Maiduguri keeps rebuilding its markets faster than the state rebuilds its promises.

On the evening of March 16, 2026, three suicide bombers walked into Maiduguri as the city broke its Ramadan fast. They hit a hospital and two crowded markets within minutes of each other. Officials eventually counted 27 dead and 146 wounded; residents in the outlying wards say the real toll was higher, and one father buried four children that week. No group claimed the attack. The army blamed Boko Haram, the insurgency that was born in that same city seventeen years ago and that a year of relative quiet had let much of the country half forget.

That is the trap Nigeria keeps falling into: mistaking a lull for an ending. Northern Nigeria’s insurgency has never been one war. It is a loose, mutating ecosystem of armed groups, jihadist and criminal, sometimes both at once, and every time it goes quiet in one place, it is usually because it has found new ground somewhere else. Right now that ground runs from Lake Chad in the northeast, across the bandit run forests of the northwest, down into Nigeria’s Middle Belt, and outward across borders that were drawn without anyone in the region in mind. I want to make the case, plainly, that this is no longer a story about “the North.” It is a story about the survival of West Africa’s largest economy and the stability of everyone around it, and both Abuja and its neighbors are still responding as if it were someone else’s emergency.

An ecosystem, not an enemy

Four names matter here, and they are not interchangeable. Boko Haram (JAS) is the original insurgency, territorially diminished but still capable of the kind of coordinated bombing that hit Maiduguri. ISWAP, the Islamic State’s West Africa franchise, split from Boko Haram in 2016 and has proven the more disciplined, better resourced faction, running a de facto government model across parts of the Lake Chad Basin. Ansaru, an older Al Qaeda linked offshoot, has reemerged in the northwest after years of dormancy. And Lakurawa, the newest entrant, took root in Sokoto and Kebbi states after Niger’s 2023 coup scrambled cross border security cooperation and gave armed groups room to move; a Nigerian court formally proscribed it as a terrorist organization only recently.

Layered underneath all of this is banditry, armed criminal gangs, many with no coherent ideology, that kidnap for ransom, raid villages, and rustle cattle across the northwest and into the Middle Belt. Security analysts have spent the past year warning about something more dangerous than any single group: convergence. Boko Haram, ISWAP, Ansaru and bandit networks increasingly share routes, weapons, and in some documented cases, direct cooperation, a crime and terror nexus that is far harder to fight than any one faction alone, because it doesn’t collapse when you kill one leader.

The scale of what this ecosystem has produced is worth sitting with.

3.5 million displaced across the Lake Chad Basin. 1.3 million displaced from the Middle Belt. Over 5,700 fatalities in nine months. 8.2 million people needing humanitarian help. These are not abstractions, they are children who grew up in tents.

The Middle Belt is where the story turns

For years, Nigeria’s security establishment treated the northeast insurgency and the northwest to Middle Belt banditry as separate files. They are converging into one. Nigeria’s Middle Belt, Benue, Plateau, Niger, Kaduna states, sits at the collision point of an old farmer and herder land conflict, a changing climate that has pushed pastoralist routes further south, and armed groups willing to exploit both. The result has been some of the worst mass casualty violence in the country: over 200 people killed in a single June 2025 attack in Benue, including displaced people sheltering at a Catholic mission; more than 200 killed and 3,000 displaced in Yelwata; a steady drumbeat of smaller attacks in Plateau and Niger states through early 2026, often timed to Christmas, Easter, or Palm Sunday for maximum psychological effect. A U.S. government commission estimated in May 2026 that 1.3 million people have been driven off their land in the Middle Belt alone, into overcrowded camps that offer little more safety than what they fled.

This is the geography that matters for the rest of Nigeria, because the Middle Belt is not the “far north.” It is the country’s breadbasket and its bridge to the south, Benue is one of Nigeria’s most important farming states. When it burns, the effect does not stay there.

You cannot pound yam that was never harvested. A breadbasket at gunpoint feeds no one.

The South is not a bystander

Southern Nigeria has largely told itself a comforting story: that the insurgency is a northern affair, remote from Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Enugu. That comfort is eroding on three fronts.

Food and prices. Nigeria’s food inflation has been driven substantially by insecurity choking supply chains out of the north and Middle Belt, the country’s key grain and cattle producing regions. When farmers in Benue and Zamfara are killed, kidnapped, or too afraid to plant, the effect shows up as higher prices for garri, tomatoes, and beef in southern markets months later. Analysts tracking Nigeria’s food security in 2026 have flagged the northwest conflict specifically as a driver of rising need nationally, not just regionally.

Lagos thinks the war is somewhere else. The price tag says otherwise.

Kidnapping’s southward drift. The ransom economy that Boko Haram pioneered and bandit groups industrialized in the north has never respected the Niger River as a boundary. Kidnapping for ransom has become a recurring feature of life well beyond the north, and the psychological normalization of it, that abduction is simply a risk of travel, of sending your child to school, is a northern export the south has absorbed without ever being asked.

A stretched, distracted state. Every soldier, dollar, and unit of political attention spent on the northeast and northwest is one not spent on the Niger Delta, on Lagos’s own security challenges, or on the basic business of governing. A federal government fighting an insurgency on multiple fronts at once is a federal government with less capacity to invest anywhere else, and investors price that in nationally, not regionally. Nigeria’s economic outlook, its currency, and its standing with lenders are shaped in part by a security crisis most of its southern population will never personally witness.

The region catches what Nigeria cannot contain

Nigeria’s insurgency has never respected its own borders, and 2026 has made that unusually visible.

A lake that shrank to a tenth of its size now anchors a crisis that has swallowed four countries. Geography did not draw these borders with people in mind, and the insurgency has noticed.

The Lake Chad Basin, the wetland frontier shared by Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, is, in the UN refugee agency’s own words, at a “tipping point.” Security incidents there are up roughly 80% since early 2024. Nine months of data through May 2026 show nearly 1,800 recorded incidents and more than 5,700 deaths. Sixteen thousand people fled northeast Nigeria into Niger’s Diffa region in a single recent wave; Chad’s Lac province has absorbed 60,000 displaced from recurrent cross border attacks. Roughly half the children in the worst hit areas are out of school, 78% in Lac province specifically. UNHCR says it needs $29 million just to sustain current operations through the end of the year, a modest sum against a crisis of this scale that remains chronically underfunded.

Zoom out further and Nigeria’s insurgency sits inside a larger, grimmer regional pattern. JNIM, the Al Qaeda linked coalition that has fought its way across Mali and Burkina Faso, has been pushing toward the West African coast, toward Benin, Togo, and northern Côte d’Ivoire, for several years now, exploiting the same governance vacuums, the same porous borders, and in places the same logistics networks that sustain groups in Nigeria’s northwest. This is not a coincidence of geography. It is one long belt of instability running from the Sahel through the Lake Chad Basin, and Nigeria, the region’s largest economy and military, sits at its hinge.

A flag is supposed to mean a bloc still shows up together. Three coups and three exits later, it is doing less work than it used to.

ECOWAS, already weakened by a string of coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger and the exit of those three states from the bloc, has less capacity to respond collectively than it did a decade ago, at precisely the moment collective response is most needed.

Washington finally showed up. Whether it is diagnosing the disease or just treating one symptom is still an open question.

Washington has taken notice, if messily. Since December 2025, U.S. forces have conducted airstrikes from the Gulf of Guinea, deployed roughly 200 personnel in a training and advisory role, and expanded to special forces raids and additional strikes in the northeast by May 2026, after the November 2025 mass abductions of 25 schoolgirls from one school and 303 children and 12 teachers from another put Nigeria’s crisis back on the front page globally. The intervention followed Nigeria’s redesignation as a Country of Particular Concern over religious freedom, and U.S. officials, including the Defense Secretary, have at times framed the mission specifically around protecting Christians. Nigeria’s own government has pushed back on that framing, and security researchers largely agree with Abuja on this point: Nigerians of every faith are targets. ISWAP and Boko Haram attack mosques as readily as churches; bandit kidnapping gangs in the northwest are agnostic about their victims’ religion; the raw numbers of Muslim victims of jihadist and bandit violence in the north are, by most independent trackers, larger than the number of Christian victims, even as certain attacks, including some in the Middle Belt, have specifically and deliberately targeted Christian communities. Both things are true at once, and a debate in Washington that flattens this into a single religion narrative does real harm: it obscures the actual drivers of the crisis, and it risks external interventions built on the wrong diagnosis.

Training a battalion is not the same as holding a territory. Nigeria has plenty of the first and not nearly enough of the second.

My case, plainly

I think the religious persecution framing that has come to dominate the international conversation about Nigeria, while it captures something real, particularly in parts of the Middle Belt, is ultimately a distraction from the harder and more honest diagnosis: this is a governance crisis first, and a sectarian one only in specific, documentable pockets of it. It is what happens when a state cannot secure its own territory, cannot resolve a land dispute between farmers and herders that is decades old before it becomes a killing field, cannot police a border that a neighboring coup left wide open, and cannot get grain out of its own breadbasket without an armed escort. Armed groups, jihadist, criminal, or both, do not create that vacuum. They find it and move in.

That diagnosis matters because it points to a different set of solutions than airstrikes and a religious freedom designation alone can deliver. Nigeria needs a security sector capable of holding territory after it clears it, not just raiding it. It needs a Middle Belt land and resettlement policy that treats farmer and herder conflict as the resolvable governance failure it is, not an intractable ancient hatred. It needs the kind of regional intelligence sharing and border coordination that an ECOWAS fractured by coups is currently poorly equipped to provide, and its neighbors and Western partners should be investing as much in rebuilding that regional architecture as in any single strike package. And southern Nigeria, which has largely watched this crisis from a comfortable distance, needs to recognize that a country cannot be economically stable in the south while it is burning in the north and center, that the two are, and always were, one balance sheet.

None of that is a complete answer, and reasonable people looking at the same evidence disagree sharply about how much weight to put on religious targeting versus general criminality and state failure, and about whether outside military intervention helps or entrenches the problem. Those are live, contested questions, and I don’t think anyone, least of all an outside observer, should pretend otherwise. What isn’t contested is the direction of the trend: incidents up 80% in the Lake Chad Basin since 2024, a Middle Belt emptying by the millions, a jihadist corridor running from the Sahel to the coast gaining ground, and a regional bloc less able to respond collectively than it was ten years ago. West Africa does not have the luxury of treating any part of this as someone else’s fire.

Sources and further reading: UNHCR Lake Chad Basin briefing (April 2026); IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix, Lake Chad Basin Crisis Dashboards 80–81; USCIRF, via Sahara Reporters (May 2026); FEWS NET Nigeria Food Security Outlook (June 2026); Africa Defense Forum reporting on terror group cooperation and the banditry crisis (2026); Wikipedia entries on the 2026 Maiduguri bombings and the 2026 U.S. intervention in Nigeria; Hudson Institute and Small Wars Journal commentary on Nigeria’s CPC redesignation.

Image credits: photographs sourced from Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons licenses, credited individually above) and DVIDS, the U.S. Department of Defense’s public domain media archive. All are free to reuse with attribution as noted.

On a Tuesday in late June 2019, most Nigerians had never heard the word “RUGA.” By the following week, it had become the most explosive acronym in the country’s politics invoked in state house press conferences, cited in ultimatums from northern youth groups, denounced from the pulpit by Wole Soyinka, and suspended by the federal government before a single settlement had broken ground. Understanding why a rural land use plan detonated that fast requires understanding what many Nigerians believed it actually was: not an agricultural reform, but the clearest evidence yet of an ethnic project running underneath the Buhari administration.

This is the case that RUGA’s critics made laid out with the evidence they cited, the government’s rebuttal, and what actually happened once the dust settled.

What RUGA proposed

RUGA, a Fulani term rendered officially as “Rural Grazing Area” was a plan to carve out reserved settlements across Nigeria’s states where nomadic Fulani herders could base their cattle permanently, ending the seasonal, cross country migration that had increasingly put herders in violent contact with farming communities. The idea wasn’t new: versions of it trace back to the Obasanjo and Yar’Adua administrations. What made the 2019 iteration different was how it arrived, approved through the National Economic Council, publicly announced in June 2019 as a plan to allocate land in every state of the federation, with the federal government initially describing it as something states would be expected to implement rather than opt into.

It followed directly on the heels of an earlier, equally short lived proposal: the 2018 “cattle colonies” plan, which had already been rejected by the great majority of Nigeria’s 36 states before RUGA revived the same basic concept under a new name.

The case critics made

The allegation that RUGA represented a Fulani ethnic agenda, rather than neutral agricultural policy, rested on several specific pieces of evidence that opponents pointed to at the time.

Land, and who controls it. Under Nigeria’s Land Use Act, land is vested in state governors, not the federal government. RUGA’s initial design, federal land allocation across all 36 states was read by many governors and civil society groups as a direct federal override of that constitutional arrangement, for the specific benefit of one ethnic group’s economic activity.

The Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum did not mince words, accusing the administration of “seeking to colonize Nigeria through the establishment of Ruga settlement.”

Afenifere in the southwest, Ohanaeze Ndigbo in the southeast, and the Middle Belt Forum in the north central states organizations that rarely agree on much all came out in unified opposition within days of each other.

The Benue anomaly.

Perhaps the most cited piece of evidence was Benue State’s reaction. Benue had suffered some of the worst herder farmer violence in the country and, on paper, stood to gain from any credible plan to reduce it. Instead, Benue’s government joined the southern opposition, arguing that RUGA would reward the very herding practices its own anti open grazing law had been built to restrict. Critics took this as proof that the plan wasn’t primarily read, even in the region most affected by the violence, as a genuine conflict resolution tool.

Coercion dressed as consultation.

