Authorities first declared him dead in 2024. In May 2026 a joint Nigerian–US operation struck his compound at Metele, in Borno, and both governments announced the death of the Islamic State’s global second-in-command. Both announcements were sold as turning points. Neither was.

That is the whole story of this war in miniature. Everything below explains why.

I. The Wrong Question

Nigerians have spent seventeen years asking when the insurgency will be defeated. It is the wrong question, and the wrongness is instructive.

By UNDP’s estimate, the Boko Haram war had indirectly cost some 350,000 lives by the end of 2020 alone, most of them through hunger and disease rather than bullets. Since then:

• The state killed Mohammed Yusuf in custody. Abubakar Shekau killed himself in 2021 during an ISWAP assault. Abuja has announced the deaths of ISWAP commanders more than once, only for some to resurface.

• It accepted the surrender of well over 100,000 fighters and family members.

• In 2023 it heard a Joint Task Force commander say the crisis would end very soon.

• In September 2024, militants killed around 130 villagers in Mafa, in Yobe’s Tarmuwa area. Police blamed Boko Haram’s JAS faction; a note left at the scene carried ISWAP’s name.

• In September 2025, JAS fighters killed at least 60 people in Darul Jamal, in Bama, a community resettled only two months earlier.

• In March 2026, three suicide bombings in Maiduguri killed at least 23 and wounded more than 100, in a city that had begun to believe the war was over.

Each decapitation is real. None of them is decisive. That pattern is not a failure of tactics. It is evidence that the thing being fought is not the kind of thing that can be killed.

Nigeria will not defeat violent jihadism because doing so would require building a functioning state in the north, and the Nigerian elite bargain depends on not building one. The war is not an interruption of Nigerian politics. It has become one of its mechanisms.

One detail matters more than it seems. Borno was never conquered by Sokoto. El-Kanemi repelled dan Fodio by out-arguing him on Islamic grounds: Kanem-Borno had been Muslim since the eleventh century and did not accept a Fulani cleric’s authority to judge its faith. Borno therefore holds an older, independent claim to Islamic legitimacy. It is no coincidence that the movement which eventually declared Nigeria’s entire Islamic establishment corrupt emerged from Maiduguri rather than Sokoto, drawing on centuries of northeastern Islamic learning and empire.

1978: the rupture that matters most. Abubakar Gumi, former Grand Kadi of the Northern Region, launched a sustained doctrinal assault on the Sufi brotherhoods, the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya, that had underpinned emirate religious authority for centuries. His followers founded Izala, and Saudi petro-money from the 1970s boom gave Salafi teaching an institutional reach it had never had in West Africa.

Look at what this did structurally, independent of theology. For centuries, religious authority in the north was hierarchical, hereditary, and attached to political power. Gumi broke that. He established that a scholar with a text could delegitimise the entire inherited establishment. Once that door was open, no one could close it. Every subsequent radical could do to Izala what Izala did to the Sufis.

That is the mechanism of Nigerian jihadism: not the arrival of a foreign ideology, but the serial collapse of any authority capable of saying no with credibility.

That is the mechanism of Nigerian jihadism: not the arrival of a foreign ideology, but the serial collapse of any authority capable of saying no with credibility.

1980. Muhammadu Marwa’s Maitatsine revolt in Kano, fuelled by almajiri boys and migrant youth, killed thousands and needed the army to crush it. It prefigured Boko Haram almost exactly: millenarian preaching, marginal urban youth, state overkill, and no reckoning with underlying conditions afterward. Nigeria has run this experiment before and learned nothing from it.

1999–2001. Twelve northern states adopted criminal Sharia after the return to democracy, beginning with Zamfara. Mohammed Yusuf’s founding critique was not that Nigeria was insufficiently Islamic in the abstract. It was that the Sharia states were a fraud: the same men who amputated a goat thief’s hand were stealing budgets. He was not wrong about that, which is why he was persuasive. The next section takes this up in full, because it is the hinge of the entire argument.

