, when my sister passed away, when the power is unavailable sometimes for eighteen hours, mostly during serious operations. GDP figures do not convey the stench of hopelessness in Nigeria’s abandoned factories, nor the humiliation of queuing for hours to withdraw a pittance while the state’s kitchen budget could feed a whole community. The reality is a schism so profound that when I mention “life before Buhari” to undergraduates, I am met with blank stares. Their Nigeria has only ever been carcass and crow.

My father’s generation knew stability: civil service jobs that spanned decades, pensions that retained value, the dignity of burying parents in ancestral soil. My inheritance is mass graves in Plateau, Benue, Nsukka, Abakiliki, Maiduguri and several other places, a national debt that mortgages the future, and a passport that brands me a global pariah. The bridges between past and present were never built. We are all displaced now – millions scattered like chaff, children denied the schools that once promised deliverance. The homeless are both free and damned: unshackled from the illusions of patriotism, yet condemned to wander the purgatory created by our leaders.

I write not as a victim, but as a scribe of our shared damnation. My only credentials are those of a Nigerian, educated, affected, a Christian whose fellow Christians in church across the North are firebombed almost every Sunday, and above all, a humanist watching reason die beneath the boots of kleptocracy. This grants me no special insight – only the cruel clarity of one standing where the lava flows hottest. I have sat where the levers of power are pulled, and I have seen how arrogance turns our “zones of peace” into killing fields.

When my friend and comrade, Mazi Ndubuisi, whispered, “Why not declare emergency on Aso Rock?” he distilled the plea of our generation. For our tragedy is not simply that Nigeria has fallen, but that those who orchestrated its collapse still dine in the villa, picking their teeth with the bones of the very future they were sworn to protect. The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.

What follows is not prophecy, but autopsy – a forensic accounting of ruin, an attempt to document the anatomy of a state that chose to eat its young. If there is any redemption to be found, it lies in the act of bearing witness, in refusing to let the architects of our disaster write the final word. This is the proof.

I. The Anatomy of Collapse
Residing in Nigeria connects me to millions enduring this fractured nation’s reality. Whether you reside here or not, you undoubtedly possess ties – through family, friends, or shared heritage – that bind your fate, making every act of chaos and every emerging crisis here a cause for concern. In my daily life, as well as in the experiences of countless Nigerians, there is an inescapable pull of anarchy that permeates every corner of our society. We are simultaneously victims and witnesses to a ceaseless barrage of unrest – a reality that leaves us, our families, and communities painfully aware of our profound inability to cope with the mounting difficulties imposed by a system that seems increasingly indifferent to our plight.

Daily, we face heartbreakingly familiar spectacles: bandits ravaging communities and leaving behind mass graves in Plateau and elsewhere – grim monuments to the routine cruelty that has become part of our existence. In regions like Enugu and Ebonyi, as well as the perennial flashpoints of the Northeast and Northwest, violence has become so normalized that it no longer shocks; it simply persists, an unending backdrop to our lives. I have walked through villages where desperate pleas for help, echoed by governors who raise urgent SOS signals, are met with a void of official inaction. The streets themselves seem to drown in a sinister blend of blood and silence – a silence orchestrated by a leadership that consistently chooses convenience over accountability.

While citizens suffer, Aso Rock’s occupants persist in detachment, seemingly insulated from the suffering that defines ordinary lives. Decisions are made behind walls that are as impenetrable as they are indifferent, and policies are enacted with a performative rigor that does little to address realities on the ground. The president, wielding vast constitutional powers, issues declarations that ring hollow against the relentless cacophony of everyday suffering. Governors, nominally charged with authority, often find themselves stripped of meaningful power, raising the troubling question: how can meaningful change occur when those entrusted with our welfare are either incapacitated or indifferent? I have watched with growing dismay as the machinery of state – once a symbol of hope – has devolved into an apparatus of neglect. Even the constitutional mechanism of declaring a state of emergency has become a hollow gesture, an empty promise that only underscores our collective impotence.

Assessing Nigeria’s condition reveals elite isolation within secure compounds and boardrooms, detached from the turmoil engulfing the rest of us. Those who might possess means to effect change either evade responsibility or are ensnared by vested interests. This reality is corroborated by policy papers, investigative journalism, and global organizations. Our GDP per capita has stagnated, educational institutions have become battlegrounds, and corridors of power echo only with empty promises. The data is relentless: over 3.5 million Nigerians are internally displaced, and more than 27 million children are out of school – a figure eclipsing entire nations’ populations.

My late friend Mazi Ndubuisi Egu’s haunting question – “Why can we not declare a state of emergency on Aso Rock?” – captures the anguish of a people betrayed. It echoes as I gather fragments of our national failure: a country besieged yet floundering in hopeless resignation. Nigeria’s collapse is not solely from overt violence but from slow corrosive attrition – erosion by leadership paralyzed by self-interest and ignorance of suffering outside their gates.

Thus, we stand at despair’s edge, witnesses to collapse that feels inevitable. This essay attempts to encapsulate that despair and transform it into a call for accountability. Through these words, I voice the simmering fury and sorrow of a nation enduring too much suffering. By examining tangible evidence – mass graves, abandoned villages, shuttered schools – and the insidious decay of trust, I invite you to join my search for understanding. Those who can act seem not to care or don’t know how to rescue us. Yet, as we stand on the precipice, we must confront these issues head-on, reject complacency, and imagine rebuilding amidst ruins.

In this essay – a disjointed, pained, sometimes rambling yet sincere attempt to decode Nigeria’s nonsensical state – I express not only personal anguish but shared national despair. My narrative is of an observant citizen refusing silence amid violence and paralyzed leadership. I am compelled to articulate the urgent need for accountability. For all who live in Nigeria, reimagining our national destiny is not merely political; it is an existential struggle for our shared future.

II. The Theater of Absurdity
Governmental functions stall while villages burn. In abandoned homesteads, terrorists descend unopposed – their knives catching scant light – while farmers bury children in shallow graves. I have witnessed market women lament charred stalls. Meanwhile, Aso Rock looms as a monument to denial, where leaders fiddle while Nigeria hemorrhages. I find it troubling that when the President swiftly declared emergency in Rivers State – suspending officials with authoritarian precision – this same government hesitates before existential crisis. Last week in a fear-choked market, a trader gripped my arm recounting bandits’ extortion before burning her stalls, whispering: “They rule here now while Abuja sleeps.” Such realities across a dozen states starkly contrast sanitized communiqués from our disconnected capital.

Constitutional grounds for emergency – war, invasion, or societal collapse – demand scrutiny. Does terrorists sacking Zamfara villages not constitute war? Bandits annexing highways and schools mirror invading forces. Paralyzed governance – scarce cash, drugless hospitals, fear-shuttered schools – points unmistakably to public order collapse. My Lagos-Abuja journey became a ten-hour ordeal of detours and checkpoints revealing state failure: soldiers without ammunition, villagers pooling resources for vigilante groups, roadside communities reduced to smoldering ruins after retaliatory attacks. These are fragments of a fractured map of a sinking state. The bitter irony: Rivers emergency granted control through a sole administrator in distant Abuja, yet when gunmen raze Benue communities at dawn or Chibok parents wait for abducted daughters, Aso Rock responds with sterile press releases. Dr. Chika Mbonu encapsulated this: “The Rivers declaration wasn’t about restoring order; it was about consolidating control” – revealing a presidency wielding power against rivals yet impotent against citizens’ existential threats.

Behind Aso Rock’s gilded gates festers profound dysfunction – corruption radiating toxic influence beyond its walls. Security personnel skirmish over promotion bribes; incoherent policies decimate fintech startups overnight. The fuel subsidy removal – implemented without promised infrastructure – plunged millions deeper into poverty. Aso Rock’s inhabitants, cocooned in armored cars amid sycophants, have lost touch with the nation. Professor Gilbert Ang’ana warned: “A government at war with itself is the silent killer of progress.” The recent cash crisis stranded ₦4.3 trillion outside banks, forcing Nigerians to queue for meager withdrawals. How can a government struggling with currency management wage effective war on terror? Economist Dr. Aliyu explained this liquidity crisis strangles SMEs – our economy’s backbone – pushing youth unemployment toward 50%. While Aso Rock obsesses over optics, our economic engine grinds to a halt.

III. The Geography of Betrayal
Across Nigeria, dissent weaves a tapestry of outrage. Rotimi Amaechi condemned Tinubu’s decree as a “brazen power grab” violating federalism. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka observed that when power’s seat becomes powerlessness’ epicenter, governance ceases. My friend Musa Abdulahi walked Katsina’s dusty streets where farmers hide in forests to evade kidnappers. Elder Malam Ibrahim decried hypocrisy: governors suspended on political grounds while Abuja’s failures go unchecked. Tinubu justified Rivers intervention to “safeguard vital oil installations,” yet militants torched the Boki gas facility under his administrator’s watch. A leaked Western diplomatic cable called Rivers move “disproportionate and politically motivated,” contrasting deafening silence on national security meltdown.

The violence on our streets is but surface rupture of deeper decay seeping into our national soul. Education collapses; hope erodes among youth. Students like Tolu, a final-year engineering student delayed three years, lament: “We are a generation in suspended animation – no degree, no skills, no jobs. What future do we build? We are tinder for chaos.” In this wasteland, radical recruitment seeds sprout the very forces terrorizing us. When society abandons youth, it forsakes tomorrow.

Section 305 empowers presidential action in dire need, yet it’s buried under political timidity. The National Assembly rubber-stamped Rivers emergency in two days with minimal scrutiny but averts eyes from capital crisis. When threats emerge from power’s highest echelons, even the Attorney General’s “imminent security threats” invocation rings hollow against daily catastrophes: overcrowded IDP camps with starving children, runaway inflation pauperizing professionals, a social contract in ruins. Nigeria’s Siracisa Principles signatory status warns against using emergency powers for isolated threats – but our crisis is metastatic, born of systemic paralysis at power’s center.

IV. Prescription: Constitutional Intervention
The hour demands radical honesty. Declaring emergency on Aso Rock isn’t coup-like but constitutional resuscitation – a desperate measure for a gasping state. I envision the National Assembly shaking off lethargy and invoking Section 305(6) oversight powers to declare emergency on executive authority itself. A temporary technocratic administration – divorced from recycled politicians and retired generals – would assume stewardship: a vetted panel of national consensus figures (jurists, economists, security experts, civil society leaders) with uncompromised integrity.

Their mandate would be clear:

1. Forensic audit of security spending and lost weapon contract billions

2. Unified, depoliticized command structure across security agencies

3. Economic stabilization plan prioritizing food security, energy, and infrastructure

4. Framework restoring local governance where state authority crumbled

The judiciary would audit executive failures, ensuring emergency measures remain lawful and time-bound. The objective: dismantle the suffocating cabal of denial strangling this nation, restoring governance to serve people, not palaces.

The philosophical underpinnings of this collapse reveal a deep bankruptcy. Buhari’s “Buharism” – blending state capitalism, religion fanaticism, and cultural rigidity – shielded domestic elites (“rich parasites”). This tainted nationalism misdirected priorities: protecting Fulani herders and cronies like Ganduje while bandits ravaged villages. The psychological toll is immeasurable: a generation adrift – students deprived, farmers dispossessed, parents burying children. The social contract has crumbled into “Nigerian dysthesia”: numbing resignation from continuous violence.

My hands shake as I type this essay, not with fear but with fury watching my nation hemorrhage while power revels in complacency. How many more Plateau mass graves before acknowledging truth? Aso Rock isn’t just failing – it’s complicit. Section 305 unravels as leaders sip champagne in armored comfort. Bandits strike within sight of Abuja’s lights (Kuje 2022, Bwari last month) – symptoms of malignancy: Buhari’s metastasized negligence becoming Tinubu’s hollow spectacle. IDP camps feature hunger edema in children while Aso Rock’s kitchen allocations could nourish states. This isn’t governance; it’s institutionalized manslaughter.

Boko Haram’s terror remains a present nightmare. The recent Borno military base overrun – where insurgents executed soldiers and broadcast slaughter – wasn’t mere attack but assault on Nigeria’s dignity. Statistics scream: 35,000 lives lost since 2015, 2.5 million displaced, 1,500 schools shuttered. In Maiduguri, Fatima watched her husband beheaded for refusing terrorist “taxes.” Her hollow eyes mirrored my fury: “They take 30% of our harvest – just like Aso Rock takes 100% of our future.” The constitutional threshold for emergency has been obliterated. Yet the Commander-in-Chief responds with statements from aides who’ve never set foot in Sambisa.