Coercion dressed as consultation. While southern and Middle Belt governors were rejecting the plan, northern groups moved in the opposite direction issuing a public ultimatum giving the south 30 days to accept RUGA and pressing Buhari to implement it immediately regardless of state consent. To critics, a “voluntary” federal program that comes bundled with an ultimatum from one region against the others is not voluntary in any meaningful sense; it reads as a demand backed by political pressure.

Pattern, not incident. RUGA didn’t arrive in a vacuum. It landed against a backdrop of years of criticism from Nigerian commentators, opposition politicians, and international observers that Buhari’s appointments to sensitive federal positions, particularly in security leadership, had disproportionately favored the north and, more specifically, his own Fulani ethnic base. For critics, RUGA wasn’t an isolated agricultural proposal to be judged on its own; it was the latest data point in a longer pattern they believed pointed toward ethnic favoritism in how the administration allocated land, jobs, and protection.

The violence gap.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s public warning that the country risked moving from “Boko Haram to Boko Ruga” captured a broader grievance: that farming communities attacked by armed herders had, in the view of many Nigerians, seen a slower and less forceful federal security response than incidents involving other kinds of violence. Whether or not that perception was statistically accurate, it shaped how RUGA was read the moment it appeared as land for the group associated, fairly or not, with the violence, rather than protection for the group being killed.

The government’s defense

The Buhari administration and its allies pushed back hard against the “Fulanization” framing, and their counter case deserves to be stated on its own terms.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo publicly distanced himself from RUGA specifically, signaling daylight within the administration itself about how the policy had been designed and communicated. Governor Atiku Bagudu, speaking for the APC Governors Forum, said Buhari ordered the suspension “considering the controversies its introduction has caused” an acknowledgment that the rollout, at minimum, had been badly mishandled, without conceding the ethnic agenda charge itself.

The government’s substantive defense rested on three points: that RUGA descended from a genuinely older, cross administration policy lineage predating Buhari and even predating the current wave of Fulani linked violence; that the underlying problem over 1,000 violent herder farmer incidents between 2010 and 2019, up from fewer than 100 in the prior decade, driven substantially by desertification and climate linked pasture loss pushing herds southward was real, national, and worsening regardless of who governed; and that RUGA was superseded by, and should be read as separate from, the National Livestock Transformation Plan the National Economic Council had already adopted in January 2019, which was explicitly voluntary and state by state.

That last point has some real support: eleven northern states voluntarily contributed roughly 55,000 hectares toward the Plan, while most southern states simply declined to participate which is closer to an opt in structure than a federally imposed land grab, at least on paper.

Separately, investigative reporting has since raised further questions about the RUGA program’s finances specifically, including documented allegations that billions of naira in RUGA linked contracts were awarded to newly registered, thinly documented companies adding a second, corruption shaped layer of scrutiny on top of the original ethnic agenda controversy.

Sources consulted for this piece include contemporaneous Nigerian reporting (AllAfrica, Vanguard, ThisDay, TheCable, Sahara Reporters, Guardian Nigeria), the International Crisis Group’s 2022 report “Ending Nigeria’s Herder-Farmer Crisis: The Livestock Reform Plan,” and background on the policy’s history and controversy.

Turkey’s re-entry into Central Asia, and its simultaneous reassertion of power across the Middle East, is one of the more consequential and under-discussed geopolitical stories of this decade. It isn’t a single master plan. It’s a convergence: a religious-cultural “ecumeny” built on shared Turkic and Islamic identity, a defense-export boom led by the Bayraktar drone, a transport-corridor strategy engineered to make Turkey indispensable to Eurasian trade, and a newly assertive posture in Syria and the wider Arab world following the collapse of the Assad regime. Put these pieces together and you understand why Ankara now matters in conversations about both Kazakhstan’s foreign policy and Israel’s northern security calculus two conversations that, until recently, had nothing to do with each other.

From Atatürk’s Inward Turn to Erdoğan’s Outward One

Modern Turkey spent most of the twentieth century deliberately turning its back on the idea of pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic leadership. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk built the republic as a secular, inward-looking nation-state, and Soviet control of Central Asia and the Caucasus made any Turkic solidarity project moot for seventy years. That changed overnight in 1991. The USSR’s collapse produced five newly independent, Turkic-majority states Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan and Ankara, under Turgut Özal, was first through the door with embassies, scholarships, and a state broadcaster beaming Turkish-language programming eastward.

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That first wave of enthusiasm mostly fizzled. Turkey in the 1990s was economically fragile, and Central Asian elites, freshly independent, had no interest in trading a Moscow patron for an Ankara one. What’s changed since is durability. Erdoğan’s Turkey is economically larger, militarily sharper, and far more comfortable running hard and soft power on the same track than the Turkey of Özal or even early Erdoğan. The result is a slow-built architecture of influence that has matured almost quietly over the past decade and is no longer being ignored.

The Institutional Skeleton: OTS and the “Turkic World Vision 2040”

The centerpiece is the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), successor to the looser Turkic Council, grouping Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan as full members, with Turkmenistan and Hungary as observers. What matters isn’t that it exists, it’s what it’s started doing. The bloc has adopted a formal long-term roadmap, the “Turkic World Vision 2040,” laying out economic integration, a joint investment fund, coordinated transport infrastructure, and even talk of a common alphabet and standardized Turkic-language education, a symbolically loaded project, since script reform has historically been a tool for both drawing closer to and pulling away from Moscow.

A room full of Central Asian and Caucasus leaders, taking notes on the Levant.

The OTS has also become a stage for increasingly bold rhetoric. At the Budapest summit, and again at the 2025 Qabala summit in Azerbaijan, Erdoğan urged member states to “think beyond our borders,” framing the Turkic world as a bloc with interests well outside Central Asia explicitly invoking Lebanon, Syria, and opposition to what he called Israeli “expansionism.” A summit of Central Asian and Caucasus states being used to stake out positions on the Levant is itself telling: Ankara increasingly treats “Turkic” and “Middle Eastern” foreign policy as one continuous theater, not two separate portfolios.

Beneath the OTS sits a thicker layer of soft-power plumbing, decades in the building and now paying off: TİKA, which funds development projects and restores Ottoman-era heritage sites across the region; the Yunus Emre Institutes, Turkey’s answer to the British Council; TÜRKSOY, promoting a shared Turkic artistic canon; and a growing web of Turkish-run schools and universities that have, in several Central Asian states, quietly replaced the Gülen-movement schools Ankara spent years pressuring host governments to shut down after the 2016 coup attempt.

Hard Power Follows Soft Power: The Drone Decade

If the 2000s were cultural affinity, the 2020s are hardware. Turkey’s defense industry led by Baykar’s Bayraktar TB2 and Akıncı drones has become one of Ankara’s most effective instruments of regional influence, and Central Asia has been an eager customer. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have all signed drone deals or deepened military-technical cooperation with Turkey in recent years, and Kazakhstan in particular has framed its purchases around border security and regional deterrence rather than any single adversary.

This matters for a reason bigger than arms revenue. Central Asian militaries were, for three decades, almost entirely dependent on Russian equipment, training, and doctrine. Every drone contract signed with Baykar is a small but real diversification away from that dependency arriving right as Russia’s war in Ukraine has both distracted the Kremlin from its “near abroad” and dented confidence in Russian military hardware as the regional gold standard. Turkey has been the most visible beneficiary of that opening: a supplier that is Muslim-majority, non-Western, non-Chinese, and culturally legible to the buyers.

Azerbaijan is the model case Ankara likes to point to. Turkish drones, doctrine, and diplomatic cover were central to Baku’s 2020 and 2023 victories over Armenia in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Turkish-Azerbaijani relationship long billed by both governments as “one nation, two states” is the template Ankara wants to extend eastward across the Caspian.

The Corridor Play: Geoeconomics as Geopolitics

Underneath all of it is infrastructure. The Middle Corridor formally the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route runs from China through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea, through Azerbaijan and Georgia, into Turkey and onward to Europe, deliberately routing around both Russia and Iran. For Turkey, the corridor is grand strategy in miniature: it makes Ankara a physically indispensable node in Eurasian trade, gives Central Asian states an alternative to total dependence on Russian and Chinese routes, and builds the kind of interdependence that soft-power institutes alone can’t manufacture.

The corridor also puts Turkey in a three-way relationship with the two powers that have historically dominated Central Asia. Russia, weakened and distracted by Ukraine, has less capacity to police the “near abroad” it once treated as exclusive turf. China flush with capital and increasingly using the Middle Corridor itself to hedge against instability in Russia and Pakistan is simultaneously Turkey’s largest infrastructure competitor in the region and a partner Ankara needs for corridor financing. Turkey’s answer has been careful multi-alignment: deepen ties with Central Asian capitals without picking a fight with Moscow or Beijing, extract economic and military openings where possible, and let the OTS do the slow work of consolidation. Central Asian governments have their own reasons to welcome a third option, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and the others have spent years avoiding an exclusive Russian or Chinese orbit, and a resurgent Turkey offers a hedge that costs them relatively little in sovereignty.

Turning West Again: Syria, Israel, and the Gulf

The same period that saw Turkey deepen its Central Asian footprint also saw it become the single most consequential outside power in a rebuilt Syria. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 removed Turkey’s most durable regional adversary and installed a government under Ahmed al-Sharaa that owes much of its military and political viability to Turkish backing training, intelligence support, and now defense pacts and reconstruction contracts that put Turkish companies and Turkish leverage at the center of Syria’s rebuilding. Analysts have taken to describing Ankara’s approach with a blunt shorthand: topple, tame, trade.

That new centrality has put Turkey on a collision course with Israel. Both states now operate extensively inside Syrian territory, both claim to be acting against extremist threats, and both eye the other’s ambitions in the vacuum Assad left behind producing what several analysts have started calling an emerging cold war, playing out through overflights, proxy positioning, and increasingly blunt talk of “red lines” on both sides. Erdoğan has folded this rivalry into his broader messaging to the Turkic and Islamic world, casting Turkey as the chief check on Israeli expansion in the Levant which conveniently rallies domestic and regional Islamist-leaning constituencies while reinforcing Ankara’s claim to Middle Eastern leadership.

Turkey’s Gulf relationships complete the picture. Years of estrangement with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt over Ankara’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood have given way to a more transactional détente, even as the underlying ideological rivalry hasn’t disappeared. Qatar remains Turkey’s closest Gulf partner, and the two capitals continue to be viewed particularly by Emirati, Saudi, and Israeli officials as the twin patrons of political Islam in the region, a framing Ankara mostly doesn’t bother denying.

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Ecumeny as Strategy

What ties Central Asia and the Middle East together in Turkish strategic thinking is the idea of ecumeny a sphere held together not by hard borders or formal empire but by shared religion, language, historical memory, and now, increasingly, economic and security dependency. It’s a deliberately elastic concept, and the elasticity is the point: it lets Ankara address Central Asian audiences in the language of Turkic kinship, Arab and broader Muslim audiences in the language of Islamic solidarity and anti-Israeli resistance, and Western audiences in the language of a reliable NATO member offering an alternative to Russian and Chinese influence sometimes within the same week.

This is neo-Ottomanism updated for a multipolar world, and Erdoğan’s government has been candid enough about the ambition that nobody needs to read between the lines anymore. The strategy borrows the Ottoman Empire’s old trick of ruling through a layered network of loyalties rather than direct annexation, but runs it with twenty-first-century tools: drone sales instead of janissary garrisons, satellite broadcasting instead of court patronage, development banks instead of tax farming.

The Limits Nobody Should Ignore

None of this is a story of unstoppable Turkish ascent. Central Asian governments have been notably careful not to become instruments of any single outside power, Turkey included, hedging Ankara’s overtures against continuing, substantial relationships with Moscow and Beijing, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in particular have pointedly resisted OTS language that reads as more than symbolic. Turkey’s own economy, still recovering from years of currency crisis and inflation, limits how much capital Ankara can actually deploy compared to Chinese infrastructure financing. And Turkey’s Syria policy, however successful in the near term, carries real risk: a Turkish-Israeli confrontation, a Kurdish backlash, or an implosion of the fragile al-Sharaa government could unwind two years of gains in a matter of months.

Still, the trajectory is unmistakable. A country that spent most of the last century defining itself by what it was not, not the Ottoman Empire, not a Middle Eastern power, not a patron to the Turkic diaspora has spent the last two decades quietly building the institutions, arms industry, and rhetorical architecture to be all three at once. Whether that adds up to a durable sphere of influence or an overextended, multi-front hedge depends largely on variables outside Ankara’s control: the war in Ukraine, the durability of Syria’s new government, and how much longer Russia and China tolerate a junior partner acting like a peer.

For now, the map with Ankara at the center and lines running to Astana, Baku, Bishkek, Tashkent, and Damascus is not a fantasy. It’s a working draft of Turkish foreign policy and one worth watching closely as it fills in.