2009. Yusuf’s urban insurrection was crushed within days, and he was extrajudicially killed in police custody in Maiduguri. That killing was the most consequential strategic error in the history of the conflict. It converted a sect with a grievance into an insurgency with a martyr, and it confirmed to a generation of young northern men the movement’s central claim: that the Nigerian state does not operate by law.

The line runs unbroken: 1804 → indirect rule → Gumi → Maitatsine → the Sharia states → Yusuf → Shekau → ISWAP. Each stage destroyed the authority that might have contained the next. The Nigerian state has no capacity to manufacture religious legitimacy, and every kinetic operation it runs confirms the delegitimising narrative it needs to defeat.

III. The Constitutional Surrender

Nigeria’s deepest vulnerability to political Islamism is not theological. It is a legal question the country has spent sixty years refusing to answer.

Start with what the 1999 Constitution actually says, because the popular shorthand is wrong. Nigeria is not declared a secular state. The word does not appear. Section 10 says only that no government shall adopt a State Religion: a non-establishment clause, not a doctrine of separation. Section 38 guarantees freedom of religion. And Sections 275 to 279 expressly provide for Sharia Courts of Appeal in states that want them, with jurisdiction over Islamic personal law: marriage, divorce, inheritance, guardianship, waqf.

That was the independence settlement, and it was a genuine compromise rather than a usurpation. Northern Muslims had never consented to a purely secular order, had lived under Islamic law through the emirates and indirect rule, and entered the federation on the understanding that their personal law would survive. The question convulsed the Constituent Assembly in 1977–78 and returned in 1988. Each time it was deferred rather than decided. Anyone who tells you the north imposed something alien on a settled secular republic is describing a republic that never existed.

What happened from October 1999 was different in kind, and that distinction is the whole argument. Zamfara, under Ahmad Sani Yerima, extended Sharia from personal status to criminal law, and eleven other northern states followed within two years. The constitutional basis was thin but not frivolous: criminal law is not on the Exclusive Legislative List, so states may legislate on it. The objections were serious and never resolved. Amputation and flogging sit uneasily with Section 34’s prohibition on inhuman and degrading treatment. Applying a criminal code to citizens by religion strains Section 42’s freedom from discrimination. And a legal order in which the same act carries different consequences depending on the accused’s faith is hard to reconcile with the idea of a single national criminal jurisdiction at all.

Then came the decision that mattered more than any legislation: Abuja declined to test it. Obasanjo dismissed the expansion as political Sharia and predicted it would fizzle out. No administration since has referred the question to the Supreme Court. Twenty-seven years on, Nigeria has two criminal legal orders operating on its territory and no authoritative ruling on which is supreme.

That non-adjudication has four consequences, and each one feeds the insurgency.

The counterargument deserves a hearing, and it is stronger than secularists usually admit. Criminal Sharia has substantially atrophied: amputations are rare, no stoning sentence has ever been carried out, and appellate courts have quietly defanged the harshest provisions. The 1999 wave was demand-driven, a response to a secular justice system that was genuinely corrupt, glacial and inaccessible to the poor. Sharia courts were faster, cheaper and closer. Forcibly abolishing them in 2000 would likely have produced a worse conflict than the one Nigeria got. And the causal chain to jihadism is indirect: the jihadists were the Sharia states’ loudest critics.

All of that is true, and none of it rescues the position. The problem was never that some Nigerians want to live under Islamic law. Plural legal orders function elsewhere, in India, Israel, Indonesia and Malaysia, precisely because each of those states settled, however imperfectly, the question of supremacy and the boundary of jurisdiction. Nigeria’s failure is not Sharia. It is the refusal to decide, which lets every faction claim the state is properly theirs and none of them be wrong.

That ambiguity is convenient for the political class, which is why it persists. It costs nothing to leave unresolved, and resolving it would cost votes in one half of the country or the other. So the question stays open, and into an open question walks anyone with a rifle and a coherent answer.