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THE SEAT OF POWERLESS POWER – A CASE FOR DECLARING A STATE OF EMERGENCY ON ASO ROCK

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

Follow
18 min read·
12 hours ago

Listen
Share
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.” – Nnedi Okorafor [From Who Fears Death]

“Chaos is come again… When majesty falls to folly.” – William Shakespeare – Othello (Act III, Scene 3) & King Lear (Act I, Scene 1)

FOREWORD
I never imagined that my own life could carry the weight of a story worth telling. Yet, when the ground beneath your feet shifts so violently that home itself becomes alien – when you speak the language but the logic of your country’s cruelty escapes you – silence is no longer an option, but a form of complicity. What compels me to write is not the urge to center myself, but the unbearable necessity of bearing witness. I am, at best, a chronicler: holding a flickering lantern to Nigeria’s open wounds, arranging the fragments of our collective shipwreck into a narrative that is not mine alone, but belongs to all who have survived the unmaking of our nation.

I was born in Nigeria in the twilight of its promise, a few years after independence, when oil wealth shimmered and universities still inspired hope. My earliest memories are rooted in the resilience of my family – my father and uncles, who ran thriving businesses in Aba’s post civil war city. Their textile shops and dealerships embodied the entrepreneurial grit of Ndigbo, but history’s cruelty was swift and unyielding. After the Civil War, their assets were obliterated by the infamous £20 Compensation Policy: a state-sanctioned dispossession that reduced the life savings of entire families to a pittance. Yet, with calloused hands and relentless will, they rebuilt from the ashes. By the late 1970s, their shops and warehouses hummed with commerce once more, a quiet defiance against a system engineered to break them.

From 1973 to 1983 I lived with my uncles in Enugu’s Uwani, a neighborhood fragrant with dust, life and ambition. After years lecturing in Pharmacology at UNN’s Nsukka campus, he retired – not to rest, but to reinvent himself. In 1974 or 75, he alongside family and brothers founded Kami Laboratories in coal camp, a modest laboratory where he compounded medicines and supplied chemicals to companies, industries and schools. The scent of antiseptic hope mingled with ground herbs, and the percussion of mortar and pestle echoed the conviction that academia must serve the people. His life influenced by Marxist philosophy was a manifesto: restitution is seized, not given.

Three ruptures define my exile within my own country. The first was the Soviet interlude: from 1987 to 2000, I studied in Voronezh and Krasnodar as communism collapsed. I saw how ideology curdles into farce, yet even in scarcity, their metros ran on time. Returning to Nigeria, I found a different decay: airports crumbling, roads resembling war trenches, governance and politics reduced to a carnival of looting. Hope itself became a currency, devalued faster than the naira. The second rupture came as I watched the deliberate strangulation of Igboland’s economy from the advocacy trenches of Ohanaeze Ndigbo. As personal secretary to the President-General Justice Ezebuilo Ozobu, I observed and documented how policy decisions – never accidental, always intentional – turned the Southeast into an industrial graveyard. The Enugu coal mines, railway, industrial layout; and the Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi industrial hubs, once sites of promise, drowned in toxic floods, decay and abandonment. Then closer home, Abiriba’s famed blacksmiths, importers, and Buisnesses, once the pride of our people, now hawked Chinese imports in markets that had lost their soul. The third rupture is the present unraveling: when bandits, kidnappers and terrorists sacked whole villages and communities, some closer home others in areas farflung but all linked together by shared grief and sense of abandonment; with factories everywhere – businesses built with seed monies, saved from hard work and perseverance – the police demanding bribes to file a report. We are told to be resilient, even as Aso Rock imports luxury goods.

My vantage is not from the ivory tower, but from the trenches of advocacy and lived experience. At Ohanaeze gatherings, I have watched governors report about begging for federal roads while Abuja allocates billions for the trivial comforts of power. I have seen policy papers on industrial revival – meticulous and data-rich – drowned by the cacophony of crude oil politics. The bitterest lesson is this: marginalization is not an accident, but an architecture. We all saw how the 2nd Niger Bridge became a 20-year extortion scheme, how billions intended for Southeast development were redirected elsewhere, how security votes evaporated into private coffers. The betrayal is intimate, because I have seen some memos that traded our infrastructure for kickbacks, and I know precisely which clauses in which bills gutted our potential. When the youth chant “we want a Sovereign National Conference and we want a referendum” on burnt streets, I hear the echo of my uncle’s lament from 1983: “They’ve made revolutionaries of our children by denying them factories.”

The geography of my loss is layered like Russian nesting dolls of displacement. Enugu, in the 1970s, was like a city slowing waking up from stupor, where trains still sang through the night [We lived in 1a Niger Close then, last house just by the rail tracks]. Today, its streets, though having signs of renewal, still feel like museums of decay. My uncle’s pharmacy, like other enterprises like the FGN Okoye, Nwankwu, Tabansi, C to C, the Udoye’s and many others are either gone or look like looted shells. Our ancestral villages gather dust as relics, the values that birthed them gone. Lagos, where I now reside, is not the city of lagoons, but a suffocating large expanse of concrete suburbs where generators drone like dirges. My house, where I live now, overlooks both a gated estate and a slum – a diorama of Nigeria’s inequality. When I say “my country,” I mean none of these places. I mean the corpse of what should have been.

Statistics cannot capture the shame in the many eyes I saw at LUTH, when my sister passed away, when the power is unavailable sometimes for eighteen hours, mostly during serious operations. GDP figures do not convey the stench of hopelessness in Nigeria’s abandoned factories, nor the humiliation of queuing for hours to withdraw a pittance while the state’s kitchen budget could feed a whole community. The reality is a schism so profound that when I mention “life before Buhari” to undergraduates, I am met with blank stares. Their Nigeria has only ever been carcass and crow.

My father’s generation knew stability: civil service jobs that spanned decades, pensions that retained value, the dignity of burying parents in ancestral soil. My inheritance is mass graves in Plateau, Benue, Nsukka, Abakiliki, Maiduguri and several other places, a national debt that mortgages the future, and a passport that brands me a global pariah. The bridges between past and present were never built. We are all displaced now – millions scattered like chaff, children denied the schools that once promised deliverance. The homeless are both free and damned: unshackled from the illusions of patriotism, yet condemned to wander the purgatory created by our leaders.

I write not as a victim, but as a scribe of our shared damnation. My only credentials are those of a Nigerian, educated, affected, a Christian whose fellow Christians in church across the North are firebombed almost every Sunday, and above all, a humanist watching reason die beneath the boots of kleptocracy. This grants me no special insight – only the cruel clarity of one standing where the lava flows hottest. I have sat where the levers of power are pulled, and I have seen how arrogance turns our “zones of peace” into killing fields.

When my friend and comrade, Mazi Ndubuisi, whispered, “Why not declare emergency on Aso Rock?” he distilled the plea of our generation. For our tragedy is not simply that Nigeria has fallen, but that those who orchestrated its collapse still dine in the villa, picking their teeth with the bones of the very future they were sworn to protect. The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.

What follows is not prophecy, but autopsy – a forensic accounting of ruin, an attempt to document the anatomy of a state that chose to eat its young. If there is any redemption to be found, it lies in the act of bearing witness, in refusing to let the architects of our disaster write the final word. This is the proof.

– Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO)

Lagos, June 2025

I. The Anatomy of Collapse
Residing in Nigeria connects me to millions enduring this fractured nation’s reality. Whether you reside here or not, you undoubtedly possess ties – through family, friends, or shared heritage – that bind your fate, making every act of chaos and every emerging crisis here a cause for concern. In my daily life, as well as in the experiences of countless Nigerians, there is an inescapable pull of anarchy that permeates every corner of our society. We are simultaneously victims and witnesses to a ceaseless barrage of unrest – a reality that leaves us, our families, and communities painfully aware of our profound inability to cope with the mounting difficulties imposed by a system that seems increasingly indifferent to our plight.

Daily, we face heartbreakingly familiar spectacles: bandits ravaging communities and leaving behind mass graves in Plateau and elsewhere – grim monuments to the routine cruelty that has become part of our existence. In regions like Enugu and Ebonyi, as well as the perennial flashpoints of the Northeast and Northwest, violence has become so normalized that it no longer shocks; it simply persists, an unending backdrop to our lives. I have walked through villages where desperate pleas for help, echoed by governors who raise urgent SOS signals, are met with a void of official inaction. The streets themselves seem to drown in a sinister blend of blood and silence – a silence orchestrated by a leadership that consistently chooses convenience over accountability.

While citizens suffer, Aso Rock’s occupants persist in detachment, seemingly insulated from the suffering that defines ordinary lives. Decisions are made behind walls that are as impenetrable as they are indifferent, and policies are enacted with a performative rigor that does little to address realities on the ground. The president, wielding vast constitutional powers, issues declarations that ring hollow against the relentless cacophony of everyday suffering. Governors, nominally charged with authority, often find themselves stripped of meaningful power, raising the troubling question: how can meaningful change occur when those entrusted with our welfare are either incapacitated or indifferent? I have watched with growing dismay as the machinery of state – once a symbol of hope – has devolved into an apparatus of neglect. Even the constitutional mechanism of declaring a state of emergency has become a hollow gesture, an empty promise that only underscores our collective impotence.

Assessing Nigeria’s condition reveals elite isolation within secure compounds and boardrooms, detached from the turmoil engulfing the rest of us. Those who might possess means to effect change either evade responsibility or are ensnared by vested interests. This reality is corroborated by policy papers, investigative journalism, and global organizations. Our GDP per capita has stagnated, educational institutions have become battlegrounds, and corridors of power echo only with empty promises. The data is relentless: over 3.5 million Nigerians are internally displaced, and more than 27 million children are out of school – a figure eclipsing entire nations’ populations.

My late friend Mazi Ndubuisi Egu’s haunting question – “Why can we not declare a state of emergency on Aso Rock?” – captures the anguish of a people betrayed. It echoes as I gather fragments of our national failure: a country besieged yet floundering in hopeless resignation. Nigeria’s collapse is not solely from overt violence but from slow corrosive attrition – erosion by leadership paralyzed by self-interest and ignorance of suffering outside their gates.

Thus, we stand at despair’s edge, witnesses to collapse that feels inevitable. This essay attempts to encapsulate that despair and transform it into a call for accountability. Through these words, I voice the simmering fury and sorrow of a nation enduring too much suffering. By examining tangible evidence – mass graves, abandoned villages, shuttered schools – and the insidious decay of trust, I invite you to join my search for understanding. Those who can act seem not to care or don’t know how to rescue us. Yet, as we stand on the precipice, we must confront these issues head-on, reject complacency, and imagine rebuilding amidst ruins.

In this essay – a disjointed, pained, sometimes rambling yet sincere attempt to decode Nigeria’s nonsensical state – I express not only personal anguish but shared national despair. My narrative is of an observant citizen refusing silence amid violence and paralyzed leadership. I am compelled to articulate the urgent need for accountability. For all who live in Nigeria, reimagining our national destiny is not merely political; it is an existential struggle for our shared future.

II. The Theater of Absurdity
Governmental functions stall while villages burn. In abandoned homesteads, terrorists descend unopposed – their knives catching scant light – while farmers bury children in shallow graves. I have witnessed market women lament charred stalls. Meanwhile, Aso Rock looms as a monument to denial, where leaders fiddle while Nigeria hemorrhages. I find it troubling that when the President swiftly declared emergency in Rivers State – suspending officials with authoritarian precision – this same government hesitates before existential crisis. Last week in a fear-choked market, a trader gripped my arm recounting bandits’ extortion before burning her stalls, whispering: “They rule here now while Abuja sleeps.” Such realities across a dozen states starkly contrast sanitized communiqués from our disconnected capital.

Constitutional grounds for emergency – war, invasion, or societal collapse – demand scrutiny. Does terrorists sacking Zamfara villages not constitute war? Bandits annexing highways and schools mirror invading forces. Paralyzed governance – scarce cash, drugless hospitals, fear-shuttered schools – points unmistakably to public order collapse. My Lagos-Abuja journey became a ten-hour ordeal of detours and checkpoints revealing state failure: soldiers without ammunition, villagers pooling resources for vigilante groups, roadside communities reduced to smoldering ruins after retaliatory attacks. These are fragments of a fractured map of a sinking state. The bitter irony: Rivers emergency granted control through a sole administrator in distant Abuja, yet when gunmen raze Benue communities at dawn or Chibok parents wait for abducted daughters, Aso Rock responds with sterile press releases. Dr. Chika Mbonu encapsulated this: “The Rivers declaration wasn’t about restoring order; it was about consolidating control” – revealing a presidency wielding power against rivals yet impotent against citizens’ existential threats.