Sources and further reading:

• Organization of Turkic States Expands Turkish Influence Across Central Asia

• Organization of Turkic States: An Instrument of Turkey’s Central Asia Policy — VIF India

• Why the US Must Include the Organization of Turkic States in Its Central Asia Policy — Hudson Institute

• Limits of Türkiye’s Rising Influence in Central Asia — ORF

• Turkey’s Third Vector: How the Turkic States Are Expanding Central Asia’s Room for Maneuver — Times of Central Asia

• Kazakhstan’s Drone Deal with Turkey Showcases Regional Security Focus — Caspian Policy Center

• Dawn of the Drone Age in Central Asia — The Diplomat

• 10 Things to Know About Turkey’s Interventions and Influence in Syria — FDD

• Turkey’s Rising Influence in Post-Assad Syria — FDD

• Topple, Tame, Trade: How Turkey Is Rewriting Syria’s Future — ECFR

• Turkey’s Search for a Middle East Order — Brookings

• At Summit of Organization of Turkic States (OTS) in Budapest, Erdoğan Urges Member States to Stand Against Israel’s Expansionism — MEMRI

• The Organisation of Turkic States Summit in Qabala — SpecialEurasia

• Israeli-Turkish Competition Intensifies in Syria and Beyond — Middle East Council on Global Affairs

• Israel and Turkey’s Emerging Cold War in the Mediterranean — Manara Magazine

• Turkey-Israel Rivalry in the New Syria — Stimson Center

• The Middle Corridor Through Central Asia: Trade and Influence Ambitions — FPRI

• Why the Middle Corridor Matters Amid a Geopolitical Resorting — Atlantic Council

• China’s Middle Corridor Push Puts Europe in the Slow Lane — Asia Times

• Turkic World Vision 2040 — Organization of Turkic States

• The Evolution of Pan-Turkism and Turanism — Caspian Post

• Qatar, Turkey, and the Rebuilding of the Muslim Brotherhood — Aspenia Online

• Turkey’s Relations with Gulf States: Temporary Shift or Permanent Alignment? — Middle East Policy

It is one of the most ethnically dense places on Earth. The Berom, Tiv, Idoma, Eggon, Mwaghavul, Jukun, Chamba, Bachama, Kataf, Tarok, and dozens of smaller nationalities live here farming peoples, mostly, whose oral histories describe centuries of resisting incorporation into the Sokoto Caliphate that Usman dan Fodio built after his 1804 jihad swept across what is now northern Nigeria. That resistance is not ancient trivia. Researchers at LSE’s Africa blog have documented it as a living memory, one that shapes how these communities read the violence arriving at their doorsteps today, not as isolated local skirmishes, but as the latest chapter of a much older story.

A region built on being overlooked

The Middle Belt’s modern political identity was forged in grievance. Colonial administrators governed it as an appendage of the northern region, under the same indirect-rule structures used for the Hausa-Fulani emirates, even though its peoples were mostly non-Muslim and had never been part of the Caliphate. After independence in 1960, Middle Belt leaders spent decades pushing through movements like the Middle Belt Forum and the United Middle Belt Congress for their own political space, recognition, and a fair share of federal power. They got some of it: Benue, Plateau, and other states were eventually carved out. But the underlying complaint never fully went away, that Middle Belt minorities are numerous, historically resilient, and yet remain politically peripheral in a country whose power still concentrates elsewhere.

That old grievance now collides with a new and much bloodier crisis.

The current wave

Since 2023, Plateau and Benue states alone have recorded thousands of deaths in a rolling series of attacks on farming communities. Compiled reporting places Benue’s toll above 6,800 lives and Plateau’s above 2,600 between January 2023 and May 2025 and the killing has continued since. In June 2025, a coordinated night attack on the town of Yelwata in Benue killed more than 200 people.

The Tor Tiv, traditional ruler of the Tiv people, described it not as a local skirmish but as:

“A calculated, well planned, full-scale genocidal invasion and land-grabbing campaign.”

Christmas Eve 2023 brought a similar wave of coordinated attacks across dozens of Plateau villages. Nigerian youth organizations in the region say roughly 946,000 people were directly affected by attacks in just the first six months of 2026. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has put the number of people displaced across the wider Middle Belt at over 1.3 million.

Untangling who is doing this, and why

Here the honest answer is: it depends who you ask, and the honest article resists collapsing that into one tidy villain.

The religious-persecution frame. Christian advocacy organizations, Open Doors, International Christian Concern, Genocide Watch, and others argue this is, in substantial part, religiously motivated violence against a Christian-majority population. They point to the overwhelmingly Christian identity of victims, the destruction of churches alongside homes, and documented links between some armed groups and the broader jihadist ecosystem that produced Boko Haram and its offshoot ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province) in Nigeria’s northeast. Open Doors has ranked Nigeria among the most dangerous countries in the world to be a Christian for eight straight years. Worth being precise here: Boko Haram and ISWAP are organized jihadist insurgencies with an explicit religious-political ideology, active mainly in Nigeria’s northeast and increasingly the North West. Their reach into the Middle Belt is real but partial recruitment, arms flows, and occasional incursions, rather than direct territorial control of Plateau or Benue.

The resource-and-climate frame. Nigeria’s own security establishment, along with many independent researchers, frames the violence primarily as an escalating farmer-herder conflict. Desertification and shrinking grazing land in the Sahel have pushed nomadic Fulani herders steadily southward for decades, straight into the path of Middle Belt farming communities, while the near-total collapse of Nigeria’s colonial-era grazing routes and the flooding of the region with small arms have turned old, manageable disputes over crop damage into massacres. Herder advocacy groups insist their communities are driven by survival and land scarcity, not ideology, and that they too suffer killings and cattle theft that go unreported.

The political-marginalization frame. A third reading, laid out well by Global Voices’ reporting on the Benue killings, argues that both frames above can obscure a harder truth: accountability is almost entirely absent. Eight months after the Yelwata massacre, suspects who had been arrested still hadn’t been tried. Officials have at times suggested affected communities should simply cede land for ranching. Middle Belt leaders describe their states as “politically expendable” numerous enough to suffer in large numbers, but without the national leverage to force a serious government response. Whatever mix of religion, climate, and land pressure is driving individual attacks, it is this impunity, more than any single ideology, that lets the violence continue at scale.

These frames are not mutually exclusive, and reasonable, well-informed people including Nigerians living through this disagree sharply about how to weight them. What’s not seriously disputed is the death toll, the displacement, or the fact that Nigeria’s security forces have not stopped it.

Three roads ahead

If you ask what the next decade holds for the Middle Belt’s ethnic minorities, three broad trajectories are visible in what’s happening right now not mutually exclusive, and Nigeria could easily see elements of all three unfold in different states at once.

The quiet-erosion path. This is the trajectory advocacy groups warn about most urgently: continued, grinding displacement that never makes a single dramatic headline but adds up to permanent demographic change. Communities driven off ancestral farmland don’t always return even when the immediate danger passes the land gets occupied, IDP camps become semi-permanent settlements, and a slow transfer of territory happens one abandoned village at a time. Reporting from Benue’s IDP camps already describes residents displaced for years, with humanitarian groups like Catholic sisters and Global Christian Relief stepping in to run self-sufficiency projects because state support is thin.

The militarized-escalation path. As trust in federal and state security forces collapses, more communities are arming and organizing their own defense vigilante groups, ethnic militias, local “protection” networks. This has an obvious short-term logic: outgunned communities want to survive the next attack. But researchers who study the region, including analysts writing for Small Wars Journal’s “Next Fight Nigeria” series, warn this risks turning a horrific but still somewhat contained crisis into a broader multi-ethnic, multi-militia conflict that becomes far harder to end young men on all sides pulled into cycles of retaliation.

The political-reform path. The more hopeful trajectory runs through institutions rather than around them. The clearest current push is for state policing allowing Nigeria’s 36 states to run their own police forces answerable to governors rather than a single centralized federal command based in Abuja, which Middle Belt and southern leaders argue would let security forces actually know and respond to local threats. That debate has intensified through 2026, with northern and Middle Belt governors publicly backing it, even as critics like Oby Ezekwesili argue that policing reform alone won’t fix a deeper structural problem and that Nigeria needs broader restructuring of federal power. Alongside that: renewed federal counter-terrorism operations against ISWAP and Boko Haram in the northeast, ongoing (if contested) debates about formalizing ranching to separate herders and farmers, and sustained pressure from Middle Belt civil-society groups, youth associations, and the diaspora plus international attention from bodies like USCIRF pushing Abuja toward real prosecutions rather than more condolence statements.

What actually bends the curve

None of these paths is predetermined, and that matters. The Middle Belt’s ethnic minorities are not passive characters waiting to find out what happens to them, they are organizing, testifying, rebuilding IDP camps into functioning communities, and pushing a genuinely difficult federal argument about policing and land use into the national conversation in a way that wasn’t happening even five years ago. Whether the region’s future looks like slow dispossession or a hard-won, more secure political settlement will likely come down to a small number of concrete things: whether arrests actually turn into prosecutions, whether state policing reform passes and is resourced rather than just debated, whether grazing-route reform gets funded instead of announced, and whether the outside attention from the diaspora, from religious-freedom bodies, from international media translates into sustained pressure rather than a news cycle.

The Middle Belt has survived being overlooked for over a century. Its people’s own history of resisting incorporation into empires that didn’t ask their permission suggests they intend to keep doing so. The question this decade is putting to Nigeria, more than to them, is whether the country is finally willing to treat their survival as a national priority rather than a regional tragedy.

Sources

• The violence in Nigeria’s Middle Belt has long historical roots — Africa at LSE

• Unpacking the political complexities of the Benue killings in Nigeria — Global Voices

• Middle Belt youths demand security emergency as terrorists attack 946,390 people in 6 months — Champion Newspapers

• 34 Killed as Fresh Attacks Hit Nigeria’s Middle Belt — Truth Nigeria

• Fulani Ethnic Militia Kill 22 Christians in Renewed Attacks Across Benue State — Truth Nigeria

• 2023 Plateau State massacres — Wikipedia

• US Commission Says 1.3 million Persons Displaced In Nigeria’s Middle Belt By Bandits — Sahara Reporters

• Nigeria: Sisters plant seeds of hope in IDP camps in Benue State — Vatican News

• In Nigeria, IDP Camps Celebrate Self-Sufficiency — Global Christian Relief

• Unweaving Insecurity Fabric in Middle Belt Nigeria: Benue and Plateau in Focus — The Authority News

• Why Nigeria’s 2026 strategic future depends on state policing — BusinessDay NG

• State Police Is Not the Answer, Restructuring Nigeria Is — Oby Ezekwesili, New Dawn Nigeria

• Southern, Middle Belt Leaders Demand Governors’ Control of Police Commissioners Under State Police System — Crime Focus News

• Next Fight Nigeria: An Introduction to the Central Nigerian Operational Environment — Small Wars Journal

• Nigeria — International Crisis Group

• Nigeria Counter Terrorism Operations in 2025 — Necessary, but ISIS Continues to Expand — The Gateway Pundit

• United Middle Belt Congress — Wikipedia

• Middle Belt Forum — Wikipedia

• Nigeria — Minority Rights Group

On paper, the collapse of the USSR should have been Türkiye’s problem. It had spent the Cold War as NATO’s most exposed eastern flank, staring across the Black Sea and the Caucasus at a superpower that could, in theory, roll armor through Georgia and Armenia in an afternoon. Türkiye’s entire strategic posture, its army size, its alliance commitments, its relationship with Washington had been built around containing the USSR.

Then, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union simply stopped existing. And Türkiye discovered that the thing it had spent decades defending against had turned, overnight, into the biggest opportunity of its modern history.

From frontline state to regional hub

The core shift was geographic and psychological at once. Overnight, the closed, militarized Soviet border that had boxed Türkiye into a corner of NATO’s map became a doorway. On the other side stood Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan states whose populations are majority Turkic-speaking, and Georgia and Armenia besides. Ankara, a middle power that had spent seventy years fighting for relevance on Europe’s southeastern edge, suddenly had a plausible claim to being the natural leader of a much larger cultural and economic space stretching to the borders of China.

Türkiye moved fast. It was among the first countries to recognize the new Central Asian and Caucasus states, and Turkish diplomats, TV crews, and businesspeople showed up in Almaty, Ashgabat, and Baku before almost anyone else did.

Kinship as strategy

The instrument Türkiye reached for first was cultural. Turkish and the Central Asian Turkic languages; Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Azerbaijani are close enough that Ankara could plausibly present itself as family rather than a foreign power. It co-founded TURKSOY, an international Turkic culture organization, and set up TIKA, its development agency, to fund infrastructure, restore mosques and monuments, and build goodwill across the region.

That early 1990s push actually stumbled Central Asian leaders, freshly independent and wary of any “big brother,” pushed back on both Türkiye’s presumption of cultural leadership and its religious outreach, and Ankara’s economy at the time wasn’t strong enough to back up the rhetoric. But Türkiye came back more patiently under President Erdoğan, and this time the institutions stuck. The Turkic Council, founded in 2009, was upgraded in 2021 into the Organization of Turkic States. Turkish soap operas became genuinely popular regional entertainment. Scholarships to Turkish universities poured toward Central Asian students in 2020 they received 21 percent of all Turkish state scholarships despite being just 6.5 percent of applicants. Türkiye now runs joint universities in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and by 2023 surveys found it was the most favorably viewed outside power in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, ahead of Russia, China, and the United States, though attitudes on the ground are described as pragmatic rather than driven by pan-Turkic ideology, and Uzbekistan in particular has stayed wary of Ankara’s cultural framing.

The pipeline that changed everything

The clearest, hardest economic prize was energy and it came from geography Türkiye had always had but could never use.

The Caspian Sea, ringed by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia, and Iran, sits on enormous oil and gas reserves. During Soviet rule, every drop of that oil moved through Russian pipelines, because there was no alternative. Independence changed that math. In September 1994, Azerbaijan signed the so-called “Contract of the Century,” a $7.5 billion deal to develop its offshore oil fields and that deal made the question of how to get the oil out suddenly urgent and internationally contested. Russia wanted the new pipeline routed through its own territory. Türkiye, with U.S. backing, pushed a different plan entirely: a pipeline that would run from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Tbilisi in Georgia, and terminate at Ceyhan on Türkiye’s Mediterranean coast, bypassing Russia completely.

Construction ran from 2003 to 2005, and the first oil reached Ceyhan on May 28, 2006. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline stretches 1,768 kilometers, more than 1,000 of them inside Türkiye, and moves roughly a million barrels a day at capacity. It has shipped more than four billion barrels since opening. Türkiye collects an estimated $200–290 million a year in transit fees, and just as valuable, the pipeline diverted an enormous volume of tanker traffic away from the increasingly congested Bosphorus Strait, which runs directly through Istanbul.

