WHEN A NATION BECOMES ACCUSTOMED TO FAILURE

There is something more frightening than a country being confronted by a serious national crisis. It is a country becoming so accustomed to the crisis that each new outrage produces little more than the familiar cycle of shock, condemnation, official statements, emergency meetings and promises that gradually disappear until the next tragedy arrives.

Nigeria has become dangerously familiar with this cycle.

People are kidnapped. Government condemns the attack. Security agencies are ordered to act. Politicians express outrage. Citizens pray. The victims become headlines for a few days. Then the country moves on.

Until the next community is invaded.

Until another family receives a ransom demand.

Until another school becomes unsafe.

Until another highway becomes a hunting ground.

Until another village empties itself because the people who live there have concluded that the state can no longer guarantee their safety.

At what point do we stop describing these incidents as isolated security failures and begin admitting that they are evidence of a deeper failure of the Nigerian state?

That is the question Aiyekooto must ask without fear of offending anybody.

The recent mass abduction in Niger State should not be treated merely as another horrifying episode in the country’s long catalogue of insecurity. The reported scale of the incident has again exposed the vulnerability of communities that are physically distant from the centres where national security decisions are made. The President ordered an immediate rescue operation, as any responsible government should. But the question Nigerians must ask is more uncomfortable: why must the rescue begin after hundreds of people have already been carried away?

That is not an argument against rescue operations. It is an argument for prevention.

A government that arrives after the crime has occurred cannot claim the same measure of success as one that prevented the crime in the first place.

This distinction has become blurred in our national conversation.

We have become too willing to celebrate reaction as though reaction were prevention. We announce that troops have been deployed after an attack, that security agencies have been directed to rescue victims, that commanders have been ordered to intensify operations. All of these may be necessary. None answers the more important question of what happened before the attackers arrived.

Was there intelligence?

Was it shared?

Did somebody receive it?

Did somebody have the authority to act?

Did the security personnel have the mobility, communications, equipment and local knowledge required to respond?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, who is responsible?

Nigeria has spent years discussing intelligence gathering while communities continue to complain that warning signs are ignored until violence becomes impossible to hide. We have built an elaborate vocabulary around national security, but the ordinary citizen remains interested in something much simpler: whether the government can keep armed men away from his home.

The kidnapping economy has become particularly revealing. Recent research cited by Reuters estimates that thousands of Nigerians were abducted between July 2025 and June 2026, with kidnappers collecting millions of dollars in ransom. The figures are conservative because many payments never become public.

This is no longer merely criminality.

It is an industry.

And every industry responds to incentives.

Where kidnapping produces money, weapons and influence, while the probability of swift punishment remains uncertain, the business will continue to attract people into it. Government must therefore attack not only the gunmen but the ecosystem that sustains them. Their financiers, informants, arms suppliers, ransom intermediaries, safe houses and channels for moving money cannot remain invisible while the public is repeatedly told that security forces are winning the war.

A country cannot arrest the foot soldiers forever while leaving the machinery that feeds them intact.

The same principle applies to corruption within the security system itself.

It is unfair to ask soldiers and policemen to perform miracles without asking whether they have the equipment, intelligence, logistics and leadership necessary to do their jobs. But it is equally unfair to the honest personnel in uniform when procurement failures, administrative leakages, poor planning or institutional rivalry undermine operations and nobody is held responsible.

Nigeria must stop treating accountability as an insult to the security establishment.

Accountability is part of security.

A commander who succeeds deserves recognition. One who fails through circumstances beyond his control deserves support. But an official who ignores credible intelligence, mismanages resources or repeatedly fails in a responsibility entrusted to him should not be protected merely because the matter concerns national security.

Secrecy cannot become a blanket covering incompetence.

This is where the political class must also examine itself.

We have created a culture in which every administration inherits insecurity and immediately begins explaining why the problem is more complicated than it appeared from outside government. There is always a history. There is always a predecessor to blame. There is always another committee, another strategy, another intervention, another acquisition programme.