Behind Aso Rock’s gilded gates festers profound dysfunction – corruption radiating toxic influence beyond its walls. Security personnel skirmish over promotion bribes; incoherent policies decimate fintech startups overnight. The fuel subsidy removal – implemented without promised infrastructure – plunged millions deeper into poverty. Aso Rock’s inhabitants, cocooned in armored cars amid sycophants, have lost touch with the nation. Professor Gilbert Ang’ana warned: “A government at war with itself is the silent killer of progress.” The recent cash crisis stranded ₦4.3 trillion outside banks, forcing Nigerians to queue for meager withdrawals. How can a government struggling with currency management wage effective war on terror? Economist Dr. Aliyu explained this liquidity crisis strangles SMEs – our economy’s backbone – pushing youth unemployment toward 50%. While Aso Rock obsesses over optics, our economic engine grinds to a halt.

III. The Geography of Betrayal
Across Nigeria, dissent weaves a tapestry of outrage. Rotimi Amaechi condemned Tinubu’s decree as a “brazen power grab” violating federalism. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka observed that when power’s seat becomes powerlessness’ epicenter, governance ceases. My friend Musa Abdulahi walked Katsina’s dusty streets where farmers hide in forests to evade kidnappers. Elder Malam Ibrahim decried hypocrisy: governors suspended on political grounds while Abuja’s failures go unchecked. Tinubu justified Rivers intervention to “safeguard vital oil installations,” yet militants torched the Boki gas facility under his administrator’s watch. A leaked Western diplomatic cable called Rivers move “disproportionate and politically motivated,” contrasting deafening silence on national security meltdown.

The violence on our streets is but surface rupture of deeper decay seeping into our national soul. Education collapses; hope erodes among youth. Students like Tolu, a final-year engineering student delayed three years, lament: “We are a generation in suspended animation – no degree, no skills, no jobs. What future do we build? We are tinder for chaos.” In this wasteland, radical recruitment seeds sprout the very forces terrorizing us. When society abandons youth, it forsakes tomorrow.

Section 305 empowers presidential action in dire need, yet it’s buried under political timidity. The National Assembly rubber-stamped Rivers emergency in two days with minimal scrutiny but averts eyes from capital crisis. When threats emerge from power’s highest echelons, even the Attorney General’s “imminent security threats” invocation rings hollow against daily catastrophes: overcrowded IDP camps with starving children, runaway inflation pauperizing professionals, a social contract in ruins. Nigeria’s Siracisa Principles signatory status warns against using emergency powers for isolated threats – but our crisis is metastatic, born of systemic paralysis at power’s center.

IV. Prescription: Constitutional Intervention
The hour demands radical honesty. Declaring emergency on Aso Rock isn’t coup-like but constitutional resuscitation – a desperate measure for a gasping state. I envision the National Assembly shaking off lethargy and invoking Section 305(6) oversight powers to declare emergency on executive authority itself. A temporary technocratic administration – divorced from recycled politicians and retired generals – would assume stewardship: a vetted panel of national consensus figures (jurists, economists, security experts, civil society leaders) with uncompromised integrity.

Their mandate would be clear:

1. Forensic audit of security spending and lost weapon contract billions

2. Unified, depoliticized command structure across security agencies

3. Economic stabilization plan prioritizing food security, energy, and infrastructure

4. Framework restoring local governance where state authority crumbled

The judiciary would audit executive failures, ensuring emergency measures remain lawful and time-bound. The objective: dismantle the suffocating cabal of denial strangling this nation, restoring governance to serve people, not palaces.

The philosophical underpinnings of this collapse reveal a deep bankruptcy. Buhari’s “Buharism” – blending state capitalism, religion fanaticism, and cultural rigidity – shielded domestic elites (“rich parasites”). This tainted nationalism misdirected priorities: protecting Fulani herders and cronies like Ganduje while bandits ravaged villages. The psychological toll is immeasurable: a generation adrift – students deprived, farmers dispossessed, parents burying children. The social contract has crumbled into “Nigerian dysthesia”: numbing resignation from continuous violence.

My hands shake as I type this essay, not with fear but with fury watching my nation hemorrhage while power revels in complacency. How many more Plateau mass graves before acknowledging truth? Aso Rock isn’t just failing – it’s complicit. Section 305 unravels as leaders sip champagne in armored comfort. Bandits strike within sight of Abuja’s lights (Kuje 2022, Bwari last month) – symptoms of malignancy: Buhari’s metastasized negligence becoming Tinubu’s hollow spectacle. IDP camps feature hunger edema in children while Aso Rock’s kitchen allocations could nourish states. This isn’t governance; it’s institutionalized manslaughter.

Boko Haram’s terror remains a present nightmare. The recent Borno military base overrun – where insurgents executed soldiers and broadcast slaughter – wasn’t mere attack but assault on Nigeria’s dignity. Statistics scream: 35,000 lives lost since 2015, 2.5 million displaced, 1,500 schools shuttered. In Maiduguri, Fatima watched her husband beheaded for refusing terrorist “taxes.” Her hollow eyes mirrored my fury: “They take 30% of our harvest – just like Aso Rock takes 100% of our future.” The constitutional threshold for emergency has been obliterated. Yet the Commander-in-Chief responds with statements from aides who’ve never set foot in Sambisa.

Tinubu’s Rivers emergency was grotesque parody. Elected officials suspended while security personnel battled over promotion bribes inside Aso Rock. Within days, militants torched the Trans-Niger pipeline under his administrator’s watch as bandits abducted 120 Kaduna students. Public fury erupted (#SecureAsoRock trended for days), yet the National Assembly sat inert, bloated with ₦500 million “emergency approval” incentives. This is treason cataloged in spreadsheets: ₦12 trillion vanished from security funds under Buhari – enough to arm every willing Nigerian. While Niger villagers repel attackers with sticks, Aso Rock requisitions ₦3 billion armored Mercedes.

THE SEAT OF POWERLESS POWER – A CASE FOR DECLARING A STATE OF EMERGENCY ON ASO ROCK

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

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By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.” – Nnedi Okorafor [From Who Fears Death]

“Chaos is come again… When majesty falls to folly.” – William Shakespeare – Othello (Act III, Scene 3) & King Lear (Act I, Scene 1)

FOREWORD
I never imagined that my own life could carry the weight of a story worth telling. Yet, when the ground beneath your feet shifts so violently that home itself becomes alien – when you speak the language but the logic of your country’s cruelty escapes you – silence is no longer an option, but a form of complicity. What compels me to write is not the urge to center myself, but the unbearable necessity of bearing witness. I am, at best, a chronicler: holding a flickering lantern to Nigeria’s open wounds, arranging the fragments of our collective shipwreck into a narrative that is not mine alone, but belongs to all who have survived the unmaking of our nation.

I was born in Nigeria in the twilight of its promise, a few years after independence, when oil wealth shimmered and universities still inspired hope. My earliest memories are rooted in the resilience of my family – my father and uncles, who ran thriving businesses in Aba’s post civil war city. Their textile shops and dealerships embodied the entrepreneurial grit of Ndigbo, but history’s cruelty was swift and unyielding. After the Civil War, their assets were obliterated by the infamous £20 Compensation Policy: a state-sanctioned dispossession that reduced the life savings of entire families to a pittance. Yet, with calloused hands and relentless will, they rebuilt from the ashes. By the late 1970s, their shops and warehouses hummed with commerce once more, a quiet defiance against a system engineered to break them.

From 1973 to 1983 I lived with my uncles in Enugu’s Uwani, a neighborhood fragrant with dust, life and ambition. After years lecturing in Pharmacology at UNN’s Nsukka campus, he retired – not to rest, but to reinvent himself. In 1974 or 75, he alongside family and brothers founded Kami Laboratories in coal camp, a modest laboratory where he compounded medicines and supplied chemicals to companies, industries and schools. The scent of antiseptic hope mingled with ground herbs, and the percussion of mortar and pestle echoed the conviction that academia must serve the people. His life influenced by Marxist philosophy was a manifesto: restitution is seized, not given.

Three ruptures define my exile within my own country. The first was the Soviet interlude: from 1987 to 2000, I studied in Voronezh and Krasnodar as communism collapsed. I saw how ideology curdles into farce, yet even in scarcity, their metros ran on time. Returning to Nigeria, I found a different decay: airports crumbling, roads resembling war trenches, governance and politics reduced to a carnival of looting. Hope itself became a currency, devalued faster than the naira. The second rupture came as I watched the deliberate strangulation of Igboland’s economy from the advocacy trenches of Ohanaeze Ndigbo. As personal secretary to the President-General Justice Ezebuilo Ozobu, I observed and documented how policy decisions – never accidental, always intentional – turned the Southeast into an industrial graveyard. The Enugu coal mines, railway, industrial layout; and the Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi industrial hubs, once sites of promise, drowned in toxic floods, decay and abandonment. Then closer home, Abiriba’s famed blacksmiths, importers, and Buisnesses, once the pride of our people, now hawked Chinese imports in markets that had lost their soul. The third rupture is the present unraveling: when bandits, kidnappers and terrorists sacked whole villages and communities, some closer home others in areas farflung but all linked together by shared grief and sense of abandonment; with factories everywhere – businesses built with seed monies, saved from hard work and perseverance – the police demanding bribes to file a report. We are told to be resilient, even as Aso Rock imports luxury goods.

My vantage is not from the ivory tower, but from the trenches of advocacy and lived experience. At Ohanaeze gatherings, I have watched governors report about begging for federal roads while Abuja allocates billions for the trivial comforts of power. I have seen policy papers on industrial revival – meticulous and data-rich – drowned by the cacophony of crude oil politics. The bitterest lesson is this: marginalization is not an accident, but an architecture. We all saw how the 2nd Niger Bridge became a 20-year extortion scheme, how billions intended for Southeast development were redirected elsewhere, how security votes evaporated into private coffers. The betrayal is intimate, because I have seen some memos that traded our infrastructure for kickbacks, and I know precisely which clauses in which bills gutted our potential. When the youth chant “we want a Sovereign National Conference and we want a referendum” on burnt streets, I hear the echo of my uncle’s lament from 1983: “They’ve made revolutionaries of our children by denying them factories.”

The geography of my loss is layered like Russian nesting dolls of displacement. Enugu, in the 1970s, was like a city slowing waking up from stupor, where trains still sang through the night [We lived in 1a Niger Close then, last house just by the rail tracks]. Today, its streets, though having signs of renewal, still feel like museums of decay. My uncle’s pharmacy, like other enterprises like the FGN Okoye, Nwankwu, Tabansi, C to C, the Udoye’s and many others are either gone or look like looted shells. Our ancestral villages gather dust as relics, the values that birthed them gone. Lagos, where I now reside, is not the city of lagoons, but a suffocating large expanse of concrete suburbs where generators drone like dirges. My house, where I live now, overlooks both a gated estate and a slum – a diorama of Nigeria’s inequality. When I say “my country,” I mean none of these places. I mean the corpse of what should have been.

Statistics cannot capture the shame in the many eyes I saw at LUTH, when my sister passed away, when the power is unavailable sometimes for eighteen hours, mostly during serious operations. GDP figures do not convey the stench of hopelessness in Nigeria’s abandoned factories, nor the humiliation of queuing for hours to withdraw a pittance while the state’s kitchen budget could feed a whole community. The reality is a schism so profound that when I mention “life before Buhari” to undergraduates, I am met with blank stares. Their Nigeria has only ever been carcass and crow.

My father’s generation knew stability: civil service jobs that spanned decades, pensions that retained value, the dignity of burying parents in ancestral soil. My inheritance is mass graves in Plateau, Benue, Nsukka, Abakiliki, Maiduguri and several other places, a national debt that mortgages the future, and a passport that brands me a global pariah. The bridges between past and present were never built. We are all displaced now – millions scattered like chaff, children denied the schools that once promised deliverance. The homeless are both free and damned: unshackled from the illusions of patriotism, yet condemned to wander the purgatory created by our leaders.

I write not as a victim, but as a scribe of our shared damnation. My only credentials are those of a Nigerian, educated, affected, a Christian whose fellow Christians in church across the North are firebombed almost every Sunday, and above all, a humanist watching reason die beneath the boots of kleptocracy. This grants me no special insight – only the cruel clarity of one standing where the lava flows hottest. I have sat where the levers of power are pulled, and I have seen how arrogance turns our “zones of peace” into killing fields.

When my friend and comrade, Mazi Ndubuisi, whispered, “Why not declare emergency on Aso Rock?” he distilled the plea of our generation. For our tragedy is not simply that Nigeria has fallen, but that those who orchestrated its collapse still dine in the villa, picking their teeth with the bones of the very future they were sworn to protect. The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.

What follows is not prophecy, but autopsy – a forensic accounting of ruin, an attempt to document the anatomy of a state that chose to eat its young. If there is any redemption to be found, it lies in the act of bearing witness, in refusing to let the architects of our disaster write the final word. This is the proof.

– Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO)

Lagos, June 2025

I. The Anatomy of Collapse
Residing in Nigeria connects me to millions enduring this fractured nation’s reality. Whether you reside here or not, you undoubtedly possess ties – through family, friends, or shared heritage – that bind your fate, making every act of chaos and every emerging crisis here a cause for concern. In my daily life, as well as in the experiences of countless Nigerians, there is an inescapable pull of anarchy that permeates every corner of our society. We are simultaneously victims and witnesses to a ceaseless barrage of unrest – a reality that leaves us, our families, and communities painfully aware of our profound inability to cope with the mounting difficulties imposed by a system that seems increasingly indifferent to our plight.

Daily, we face heartbreakingly familiar spectacles: bandits ravaging communities and leaving behind mass graves in Plateau and elsewhere – grim monuments to the routine cruelty that has become part of our existence. In regions like Enugu and Ebonyi, as well as the perennial flashpoints of the Northeast and Northwest, violence has become so normalized that it no longer shocks; it simply persists, an unending backdrop to our lives. I have walked through villages where desperate pleas for help, echoed by governors who raise urgent SOS signals, are met with a void of official inaction. The streets themselves seem to drown in a sinister blend of blood and silence – a silence orchestrated by a leadership that consistently chooses convenience over accountability.

While citizens suffer, Aso Rock’s occupants persist in detachment, seemingly insulated from the suffering that defines ordinary lives. Decisions are made behind walls that are as impenetrable as they are indifferent, and policies are enacted with a performative rigor that does little to address realities on the ground. The president, wielding vast constitutional powers, issues declarations that ring hollow against the relentless cacophony of everyday suffering. Governors, nominally charged with authority, often find themselves stripped of meaningful power, raising the troubling question: how can meaningful change occur when those entrusted with our welfare are either incapacitated or indifferent? I have watched with growing dismay as the machinery of state – once a symbol of hope – has devolved into an apparatus of neglect. Even the constitutional mechanism of declaring a state of emergency has become a hollow gesture, an empty promise that only underscores our collective impotence.

Assessing Nigeria’s condition reveals elite isolation within secure compounds and boardrooms, detached from the turmoil engulfing the rest of us. Those who might possess means to effect change either evade responsibility or are ensnared by vested interests. This reality is corroborated by policy papers, investigative journalism, and global organizations. Our GDP per capita has stagnated, educational institutions have become battlegrounds, and corridors of power echo only with empty promises. The data is relentless: over 3.5 million Nigerians are internally displaced, and more than 27 million children are out of school – a figure eclipsing entire nations’ populations.

My late friend Mazi Ndubuisi Egu’s haunting question – “Why can we not declare a state of emergency on Aso Rock?” – captures the anguish of a people betrayed. It echoes as I gather fragments of our national failure: a country besieged yet floundering in hopeless resignation. Nigeria’s collapse is not solely from overt violence but from slow corrosive attrition – erosion by leadership paralyzed by self-interest and ignorance of suffering outside their gates.

Thus, we stand at despair’s edge, witnesses to collapse that feels inevitable. This essay attempts to encapsulate that despair and transform it into a call for accountability. Through these words, I voice the simmering fury and sorrow of a nation enduring too much suffering. By examining tangible evidence – mass graves, abandoned villages, shuttered schools – and the insidious decay of trust, I invite you to join my search for understanding. Those who can act seem not to care or don’t know how to rescue us. Yet, as we stand on the precipice, we must confront these issues head-on, reject complacency, and imagine rebuilding amidst ruins.

In this essay – a disjointed, pained, sometimes rambling yet sincere attempt to decode Nigeria’s nonsensical state – I express not only personal anguish but shared national despair. My narrative is of an observant citizen refusing silence amid violence and paralyzed leadership. I am compelled to articulate the urgent need for accountability. For all who live in Nigeria, reimagining our national destiny is not merely political; it is an existential struggle for our shared future.

II. The Theater of Absurdity
Governmental functions stall while villages burn. In abandoned homesteads, terrorists descend unopposed – their knives catching scant light – while farmers bury children in shallow graves. I have witnessed market women lament charred stalls. Meanwhile, Aso Rock looms as a monument to denial, where leaders fiddle while Nigeria hemorrhages. I find it troubling that when the President swiftly declared emergency in Rivers State – suspending officials with authoritarian precision – this same government hesitates before existential crisis. Last week in a fear-choked market, a trader gripped my arm recounting bandits’ extortion before burning her stalls, whispering: “They rule here now while Abuja sleeps.” Such realities across a dozen states starkly contrast sanitized communiqués from our disconnected capital.

Constitutional grounds for emergency – war, invasion, or societal collapse – demand scrutiny. Does terrorists sacking Zamfara villages not constitute war? Bandits annexing highways and schools mirror invading forces. Paralyzed governance – scarce cash, drugless hospitals, fear-shuttered schools – points unmistakably to public order collapse. My Lagos-Abuja journey became a ten-hour ordeal of detours and checkpoints revealing state failure: soldiers without ammunition, villagers pooling resources for vigilante groups, roadside communities reduced to smoldering ruins after retaliatory attacks. These are fragments of a fractured map of a sinking state. The bitter irony: Rivers emergency granted control through a sole administrator in distant Abuja, yet when gunmen raze Benue communities at dawn or Chibok parents wait for abducted daughters, Aso Rock responds with sterile press releases. Dr. Chika Mbonu encapsulated this: “The Rivers declaration wasn’t about restoring order; it was about consolidating control” – revealing a presidency wielding power against rivals yet impotent against citizens’ existential threats.

Behind Aso Rock’s gilded gates festers profound dysfunction – corruption radiating toxic influence beyond its walls. Security personnel skirmish over promotion bribes; incoherent policies decimate fintech startups overnight. The fuel subsidy removal – implemented without promised infrastructure – plunged millions deeper into poverty. Aso Rock’s inhabitants, cocooned in armored cars amid sycophants, have lost touch with the nation. Professor Gilbert Ang’ana warned: “A government at war with itself is the silent killer of progress.” The recent cash crisis stranded ₦4.3 trillion outside banks, forcing Nigerians to queue for meager withdrawals. How can a government struggling with currency management wage effective war on terror? Economist Dr. Aliyu explained this liquidity crisis strangles SMEs – our economy’s backbone – pushing youth unemployment toward 50%. While Aso Rock obsesses over optics, our economic engine grinds to a halt.

III. The Geography of Betrayal
Across Nigeria, dissent weaves a tapestry of outrage. Rotimi Amaechi condemned Tinubu’s decree as a “brazen power grab” violating federalism. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka observed that when power’s seat becomes powerlessness’ epicenter, governance ceases. My friend Musa Abdulahi walked Katsina’s dusty streets where farmers hide in forests to evade kidnappers. Elder Malam Ibrahim decried hypocrisy: governors suspended on political grounds while Abuja’s failures go unchecked. Tinubu justified Rivers intervention to “safeguard vital oil installations,” yet militants torched the Boki gas facility under his administrator’s watch. A leaked Western diplomatic cable called Rivers move “disproportionate and politically motivated,” contrasting deafening silence on national security meltdown.

The violence on our streets is but surface rupture of deeper decay seeping into our national soul. Education collapses; hope erodes among youth. Students like Tolu, a final-year engineering student delayed three years, lament: “We are a generation in suspended animation – no degree, no skills, no jobs. What future do we build? We are tinder for chaos.” In this wasteland, radical recruitment seeds sprout the very forces terrorizing us. When society abandons youth, it forsakes tomorrow.

Section 305 empowers presidential action in dire need, yet it’s buried under political timidity. The National Assembly rubber-stamped Rivers emergency in two days with minimal scrutiny but averts eyes from capital crisis. When threats emerge from power’s highest echelons, even the Attorney General’s “imminent security threats” invocation rings hollow against daily catastrophes: overcrowded IDP camps with starving children, runaway inflation pauperizing professionals, a social contract in ruins. Nigeria’s Siracisa Principles signatory status warns against using emergency powers for isolated threats – but our crisis is metastatic, born of systemic paralysis at power’s center.

IV. Prescription: Constitutional Intervention
The hour demands radical honesty. Declaring emergency on Aso Rock isn’t coup-like but constitutional resuscitation – a desperate measure for a gasping state. I envision the National Assembly shaking off lethargy and invoking Section 305(6) oversight powers to declare emergency on executive authority itself. A temporary technocratic administration – divorced from recycled politicians and retired generals – would assume stewardship: a vetted panel of national consensus figures (jurists, economists, security experts, civil society leaders) with uncompromised integrity.

Their mandate would be clear:

1. Forensic audit of security spending and lost weapon contract billions

2. Unified, depoliticized command structure across security agencies

3. Economic stabilization plan prioritizing food security, energy, and infrastructure

4. Framework restoring local governance where state authority crumbled

The judiciary would audit executive failures, ensuring emergency measures remain lawful and time-bound. The objective: dismantle the suffocating cabal of denial strangling this nation, restoring governance to serve people, not palaces.

The philosophical underpinnings of this collapse reveal a deep bankruptcy. Buhari’s “Buharism” – blending state capitalism, religion fanaticism, and cultural rigidity – shielded domestic elites (“rich parasites”). This tainted nationalism misdirected priorities: protecting Fulani herders and cronies like Ganduje while bandits ravaged villages. The psychological toll is immeasurable: a generation adrift – students deprived, farmers dispossessed, parents burying children. The social contract has crumbled into “Nigerian dysthesia”: numbing resignation from continuous violence.

My hands shake as I type this essay, not with fear but with fury watching my nation hemorrhage while power revels in complacency. How many more Plateau mass graves before acknowledging truth? Aso Rock isn’t just failing – it’s complicit. Section 305 unravels as leaders sip champagne in armored comfort. Bandits strike within sight of Abuja’s lights (Kuje 2022, Bwari last month) – symptoms of malignancy: Buhari’s metastasized negligence becoming Tinubu’s hollow spectacle. IDP camps feature hunger edema in children while Aso Rock’s kitchen allocations could nourish states. This isn’t governance; it’s institutionalized manslaughter.

Boko Haram’s terror remains a present nightmare. The recent Borno military base overrun – where insurgents executed soldiers and broadcast slaughter – wasn’t mere attack but assault on Nigeria’s dignity. Statistics scream: 35,000 lives lost since 2015, 2.5 million displaced, 1,500 schools shuttered. In Maiduguri, Fatima watched her husband beheaded for refusing terrorist “taxes.” Her hollow eyes mirrored my fury: “They take 30% of our harvest – just like Aso Rock takes 100% of our future.” The constitutional threshold for emergency has been obliterated. Yet the Commander-in-Chief responds with statements from aides who’ve never set foot in Sambisa.

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Tinubu’s Rivers emergency was grotesque parody. Elected officials suspended while security personnel battled over promotion bribes inside Aso Rock. Within days, militants torched the Trans-Niger pipeline under his administrator’s watch as bandits abducted 120 Kaduna students. Public fury erupted (#SecureAsoRock trended for days), yet the National Assembly sat inert, bloated with ₦500 million “emergency approval” incentives. This is treason cataloged in spreadsheets: ₦12 trillion vanished from security funds under Buhari – enough to arm every willing Nigerian. While Niger villagers repel attackers with sticks, Aso Rock requisitions ₦3 billion armored Mercedes.

V. Regional Unraveling
Nations reach an inflection point when crises demand reckoning. Nigeria’s security architecture frays at its core. Aso Rock stands exposed as a monument to systemic failure. Tremors from North East to South South aren’t isolated – they’re cumulative results of governmental inertia. Only emergency declaration can compel leadership to confront these challenges.

• North East: Boko Haram/ISWAP reduced Borno, Adamawa, Yobe to rubble. 2.3 million displaced; civilian casualties highest since 2018 (411 deaths by Nov 2024). ISWAP’s resurgence with cross-border alliances forces military onto back foot.

• North West: Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina are kidnapping theaters. Criminal syndicates exploit security gaps, eroding public faith.

• North Central: Farmer-herder clashes escalated 64% YoY, fracturing Benue, Kogi, Plateau communities.

• South East: Separatist violence surged 125% in Anambra, Enugu, Imo. Simmering anger from neglect.

• South South: Militancy and cyber terror intersect. Rivers emergency declared after violence shattered communities. 64% cyber attack surge targets critical infrastructure.

• South West: Lagos/Ogun besieged by gang-cybercrime blends – bank heists, digital scams, neighborhoods held hostage.

Aso Rock’s vulnerability warns that regional rot has reached the center. Section 305 exists precisely for such moments – war, invasion, or public order collapse. Delay courts catastrophe.