Money followed the flag

Energy transit was the headline, but the deeper economic story is construction and trade. Turkish contractors who had already built a reputation across the Middle East and North Africa, poured into the former Soviet space as soon as it opened. Turkish firms have completed an estimated $50.9 billion worth of construction projects in Turkmenistan alone since independence, and Turkish construction companies’ cumulative work in Russia has approached $100 billion. Nearly 4,000 Turkish businesses now operate across Central Asia; in Uzbekistan alone, roughly 1,900 Turkish companies are active, trailing only China and Russia in market presence. Türkiye has ranked among Kyrgyzstan’s top three sources of foreign direct investment continuously since 2008.

More recently, the Organization of Turkic States has tried to formalize this financial relationship: it launched a Turkic Investment Fund in May 2024, initially capitalized at $500 million and since expanded to $600 million, alongside the “Middle Corridor” transport initiative, a trade route running from China through Central Asia, across the Caspian, through the Caucasus and Türkiye, into Europe, explicitly designed as an alternative to routes running through Russia. That project has taken on new urgency since 2022, as sanctions on Russia have pushed Central Asian and European trade to look for paths around Russian territory rather than through it and every one of those alternative paths runs through Türkiye.

A complicated neighbor, not a simple win

What Türkiye actually built, in other words, isn’t dominance. It’s optionality a set of cultural, energy, and trade relationships that didn’t exist for seventy years and that give modern Türkiye leverage, revenue, and diplomatic reach it simply could not have had while the USSR stood.

The bigger picture

Zoom out, and the USSR’s collapse is one of the clearest cases of a geopolitical earthquake reshaping a neighboring middle power’s entire strategic identity. Cold War Türkiye was a defensive garrison state on NATO’s edge, valued mainly for the Bosphorus and for hosting American bases aimed at Moscow. Post-Soviet Türkiye is something else: an energy transit hub collecting rent on Caspian oil, the cultural anchor of an emerging Turkic political bloc stretching to the Chinese border, a top-three foreign investor across several Central Asian economies, and a country that gets courted by Washington, Moscow, and Beijing simultaneously because its geography now matters to all three.

None of that was inevitable. It took thirty-plus years of patient, sometimes clumsy, sometimes very well-timed diplomacy, recognizing new states within days, building universities and TV networks, backing the right pipeline at the right moment, and showing up with construction crews when other countries were still debating strategy. But the underlying opportunity, an empire collapsing right on its doorstep and leaving behind nations that spoke its language is one most countries never get. Türkiye got it once, in 1991, and is still cashing it in.

Sources

• Why Washington should pay attention to Turkey’s presence in Central Asia — Atlantic Council

• Turkey’s Growing Influence in Central Asia — The Diplomat

• Turkey’s Comeback to Central Asia — Insight Turkey

• Turkey’s Turns to Central Asia: Learning by Doing — Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP)

• Turkey’s policy in Central Asia — New Eastern Europe

• Pipeline Dreams in the Caucasus — Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

• Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline — Wikipedia

• Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline delivers over 4B barrels of oil since 2006 — Anadolu Agency

• Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline fact sheet — European Commission

• Turkish contractors have fulfilled $50.9 billion worth of construction projects in Turkmenistan — News Central Asia

• Turkish construction companies implemented almost $100B worth of projects in Russia over 50 years — Azerbaycan24

• Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation — Wikipedia

• The Economics of Turkey-Russia Relations — Soli Özel, EDAM

Why a 400 year old West African world may hold the survival manual for a fractured 21st century

There’s a family of words historians reach for when describing an order that held, however imperfectly, across a chaotic stretch of time: Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana. Each names a period when one power’s reach was wide enough, and its institutions coherent enough, that a kind of peace, uneven, often coercive, but real, settled over the territory it touched. Every one of these was built the same way: a center, an army, and a periphery that submitted to it.

I want to propose a different kind of pax, one never declared, never enforced by a navy, and never anchored to a capital you could mark with a single pin. Call it Pax Yorubana: not an empire that pacified the world, but a civilization that survived the collapse of its own empire and, in doing so, built something more durable, a networked, diasporic, endlessly adaptive culture that has quietly become one of the most resilient human systems on the planet. In a century where the old pax model, one hegemon, one currency, one navy, one set of rules, is visibly breaking down, that resilience isn’t a curiosity. It’s a blueprint.

What “Pax Yorubana” actually names.

Let’s be precise, because it’s easy to overreach with a phrase like this. The Yoruba never built a unified continental empire the way Rome or Britain did. What existed, from roughly the twelfth century onward, was a constellation of city states and kingdoms, Ile Ife, Oyo, Ijebu, Egba, Ekiti, and dozens more, bound not by a single throne but by a shared cosmology, a shared language family, a shared oral literature, and a shared claim of descent from Ile Ife as the point of human origin. Oyo came closest to continental style dominance, running a cavalry based tributary system across much of present day southwestern Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, until it collapsed in the early nineteenth century under civil war, pressure from the Fulani jihad in the north, and a transatlantic slave trade hollowing out its population from the south.

That collapse is usually where the story stops in conventional histories. It’s actually where the more interesting story begins.

The slave trade that helped destroy Oyo also scattered millions of Yoruba speakers across the Atlantic, to Bahia, Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, and what traveled with them wasn’t just labor. It was Ifá, the divination system built on an oral corpus of thousands of verses; it was the Orisha pantheon, Ṣàngó, Ọya, Ọ̀ṣun, Ẹlẹ́gbá, Yemọja, encoded in ritual, music, and dance; it was a language and a way of organizing meaning that proved portable enough to survive plantation slavery, colonial suppression, and outright persecution. That system didn’t just survive the Middle Passage. It re rooted, syncretized with Catholicism under pressure, and became the scaffolding for Candomblé in Brazil, Santería in Cuba, and Orisha traditions in Trinidad, living religions today with millions of adherents who have never set foot in Nigeria. UNESCO inscribed Ifá on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, recognizing it as a practice sustained by both Yoruba communities and the diaspora across the Americas and the Caribbean. That isn’t the residue of a dead empire. That’s a civilization operating as a distributed network, four centuries and an ocean away from its point of origin, with no state apparatus enforcing its continuity.

That’s the actual substance of Pax Yorubana: not territorial control, but civilizational persistence through decentralization. Worth taking seriously as a geopolitical concept, not just a cultural one, because the century we’re entering rewards exactly that trait.

The four pillars, in the present tense.

Demographic and economic mass. The Yoruba are one of Africa’s largest ethnic nations, somewhere in the range of 45 to 50 million people across Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, with millions more in diaspora. Lagos, the Yoruba world’s commercial capital, is routinely cited as Africa’s second largest city economy, with an estimated GDP around $259 billion on a purchasing power basis, outpacing many entire African nation states, and ranks among the world’s fastest growing tech ecosystems, home to more than 2,000 startups and several fintech unicorns. This isn’t a folkloric hinterland. It’s one of the most economically dynamic urban regions on the continent, sitting at the mouth of a demographic wave that the aging economies of East Asia and Europe simply don’t have.

Diasporic religious and cultural infrastructure. Few civilizations anywhere have the equivalent of what Yoruba spirituality has: a living, actively practiced religious system with autonomous, self sustaining communities on at least four continents, none dependent on the others for legitimacy or survival. A Candomblé terreiro in Salvador and an Ifá shrine in Ile Ife are both authentic expressions of the same cosmological grammar, adapted independently to radically different political environments. Structurally, that’s a fault tolerant network, the kind of system engineers value precisely because no single node’s failure takes down the whole.

Cultural soft power. Afrobeats, its sonic and linguistic DNA heavily Yoruba, from Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat to the contemporary global chart presence of Lagos rooted artists, and Nollywood, one of the largest film industries in the world by volume, have made Yoruba idiom, proverb, and rhythm part of everyday cultural vocabulary from London to Manila. Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize carried Yoruba dramaturgical and mythic structure into the global canon decades before “soft power” was a term anyone used. This is influence that doesn’t require a treaty or an overseas base. It travels on phones.

A stabilizing, rather than dominating, security role. Nigeria, Yoruba political influence being only one strand within it, but a load bearing one, has repeatedly anchored regional peacekeeping in West Africa, from the ECOMOG interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s to ongoing leadership within ECOWAS. Whatever the real criticisms of that record, the pattern is instructive: influence exercised through regional institutions and coalition building, not unilateral imperial command.

Why this matters for survival, not just heritage.

Here’s the geopolitical argument, stated plainly. The twentieth century model of order, a single dominant power projecting military and monetary force outward, everyone else arranged in relation to it, is under visible strain. Multipolarity isn’t a forecast anymore; it’s the current condition. Supply chains are being reshored and regionalized. Currencies are being hedged against. Climate stress, resource competition, and migration pressure are redrawing what “security” even means, and doing it faster in the Global South than anywhere else. In that kind of environment, the actors most likely to come through intact aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest armies. They’re the ones with the most redundant, adaptive, networked forms of power, economic hubs that don’t depend on a single patron, cultural systems that don’t depend on a single state, diasporic communities that can route around a crisis in any one location because the civilization itself isn’t stored in one place.

That’s precisely the architecture Yoruba civilization has, largely by historical accident rather than design. It survived the destruction of its own imperial center, the trauma of mass enslavement, and a century of colonial rule, and came out the other side more distributed, and in some respects more resilient, than it went in. A civilizational network like this is hard to decapitate because it has no single head. Hard to sanction into irrelevance because its value isn’t held in a currency or a court. And it has enormous latent economic upside precisely because so much of its demographic center of gravity, young, urban, digitally fluent Lagos and its diaspora, is still in the early stages of converting cultural and human capital into hard economic and political weight.

None of this is an argument for a Yoruba nation state, though it’s worth being honest that the idea has real political currency: the Oduduwa Republic movement, associated with figures like Sunday Igboho and Professor Banji Akintoye, has pushed active secessionist agitation within Nigeria in recent years, reflecting genuine grievances about federal governance, security, and resource allocation in the southwest. That movement is a symptom of the same underlying dynamic this essay describes, a civilization increasingly aware of its own coherence and leverage, but statehood and civilizational resilience are not the same project, and conflating them would be a mistake. Pax Yorubana, as I’m using it, isn’t a call for a new sovereign entity. It’s an observation about a form of power that doesn’t need one to be effective, and a suggestion that other communities, ethnic, diasporic, digital, or otherwise, facing the same fracturing global order might learn something from a civilization that’s already run this experiment for four hundred years.

The honest caveats.

It would be dishonest to end without naming the friction. Nigeria’s federal governance is troubled; insecurity, from banditry to communal violence, remains a serious problem across the southwest and beyond; infrastructure and public services lag far behind the ambition of a city like Lagos; and brain drain, the japa phenomenon of skilled Yoruba and other Nigerian professionals emigrating en masse, is both evidence of the diaspora’s strength and a symptom of real domestic dysfunction that a networked power thesis shouldn’t paper over. Ifá itself, per UNESCO’s own listing, faces a genuine threat from an aging practitioner base and declining transmission to younger generations under pressure from other religious traditions. Resilience isn’t the same as invulnerability, and a network can fray at its nodes even while surviving as a whole.

But that, if anything, sharpens the point rather than undermining it. The twenty first century isn’t going to reward civilizations that wait for a strong center to fix everything from the top down. It’s going to reward the ones that keep functioning, adapting, and generating value at the edges even when the center is under strain, which is exactly what Yoruba communities, from Ibadan to Salvador to Brooklyn, have been quietly doing for two centuries already. Pax Yorubana isn’t a peace imposed by a throne. It’s a peace that persists because no throne was ever required.

Àṣírí Ọ̀rọ̀

The Yorùbá Nation - the Emerging Hegemon of West Africa Coast

Summary: This report analyzes the historical, cultural, and economic foundations that position the Yorùbá-speaking region—spanning Southwest and Central Nigeria, Benin Republic, and Togo—as the natural successor to regional leadership in West Africa. By examining “Lingual Soft Power,” the “Greater Lagos” industrial cluster, and the coined concept of …

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6 months ago · 1 like · Adejumo David Adebayo

Summary: This report analyzes the historical, cultural, and economic foundations that position the Yorùbá-speaking region—spanning Southwest and Central Nigeria, Benin Republic, and Togo—as the natural successor to regional leadership in West Africa. By examining “Lingual Soft Power,” the “Greater Lagos” industrial cluster, and the coined concept of “Association of Golf of Guinea Nations” (AGGN), we identify the shift from “potentiality” to “actualization” through coastal infrastructure and trade integration

The purpose of this essay is to analyse facts, evidence, reality, and history for the case; it has nothing to do with racial narcissism, chauvinism, or feelings of ethnic superiority over others. The United States of America may be a global superpower, but it wouldn’t be if it weren’t the Hegemon of the Americas. Being a regional hegemon is more about stability and the capacity to project influence and power in the area so that the hegemon’s interests or point of view maintain stability and security than it is about morality or altruistic commitment.

China is the regional hegemon in Asia, particularly the South China Sea, while maintaining its historical role as a “Merchant State.” Russia is the regional hegemon in the Balkans, Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. There are no regional or sub-regional hegemons in Africa alone. In the past, Nigeria assumed the role of pseudo-hegemon, projecting its power and influence beyond its borders and stabilizing/interfering in the affairs of its West African counterparts and beyond. However, this was during the Oil Boom, when Nigeria had enormous wealth linked to the global oil boom during its period of military dictatorship.

Naturally, I ought to have listed “NIGERIA” as the Potential Hegemon that ought to take the helm of sub-Saharan Africa, but NIGERIA has lost time. Time and era are two of the most crucial elements of civilisation and development. Nigeria’s sabotage is primarily due to internal factors rather than the bogeyman theory; this is nearly the same reason why India is unable to compete with China and has turned into a “Nigeria” of Asia with its enormous potential, which means little if they remain fictional/aspirational. There are a number of reasons why Nigeria was unable to keep up the pace and assume the sole role, most of which are internal factors rather than external forces.

