Monday, December 1, 2025 - Serving Overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, Tunde Bakare, has challenged President Bola Tinubu to confront Nigeria’s worsening insecurity head-on, accusing the federal government of “playing the ostrich” as terrorists expand their attacks across the country.
Speaking in Lagos during his state of the nation address
titled “The Darkness Before Dawn,” Bakare warned that Nigeria is “in the centre
of an unfolding storm,” saying the spike in violence coincides with renewed
global scrutiny following U.S. President Donald Trump’s redesignation of
Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern over alleged government-tolerated
killings of Christians.
“The level of insecurity seems to have worsened… terrorists
and bandits brazenly dare the Nigerian state,” he said.
Bakare urged Tinubu to resist the temptation to shape policy
around the 2027 elections and instead “embark on the holistic reform of the
security and governance framework” he once championed as an advocate of
restructuring.
“President Bola Tinubu stands at the threshold of history,”
Bakare said. “He can either take the bull by the horns or, like his
predecessors, prioritise politics, resort to piecemeal interventions, and
approach the situation in fits and starts.”
While acknowledging ongoing federal efforts — including the
security emergency declaration and mass police recruitment — he insisted the
country’s security architecture requires deeper restructuring.
Bakare said Tinubu must confront what he called the Nigeria
Question — unresolved national identity and governance issues that have shaped
the country’s tensions since independence.
“Who is a Nigerian? What minimum dignity must every Nigerian
be guaranteed? Under what terms should groups coexist?” he asked, adding that
the political imbalance between North and South, economic disparities, resource
control debates and ethnic grievances continue to fuel instability.
He said decades-long failures to resolve disputes between
Hausa farmers and Fulani pastoralists allowed local tensions to evolve into “a
sophisticated and deeply entrenched network of terror.”
‘Stop masking terrorism as farmer-herder clashes’
Bakare accused the government of downplaying coordinated
armed attacks, particularly in the Middle Belt, by describing them as mere
farmer-herder clashes.
“It is a shame on the Nigerian government that these
communities would resort to calling on the American government to help because
their own government has failed them,” he said.
He urged the federal government to directly dismantle the
camps of “armed marauders who hide under the cloak of herdsmen of whatever
ethnicity” and continue to massacre civilians
0 Comments