We can no longer endure. National anguish must catalyze action. Emergency declaration isn’t just legal – it’s moral imperative. Our democracy, future, and lives depend on it.

VI. Midnight Sanitation
We’ve moved beyond petitions. #ReviveNigeria demands citizen-led task forces with blockchain-tracked militias. Every bullet, skirmish, operation digitally accounted for.

SERAP proposes an accountability siege: freeze Aso Rock budgets until security audits go public – make architects of economic suffocation taste cash scarcity they engineered. Judicial action must follow Femi Falana’s blueprint: activate Section 305(6), compelling National Assembly to declare emergency on power’s heart – when presidential negligence becomes principal threat.

Digital resistance must rise. Ethical hackers must dismantle terror financing on dark webs.

Power’s complacency assumes people surrendered to despair. They’re mistaken. Nigeria’s veins flow with rage potent enough to ignite transformation. When bandits abduct a senator’s daughter kilometers from Aso Rock while the president flees to Paris for “security talks,” crisis meets absurdity. I stand with Chibok mothers enduring 3,650 nights waiting for daughters abandoned by protectors. I stand with 27 million out-of-school children whose futures were bartered for elite luxury. This emergency is overdue. The citadel must be stormed.

As Remi Raji wrote: “When the palace becomes a slaughterhouse, revolution is sanitation.” This isn’t rhetoric – it’s a clarion call. The question scrawled on a federal parastatal’s gates haunts: “What crime did our children commit to inherit this hell?”

Raji’s “Lovesong for my Wasteland, Sequence VII” indicts power’s duplicity:

“no water runs where the Niger flows…

i will be thunder in the kidneys of liars…

i smell the odour in the air

which betrays the anus of the tribe

dressed but naked like prostitutes…”

Niyi Osundare’s “The Leader and the Led” allegorizes failed leadership:

“The pack thrashes around like a snake without a head…

Our need calls for a hybrid of habits –

Tough like a tiger, compassionate like a doe

Transparent like a river, mysterious like a lake”

Declaring this emergency constitutes necessary sanitation, not sedition. We must heed poets – our national conscience. We must remember pain and possibility. Refuse to inherit this hell silently. Rise not just in anger but conviction. The clock strikes midnight. The emergency begins with collective resolve.

THE SEAT OF POWERLESS POWER – A CASE FOR DECLARING A STATE OF EMERGENCY ON ASO ROCK

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

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By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.” – Nnedi Okorafor [From Who Fears Death]

“Chaos is come again… When majesty falls to folly.” – William Shakespeare – Othello (Act III, Scene 3) & King Lear (Act I, Scene 1)

FOREWORD
I never imagined that my own life could carry the weight of a story worth telling. Yet, when the ground beneath your feet shifts so violently that home itself becomes alien – when you speak the language but the logic of your country’s cruelty escapes you – silence is no longer an option, but a form of complicity. What compels me to write is not the urge to center myself, but the unbearable necessity of bearing witness. I am, at best, a chronicler: holding a flickering lantern to Nigeria’s open wounds, arranging the fragments of our collective shipwreck into a narrative that is not mine alone, but belongs to all who have survived the unmaking of our nation.

I was born in Nigeria in the twilight of its promise, a few years after independence, when oil wealth shimmered and universities still inspired hope. My earliest memories are rooted in the resilience of my family – my father and uncles, who ran thriving businesses in Aba’s post civil war city. Their textile shops and dealerships embodied the entrepreneurial grit of Ndigbo, but history’s cruelty was swift and unyielding. After the Civil War, their assets were obliterated by the infamous £20 Compensation Policy: a state-sanctioned dispossession that reduced the life savings of entire families to a pittance. Yet, with calloused hands and relentless will, they rebuilt from the ashes. By the late 1970s, their shops and warehouses hummed with commerce once more, a quiet defiance against a system engineered to break them.

From 1973 to 1983 I lived with my uncles in Enugu’s Uwani, a neighborhood fragrant with dust, life and ambition. After years lecturing in Pharmacology at UNN’s Nsukka campus, he retired – not to rest, but to reinvent himself. In 1974 or 75, he alongside family and brothers founded Kami Laboratories in coal camp, a modest laboratory where he compounded medicines and supplied chemicals to companies, industries and schools. The scent of antiseptic hope mingled with ground herbs, and the percussion of mortar and pestle echoed the conviction that academia must serve the people. His life influenced by Marxist philosophy was a manifesto: restitution is seized, not given.

Three ruptures define my exile within my own country. The first was the Soviet interlude: from 1987 to 2000, I studied in Voronezh and Krasnodar as communism collapsed. I saw how ideology curdles into farce, yet even in scarcity, their metros ran on time. Returning to Nigeria, I found a different decay: airports crumbling, roads resembling war trenches, governance and politics reduced to a carnival of looting. Hope itself became a currency, devalued faster than the naira. The second rupture came as I watched the deliberate strangulation of Igboland’s economy from the advocacy trenches of Ohanaeze Ndigbo. As personal secretary to the President-General Justice Ezebuilo Ozobu, I observed and documented how policy decisions – never accidental, always intentional – turned the Southeast into an industrial graveyard. The Enugu coal mines, railway, industrial layout; and the Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi industrial hubs, once sites of promise, drowned in toxic floods, decay and abandonment. Then closer home, Abiriba’s famed blacksmiths, importers, and Buisnesses, once the pride of our people, now hawked Chinese imports in markets that had lost their soul. The third rupture is the present unraveling: when bandits, kidnappers and terrorists sacked whole villages and communities, some closer home others in areas farflung but all linked together by shared grief and sense of abandonment; with factories everywhere – businesses built with seed monies, saved from hard work and perseverance – the police demanding bribes to file a report. We are told to be resilient, even as Aso Rock imports luxury goods.

My vantage is not from the ivory tower, but from the trenches of advocacy and lived experience. At Ohanaeze gatherings, I have watched governors report about begging for federal roads while Abuja allocates billions for the trivial comforts of power. I have seen policy papers on industrial revival – meticulous and data-rich – drowned by the cacophony of crude oil politics. The bitterest lesson is this: marginalization is not an accident, but an architecture. We all saw how the 2nd Niger Bridge became a 20-year extortion scheme, how billions intended for Southeast development were redirected elsewhere, how security votes evaporated into private coffers. The betrayal is intimate, because I have seen some memos that traded our infrastructure for kickbacks, and I know precisely which clauses in which bills gutted our potential. When the youth chant “we want a Sovereign National Conference and we want a referendum” on burnt streets, I hear the echo of my uncle’s lament from 1983: “They’ve made revolutionaries of our children by denying them factories.”

The geography of my loss is layered like Russian nesting dolls of displacement. Enugu, in the 1970s, was like a city slowing waking up from stupor, where trains still sang through the night [We lived in 1a Niger Close then, last house just by the rail tracks]. Today, its streets, though having signs of renewal, still feel like museums of decay. My uncle’s pharmacy, like other enterprises like the FGN Okoye, Nwankwu, Tabansi, C to C, the Udoye’s and many others are either gone or look like looted shells. Our ancestral villages gather dust as relics, the values that birthed them gone. Lagos, where I now reside, is not the city of lagoons, but a suffocating large expanse of concrete suburbs where generators drone like dirges. My house, where I live now, overlooks both a gated estate and a slum – a diorama of Nigeria’s inequality. When I say “my country,” I mean none of these places. I mean the corpse of what should have been.

Statistics cannot capture the shame in the many eyes I saw at LUTH, when my sister passed away, when the power is unavailable sometimes for eighteen hours, mostly during serious operations. GDP figures do not convey the stench of hopelessness in Nigeria’s abandoned factories, nor the humiliation of queuing for hours to withdraw a pittance while the state’s kitchen budget could feed a whole community. The reality is a schism so profound that when I mention “life before Buhari” to undergraduates, I am met with blank stares. Their Nigeria has only ever been carcass and crow.

My father’s generation knew stability: civil service jobs that spanned decades, pensions that retained value, the dignity of burying parents in ancestral soil. My inheritance is mass graves in Plateau, Benue, Nsukka, Abakiliki, Maiduguri and several other places, a national debt that mortgages the future, and a passport that brands me a global pariah. The bridges between past and present were never built. We are all displaced now – millions scattered like chaff, children denied the schools that once promised deliverance. The homeless are both free and damned: unshackled from the illusions of patriotism, yet condemned to wander the purgatory created by our leaders.

I write not as a victim, but as a scribe of our shared damnation. My only credentials are those of a Nigerian, educated, affected, a Christian whose fellow Christians in church across the North are firebombed almost every Sunday, and above all, a humanist watching reason die beneath the boots of kleptocracy. This grants me no special insight – only the cruel clarity of one standing where the lava flows hottest. I have sat where the levers of power are pulled, and I have seen how arrogance turns our “zones of peace” into killing fields.

When my friend and comrade, Mazi Ndubuisi, whispered, “Why not declare emergency on Aso Rock?” he distilled the plea of our generation. For our tragedy is not simply that Nigeria has fallen, but that those who orchestrated its collapse still dine in the villa, picking their teeth with the bones of the very future they were sworn to protect. The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.

What follows is not prophecy, but autopsy – a forensic accounting of ruin, an attempt to document the anatomy of a state that chose to eat its young. If there is any redemption to be found, it lies in the act of bearing witness, in refusing to let the architects of our disaster write the final word. This is the proof.

– Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO)

Lagos, June 2025

I. The Anatomy of Collapse
Residing in Nigeria connects me to millions enduring this fractured nation’s reality. Whether you reside here or not, you undoubtedly possess ties – through family, friends, or shared heritage – that bind your fate, making every act of chaos and every emerging crisis here a cause for concern. In my daily life, as well as in the experiences of countless Nigerians, there is an inescapable pull of anarchy that permeates every corner of our society. We are simultaneously victims and witnesses to a ceaseless barrage of unrest – a reality that leaves us, our families, and communities painfully aware of our profound inability to cope with the mounting difficulties imposed by a system that seems increasingly indifferent to our plight.

Daily, we face heartbreakingly familiar spectacles: bandits ravaging communities and leaving behind mass graves in Plateau and elsewhere – grim monuments to the routine cruelty that has become part of our existence. In regions like Enugu and Ebonyi, as well as the perennial flashpoints of the Northeast and Northwest, violence has become so normalized that it no longer shocks; it simply persists, an unending backdrop to our lives. I have walked through villages where desperate pleas for help, echoed by governors who raise urgent SOS signals, are met with a void of official inaction. The streets themselves seem to drown in a sinister blend of blood and silence – a silence orchestrated by a leadership that consistently chooses convenience over accountability.

While citizens suffer, Aso Rock’s occupants persist in detachment, seemingly insulated from the suffering that defines ordinary lives. Decisions are made behind walls that are as impenetrable as they are indifferent, and policies are enacted with a performative rigor that does little to address realities on the ground. The president, wielding vast constitutional powers, issues declarations that ring hollow against the relentless cacophony of everyday suffering. Governors, nominally charged with authority, often find themselves stripped of meaningful power, raising the troubling question: how can meaningful change occur when those entrusted with our welfare are either incapacitated or indifferent? I have watched with growing dismay as the machinery of state – once a symbol of hope – has devolved into an apparatus of neglect. Even the constitutional mechanism of declaring a state of emergency has become a hollow gesture, an empty promise that only underscores our collective impotence.

Assessing Nigeria’s condition reveals elite isolation within secure compounds and boardrooms, detached from the turmoil engulfing the rest of us. Those who might possess means to effect change either evade responsibility or are ensnared by vested interests. This reality is corroborated by policy papers, investigative journalism, and global organizations. Our GDP per capita has stagnated, educational institutions have become battlegrounds, and corridors of power echo only with empty promises. The data is relentless: over 3.5 million Nigerians are internally displaced, and more than 27 million children are out of school – a figure eclipsing entire nations’ populations.

My late friend Mazi Ndubuisi Egu’s haunting question – “Why can we not declare a state of emergency on Aso Rock?” – captures the anguish of a people betrayed. It echoes as I gather fragments of our national failure: a country besieged yet floundering in hopeless resignation. Nigeria’s collapse is not solely from overt violence but from slow corrosive attrition – erosion by leadership paralyzed by self-interest and ignorance of suffering outside their gates.

Thus, we stand at despair’s edge, witnesses to collapse that feels inevitable. This essay attempts to encapsulate that despair and transform it into a call for accountability. Through these words, I voice the simmering fury and sorrow of a nation enduring too much suffering. By examining tangible evidence – mass graves, abandoned villages, shuttered schools – and the insidious decay of trust, I invite you to join my search for understanding. Those who can act seem not to care or don’t know how to rescue us. Yet, as we stand on the precipice, we must confront these issues head-on, reject complacency, and imagine rebuilding amidst ruins.