Àṣírí Ọ̀rọ̀

A Nigerian Addiction to Potential

An average Nigerian can parrot the potential of Nigeria in their sleep without forethought…

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4 years ago · 5 likes · Olúwáṣèyí

However, potentiality is an illusion; potentials are like dreams that might never come true; they don’t alter countries; actualisation does. Putting in the work while accepting reality and making reasonable compromises to take one step closer is how we’ve seen China rise.

The Historical Foundation: Lingual Soft Power

History confirms that the Yorùbá language served as a pre-colonial lingua franca, functioning similarly to Latin in Europe.

“Yorùbá was the Lingua Franca of most of southern Nigeria (Antonio brassio monumenta missionaria africana (1st series, 14 vols:lisbon, 1952-85, 8 no 135: Columbin de Nantes, Sao tome, 26 Dec 1940;)

In fact, by the time that the trade with Europe started, the Yorùbá language had become the lingua franca for peoples beyond the Yorùbá ethnic homeland.

Writing about the Aja kingdom of Allada; In 1668, Dapper said: “Their own mother tongue is by them little regarded; therefore, they seldom speak it; but they are obliged to speak mostly Alkomijs which in their country is regarded as a noble language.”

One Father Columbin of Nantes visited the coast of West Africa as head of the French mission in 1634 and 1640.

In a letter to the higher authorities of the mission, he wrote as follows about the Benin kingdom:

“In this kingdom, the people may very easily be led to embrace the faith, and priests can live here with greater ease than in other parts of Guinea because of the healthy climate … Their language is simple; it is called Licomin language and is universally used in these parts, just like Latin in Europe”.

Europeans along the West African coast called the Yorùbá- Lukumi, Lucumi or Alkomin (and endless variations of it) and the Yorùbá language Alkomijs, Licomin (and other variations).

Thus, Dapper’s Alkomijs and Father Columbin’s Licomin meant the same — the Yorùbá language.

The use of the Yorùbá language, therefore, linked together not only all parts of the Yorùbá homeland but also areas extending beyond. As earlier pointed out, the Aja country, commercially, was essentially part of western Yorùbáland. Such an expansive cultural and linguistic continuum provided great opportunities for commercial development.

Contrast in Lingual Power: Organic vs. Imposed

A critical distinction in African hegemony is the method of linguistic spread. While Yorùbá influence has historically been organic, other regional powers relied on state-led “unification.”

The “Northernization” Policy and Hausa Imposition

• Ahmadu Bello’s Vision: Under the Late Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello, the “Northernization Policy” was implemented to create a monolithic Northern identity (Arewanism) to compete with the South.

• Institutional Imposition: Hausa was established as the official regional language alongside English. It was mandated in primary education and civil service recruitment, effectively imposing it on hundreds of non-Hausa ethnic groups in the Middle Belt and Central Nigeria.

• Modern Resistance: In recent decades, a “Middle Belt consciousness” has emerged to challenge “Hausa-Fulani hegemony.” Efforts are currently underway in Central Nigeria to revitalize indigenous languages and undo the cultural erasure caused by decades of administrative Hausanization.

The Yorùbá Cultural Continuum (Organic Hegemony)

The Yorùbá language is the most widely spoken language in West Africa, second only to Hausa.

• The Contemporary Creative Economy: Today, Yorùbá influence is surging globally via music (Afrobeats) and religion (Ifá/Santería/Candomble). This “soft power” is voluntary; global audiences seek out the language to engage with the culture, creating a robust, non-coercive foundation for leadership.

Unlike Hausa or Swahili, which were often promoted via State Policy or administrative unification. Although Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, especially in East Africa, the subsequent governments of these nations imposed this language on their indigenous people because they wanted to promote Pan Africanism and unity. Additionally, Swahili is a hybrid Bantu-Arabic Creole.

Yorùbá influence is expanding organically through the global “Creative Economy” (Afrobeats, Fuji, Juju).

Global Reach:

With approximately 60 million native speakers and a significant diaspora, the language’s relevance is amplified by digital consumption. High-profile icons (e.g., Asake) drive millions of non-native listeners to engage with the language via search engines and translation tools.

Due to its increasing usefulness and relevance, particularly in music genres like Afrobeats, Fuji, Juju, and more, Yorùbá is quickly emerging as the most influential African language in the world. Additionally, the language’s use by global musical icons of Yoruba origin has increased demand for the language. I conclude that if Asake had 1 billion listeners worldwide, an estimated 800 million of those listeners would attempt to recite his lyrics. As a result, they would probably say Yorùbá words or statements, and roughly 400 million would use search engines for Yoruba-native language translators to find the context or meanings of these Yorùbá words in his lyrics.

And this includes native Yoruba speakers. If 90% of Africans are able to speak the language, the number of native Yoruba speakers in Africa is probably close to 60 million, and the number of diasporic Yoruba speakers outside of Africa may be close to one million worldwide.

Yorùbá As Liturgical Language in Religio-cultural World

In Ifá and Orisa religion, Candomble, and Santeria, the Yorùbá language is primarily a significant language. With common or loaned deities like Ògún and Esu, the Yorùbá Language is also basic in Vodun, Ewe, and Fon divination systems. The need for the Yorùbá language is growing as the religion spreads throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, and more universities may begin to create departments of Yorùbá language, linguistics, and religious/Orisa studies.

The Geographic Advantage: The Coastal Hegemon

The center of gravity in African development is shifting toward “Coastal States.” The Yorùbá homeland possesses the most strategic maritime assets in West Africa.

Key Infrastructure & Ports

The Guinea Coast or the Bight of Benin and Yorùbá region plays the most significant and crucial role in this trans-border region, with Lagos becoming the West Africa Commercial and Industrial zone.

• Maritime Command: The region controls roughly 300km of Nigeria’s coastline (¾ of the national total) plus vital corridors in Benin and Togo. It stretches from Badagry/Port Novo (Ajase) to Itsekiri’s Escravos from Dahomey Basin to The Niger Delta.

• The T-Junction: Lagos serves as the nexus for the Abidjan-Lagos Coastal Highway, the Lagos-Calabar Highway, and the Sokoto-Badagry Super Highway, effectively linking the Sahel to the Atlantic.

The Economic Corridor: The Association of Gulf of Guinea Nations (AGGN)

The Association of Gulf of Guinea Nations (AGGN) is proposed for the indigenous Nations/Civilisations that inhabit the West African coast. Most important of these are the Yorùbá - Fon&Adja&Gun - Ewe-Ashanti/Twi/Fante - Akan Confederation, as in the European Union (EU) and ASEAN.

The proposed AGGN represents a borderless economic cluster (Yorùbá – Fon – Ewe – Akan) that de-emphasizes colonial linguistic barriers (French/English) in favour of indigenous commercial continuity.

As Western Nigeria, the Republic of Benin, Togo, and Ivory Coast form a seamless “Trans-Border” or “Borderless” African trade and commercial network, the historical civilisational relationship between Yorùbá and their neighbours that was hindered by French-British Colonialism and French-British Lingual Franca may be erased or de-emphasized. The barrier may be broken with the AfCFTA and African single currency, ECO.

Ports, industries, skilled labour, cross-cultural contacts, and logistics would all be seamlessly connected by one corridor.

Hegemons would emerge through comparative advantage and competition, even though all participating entities would benefit collectively.

The Greater Lagos Economic Cluster

The “Greater Lagos” concept represents the transition of the Lagos metropolitan area into a trans-border “Economic Development Cluster and Corridor.” By integrating the industrial heartlands of Ogun State and the untapped maritime potential of Coastal Ondo, this cluster is poised to become the most significant industrial and demographic engine in West Africa over the next several decades.

Àṣírí Ọ̀rọ̀

Nigeria's Yorùbáland Geo-Economy - Prospects and Plans

In general, Yorùbáland, which is part of Nigeria, is divided into two geo-economic zones or corridors: The Western and The Eastern…

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a year ago · 9 likes · Adejumo David Adebayo

The Geographic and Demographic Scope

Unlike the administrative boundaries of Lagos State, the Greater Lagos Cluster functions as a contiguous economic zone.

• Lagos Core: The financial and commercial nerve center.

• Ogun Industrial Corridor: Host to the highest concentration of manufacturing plants in West Africa (Agbara, Sagamu, and Mowe/Ibafo).

• Coastal Ondo: The frontier for deep-sea port development and expanded oil and gas extraction.

With a population density that is already the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, this cluster provides a massive, youthful consumer market and a concentrated labor force.

The “Aeropolis” of Coastal Africa

The vision of Greater Lagos as a continental Aeropolis hinges on its role as a multimodal logistics hub.

Aviation Hub: Strategic positioning to connect East African markets (Addis Ababa, Nairobi) with West African capitals.

Trans-Atlantic Gateway: The shortest flight paths and shipping routes connecting Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean, re-establishing historical and commercial “South-South” ties.

Infrastructure Synergy: The integration of the Lekki Free Trade Zone, the Lekki Deep Sea Port, and the proposed Dangote/Lagos airport projects into a unified logistics network.

The Creative Economy: Lagos is already the global capital of Afrobeats and Nollywood. In the “Greater Lagos” model, this expands into tech-enabled creative hubs, gaming, and digital exports, drawing significant venture capital and international collaborations.

Energy, Oil, and Gas: With the Dangote Refinery and potential new discoveries and processing plants in the Ondo coastal area, the cluster is moving from being a consumer of energy to a primary producer and refiner for the entire continent.

Industrialization and Manufacturing: The “borderless” nature of the corridor allows for seamless supply chains between the raw materials and ports of Ondo/Lagos and the processing factories in Ogun. This synergy reduces the “cost of doing business” by centralizing the ecosystem.

Future Outlook and Global Investment: Over the next two decades, Greater Lagos is expected to:

Surpass National Growth: Act as an independent economic entity with a GDP rivaling mid-sized European or Southeast Asian nations.

Magnet for FDI: Attract global sovereign wealth funds looking for exposure to Africa’s urbanization.Urban Governance Challenges: Require a unified regulatory framework between the three state governments (Lagos, Ogun, Ondo) to manage transportation, waste, and security across state lines.

Conclusion

While Nigeria as a whole has faced internal stagnation (the “Nigeria of Asia” comparison to India), the Yorùbá region remains the engine of actualization. For the region to stabilize, it requires a “Class Captain”—a hegemon capable of projecting stability and economic interest.

The Yorùbá homeland, through its combination of: Industrialization (Petrochemicals and Manufacturing), Logistics (Deep Sea Ports and Superhighways), Soft Power (Language, Music, and Religion) is uniquely positioned to serve as the regional superpower that defines the future of the West African sub-continent.

The Yorùbá region’s strength lies in its Coastal Hegemony and Organic Soft Power.

The Yorùbá homeland is positioned not just as an ethnic territory, but as the “Class Captain” of West Africa—representing the sub-region in the global community through economic actualization rather than the “potentials” of the past.

Àṣírí Ọ̀rọ̀

The Interrupted Peace: From Colonial Consolidation to the Resurgence of Precolonial Conflicts

The Colonial Band-Aid: How British Amalgamation Masked Nigeria’s Unresolved Hostilities…

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7 months ago · 4 likes · Adejumo David Adebayo

The Colonial Band-Aid: How British Amalgamation Masked Nigeria’s Unresolved Hostilities

Before British colonisation, there was no peace in precolonial Nigeria. The British encountered warring kingdoms and empires, but they pursued the policy of maintaining or bringing about peace to the Polity in order to govern what would eventually become Nigeria following the Berlin Conference in 1884–1855. While the British were in Nigeria, they were able to maintain peace, but it would soon come to an end. Seven years after Nigeria gained her independence, the people resumed their hostilities. British colonisation only put a halt to the unresolved conflicts in precolonial Nigeria.

Nigeria has experienced sporadic crises since gaining its independence, including riots, political unrest, civil war, and military coups. However, in the 1970s, an ideologically motivated group known as Maitasine emerged in Nigeria for the first time since the popular Fulani Jihad of Gobir (Sokoto) in 1804. This group was led by a radical preacher from Cameroon named Alhaji Muhammad Marwa, who commanded followers in Kano and other Northern Nigeria.

Then, in early 2000, following Nigeria’s return to civilian and democratic leadership, Yusufiyah began, giving rise to JAS, also known as Boko Haram. In 2012, JAS underwent its first split, giving rise to rival Alqaeda-affiliated ANSARU Islam. In 2016, IS-affiliated ISWAP emerged, and Nigeria now has JAS (BH), ANSARU Islam, ISWAP, Darul Islam, and, more recently, Lakurawa (likely ISSP/ISGS), Mahmuda, and JNIM.

JAS and ISWAP have operated in the North-East and Lake Chad for decades, while ISWAP has been more involved in a few incidents outside of the North-East, such as the Abuja-Kaduna Train attack and the Kuje Prison attack. Meanwhile, ANSARU has terror cells in Okene/Ebiraland and other parts of Kogi State, and it has been involved in numerous bank robberies, high-level kidnappings, and attacks on police stations that have spread to Ondo, Edo, and Ọṣun States and Abuja.

The Siege on the Heartland: The Encroachment of Jihadi Terror into the South-West

By June 2022, the Yorùbá heartland’s operating theatre had begun when a Jihadi terror strike occurred for the first time in the South-West at St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State.

Despite the Fulani Militia’s attacks on sedentary farming communities in the predominantly Christian Middlebelt of Nigeria, which can be characterised as an ethno-religious genocide campaign, Kwara and Kogi-West/Kogi State were spared for decades. Though Yorùbáland had been caught up in the increased Fulani Herders’ hostilities against farmers and communities in Yorùbáland, these began to change by 2023. This led to the emergence of Sunday Igboho as a non-state actor and pro-Yoruba separatist sentiment, which ultimately led to the creation of the Western Nigeria Security Network, codenamed Amotekun, by states in the South-West Geopolitical Region. At this point, there had never been any known religiously motivated jihadi attacks in the South-West or Yorùbáland in general.