The recruitment pool grows faster than the army. Northern Nigeria combines some of the world’s highest fertility with the country’s deepest multidimensional poverty and its largest out-of-school population. The almajiri system delivers millions of unaccompanied boys into cities, dependent on alms, with religious instruction and no economic pathway. Tinubu has promised 30,000 new recruits and four additional divisions to provide the “teeth” to defeat terrorism and banditry, an initiative tied to elections in early 2027 in which public safety is a central issue. But 30,000 soldiers against an annual cohort of hundreds of thousands of unemployed, unschooled young men is not a counterinsurgency. It is a rounding error with a uniform.

ISWAP is not a gang. It is a competing state. It taxes, adjudicates disputes, regulates fishing and farming, and bans the plunder of civilians that its rival practises. Boko Haram’s JAS survives on looting and extortion known as fey’u, which ISWAP prohibits. Its revenue base exceeds what Borno State itself collects. It is centralised, bureaucratic, well-funded and tactically adaptable, and its combat successes have attracted experienced fighters and instructors from across the Sahel and the Maghreb. Farmers live under its administration and travel to Maiduguri to buy equipment. One such farmer described ISWAP’s only real anxiety as air force bombing, and noted that every house has a shelter.

You cannot bomb a tax administration out of existence. Where the Nigerian state offers absence, ISWAP offers predictable, brutal, functioning governance. In rural Borno, that is not a close contest.

The geography is unconquerable with current means. ISWAP’s core bases sit on the islands of Lake Chad, in a shifting ecology of swamps and channels. The Nigerian navy has never mounted a meaningful lake offensive. Until it does, the insurgency has a sanctuary, and sanctuaries are the most reliable predictor of insurgent survival in the modern record.

And the war has become an economy. Nigerian defence procurement is among the country’s most notorious rent centres. The Dasuki affair established, in the public mind, that the insurgency’s budget flows more reliably than its battles are won. Add ransom. The New Humanitarian reports that the June release of 360 civilians abducted from Ngoshe was accompanied by a government payment of 5 billion naira, roughly $3.7 million, which Abuja denies, amid controversy over the alleged misappropriation of part of it. As an Abuja security official put it to the same publication, any arrangement involves payment, since otherwise the fighters would have no income absent fey’u.

Buying off armed opponents is the traditional method of the Nigerian political establishment, from the Niger Delta amnesty of 2009 to the ongoing attempts to contain banditry in the northwest. A former hostage negotiator named the problem plainly: money does not guarantee peace, it generates demand for more. When violence is a revenue stream for the perpetrators and a skimmable flow for parts of the apparatus meant to stop it, you do not have a war with two sides. You have a market with several participants, some of whom wear uniforms.

So the state does what it can do, which is negotiate quietly while denying it. A ceasefire with Boko Haram has reportedly held for three months and is expected to be extended, according to The New Humanitarian, and Abuja has not acknowledged it. Its public position remains emphatic rejection of talks with a proscribed organisation. The talks are run by the Office of the National Security Adviser and the DSS. They have repeatedly collapsed before, typically scuppered, in participants’ words, by spoilers within the government and military. The last hudna fell apart in 2022–23.

That detail is the whole thesis in miniature. The Nigerian state cannot make peace because it is not one actor. It cannot deliver on an agreement its own security services will sabotage, and it cannot fight a war its own procurement class profits from prolonging.

The strategy the security establishment reportedly finds most attractive is a deal with Bakura Doro’s Boko Haram faction in order to fight ISWAP: one jihadist group dealt with to fight the other. That is how you formalise a jihadist faction as a state proxy, and anyone who has watched the Sahel over the past decade knows what that produces. Note, too, that Bakura’s animus toward ISWAP is personal rather than ideological. He stayed loyal to Shekau, whom ISWAP destroyed, and former fighters report he prefers attacking ISWAP to attacking the army, raiding military bases mainly to get weapons for that fight. An ally whose loyalty is a grudge is not an ally.

VI. The Regional Arithmetic Has Turned Against Nigeria

Nigeria’s insurgency is no longer primarily Nigerian.