In this essay – a disjointed, pained, sometimes rambling yet sincere attempt to decode Nigeria’s nonsensical state – I express not only personal anguish but shared national despair. My narrative is of an observant citizen refusing silence amid violence and paralyzed leadership. I am compelled to articulate the urgent need for accountability. For all who live in Nigeria, reimagining our national destiny is not merely political; it is an existential struggle for our shared future.

II. The Theater of Absurdity
Governmental functions stall while villages burn. In abandoned homesteads, terrorists descend unopposed – their knives catching scant light – while farmers bury children in shallow graves. I have witnessed market women lament charred stalls. Meanwhile, Aso Rock looms as a monument to denial, where leaders fiddle while Nigeria hemorrhages. I find it troubling that when the President swiftly declared emergency in Rivers State – suspending officials with authoritarian precision – this same government hesitates before existential crisis. Last week in a fear-choked market, a trader gripped my arm recounting bandits’ extortion before burning her stalls, whispering: “They rule here now while Abuja sleeps.” Such realities across a dozen states starkly contrast sanitized communiqués from our disconnected capital.

Constitutional grounds for emergency – war, invasion, or societal collapse – demand scrutiny. Does terrorists sacking Zamfara villages not constitute war? Bandits annexing highways and schools mirror invading forces. Paralyzed governance – scarce cash, drugless hospitals, fear-shuttered schools – points unmistakably to public order collapse. My Lagos-Abuja journey became a ten-hour ordeal of detours and checkpoints revealing state failure: soldiers without ammunition, villagers pooling resources for vigilante groups, roadside communities reduced to smoldering ruins after retaliatory attacks. These are fragments of a fractured map of a sinking state. The bitter irony: Rivers emergency granted control through a sole administrator in distant Abuja, yet when gunmen raze Benue communities at dawn or Chibok parents wait for abducted daughters, Aso Rock responds with sterile press releases. Dr. Chika Mbonu encapsulated this: “The Rivers declaration wasn’t about restoring order; it was about consolidating control” – revealing a presidency wielding power against rivals yet impotent against citizens’ existential threats.

Behind Aso Rock’s gilded gates festers profound dysfunction – corruption radiating toxic influence beyond its walls. Security personnel skirmish over promotion bribes; incoherent policies decimate fintech startups overnight. The fuel subsidy removal – implemented without promised infrastructure – plunged millions deeper into poverty. Aso Rock’s inhabitants, cocooned in armored cars amid sycophants, have lost touch with the nation. Professor Gilbert Ang’ana warned: “A government at war with itself is the silent killer of progress.” The recent cash crisis stranded ₦4.3 trillion outside banks, forcing Nigerians to queue for meager withdrawals. How can a government struggling with currency management wage effective war on terror? Economist Dr. Aliyu explained this liquidity crisis strangles SMEs – our economy’s backbone – pushing youth unemployment toward 50%. While Aso Rock obsesses over optics, our economic engine grinds to a halt.

III. The Geography of Betrayal
Across Nigeria, dissent weaves a tapestry of outrage. Rotimi Amaechi condemned Tinubu’s decree as a “brazen power grab” violating federalism. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka observed that when power’s seat becomes powerlessness’ epicenter, governance ceases. My friend Musa Abdulahi walked Katsina’s dusty streets where farmers hide in forests to evade kidnappers. Elder Malam Ibrahim decried hypocrisy: governors suspended on political grounds while Abuja’s failures go unchecked. Tinubu justified Rivers intervention to “safeguard vital oil installations,” yet militants torched the Boki gas facility under his administrator’s watch. A leaked Western diplomatic cable called Rivers move “disproportionate and politically motivated,” contrasting deafening silence on national security meltdown.

The violence on our streets is but surface rupture of deeper decay seeping into our national soul. Education collapses; hope erodes among youth. Students like Tolu, a final-year engineering student delayed three years, lament: “We are a generation in suspended animation – no degree, no skills, no jobs. What future do we build? We are tinder for chaos.” In this wasteland, radical recruitment seeds sprout the very forces terrorizing us. When society abandons youth, it forsakes tomorrow.

Section 305 empowers presidential action in dire need, yet it’s buried under political timidity. The National Assembly rubber-stamped Rivers emergency in two days with minimal scrutiny but averts eyes from capital crisis. When threats emerge from power’s highest echelons, even the Attorney General’s “imminent security threats” invocation rings hollow against daily catastrophes: overcrowded IDP camps with starving children, runaway inflation pauperizing professionals, a social contract in ruins. Nigeria’s Siracisa Principles signatory status warns against using emergency powers for isolated threats – but our crisis is metastatic, born of systemic paralysis at power’s center.

IV. Prescription: Constitutional Intervention
The hour demands radical honesty. Declaring emergency on Aso Rock isn’t coup-like but constitutional resuscitation – a desperate measure for a gasping state. I envision the National Assembly shaking off lethargy and invoking Section 305(6) oversight powers to declare emergency on executive authority itself. A temporary technocratic administration – divorced from recycled politicians and retired generals – would assume stewardship: a vetted panel of national consensus figures (jurists, economists, security experts, civil society leaders) with uncompromised integrity.

Their mandate would be clear:

1. Forensic audit of security spending and lost weapon contract billions

2. Unified, depoliticized command structure across security agencies

3. Economic stabilization plan prioritizing food security, energy, and infrastructure

4. Framework restoring local governance where state authority crumbled

The judiciary would audit executive failures, ensuring emergency measures remain lawful and time-bound. The objective: dismantle the suffocating cabal of denial strangling this nation, restoring governance to serve people, not palaces.

The philosophical underpinnings of this collapse reveal a deep bankruptcy. Buhari’s “Buharism” – blending state capitalism, religion fanaticism, and cultural rigidity – shielded domestic elites (“rich parasites”). This tainted nationalism misdirected priorities: protecting Fulani herders and cronies like Ganduje while bandits ravaged villages. The psychological toll is immeasurable: a generation adrift – students deprived, farmers dispossessed, parents burying children. The social contract has crumbled into “Nigerian dysthesia”: numbing resignation from continuous violence.

My hands shake as I type this essay, not with fear but with fury watching my nation hemorrhage while power revels in complacency. How many more Plateau mass graves before acknowledging truth? Aso Rock isn’t just failing – it’s complicit. Section 305 unravels as leaders sip champagne in armored comfort. Bandits strike within sight of Abuja’s lights (Kuje 2022, Bwari last month) – symptoms of malignancy: Buhari’s metastasized negligence becoming Tinubu’s hollow spectacle. IDP camps feature hunger edema in children while Aso Rock’s kitchen allocations could nourish states. This isn’t governance; it’s institutionalized manslaughter.

Boko Haram’s terror remains a present nightmare. The recent Borno military base overrun – where insurgents executed soldiers and broadcast slaughter – wasn’t mere attack but assault on Nigeria’s dignity. Statistics scream: 35,000 lives lost since 2015, 2.5 million displaced, 1,500 schools shuttered. In Maiduguri, Fatima watched her husband beheaded for refusing terrorist “taxes.” Her hollow eyes mirrored my fury: “They take 30% of our harvest – just like Aso Rock takes 100% of our future.” The constitutional threshold for emergency has been obliterated. Yet the Commander-in-Chief responds with statements from aides who’ve never set foot in Sambisa.

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Tinubu’s Rivers emergency was grotesque parody. Elected officials suspended while security personnel battled over promotion bribes inside Aso Rock. Within days, militants torched the Trans-Niger pipeline under his administrator’s watch as bandits abducted 120 Kaduna students. Public fury erupted (#SecureAsoRock trended for days), yet the National Assembly sat inert, bloated with ₦500 million “emergency approval” incentives. This is treason cataloged in spreadsheets: ₦12 trillion vanished from security funds under Buhari – enough to arm every willing Nigerian. While Niger villagers repel attackers with sticks, Aso Rock requisitions ₦3 billion armored Mercedes.

V. Regional Unraveling
Nations reach an inflection point when crises demand reckoning. Nigeria’s security architecture frays at its core. Aso Rock stands exposed as a monument to systemic failure. Tremors from North East to South South aren’t isolated – they’re cumulative results of governmental inertia. Only emergency declaration can compel leadership to confront these challenges.

• North East: Boko Haram/ISWAP reduced Borno, Adamawa, Yobe to rubble. 2.3 million displaced; civilian casualties highest since 2018 (411 deaths by Nov 2024). ISWAP’s resurgence with cross-border alliances forces military onto back foot.

• North West: Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina are kidnapping theaters. Criminal syndicates exploit security gaps, eroding public faith.

• North Central: Farmer-herder clashes escalated 64% YoY, fracturing Benue, Kogi, Plateau communities.

• South East: Separatist violence surged 125% in Anambra, Enugu, Imo. Simmering anger from neglect.

• South South: Militancy and cyber terror intersect. Rivers emergency declared after violence shattered communities. 64% cyber attack surge targets critical infrastructure.

• South West: Lagos/Ogun besieged by gang-cybercrime blends – bank heists, digital scams, neighborhoods held hostage.

Aso Rock’s vulnerability warns that regional rot has reached the center. Section 305 exists precisely for such moments – war, invasion, or public order collapse. Delay courts catastrophe.

We can no longer endure. National anguish must catalyze action. Emergency declaration isn’t just legal – it’s moral imperative. Our democracy, future, and lives depend on it.

VI. Midnight Sanitation
We’ve moved beyond petitions. #ReviveNigeria demands citizen-led task forces with blockchain-tracked militias. Every bullet, skirmish, operation digitally accounted for.

SERAP proposes an accountability siege: freeze Aso Rock budgets until security audits go public – make architects of economic suffocation taste cash scarcity they engineered. Judicial action must follow Femi Falana’s blueprint: activate Section 305(6), compelling National Assembly to declare emergency on power’s heart – when presidential negligence becomes principal threat.

Digital resistance must rise. Ethical hackers must dismantle terror financing on dark webs.

Power’s complacency assumes people surrendered to despair. They’re mistaken. Nigeria’s veins flow with rage potent enough to ignite transformation. When bandits abduct a senator’s daughter kilometers from Aso Rock while the president flees to Paris for “security talks,” crisis meets absurdity. I stand with Chibok mothers enduring 3,650 nights waiting for daughters abandoned by protectors. I stand with 27 million out-of-school children whose futures were bartered for elite luxury. This emergency is overdue. The citadel must be stormed.

As Remi Raji wrote: “When the palace becomes a slaughterhouse, revolution is sanitation.” This isn’t rhetoric – it’s a clarion call. The question scrawled on a federal parastatal’s gates haunts: “What crime did our children commit to inherit this hell?”

Raji’s “Lovesong for my Wasteland, Sequence VII” indicts power’s duplicity:

“no water runs where the Niger flows…

i will be thunder in the kidneys of liars…

i smell the odour in the air

which betrays the anus of the tribe

dressed but naked like prostitutes…”

Niyi Osundare’s “The Leader and the Led” allegorizes failed leadership:

“The pack thrashes around like a snake without a head…

Our need calls for a hybrid of habits –

Tough like a tiger, compassionate like a doe

Transparent like a river, mysterious like a lake”

Declaring this emergency constitutes necessary sanitation, not sedition. We must heed poets – our national conscience. We must remember pain and possibility. Refuse to inherit this hell silently. Rise not just in anger but conviction. The clock strikes midnight. The emergency begins with collective resolve.

EPILOGUE NOTE
Okorafor’s “beast” manifests in Aso Rock’s hijacked governance – ₦12 trillion vanished from security budgets since 2016; ministers in armored convoys while Niger villagers drink cholera-infested water. Shakespeare’s “chaos” embodies Nigeria’s anarchy – Rivers emergency declared for political rivalries while 400+ bodies lie unburied in bandit-ravaged communities.

Their convergence is evident: elite plundering starves security, creating insurgent vacuums. Global Terrorism Index confirms Nigeria’s surge to 6th globally in terrorism impact (incidents up 23% since 2018). Bandit “taxation” networks control highways and schools as parallel states. This breeds “Nigerian dysthesia” – numbing resignation as masses bury children while government denies.

Section 305, intended for war or civil breakdown, is weaponized to suppress opposition. Lawmakers rubber-stamp selective emergencies for ₦500 million bribes, betraying their duty to declare Aso Rock a crisis zone. The beast’s crowns are woven from constitutional subversion.

Mazi Ndubuisi Egu’s piercing query finds its answer here: The beast expands because we permit crowns; chaos reigns because we mistake folly for governance. Nigeria’s emergency originates in power’s seat. Declaring emergency on Aso Rock strips crowns before chaos consumes us.