In February 2026, the Woro community in Kaiama Local Government Area of Kwara State was invaded by a Jihadi Militant Group suspected of being members of Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS), also known as Boko Haram, led by a faction leader named Sadiku. The Jihadists killed 178 people, mostly men, and took 200 people, mostly women and children, hostage before marching them into an unidentified location. JAS has since released a video of the abducted individuals. This marks a significant milestone in JAS’s operations in Yorùbá World and its nearby neighbours, Nupe and Borgu, to the north.

The RUGA Legacy: Land Usurpation, Settler Colonies, and the New Frontier of Terror

Organised Fulani Militia gangs, commonly known as bandits, began launching serious attacks on Kogi-West, also known as Okunland, the Yorùbá-speaking region of Kogi State, in 2023. These gangs would soon spread into Kwara State, particularly Kwara South and Kwara North, which border Kogi West to the east and Niger State to the north. I looked into what could have caused this and why now. The responses I received were incredibly implausible and might be regarded as conspiratorial.

The Late President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration attempted to pass the RUGA and Water Resources Bills in order to create Federal Government-owned colonies for Pastoralists or nomadic herdsmen. However, the bills were thwarted because they were highly contentious, raised suspicions, and were seen as a sinister plot to usurp Indigenous or native lands from peoples in order to create Settler Colonies for future resource conflicts.

The Ebira-Fulani Alliance: Political Proteges and the Destabilization of Okunland

Alhaji Yahaya Bello, the former governor of Kogi State, was reportedly consumed by his desire to see his protege and Ebira Kinsman succeed him.

He reportedly welcomed this idea from the Federal Government and reported that Fulani herders were welcomed in large numbers in the state, with truckloads of cattle and herders pouring in every day.

More significantly, he allegedly did not give Ebiraland to the migrant herders, but rather Okunland/Kogi-West for this experiment.

There were serious repercussions:

The population of many villages and towns where Fulani herder migrants settled drastically changed, and they established settlements they called “Zango.”

In order to communicate with these communities, the locals had to learn Hausa and Fulfude languages.

With a dark “Ebira-Fulani Alliance,” he was able to effectively make his kinsman and protege to succeed him as governor of the state during an Ebira-Ebira transition.

This analysis has political implications.

The Greater Fulani Ambition: Mapping the Geopolitics of Expansion in the Niger-Benue Trough

From Futa Jalon and Futa Toro along the Sene-gambia River to Macina and Tukulor Emirate in Mali along the River Niger, and Madibbo Adama’s raids and push for access to the Benue Valley along present-day Adamawa, an unmistakable pattern can be seen throughout history. Perhaps because Okunland from Lokoja is immediately west of the River Niger, it’s a continuum of “Greater Fulani,” but this doesn’t mean that all Fulani in the world “agree” or even had consensus about this goal or ambition.

The “Bandit” Euphemism: Unmasking the Fulani Militia’s War on Sedentary Communities

According to the BBC documentary “Bandit Warlords of Zamfara,” “Bandits” are semi-independent or independent Non State Militia gangs that seek financial and territorial rewards for their acts of terror.

The Cognomen term “Bandit” is simply a euphemistic term for “Fulani Militia Gangs.”

They are merely material-driven militias, but they use ethnic sentiment or chauvinistism to defend their actions by pointing to the marginalization and criminalisation of Fulani people, the lack of commitment on the part of the Federal Government of Nigeria to improve their society and people, and actions against communities hostile to the Fulani and their nomadic culture.

They aim to replicate their demands and rationale for their acts with the Amnesty Program and the Niger Delta Militant. These bandits’ operational threat has been in the north-west, where Hausa and Fulani communities are localised or entangled. The Chief of Army Staff, the Late General Taoreed Lagbaja, conducted significant offensive theatre operations against bandits in the North-West when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu assumed the presidency of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2023.

The current president is from the Yorùbá Speaking Nation of Nigeria, so it’s possible that they expanded their operations to Kwara-Kogi to send a message to the Federal Government of Nigeria, which they resent. However, they chose not to do so when the late President Muhammad Buhari was in office.

Things Yorùbáland Needs to Do:

• The Western Nigeria Security Network, codenamed Amotekun has to sign an operational memorandum of understanding with the states of Kwara, Kogi, and Niger for cross-border operations.

• Demand for divisions or permanent military bases along the Kwara-Kogi axis.

• Demand that the establishment of State Police be accelerated.

• Every South-West State, including Kwara and Kogi, is required to acquire Reconnicance drones as well as other security and military equipment.

• In order to respond to emergency situations more quickly, all South-West states, Kwara, and Kogi states should grade or build roads in remote and rural areas through RAAMP.

• The Security Trust Fund, which South-West announced under the DAWN Commission, needs to be realised.

• Amotekun should receive more training and recruiting, as well as better enumerations and a better reward system.

• Ungoverned areas, such as border towns, which have frequently been disregarded by governments, ought to have more security and be easier to reach.

• SOS technology for prompt action in emergency situations.

• To reduce fatalities from ambushes, State Governments must invest in heavily armoured vehicles and Armoured Personnel Carriers from Pro force.

• Activities related to illegal mining should be stopped.

• The South-West Geopolitical Zone and the Benin Republic need to establish a security network or collaboration.

• To build cooperation with the police and military, the South-West States, Kwara, and Kogi States must support and encourage local vigilante groups and militia groups like OPC and Agbekoya.

• The Creation and registration of private security firms similar as PMC Wagner or Black Water should be funded or pursued by a few prominent and affluent Yorùbá patrons.

Àṣírí Ọ̀rọ̀

The Ghost of Berlin: Why Africa Must Redraw Its Own Map

If First Generation African leaders had desired True freedom of Africa, they should not have supported the strict policy of upholding the integrity of colonial borders once the colonies were awarded freedom. African leaders, both then and now, have maintained the hypocrisy of wanting an end to colonisation by adamantly upholding the colonial borders tha…

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8 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Adejumo David Adebayo

If First Generation African leaders had desired True freedom of Africa, they should not have supported the strict policy of upholding the integrity of colonial borders once the colonies were awarded freedom. African leaders, both then and now, have maintained the hypocrisy of wanting an end to colonisation by adamantly upholding the colonial borders that were established without the consent and context of Africans themselves. Meanwhile, with intentional ignorance, some Pan Africanists continue to propagate the idea of neocolonialism in Africa, accusing Europeans of exploiting Africa, keeping it impoverished, and engaging in what they called White Supremacy.

The Flaw of 1963: How the OAU Failed the African Agency

A period of self-determination for all African populations and the ratification of existing empires, kingdoms, or states at the end of the 19th century by referenda would have constituted true decolonisation of Africa. An illustration of the Swiss Confederacy, Malaysia-Singapore, or India-Pakistan-Bangladesh. This would have rectified the mistakes made during the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, which initiated the legalisation and formalization of African colonisation. The OAU (now AU) adopted the “Policy of maintaining the Colonial borders to prevent conflicts in Africa,” which has shown to be flawed since easy paths aren’t always the best ones.

Inherent Instability: The Link Between Artificial Borders and Intra-State Conflict

It is crucial to remember that the majority of conflicts in Africa are “Intra-State Conflicts and Wars” (conflict within the state/countries) rather than “Inter-State Conflicts” (conflict between 2 states/countries) or “Wars”. African nations are the least stable in the world, with the majority of them being devastated by sporadic deadly conflicts within their borders. The majority of African militaries focus most of their efforts/capabilities on preventing intra-state conflicts than inter-state conflicts. Due to the lack of national identities in the majority of African countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, these nations have frozen ethno-national identities. As a result, the constituent groups that make up each African state continue to exist in ethno-identical Civilizational states similar to those found throughout the world.

The majority of African states, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, lack the homogeneity that should serve as the foundation for national identity. Africa is the world’s most diverse continent, so it is impractical for every ethnic group to have its own ethno-state. Nevertheless, Africans have never been granted the right to self-determination to choose their statehood, and their opinions have never been acknowledged. In the hearts of Africans themselves, the majority of sub-Saharan African nations are imaginary and fake states. Contrary to the widely held belief that Europeans divided Africa and took control, many African communities were pleased to sign treaties with colonial states to defend themselves against local bullies, who are typically rival city states or other African groups or kingdoms.

Àṣírí Ọ̀rọ̀

Beyond the Berlin Border - Restoring Africa's Nations and Civilisations

This work is in collaboration with Adejumo David Adebayo. He provided the research used for this piece, which is the first of many contributions to Àṣírí Ọ̀rọ̀. There are a few maps presented throughout the article. Please spend a few moments digesting them…

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4 years ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Olúwáṣèyí and Adejumo David Adebayo

The idea of “Protectorate” in Africa was about “Formal Protection allyship” from other Africans and rival Colonial Powers seeking administrative influence in the region.

Europeans then sought to end all wars and conflicts in Africa in order to administer and rule the Africans using arbitrary borders of convenience.

Africa is the world’s most linguistically and genetically diverse continent, in addition to being the most culturally diverse.

Decolonizing the Map: Why Skin-folk is Not Kinfolk

The notion that all Africans are the same negroid with melanin is absurd; it would be equivalent to claiming that all Asians are the same, which would mean that Han Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Koreans, or all Europeans are the same.

Africans are not “Black” in Africa: Despite their skin colour, some African groups are more genetically similar to some European groups than to other African groups; people in Africa have their realities in their ethnic groups rather than racial realities; even the idea of being African is rarely felt; they are only classified as “Black” when they are among other races like White or Asian.

Within Nigerian borders, the cultural distinctions between Yorùbá and Kanuri are similar to those between Yorùbá and Germans.

From Colonial Constructs to Civilizational States: A Path to African Stability

Not only was Africa colonized and even occupied in the 19th century, but the Korean Peninsula was also occupied and colonized by its neighbours at various points in history, as was the Qin Dynasty of China, British India, and other places. Colonisation is not a recent phenomenon.

If I were to expand on this, I would even suggest that Russians colonized Mongolia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. It’s possible that Balkan nations were the last in the world to gain Independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Today, With a projected nominal GDP, Poland’s economy is now expanding significantly and quickly.

Africa’s Lost Time: How Asian-Style Self-Determination Could Have Saved a Continent

The British Empire and its colonies in Africa would be viewed as “colonisation” on the basis of White vs. African/Black racial realities because most people would not consider what the Russians did during the Soviet Union, the Japanese during the Imperial Japanese Empire, or the Roman/Greek Empire as colonisation based on race and skin colour, forgetting that peoples of the same race could colonise one another and had nothing to do with racial differences. However, Asia and Europe only lost time, not self-determination, in contrast to Africa, which lost two crucial components of development due to colonisation: time and self-determination.

Post Colonial Africa VS Post Colonial Asia

When Imperial Japan gave up its colonies in Korea, China, and the Philippines, they simply returned to their pre-colonization state and lost only TIME. British India, on the other hand, sought self-determination as soon as it gained independence by dividing into Hindu-majority India, Muslim-majority Pakistan and Bangladesh, Singapore and Malaysia, and China returned to the state of its Qin Dynasty.

African nations such as Kanem-Borno, Sokoto Caliphate, Yorùbá Country (Ibadan, Èkìtì federation of Kingdoms, Ijebu Kingdom, New Òyó Kingdom, Ijesa, and many more), Benin Kingdom, Dahomey, Ashante Empire, Fante Confederacy, Kingdom of Kongo, Emirate of Nupe, Zulu Empire, Macina Emirate, and many more simply abandoned their agencies and refused to return to their pre-colonization state.

Rather, under the Organization of African Union, or OAU (later AU), they decided to keep the artificial borders and countries that Europeans had formed without the consents or context of Africa.

Africans would have pursued the creation of new states with their consent and contexts (self-determination) if they had followed different paths like Asians and Eastern Europe. The Emerging States might have been:

Through a treaty or charter, a number of Yorùbá Kingdoms and City States may have consented to join a single nation state. They may also be willing to unite with the Benin Kingdom and the Dahomey Kingdom to create a nation that resembles Switzerland, Belgium, or the United Kingdom.

Perhaps comparable to the United Arab Emirates, the Sokoto Caliphate (along with other Emirates) had a Unity Treaty or charter with Kanem-Borno to form a single state.

The Fante Confederacy and the Kingdom of Ga Adangbe may have had a treaty or charter with the Ashante Empire/Akan to become a state. And so on

Beyond Artificial Borders: The Case for African Self-Determination

Today, Africa’s borders would have been different, and its political reality would have been different, more stable, more progressive.

• African agency, circumstances, consent, self-determination, and their own realities would have all played a role in the formation of these states.

• The fundamental national identities of these African states would serve as the foundation for their nations.

• These African nations would have established foreign and domestic policies.

• These African nations would have had more advanced social, economic, political, and governmental systems, such as parliamentary, monarchical, Islamic, secular, theocratic, free market, socialist, etc.

• In order to promote Pan Africanism through self-determination, it would have been more practical for these African states to establish a trade and/or defence pact akin to ASEAN, the European Union, or NATO. Compared to the current ECOWAS, EAC, AU, etc., these unions would be more feasible.

Moving Forward: Why It’s Not Too Late

• The African Union should have a conference overseen by all of its partners, including the EU, rather than embracing the policy of upholding colonial borders.

• Sub-Saharan African groups ought to be gazetted, and the body should acknowledge their sovereign representatives as human agencies and the voices of their people.

The following outcomes should be adopted by the body:

• Reverse all of Berlin’s borders from 1884.

• Depending on their circumstances and reality, emerging nations can either adopt or design their own indigenous African political systems and structures or systems of government and structures.

• Ratification of statehood with African settings and consent through self-determination.