But the citizen is not living in the history of the problem.

He is living inside its consequences.

The farmer whose land has become inaccessible does not eat an explanation about the complexity of insecurity. The parent who cannot send a child to school because armed men operate around the community does not draw comfort from another security summit. The traveller who fears abduction on the road does not measure government performance by the number of security meetings held in Abuja.

Government is ultimately judged at the point where policy touches life.

That is why the country needs to change the way it measures security.

The number of weapons purchased is not security.

The number of operations announced is not security.

The number of meetings held by security chiefs is not security.

The number of press statements issued after an attack is certainly not security.

Security is the reduction of fear.

Security is the restoration of normal life.

Security is the farmer returning to his field.

Security is the child walking to school.

Security is the trader travelling between towns without calculating the possibility of becoming a ransom victim.

Security is the family sleeping without listening for motorcycles outside the compound.

This is not too much to demand from a government.

Indeed, it is the most basic obligation of government.

There is, however, another uncomfortable truth. Citizens must also examine the culture that surrounds this crisis.

We cannot condemn kidnapping while quietly celebrating the sudden wealth of people whose sources of income nobody can explain. We cannot complain about corruption and then offer money to officials to bypass procedures. We cannot demand justice while protecting criminals because they belong to our community, political camp, ethnic group or religious circle.

A society cannot outsource morality entirely to government.

But there is no equivalence between the responsibilities of citizens and those of the state. Government possesses the coercive authority, intelligence architecture, security institutions and public resources required to protect citizens. Its responsibility is therefore greater.

The citizen may be tempted to compromise.

The state must not.

The state must know better.

This is why the present moment requires more than anger. It requires institutional honesty.

If intelligence is not reaching the field, fix the intelligence chain.

If agencies are competing rather than cooperating, enforce a system that makes cooperation compulsory and measurable.

If communities are inaccessible to security forces, invest in mobility and communications.

If ransom payments are financing criminal networks, follow the money.

If weapons are entering through porous borders, strengthen border intelligence and enforcement.

If local informants are exposing communities to attackers, protect those who provide credible information.

If personnel are repeatedly deployed without adequate support, fix the logistics.

If officials fail through negligence, let the consequences be unmistakable.

These are not revolutionary ideas.

They are the elementary requirements of a functioning state.

The tragedy is that Nigeria often knows what needs to be done. What it has not demonstrated consistently is the discipline to do it, sustain it and punish those who frustrate it.

That is the real mask that must come off.

Our greatest problem is not ignorance of our problems.

It is the tolerance of known problems.

We know that rural communities are vulnerable. We know that criminal groups exploit difficult terrain. We know that intelligence sharing remains critical. We know that policing capacity is inadequate in many places. We know that corruption weakens institutions. We know that poor roads and communications complicate response. We know that kidnapping has become financially attractive.

Yet knowledge without execution becomes another form of helplessness.

Nigeria does not need another season of national outrage followed by administrative forgetfulness.

It needs consequences.

The government must be willing to identify failures honestly, correct them publicly and hold responsible officials to account. The security services must be given what they require to perform. Communities must become partners rather than distant spectators. And citizens must stop romanticising the very culture of impunity that eventually turns against everybody.

The question is no longer whether Nigeria has security plans.

It has plenty.

The question is whether the Nigerian state can finally develop the institutional discipline to make those plans work before another community is buried, another family is shattered and another group of citizens becomes a statistic.

Aiyekooto has no interest in comforting anybody with pretty words.

The truth is uncomfortable.

A nation cannot call itself secure because its government is capable of responding to disaster.

It becomes secure when the government becomes capable of preventing disaster.

Until then, every emergency rescue is also a reminder of the failure that made the rescue necessary.

And Nigerians deserve better than a government that keeps arriving after the damage is done.

Ogundipe, Public Affairs Analyst and former President Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists writes from Abuja.