THE SEAT OF POWERLESS POWER – A CASE FOR DECLARING A STATE OF EMERGENCY ON ASO ROCK

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

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By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.” – Nnedi Okorafor [From Who Fears Death]

“Chaos is come again… When majesty falls to folly.” – William Shakespeare – Othello (Act III, Scene 3) & King Lear (Act I, Scene 1)

FOREWORD
I never imagined that my own life could carry the weight of a story worth telling. Yet, when the ground beneath your feet shifts so violently that home itself becomes alien – when you speak the language but the logic of your country’s cruelty escapes you – silence is no longer an option, but a form of complicity. What compels me to write is not the urge to center myself, but the unbearable necessity of bearing witness. I am, at best, a chronicler: holding a flickering lantern to Nigeria’s open wounds, arranging the fragments of our collective shipwreck into a narrative that is not mine alone, but belongs to all who have survived the unmaking of our nation.

I was born in Nigeria in the twilight of its promise, a few years after independence, when oil wealth shimmered and universities still inspired hope. My earliest memories are rooted in the resilience of my family – my father and uncles, who ran thriving businesses in Aba’s post civil war city. Their textile shops and dealerships embodied the entrepreneurial grit of Ndigbo, but history’s cruelty was swift and unyielding. After the Civil War, their assets were obliterated by the infamous £20 Compensation Policy: a state-sanctioned dispossession that reduced the life savings of entire families to a pittance. Yet, with calloused hands and relentless will, they rebuilt from the ashes. By the late 1970s, their shops and warehouses hummed with commerce once more, a quiet defiance against a system engineered to break them.

From 1973 to 1983 I lived with my uncles in Enugu’s Uwani, a neighborhood fragrant with dust, life and ambition. After years lecturing in Pharmacology at UNN’s Nsukka campus, he retired – not to rest, but to reinvent himself. In 1974 or 75, he alongside family and brothers founded Kami Laboratories in coal camp, a modest laboratory where he compounded medicines and supplied chemicals to companies, industries and schools. The scent of antiseptic hope mingled with ground herbs, and the percussion of mortar and pestle echoed the conviction that academia must serve the people. His life influenced by Marxist philosophy was a manifesto: restitution is seized, not given.

Three ruptures define my exile within my own country. The first was the Soviet interlude: from 1987 to 2000, I studied in Voronezh and Krasnodar as communism collapsed. I saw how ideology curdles into farce, yet even in scarcity, their metros ran on time. Returning to Nigeria, I found a different decay: airports crumbling, roads resembling war trenches, governance and politics reduced to a carnival of looting. Hope itself became a currency, devalued faster than the naira. The second rupture came as I watched the deliberate strangulation of Igboland’s economy from the advocacy trenches of Ohanaeze Ndigbo. As personal secretary to the President-General Justice Ezebuilo Ozobu, I observed and documented how policy decisions – never accidental, always intentional – turned the Southeast into an industrial graveyard. The Enugu coal mines, railway, industrial layout; and the Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi industrial hubs, once sites of promise, drowned in toxic floods, decay and abandonment. Then closer home, Abiriba’s famed blacksmiths, importers, and Buisnesses, once the pride of our people, now hawked Chinese imports in markets that had lost their soul. The third rupture is the present unraveling: when bandits, kidnappers and terrorists sacked whole villages and communities, some closer home others in areas farflung but all linked together by shared grief and sense of abandonment; with factories everywhere – businesses built with seed monies, saved from hard work and perseverance – the police demanding bribes to file a report. We are told to be resilient, even as Aso Rock imports luxury goods.

My vantage is not from the ivory tower, but from the trenches of advocacy and lived experience. At Ohanaeze gatherings, I have watched governors report about begging for federal roads while Abuja allocates billions for the trivial comforts of power. I have seen policy papers on industrial revival – meticulous and data-rich – drowned by the cacophony of crude oil politics. The bitterest lesson is this: marginalization is not an accident, but an architecture. We all saw how the 2nd Niger Bridge became a 20-year extortion scheme, how billions intended for Southeast development were redirected elsewhere, how security votes evaporated into private coffers. The betrayal is intimate, because I have seen some memos that traded our infrastructure for kickbacks, and I know precisely which clauses in which bills gutted our potential. When the youth chant “we want a Sovereign National Conference and we want a referendum” on burnt streets, I hear the echo of my uncle’s lament from 1983: “They’ve made revolutionaries of our children by denying them factories.”

The geography of my loss is layered like Russian nesting dolls of displacement. Enugu, in the 1970s, was like a city slowing waking up from stupor, where trains still sang through the night [We lived in 1a Niger Close then, last house just by the rail tracks]. Today, its streets, though having signs of renewal, still feel like museums of decay. My uncle’s pharmacy, like other enterprises like the FGN Okoye, Nwankwu, Tabansi, C to C, the Udoye’s and many others are either gone or look like looted shells. Our ancestral villages gather dust as relics, the values that birthed them gone. Lagos, where I now reside, is not the city of lagoons, but a suffocating large expanse of concrete suburbs where generators drone like dirges. My house, where I live now, overlooks both a gated estate and a slum – a diorama of Nigeria’s inequality. When I say “my country,” I mean none of these places. I mean the corpse of what should have been.

Statistics cannot capture the shame in the many eyes I saw at LUTH, when my sister passed away, when the power is unavailable sometimes for eighteen hours, mostly during serious operations. GDP figures do not convey the stench of hopelessness in Nigeria’s abandoned factories, nor the humiliation of queuing for hours to withdraw a pittance while the state’s kitchen budget could feed a whole community. The reality is a schism so profound that when I mention “life before Buhari” to undergraduates, I am met with blank stares. Their Nigeria has only ever been carcass and crow.

My father’s generation knew stability: civil service jobs that spanned decades, pensions that retained value, the dignity of burying parents in ancestral soil. My inheritance is mass graves in Plateau, Benue, Nsukka, Abakiliki, Maiduguri and several other places, a national debt that mortgages the future, and a passport that brands me a global pariah. The bridges between past and present were never built. We are all displaced now – millions scattered like chaff, children denied the schools that once promised deliverance. The homeless are both free and damned: unshackled from the illusions of patriotism, yet condemned to wander the purgatory created by our leaders.

I write not as a victim, but as a scribe of our shared damnation. My only credentials are those of a Nigerian, educated, affected, a Christian whose fellow Christians in church across the North are firebombed almost every Sunday, and above all, a humanist watching reason die beneath the boots of kleptocracy. This grants me no special insight – only the cruel clarity of one standing where the lava flows hottest. I have sat where the levers of power are pulled, and I have seen how arrogance turns our “zones of peace” into killing fields.

When my friend and comrade, Mazi Ndubuisi, whispered, “Why not declare emergency on Aso Rock?” he distilled the plea of our generation. For our tragedy is not simply that Nigeria has fallen, but that those who orchestrated its collapse still dine in the villa, picking their teeth with the bones of the very future they were sworn to protect. The beast has grown too large. It has learned to wear crowns.

What follows is not prophecy, but autopsy – a forensic accounting of ruin, an attempt to document the anatomy of a state that chose to eat its young. If there is any redemption to be found, it lies in the act of bearing witness, in refusing to let the architects of our disaster write the final word. This is the proof.

– Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO)

Lagos, June 2025

I. The Anatomy of Collapse
Residing in Nigeria connects me to millions enduring this fractured nation’s reality. Whether you reside here or not, you undoubtedly possess ties – through family, friends, or shared heritage – that bind your fate, making every act of chaos and every emerging crisis here a cause for concern. In my daily life, as well as in the experiences of countless Nigerians, there is an inescapable pull of anarchy that permeates every corner of our society. We are simultaneously victims and witnesses to a ceaseless barrage of unrest – a reality that leaves us, our families, and communities painfully aware of our profound inability to cope with the mounting difficulties imposed by a system that seems increasingly indifferent to our plight.

Daily, we face heartbreakingly familiar spectacles: bandits ravaging communities and leaving behind mass graves in Plateau and elsewhere – grim monuments to the routine cruelty that has become part of our existence. In regions like Enugu and Ebonyi, as well as the perennial flashpoints of the Northeast and Northwest, violence has become so normalized that it no longer shocks; it simply persists, an unending backdrop to our lives. I have walked through villages where desperate pleas for help, echoed by governors who raise urgent SOS signals, are met with a void of official inaction. The streets themselves seem to drown in a sinister blend of blood and silence – a silence orchestrated by a leadership that consistently chooses convenience over accountability.

While citizens suffer, Aso Rock’s occupants persist in detachment, seemingly insulated from the suffering that defines ordinary lives. Decisions are made behind walls that are as impenetrable as they are indifferent, and policies are enacted with a performative rigor that does little to address realities on the ground. The president, wielding vast constitutional powers, issues declarations that ring hollow against the relentless cacophony of everyday suffering. Governors, nominally charged with authority, often find themselves stripped of meaningful power, raising the troubling question: how can meaningful change occur when those entrusted with our welfare are either incapacitated or indifferent? I have watched with growing dismay as the machinery of state – once a symbol of hope – has devolved into an apparatus of neglect. Even the constitutional mechanism of declaring a state of emergency has become a hollow gesture, an empty promise that only underscores our collective impotence.

Assessing Nigeria’s condition reveals elite isolation within secure compounds and boardrooms, detached from the turmoil engulfing the rest of us. Those who might possess means to effect change either evade responsibility or are ensnared by vested interests. This reality is corroborated by policy papers, investigative journalism, and global organizations. Our GDP per capita has stagnated, educational institutions have become battlegrounds, and corridors of power echo only with empty promises. The data is relentless: over 3.5 million Nigerians are internally displaced, and more than 27 million children are out of school – a figure eclipsing entire nations’ populations.

My late friend Mazi Ndubuisi Egu’s haunting question – “Why can we not declare a state of emergency on Aso Rock?” – captures the anguish of a people betrayed. It echoes as I gather fragments of our national failure: a country besieged yet floundering in hopeless resignation. Nigeria’s collapse is not solely from overt violence but from slow corrosive attrition – erosion by leadership paralyzed by self-interest and ignorance of suffering outside their gates.

Thus, we stand at despair’s edge, witnesses to collapse that feels inevitable. This essay attempts to encapsulate that despair and transform it into a call for accountability. Through these words, I voice the simmering fury and sorrow of a nation enduring too much suffering. By examining tangible evidence – mass graves, abandoned villages, shuttered schools – and the insidious decay of trust, I invite you to join my search for understanding. Those who can act seem not to care or don’t know how to rescue us. Yet, as we stand on the precipice, we must confront these issues head-on, reject complacency, and imagine rebuilding amidst ruins.

In this essay – a disjointed, pained, sometimes rambling yet sincere attempt to decode Nigeria’s nonsensical state – I express not only personal anguish but shared national despair. My narrative is of an observant citizen refusing silence amid violence and paralyzed leadership. I am compelled to articulate the urgent need for accountability. For all who live in Nigeria, reimagining our national destiny is not merely political; it is an existential struggle for our shared future.

II. The Theater of Absurdity
Governmental functions stall while villages burn. In abandoned homesteads, terrorists descend unopposed – their knives catching scant light – while farmers bury children in shallow graves. I have witnessed market women lament charred stalls. Meanwhile, Aso Rock looms as a monument to denial, where leaders fiddle while Nigeria hemorrhages. I find it troubling that when the President swiftly declared emergency in Rivers State – suspending officials with authoritarian precision – this same government hesitates before existential crisis. Last week in a fear-choked market, a trader gripped my arm recounting bandits’ extortion before burning her stalls, whispering: “They rule here now while Abuja sleeps.” Such realities across a dozen states starkly contrast sanitized communiqués from our disconnected capital.

Constitutional grounds for emergency – war, invasion, or societal collapse – demand scrutiny. Does terrorists sacking Zamfara villages not constitute war? Bandits annexing highways and schools mirror invading forces. Paralyzed governance – scarce cash, drugless hospitals, fear-shuttered schools – points unmistakably to public order collapse. My Lagos-Abuja journey became a ten-hour ordeal of detours and checkpoints revealing state failure: soldiers without ammunition, villagers pooling resources for vigilante groups, roadside communities reduced to smoldering ruins after retaliatory attacks. These are fragments of a fractured map of a sinking state. The bitter irony: Rivers emergency granted control through a sole administrator in distant Abuja, yet when gunmen raze Benue communities at dawn or Chibok parents wait for abducted daughters, Aso Rock responds with sterile press releases. Dr. Chika Mbonu encapsulated this: “The Rivers declaration wasn’t about restoring order; it was about consolidating control” – revealing a presidency wielding power against rivals yet impotent against citizens’ existential threats.