• Encourage ethnic groups with comparable pre-colonial experiences to form states. For example, ethnic groups with histories of belonging to the Songhai, Mali, Ashanti, or Sokoto empires, as well as the Yoruba Nation (Yorùbá kingdoms and city states), Kwararafa Confederacy, and Kanem-Borno Empire, should form union treaties or charters to merge into countries or states.

The requirements should include proximity and economic viability of the emerging states, Contiguous territories and borders, well defined borders, and a stable and permanent population.

• Ethno-Political Composition: Minority rights and autonomy must be accorded to dominant ethnic groups in emerging states. Alternatively, states that are heterogeneous—that is, lack dominating ethnic groups—must establish federal constitutions and autonomy.

What the African Borders, Countries and Map may look:

Many people are not aware of the brutal "Monroe doctrine" in Nigeria and how it shaped Nigeria's past and currently shaping Nigeria's future.

What many naive Nigerians especially Yorubas see as "tribal rivalry" is actually a brutal Geopolitical struggle that will determine the future of generations yet unborn.

The greatest weapon of empires is not steel, bullets or drones but the ignorance and stupidity of the ruled and conquered. Those who want you subjugated will never want you to be enlightened Which is why my teachings here should be given priority by anybody of colour especially Yoruba people.

Let us start with the Ijaws, Yes Ijaws! Ijaws have their version of Monroe doctrine and they have used brutal violence to enforce their will in Nigeria via politics or war. Ijaws believe the entire coast and creeks of Southern Nigeria belongs to them. They fought with the Yorubas in Lagos, Ogun and Ondo state between 1996 to 2003 in order to lay claim to the coastal axis of the Yoruba people. They were beaten back by OPC in Ajegunle and the Gwama boys at the Ilaje coast.

Ijaws are currently at it fighting Ibibios over the control of the entire Akwa Ibom coast line.

Go and study the Toru- ebe state that Ijaws are proposing, they literally annexed the entire Ilaje coastline, Itsekiri coastline and Itsekiri homeland into their proposed state and went to submit it to the National assembly for approval. That map is the definition of Manifest destiny and Monroe doctrine wrapped in one piece.

If Nigeria ceases to exist today and the Ijaws moves to enforce that doctrine as they have been proposing for over 30 years, the Ijaws will be at war with the Yorubas, Benins, Ibibios and Ikweeres for the next 50 years on all fronts.

What about the North???? This is one of the most interesting scenario. Ahmadu Bello, the father of modern Arewa nation, set the Monroe doctrine of the Fulanis in stone. It is straightforward, the entire Northern region created by the British colonialists must be controlled politically and ideologically by the Fulanis. When the Tivs, a formidable Ethnic bloc rose up to fight against this evil, Ahmadu Bello used federal might to Annihilate, capture and erase close to 50,000 people in 1961. That incidence was called Tiv riots. This Monroe doctrine is why Arewa elites and Nationalists will deploy billions and if need be violence to Annihilate any form of Middle Belt region and identity. Fulanis want to control the Niger River and the Benue River together with the rich fertile lands of the Non Fulani North because of their agenda for the rebuilding of a Fulanii led Sahelian order.

Arewa wants to have direct borders with the Yoruba nation and the Igbos in case of any eventuality. Therefore, they will not tolerate Ethnic nationalism by ethnic minorities in the former Northern Nigeria. The Nationalism and identity that is tolerated in this axis are Islamic Nationalism, Arewa nationalism and Fulani Nationalism. If you do otherwise, you are considered a Kafir, unpatriotic Nigerian and "an enemy of the North". The current insecurity where bandits of Fulanii extraction are wrecking havoc on ethnic minorities across this former region is intertwined with this Monroe doctrine.

Credit — Oladimeji Bolarinwa MSc, MBA

First, I want to state that I do not speak on this beyond political and historical analysis.

Already when we talk of Political polarization, propaganda, and martyrdom , we are confronted with a dangerous feedback loop, where each element intensifies the others to create a climate ripe for conflict.

The assassination of conservative figure Charlie Kirk serves as a powerful contemporary example, as his death has immediately been framed as a martyrdom event, a common historical tactic used to mobilize and radicalize a political and social base. By examining this event through a historical lens, we can see how these three forces have consistently converged to escalate political tensions and, in some cases, spark violence, but also propel a movement to greater heights.

The framing of Charlie Kirk’s death as a political martyrdom “sanctifies” his political cause, elevating it to a righteous and noble struggle, just like Christian martyrs like St. Agnes; her martyrdom sanctified the Christian faith. She chose death over renouncing her beliefs, a sacrifice that transformed her into a powerful symbol of Christian piety and purity. Essentially, there is power in the narrative of dying for what you believe in.

The Historical Tactic of Martyrdom and Political Propaganda

The concept of a political martyr is not new. It’s an ancient and potent tool of propaganda, where the death of an individual for a cause is used to sanitize a political movement, and create a powerful rallying cry. By framing a death as a martyrdom, a movement can:

Sanctify the cause: It gives a political struggle the moral and spiritual weight of a holy war. The martyr’s death is not seen as a tragedy but as a noble sacrifice, a testament to the righteousness of their beliefs. This elevates the cause above mundane politics, making it a sacred duty for followers to uphold.

Demonize the opposition: The “martyr” narrative inherently casts the “other side” as the evil persecutor or murderer. This simplifies the political landscape into a binary of good versus evil, leaving no room for nuance or compromise. The opposition is no longer just a political rival but a moral enemy that must be defeated.

Mobilize followers: The martyr’s death provides a clear motivation for action. It transforms grief and outrage into a call for vengeance, encouraging supporters to become more radicalized and committed to the cause. It can inspire acts of violence, recruit new members, and justify previously unthinkable actions in the name of avenging the martyr.

Historical examples abound. The Nazi Party leveraged the death of Horst Wessel, a member of the SA (Sturmabteilung: the party’s paramilitary wing), who was killed in a fight with communists. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, immediately mythologized Wessel’s death, turning him into a symbol of the movement’s struggle. The song he wrote lyrics for, the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” became the official anthem of the Nazi Party. This propaganda effectively painted the Nazis as the victims of political violence and justified their subsequent brutal crackdowns on political opponents.

The Role of Political Polarization in Creating a Martyrdom Narrative

In a highly polarized society, the conditions are ripe for martyrdom to flourish. The two sides are already defined by deep-seated distrust and animosity. In this environment, any act of violence is immediately interpreted through a partisan lens. The death of a prominent political figure triggers so much emotions from members of their group. Because already, giving your life for the cause is the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate contribution.

The death of Charlie Kirk provides a modern illustration. His supporters are framing his death as a political assassination, a direct consequence of “the left’s” violent rhetoric and hatred. This interpretation, regardless of the attacker’s actual motive, serves to:

Deepen the divide: It reinforces the pre-existing belief that the opposing side is not just wrong but actively hostile and dangerous. This makes civil discourse and compromise nearly impossible.

Justify escalation: When a movement believes its own members are being martyred, it feels justified in taking more extreme measures to protect itself and its cause. This can lead to a dangerous spiral of retaliatory violence.

Solidify identities: The shared grief and outrage over a martyr’s death create a stronger sense of collective identity and purpose. It brings a community together in a common cause against a perceived enemy.

Factors in Amplifying and Disseminating the Martyrdom Narrative

Propaganda acts as the engine that fuels the martyrdom feedback loop. In the digital age, this process is faster and more powerful than ever before. Social media platforms, right-wing news outlets, and political influencers can instantly amplify a message and spread it to millions, circumventing traditional media gatekeepers.

The “martyrdom” narrative around Charlie Kirk’s death is a textbook example. Hashtags and posts on social media platforms, statements on American national television, and more immediately began framing him as a “martyr for truth and freedom,” and major political figures and commentators echoed the sentiment, even the President.

A problem with this, that many would agree with, regardless of political leanings, is that this kind of martyr rhetoric prevents a more complex or nuanced discussion about the causes of the violence and instead forces a simple “us vs. them” narrative.

But it is understandable, this is politics. This rhetoric serves as a powerful recruitment tool, inviting others to join the cause of a “martyred” leader and warning that the same fate awaits them if they don’t fight back. The act of venerating the martyr is not just about remembering them, the martyr himself or herself can be a despicable person but; it’s all about what the narrative that is crafted means for the group, their history, their struggle whether real or perceived, it’s about one’s own loyalty to the cause, and the example of the martyr as the ultimate role model.

In conclusion, the intertwining of martyrdom, political polarization, and propaganda creates a volatile and dangerous political climate. The death of a political figure in this environment can become a catalyst for further division and violence. By understanding the historical use of martyrdom as a tool of propaganda, we can better recognize and resist its modern manifestations and their potential to tear at the fabric of a peaceful society.

A people who lose their language their worldview. Language is not just for greetings or proverbs. It is the architecture of thought, the software of identity, the first school of every nation.

Here are 3 facts Yorùbá people must confront:

1. Within Yorùbá are codes for diplomacy, morality, science, and spirituality. From titles to tonalities, the language encodes a philosophy of balance, responsibility, and respect. When it fades, these values fade too.

2. Once a people start thinking only in another tongue, they start seeing the world only through another lens. This affects governance, education, and even economic behavior. They begin to consume more than they create and lose confidence in their own judgment.

3. We need public schools that teach in Yorùbá, serious funding for translation and publishing, and digital tools that make our language visible and useful. Sentiment is not strategy. National survival needs systems.

To speak Yorùbá clearly is to think Yorùbá, To feel Yorùbá and To plan Yorùbá.

Yorùbá Thought

Apòdà

This note is a treatise on how naivety, historical amnesia, and imported faiths enable the enslavement of indigenous peoples…

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a year ago

This note is a treatise on how naivety, historical amnesia, and imported faiths enable the enslavement of indigenous peoples.

APÒDÀ - this is a name for those among us who spit on ancestral wisdom while cuddling up to foreign powers. That was the term our ancestors used; an epithet for souls so naïve, so stripped of strategic sense, they become tools for their people’s destruction. In every generation, there are those who, whether out of fear, greed, or sheer stupidity, side with the oppressor against their own.

And the outcome is always the same: loss. Loss of land. Loss of memory. Loss of self.

Take Ilọrin, for instance. The very name comes from the Yoruba phrase Ìlú tí wọ́n ti n lọ irin - the city where iron tools were sharpened. Once a thriving Yorùbá settlement, it was turned into a theocratic outpost by Fulani invaders, assisted by a local convert who betrayed his kin. That wasn’t a mere religious shift. It was conquest. Yorùbáland didn’t fall to military superiority, it buckled under betrayal. And the sons and daughters of ÌSÈSE; keepers of the land, were pushed to the margins.

This is not unique to the Yorùbá. It is a global story, and one that should make your blood boil if you still claim to be indigenous in mind or soul.

Look to South Africa. What happened when European settlers arrived? It wasn't just guns and greed, it was ideology. Doctrine. Imported gods that promised salvation while the land was being stolen under their feet. While local chiefs and elders held on for dear life, many native converts welcomed the “light” of foreign religion, thinking it would save them. It didn't. It reduced them to pariars in their ancestral space.

The Khoisan were nearly wiped out. Zulu resistance, despite its legendary ferocity, could not withstand the alliance of Christian doctrine and colonial guns. Today, the land question still festers, unresolved. Indigenous South Africans remain second-class citizens on ancestral soil.

Australia? The Aboriginal population was decimated. Not just killed, but broken. Children stolen. Cultures outlawed. A people turned into a footnote. Christian missions rebranded as saviors, all while erasing entire ways of life.

In Canada and the United States, the pattern was even more aggressive. Entire nations of native peoples were either exterminated or boxed into reservations - pushed to the fringes on lands so poor and small they could barely sustain life. All the while, churches sprang up like weeds, offering Jesus in one hand and cultural annihilation in the other.

So when you hear someone today, a Yoruba, Zulu, Māori, Apache, praising the Abrahamic gods of their colonizers while scorning the spiritual systems of their ancestors, know that you’re witnessing the APÒDÀ archetype in full bloom. A soul so alienated from itself, it will wear its chains like a badge.

History is not kind to indigenous peoples who let their guard down.

And the Abrahamic Gods, for all their promises, have never once stopped the soldiers bearing their names. Never stopped the crusaders. Never stopped the jihadis. Never stopped the missionaries from burning shrines or renaming mountains. They watched. Or worse, they were invoked.

Tell me: when the Portuguese came to the Bight of Benin, which God did they pray to? When the British razed Benin City, which hymns did they sing? When the Fulani stormed Yorùbáland, who rode with them?

We chant Psalms while they wield rifles. We fast while they negotiate treaties over our bones. We teach our children to be polite and forgiving, even as their futures are mortgaged.

Keep playing. Keep being the polite, educated APÒDÀ - welcoming your own erasure with open arms and a choir song.

Or remember who you are.

Because Earth won't miss the ones who forget themselves.

Stand up for what you stand on.

Ire o 🌴

In the heart of every human being lies an immutable truth, as ancient as existence itself: true belonging to the world is rooted in belonging to a land. Not as a fleeting guest, but in that profound, unyielding way that binds one’s very name to the soil where ancestors walked, worshipped, and were laid to rest.

"Do not sell land." This is a caution that safeguards the fundamental future of generations yet unborn. History bears witness: a people dispossessed of their land risk becoming pariahs, homeless strangers on their own planet. Our land is where Oduduwa’s legacy took root, where the oriki of our lineages were first chanted under vast, starlit skies. It is our living archive, our sacred altar, our unwavering anchor. To part with it carelessly is to sever the vital thread that binds us to our past and unravels the very fabric of our future.

Without land, a Yoruba person may still speak the language, don the Aso-oke, or dance to the vibrant rhythms of the bata drum. Yet, something profoundly vital slips away. Culture becomes a mere performance, devoid of its pulsating heart. You risk becoming a stranger to your own heritage, a visitor who knows the songs but finds no sacred ground to sing them upon. Home is the tangible embrace of earth and memory; a landless home fades into fleeting sentiment and the haunting nostalgia of what might have been. We must never allow ourselves such a desolate state.

