Insecurity can leave permanent scars on the psyche of the young and impressionable. Its experience and government response, real or perceived, can determine the future loyalty to country, call it patriotism, of those impacted.
The casualties of Nigeria’s insecurity are many and go beyond the kidnapped, the mained, the ransom payers thrown in massive debts and those deceived by Gwamnishu and co-travelers. The genuine security agents committed to the fight, their families who lose loved ones or can’t sleep because husbands with mere rifles and limited bullets have gone to confront terrorists armed with submachine guns that carry a box and chain of ammunitions, are casualties too. So are the farmers who can’t farm anymore and those who planted but the harvest was done by herdsmen wielding AK47, daring them to complain!
If you couldn’t travel for Christmas and New Year celebrations in the village where the real fun is; if you now regard the highway with trepidation rather than see it as a bridge connecting friends, families and communities in different locales; if you hear the sound of bangers and you dive for cover, or curse the one foolhardy enough to shoot it at this time; or driving along you see a broken-down vehicle and you turn and frantically start driving backwards, thinking those by that vehicle must surely be bandits and kidnappers, you are all casualties of this insecurity in the nation too.
So is the parent of a teenage JSS3 student I saw at MMA2 yesterday with her son, a student of Lumen Christi International School Uromi. He was wearing his iconic green school house uniform. It was the uniform that gave him away! As a parent of an alumnus of the school, I stopped to greet them and introduced myself. We (the boy and I) were on the same Aero flight to Benin City. I offered to chaperone the boy to Benin and possibly take him with me to Lumen Christi since I too would be headed to Uromi to receive the corpse of my sister who died that morning and was being brought from Port Harcourt.
The mother’s concern was the reported insecurity (kidnapping, banditry, and protests) at Ekpoma through which we would drive to Uromi after landing at the airport. I reassured her that he would be very safe as there are alternative routes. I had information that the town was calm as at that morning. She looked unconvinced and her fear was palpable as she conversed with me! She had arranged for someone to take the son from Benin airport to Uromi.
The little boy listened to this conversation. I didn’t ask his views but I was sure in his mind would be confusion as to why his beloved mother had to be in such distress just because he was going to school as his contemporaries do all over the world! And he would wonder why those charged with securing our lives from harm seem to be less powerless than those that do not want us to have peace.
He would be thinking why government is so impotent that his going to school is now like going to battle unarmed!
It would not be unlikely that this impressionable young man would be asking his parents why he too cannot go abroad to join his friends whose parents have sent them there. Those do not talk about kidnappers. They only tell him about computer games, their learning of AI and school escortion to the zoos and wildlife sanctuaries and football games.
Love of country would be far from his mind. He would wonder too, why his dad cannot just take him to school with police or army escorts the way two of his classmates do, with siren blaring. Can he join the army, like Gumi’s son did, and have daddy fix epaulettes to his shoulders declaring him a 2nd Lieutenant? These may be the thoughts crossing the inscrutable mind of the little boy at the airport.
His little heart would have been beating a little harder as we prepared to disembark at Benin City Airport whose outer wall paints have all peeled off and discoloured by rain damage due to bad design and short-cuts by contractors and their conspirators who eat our present and future.
I was a casualty of the dysfunctional state of our nation too. My sister would not have died had hospitals not gone on strike; had governments honoured agreements with doctors; had arrangements I made for her medical attention not failed due to our over-religiousity that interfered with a critical link in the chain; she would not have needed to be moved to Port Harcourt crossing Edo, Delta, Anambra and Imo States to get help at Port Harcourt in Wike’s Rivers State; there would have been no need to move her through three hospitals (including a military one) before a functional one with bed space be found in the only functional Teaching Hospital that has patients on floors and medical personnel overwhelmed. CT scan equipment is as scarce as squirrels excrement in these parts.
As I thought about these things, I wondered too if Manduro migrated from here or left his clones to lead us. The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind…..
*12 Jan. 2026*
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