Behind Aso Rock’s gilded gates festers profound dysfunction – corruption radiating toxic influence beyond its walls. Security personnel skirmish over promotion bribes; incoherent policies decimate fintech startups overnight. The fuel subsidy removal – implemented without promised infrastructure – plunged millions deeper into poverty. Aso Rock’s inhabitants, cocooned in armored cars amid sycophants, have lost touch with the nation. Professor Gilbert Ang’ana warned: “A government at war with itself is the silent killer of progress.” The recent cash crisis stranded ₦4.3 trillion outside banks, forcing Nigerians to queue for meager withdrawals. How can a government struggling with currency management wage effective war on terror? Economist Dr. Aliyu explained this liquidity crisis strangles SMEs – our economy’s backbone – pushing youth unemployment toward 50%. While Aso Rock obsesses over optics, our economic engine grinds to a halt.

III. The Geography of Betrayal
Across Nigeria, dissent weaves a tapestry of outrage. Rotimi Amaechi condemned Tinubu’s decree as a “brazen power grab” violating federalism. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka observed that when power’s seat becomes powerlessness’ epicenter, governance ceases. My friend Musa Abdulahi walked Katsina’s dusty streets where farmers hide in forests to evade kidnappers. Elder Malam Ibrahim decried hypocrisy: governors suspended on political grounds while Abuja’s failures go unchecked. Tinubu justified Rivers intervention to “safeguard vital oil installations,” yet militants torched the Boki gas facility under his administrator’s watch. A leaked Western diplomatic cable called Rivers move “disproportionate and politically motivated,” contrasting deafening silence on national security meltdown.

The violence on our streets is but surface rupture of deeper decay seeping into our national soul. Education collapses; hope erodes among youth. Students like Tolu, a final-year engineering student delayed three years, lament: “We are a generation in suspended animation – no degree, no skills, no jobs. What future do we build? We are tinder for chaos.” In this wasteland, radical recruitment seeds sprout the very forces terrorizing us. When society abandons youth, it forsakes tomorrow.

Section 305 empowers presidential action in dire need, yet it’s buried under political timidity. The National Assembly rubber-stamped Rivers emergency in two days with minimal scrutiny but averts eyes from capital crisis. When threats emerge from power’s highest echelons, even the Attorney General’s “imminent security threats” invocation rings hollow against daily catastrophes: overcrowded IDP camps with starving children, runaway inflation pauperizing professionals, a social contract in ruins. Nigeria’s Siracisa Principles signatory status warns against using emergency powers for isolated threats – but our crisis is metastatic, born of systemic paralysis at power’s center.

IV. Prescription: Constitutional Intervention
The hour demands radical honesty. Declaring emergency on Aso Rock isn’t coup-like but constitutional resuscitation – a desperate measure for a gasping state. I envision the National Assembly shaking off lethargy and invoking Section 305(6) oversight powers to declare emergency on executive authority itself. A temporary technocratic administration – divorced from recycled politicians and retired generals – would assume stewardship: a vetted panel of national consensus figures (jurists, economists, security experts, civil society leaders) with uncompromised integrity.

Their mandate would be clear:

1. Forensic audit of security spending and lost weapon contract billions

2. Unified, depoliticized command structure across security agencies

3. Economic stabilization plan prioritizing food security, energy, and infrastructure

4. Framework restoring local governance where state authority crumbled

The judiciary would audit executive failures, ensuring emergency measures remain lawful and time-bound. The objective: dismantle the suffocating cabal of denial strangling this nation, restoring governance to serve people, not palaces.

The philosophical underpinnings of this collapse reveal a deep bankruptcy. Buhari’s “Buharism” – blending state capitalism, religion fanaticism, and cultural rigidity – shielded domestic elites (“rich parasites”). This tainted nationalism misdirected priorities: protecting Fulani herders and cronies like Ganduje while bandits ravaged villages. The psychological toll is immeasurable: a generation adrift – students deprived, farmers dispossessed, parents burying children. The social contract has crumbled into “Nigerian dysthesia”: numbing resignation from continuous violence.

My hands shake as I type this essay, not with fear but with fury watching my nation hemorrhage while power revels in complacency. How many more Plateau mass graves before acknowledging truth? Aso Rock isn’t just failing – it’s complicit. Section 305 unravels as leaders sip champagne in armored comfort. Bandits strike within sight of Abuja’s lights (Kuje 2022, Bwari last month) – symptoms of malignancy: Buhari’s metastasized negligence becoming Tinubu’s hollow spectacle. IDP camps feature hunger edema in children while Aso Rock’s kitchen allocations could nourish states. This isn’t governance; it’s institutionalized manslaughter.

Boko Haram’s terror remains a present nightmare. The recent Borno military base overrun – where insurgents executed soldiers and broadcast slaughter – wasn’t mere attack but assault on Nigeria’s dignity. Statistics scream: 35,000 lives lost since 2015, 2.5 million displaced, 1,500 schools shuttered. In Maiduguri, Fatima watched her husband beheaded for refusing terrorist “taxes.” Her hollow eyes mirrored my fury: “They take 30% of our harvest – just like Aso Rock takes 100% of our future.” The constitutional threshold for emergency has been obliterated. Yet the Commander-in-Chief responds with statements from aides who’ve never set foot in Sambisa.

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Tinubu’s Rivers emergency was grotesque parody. Elected officials suspended while security personnel battled over promotion bribes inside Aso Rock. Within days, militants torched the Trans-Niger pipeline under his administrator’s watch as bandits abducted 120 Kaduna students. Public fury erupted (#SecureAsoRock trended for days), yet the National Assembly sat inert, bloated with ₦500 million “emergency approval” incentives. This is treason cataloged in spreadsheets: ₦12 trillion vanished from security funds under Buhari – enough to arm every willing Nigerian. While Niger villagers repel attackers with sticks, Aso Rock requisitions ₦3 billion armored Mercedes.

V. Regional Unraveling
Nations reach an inflection point when crises demand reckoning. Nigeria’s security architecture frays at its core. Aso Rock stands exposed as a monument to systemic failure. Tremors from North East to South South aren’t isolated – they’re cumulative results of governmental inertia. Only emergency declaration can compel leadership to confront these challenges.

• North East: Boko Haram/ISWAP reduced Borno, Adamawa, Yobe to rubble. 2.3 million displaced; civilian casualties highest since 2018 (411 deaths by Nov 2024). ISWAP’s resurgence with cross-border alliances forces military onto back foot.

• North West: Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina are kidnapping theaters. Criminal syndicates exploit security gaps, eroding public faith.

• North Central: Farmer-herder clashes escalated 64% YoY, fracturing Benue, Kogi, Plateau communities.

• South East: Separatist violence surged 125% in Anambra, Enugu, Imo. Simmering anger from neglect.

• South South: Militancy and cyber terror intersect. Rivers emergency declared after violence shattered communities. 64% cyber attack surge targets critical infrastructure.

• South West: Lagos/Ogun besieged by gang-cybercrime blends – bank heists, digital scams, neighborhoods held hostage.

Aso Rock’s vulnerability warns that regional rot has reached the center. Section 305 exists precisely for such moments – war, invasion, or public order collapse. Delay courts catastrophe.

We can no longer endure. National anguish must catalyze action. Emergency declaration isn’t just legal – it’s moral imperative. Our democracy, future, and lives depend on it.

VI. Midnight Sanitation
We’ve moved beyond petitions. #ReviveNigeria demands citizen-led task forces with blockchain-tracked militias. Every bullet, skirmish, operation digitally accounted for.

SERAP proposes an accountability siege: freeze Aso Rock budgets until security audits go public – make architects of economic suffocation taste cash scarcity they engineered. Judicial action must follow Femi Falana’s blueprint: activate Section 305(6), compelling National Assembly to declare emergency on power’s heart – when presidential negligence becomes principal threat.

Digital resistance must rise. Ethical hackers must dismantle terror financing on dark webs.

Power’s complacency assumes people surrendered to despair. They’re mistaken. Nigeria’s veins flow with rage potent enough to ignite transformation. When bandits abduct a senator’s daughter kilometers from Aso Rock while the president flees to Paris for “security talks,” crisis meets absurdity. I stand with Chibok mothers enduring 3,650 nights waiting for daughters abandoned by protectors. I stand with 27 million out-of-school children whose futures were bartered for elite luxury. This emergency is overdue. The citadel must be stormed.

As Remi Raji wrote: “When the palace becomes a slaughterhouse, revolution is sanitation.” This isn’t rhetoric – it’s a clarion call. The question scrawled on a federal parastatal’s gates haunts: “What crime did our children commit to inherit this hell?”

Raji’s “Lovesong for my Wasteland, Sequence VII” indicts power’s duplicity:

“no water runs where the Niger flows…

i will be thunder in the kidneys of liars…

i smell the odour in the air

which betrays the anus of the tribe

dressed but naked like prostitutes…”

Niyi Osundare’s “The Leader and the Led” allegorizes failed leadership:

“The pack thrashes around like a snake without a head…

Our need calls for a hybrid of habits –

Tough like a tiger, compassionate like a doe

Transparent like a river, mysterious like a lake”

Declaring this emergency constitutes necessary sanitation, not sedition. We must heed poets – our national conscience. We must remember pain and possibility. Refuse to inherit this hell silently. Rise not just in anger but conviction. The clock strikes midnight. The emergency begins with collective resolve.

EPILOGUE NOTE
Okorafor’s “beast” manifests in Aso Rock’s hijacked governance – ₦12 trillion vanished from security budgets since 2016; ministers in armored convoys while Niger villagers drink cholera-infested water. Shakespeare’s “chaos” embodies Nigeria’s anarchy – Rivers emergency declared for political rivalries while 400+ bodies lie unburied in bandit-ravaged communities.

Their convergence is evident: elite plundering starves security, creating insurgent vacuums. Global Terrorism Index confirms Nigeria’s surge to 6th globally in terrorism impact (incidents up 23% since 2018). Bandit “taxation” networks control highways and schools as parallel states. This breeds “Nigerian dysthesia” – numbing resignation as masses bury children while government denies.

Section 305, intended for war or civil breakdown, is weaponized to suppress opposition. Lawmakers rubber-stamp selective emergencies for ₦500 million bribes, betraying their duty to declare Aso Rock a crisis zone. The beast’s crowns are woven from constitutional subversion.

Mazi Ndubuisi Egu’s piercing query finds its answer here: The beast expands because we permit crowns; chaos reigns because we mistake folly for governance. Nigeria’s emergency originates in power’s seat. Declaring emergency on Aso Rock strips crowns before chaos consumes us.

POSTSCRIPT
Monday, 16 June 2025

As I was finalising this essay, another tragic news punctuates our tragedy: 59 slaughtered at Yelewata (Benue-Nasarawa border) – civilians, soldiers, civil defense personnel. This exposes our security apparatus’ paralyzing vulnerability. Pope Leo XIV decries the brutality; President Tinubu directs Governor Alia to “manage the crisis” from frontline while remaining in Abuja’s safety. Why does the Commander-in-Chief abstain from bloodshed’s front? Why treat constitutional emergency as abstraction? This evasion erodes public faith.

Benue’s massacre epitomizes converging plagues: terrorism, banditry, separatism, economic ruin, governmental paralysis. Tinubu’s refusal to embody command is intolerable. When the presidency signifies abdication during slaughter, extraordinary measures become imperative. His conduct – reducing command to issuing orders – reveals political expediency over national security.

Disaster management collapses alongside security. Air Vice Marshal (RTD) Akugbe Iyamu argues that recurrent flooding stems from choices: unregulated construction on drainage channels, chronic resilience underinvestment. Unlike South Africa’s president appearing at disaster sites within hours, Nigeria’s absent leadership renders disaster management a collapsing edifice. “Let our disaster management not be lost in politics” underscores that resilience requires enforcing order and investing in preparedness.

Dissenting voices amplify systemic reckoning calls. The Nigerian Guild of Editors asserts media’s indispensable accountability role. The Socialist Equality Movement (SEM) condemns ₦10 billion for Aso Rock solar panels amid national penury, demanding:

1. Arrest officials failing education/urban development

2. Repeal Cyber Crimes Act

3. Empower democratic self-defense committees

Tinubu’s “political solution” to Benue killings – mediating APC tensions while bodies litter Yelwata – epitomizes leadership by optics. Governor Alia’s claim that violence is “remote-controlled” offers no solace to families of 160 recent dead. Such choreography confirms Aso Rock’s transformation into a citadel of abstraction.

The President’s constitutional role demands presence and courage to witness state failure’s consequences. If decisive leadership remains absent within the villa, dismantling its walls and rebuilding on truth’s foundation is our imperative. Evidence is irrefutable: our ruling elite abdicated sacred duty.

Nigeria stands at the precipice. Declaring emergency under Section 305 is the essential first step toward reclaiming our nation from negligence’s abyss. The time for radical action is now.

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