History provides stark lessons on the devastating cost of losing land. From the colonial doctrine of terra nullius that erased ancient ties, to the rolling hills of Rwanda, the contested fields of Palestine, the indigenous territories of the Americas, and Nigeria’s own Plateau, the narrative is consistent: land is the first thing seized and the last thing mourned. It lies at the genesis of countless human conflicts. When Constantinople became Istanbul, the very name shifted, and with it, the story of a people, rewritten by those who claimed dominion. To lose land is to court erasure, to yield to others the power to dictate our identity and destiny.

Land is profoundly spiritual. It serves as the sacred bridge connecting the living, the revered ancestors, and the unblemished hope of the yet unborn. It is the hallowed ground where we pour libations to honor those who came before and where we plant the seeds of prosperity for those who will follow. To sell land without profound foresight, without a meticulously crafted plan to preserve its sanctity, is to squander what your grandchildren will desperately need to stand tall. If we collectively relinquish our land, we are left with nothing to call our own, borrowing our future from strangers who may not share our cherished dreams.

This is not a cry of hatred or a rejection of progress. It is an urgent call for clarity and profound wisdom. Leasing land, executed with discernment, can indeed foster partnerships and cultivate prosperity without ever surrendering our invaluable heritage. This path offers growth that keeps our roots firmly intact. However, to sell land outright, particularly in areas holding deep cultural or strategic significance, is to invite a silent, creeping loss and sow the seeds of future conflicts that emerge without war or warning, leaving us utterly rootless.

To my Yoruba kin, I implore you: our land is the very heartbeat of who we are. It cradles the timeless stories of our ancestors, holds the boundless promise of our children, and embodies the undeniable truth of our existence. If we lose it, we risk losing ourselves entirely. Let us hold fast to our land; it is more than a possession, it is a sacred duty to our past, our present, and the countless generations yet to come.

Awòlúmátè, ìwòn ara rẹ̀ ló mọ̀

So say the elders to the overtly boisterous and one lacking moderation, affirming that the truly discerning person knows not only what is right, but what is appropriate, and most importantly, what is within their reach especially when you are in another’s territory. Let this thought marinade.

In our time, where assertiveness is often mistaken for intelligence, and loudness confused with leadership, we must return to the deep wells of Yorùbá thought, where wisdom is not always the most visible thing in the room but often, the most respectful.

The Awòlúmátè does not walk with haste. He does not throw his weight around. He does not declare himself in every gathering. He knows his size, his season, his strength. He knows how to read the signs, not just the written ones, but the atmospheric ones: the weight of silence in a room, the age of the land beneath his feet, the tone of a host’s greeting.

When you walk in a land that is not your own, wisdom is not in the noise you make, but in the silence you keep.

It is this awareness, not fear, that shapes his posture. He walks not because he has nowhere to run, but because he knows how sacred it is to be received. He knows what it means to be allowed in. He knows that presence is not a right, it is a privilege.

Move gently, like breath over water, with the grace of one who knows that presence is a privilege, not a right.

He does not mistake hospitality for possession. He does not overstay. He does not overstep. In a world that celebrates the one who claims the floor, Awòlúmátè asks: what did it cost the host to prepare it?

Pay homage, not just with your words, but with your posture, your restraint, your reverence for names spoken before yours.

It is easy to forget that in Yorùbá worldview, every space is alive. Every land has a keeper. Every moment has a spirit. Even the air has elders. The Awòlúmátè does not forget. He shows up with humility, with quiet gratitude. He offers ÌBÀ before offering ideas. He listens before he speaks. He watches the rhythm of the people before adding his own beat.

To be received is a favour.

To be regarded, an honour.

To be remembered, that is earned by the care you carry in your steps.

In the land of another, power is not in declaring yourself, but in aligning yourself. Those who are truly wise do not dominate foreign ground, they attune to it. They do not impose. They don’t wear their own customs so tightly that they cannot bow in respect to another’s.

The wise do not dominate foreign ground; they dance with its spirit, asking nothing but the blessing to pass through without arrogance, without assumption.

We live in an age of constant movement; migration, travel, cultural exchange, digital presence. We enter spaces, physical and virtual, often with entitlement. But the Yorùbá remind us: Kò sí ohun tó dà bí ilé. Home is sacred. And when you are not in yours, your posture should reflect that awareness. To forget this is to forget ÌWÀ (character) which is the foundation of all that makes a person truly respected, truly remembered.

Awòlúmátè walks with this understanding. He doesn’t need to be told when to bow. He doesn’t need to be corrected. He knows the weight of his footsteps. He carries himself with awareness.

Let the uncivilised be guarded accordingly because, even the air has elders.

Ire o 🌴

• Ethno-Linguistic Yorubas: Rooted in West Africa, these individuals share Yoruba ancestry an…

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The Think Yoruba First School of Geopolitics (TYF-SoG) successfully held its inaugural lecture on April 26th, 2025, marking a significant milestone in the formal launch of the school and its commitment to insightful geopolitical analysis and discourse. The foundational lecture, titled "Deciphering the Fulani Empire - The Sokoto Caliphate's Nation-Building Methods & Their Influence on Modern Nigeria & West Africa," offered a deep dive into a critical historical entity whose legacy profoundly shapes the contemporary landscape of the region.

Delivered by the esteemed President of TYF, Arakunrin Oladimeji Bolarinwa, the inaugural lecture navigated the complex history of the Sokoto Caliphate, one of the largest and most influential empires in pre-colonial Africa. The lecture went beyond a mere historical overview, successfully deciphering the intricate methods employed by the Caliphate in its ambitious nation-building project. Attendees gained valuable insights into the political, administrative, social, and religious structures that underpinned the Caliphate's expansion and consolidation of power across a vast territory encompassing parts of present-day Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and Mali.

Arakunrin Oladimeji Bolarinwa illuminated the Caliphate's unique approach to governance, its legal system rooted in Islamic principles, its economic strategies, and its impact on the diverse populations it encompassed. The lecture critically examined the dynamics of its expansion, the establishment of emirates, and the lasting effects of its administrative framework.

Crucially, the lecture effectively bridged the historical past with the contemporary present, analyzing the enduring influence of the Sokoto Caliphate's methods on modern Nigeria and the wider West African sub-region. Arakunrin Oladimeji Bolarinwa explored how the Caliphate's legacy continues to resonate in political structures, ethno-religious dynamics, land ownership patterns, educational systems, and cultural identities. The lecture addressed how the historical forces set in motion by the Caliphate continue to shape contemporary challenges and opportunities in nation-building and regional stability.

This inaugural lecture served as an indispensable opportunity for scholars, policymakers, students, and the general public who were in attendance to engage with a topic of immense historical and contemporary significance. By deciphering the complexities of the Fulani Empire and the Sokoto Caliphate's nation-building strategies, TYF-SoG successfully fostered a deeper understanding of the historical trajectories that have led to the present geopolitical realities of Nigeria and West Africa.

The insights shared by Arakunrin Oladimeji Bolarinwa during this significant intellectual event have undoubtedly sparked crucial conversations and provided a foundational understanding for navigating the intricate geopolitical landscape of modern West Africa, setting a high standard for the rigorous and relevant analyses that the Think Yoruba First School of Geopolitics will continue to contribute to the study of geopolitics in the region.

Think Yoruba First

Think Yoruba First is here to preserve the interest of everything Yoruba, from history to politics, music, language, culture, and heritage. We Think Yoruba First.

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In Yorùbá culture, lineage is a profound link connecting individuals to their ancestry. This link, woven intricately, ties one’s identity to a skilled and artful profession. As witnessed in the movie, Gbọ́tìjà’s essence isn’t rooted in mystical charms, but rather, in his family’s ancient secrets. These secrets, entrusted by his forebears, are tenderly imparted by his father, who weaves the threads of knowledge and ancestral wisdom.

At the heart of it all lies the transfer of wisdom across lineages, a sacred passage of enlightenment. Deeply ingrained in Yorùbá tradition, this inheritance transcends mere material wealth. The inheritance encompasses the essence of wisdom and sacred power, echoing the profound understanding our ancestors held about the potency of ancestral strength.

This understanding, a cornerstone of Yorùbá heritage, ushers every newborn into their family with the promise of a triumphant journey. Gbọ́tìjà, the embodiment of these principles, bridges his lineage’s vocation with his father’s teachings, epitomizing the profound interplay between ancestry and craft. The movie, a vibrant canvas, paints the portrait of inheriting not solely riches, but the intangible treasures of ancestral wisdom and sacred vitality — keys to a flourishing odyssey through life.

Awo, Imule, and Òrìṣà

Within each lineage’s vocation, an Òrìṣà resides — a wellspring of enigmatic energy, embodying ancestral reverence. In the Yorùbá community, knowledge is both spiritual and enigmatic, reflecting the universe’s mysteries. Today’s certainties may yield to tomorrow’s revelations. Thus, the Awo system emerges — an institution akin to modern governing bodies, molding society. Rooted in Yorùbá’s belief in mystic and experiential knowledge, wisdom is internalized through transformative experiences, bound by Imule — a pledge of honesty, integrity, and respect to forces.

Gbọ́tìjà’s lineage, exemplifying this, harbors age-old Imule pacts with tree spirits. This sacred bond intertwines humanity and nature, dormant power bestowed by ancestry — each Yorùbá lineage, yours and mine, cradles such mystical endowment. Nature’s divine bestowal, nurturing consciousness with profound awareness.

The dismantling of the Yorùbá community’s nucleus, the Òrìṣàs — the lifeblood of each lineage — inflicts a profound disservice upon future generations. Many view these traditions as mere myths, relics of antiquity, and uncivilized practices. This dismissal robs us of ancestral wisdom and the sacred rapport with nature. The Òrìṣàs stand as conduits to our connection with nature’s enigma, delving into its profound mysteries.

In the rich landscape of Yorùbáland, numerous Òrìṣàs are interwoven with diverse lineages. Òrìṣà Oko, the guardian of farming, epitomizes the relationship with the earth. Ògún, tethered to hunting and iron, symbolizes a bridge to both primal and technological forces. These deities bestow upon their adherents a treasury of insights, secrets capable of propelling human technology and science.

For those within the realm of medicine and philosophy, proximity to Ifá and Osanyin unveils the mysteries underpinning the essence of remedies. Tragically, the weight of civilization’s loss and identity erosion inflicted by colonization casts a somber shadow. Our heritage, plundered by colonization’s grasp, has led to the conditioning of our minds and society, fostering the neglect and marginalization of our rich traditions and vibrant culture.

Yet, the echoes of our heritage linger, resilient in the depths of Yorùbá consciousness. The call to reclaim our lineage, honor our ancestors, and embrace the sacred synergy between humanity and nature resonates. By rekindling our connection with the Òrìṣàs, we reinvigorate our cultural essence, transcending the limitations imposed by colonization, and ushering in a resurgence of wisdom, unity, and self-awareness.

The English pushed the Opium trade on the Chinese, killed millions of Chinese, and annexed Hong Kong while China endured Opium Wars, Russian, French, and English aggression against it. They also shared the Qing dynasty. The Chinese term this time period, which spans the 1700s to 1800s, the "Age or Century of Humiliation."

They remember their history, teach it to their people, and instill it in them, but when it comes to geopolitics, interest comes first and all else follows, and China has traded and allied with the West, Russia, and built itself into a formidable force to be reckoned with economically and militarily in the modern world.

As a Yorùbá Man, I don't give a damn if the British killed My ancestors in the Anglo-ijebu War in 1892, the Anglo-Egba War (Adubi) in 1918, the Ahoyaya War (War of Boiling Water) in 1851, the Bombardment of Òyó, or the British proxy war in the Yorùbá Civil Wars (Èkìtì parapo/Kiriji War), and their involvements, as well as what they accomplished in the 19th century. If doing so can advance the interests of the Yorùbá people and their land in the twenty-first century, I will do so while keeping in mind our shared past.I have the past in my back pocket.

Geopolitics and malice do not mix.

Recall that China has undone its humiliation, reclaimed Hong Kong from the British, and is now pursuing Taiwan (the One China Policy), which was a part of the Qing dynasty at its height. China will complete the reversal of its humiliation regardless of what the US and its allies do!

Vladimir Putin stands in for the Tsar of the Russian Empire, while Xi Jinping symbolises the Chinese Emperor. All of these have profound cultural undertones. Russia has restored its imperial status with the invasion of Crimea and its special military operation in the Donbass area of Ukraine; China and Asia will thereafter be under Chinese empire.

Russia has frequently sided with the West throughout history, but it is currently moving away from the West and towards the East and the Global South.

India, what about it?

India endured a great deal of hardship—Mughal hunger, becoming a colony, being pillaged, and other things—but it is now developing its Hindu civilisation and regaining its dominance.

These are advanced civilizations, yet the West made them feel inferior. Eat from the West, Eat from Russia, and Eat from the East is India's policy. Your battles don't really interest them all that much. Hey, you have cheap Russian gas. I don't care about your conflict with the West or Ukraine, so bring them.

If I were the head of state, a political office bearer, or the department in charge of foreign policy, I would gladly cooperate with past colonisers if doing so would be advantageous to the Yorùbá people and nation. The same if Russia is involved. even if it's North Korea under Kim Jong Un.

Japan was a US enemy before and during WWII, but today the US and Japan are friends against Chinese dominance. This is despite the fact that the US unleashed nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Japan's violent imperialism resulted in the annexation of Asia.

Geopolitics is not about resentments; rather, its defining characteristic is interest.

Nothing to feel here.

This must be understood by the Yorùbá people and their leaders. And to select our wars, adversaries, and alliances objectively and with ongoing interest. The world is not a happy place.