The AES states’ departure from ECOWAS and the rupture of intelligence cooperation with Niger removed the cross-border architecture on which the Multinational Joint Task Force depended. The Sahel has become the fastest-growing theatre of violent extremism on earth, and its groups are moving south. The emergence of Lakurawa in Sokoto and Kebbi is a Sahelian import, not a local mutation. Tinubu himself said the December 2025 strikes targeted ISIS, Lakurawa and bandits, that the Islamic State supplies and trains Lakurawa and bandit groups through the Sahel, and that US intelligence had detected an influx of IS fighters into the area.

Meanwhile the region has become a competitive arena for external powers, with Russian influence across the AES states and Turkish forces and Syrian mercenaries reportedly deployed in Niger. More sponsors means more options for armed groups and less leverage for any single government. Nigeria now faces a networked, externally resourced, technologically improving adversary across borders it does not control, with regional partners it has alienated.

VII. The American Complication

In late October 2025 the United States designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern. Days later Trump threatened to halt all aid and told the Pentagon to prepare for possible action, warning the US might go in “guns-a-blazing.” Tinubu replied that portraying Nigeria as religiously intolerant did not reflect national reality. A delegation led by NSA Nuhu Ribadu went to Washington and met Hegseth and others.

The outcome was not confrontation but absorption. On Christmas Day 2025, US strikes hit two IS-linked enclaves in the Bauni forest of Tangaza, Sokoto, with Tinubu’s explicit approval. Foreign Minister Tuggar, who had spoken to Rubio beforehand, insisted the operation was not about religion, pointing out that the Sahel’s victims are overwhelmingly Muslim. In January a Nigeria–US Joint Working Group on counterterrorism was inaugurated in Abuja. On 16 May 2026, a joint operation at Metele killed al-Minuki, described by Washington and Abuja as the Islamic State’s global second-in-command. Trump has said further strikes will follow if the killing of Christians continues.

Three observations.

First, the framing dispute is not cosmetic. Whether this is anti-Christian persecution or generalised state failure determines what counts as success, who gets protected, and what Nigerian domestic politics does with it. Both descriptions capture something real: Christian communities in the Middle Belt and southern Borno have suffered targeted atrocities, and Muslims are the overwhelming majority of those killed by ISWAP and JAS. As Control Risks analyst Joachim MacEbong argued, the religious frame obscures something worse: the Nigerian state as presently constituted cannot secure anyone but the elite. The measure of that was Tinubu’s own November 2025 security emergency, when the Inspector General reported pulling 11,000 officers off VIP protection duty. It was an admission, in a single statistic, of where Nigerian policing had actually been deployed.

Second, precision has limits. The New Humanitarian’s January analysis reported that some US missiles missed their targets, with damage in Ofa, Kwara State, and raised questions about whether the Sokoto target area had an established Islamic State presence at all, notwithstanding Nigerian military intelligence assessments. Villagers near the strikes told AFP the area had never been a Lakurawa stronghold.

Third, and most important: decapitation strikes accelerate leadership turnover. They do not touch recruitment, taxation, or legitimacy. ISWAP replaced its leadership repeatedly between 2019 and 2021 and emerged stronger. Al-Minuki’s death will be absorbed the same way. What external strikes reliably deliver is a way for Abuja to look decisive without doing any of the hard things. They are a substitute for state-building dressed up as a supplement to it.

VIII. Two Honest Qualifications

“Never” is too strong as a literal claim. Insurgencies do end. They end by annihilation when a state is willing to be ruthless and unified, as in Sri Lanka. They end by political settlement when a state can credibly commit, as in Northern Ireland. They end by exhaustion and co-optation, as in Algeria. What every successful termination shares is a state that could act as a single agent. Nigeria’s deficit is not firepower, money, or even will. It is stateness: the capacity to make a decision and have it executed all the way down. Until that changes, the realistic ceiling is management, reducing jihadism to endemic banditry and living with it, as Nigeria already lives with oil theft and kidnapping. That is not defeat. It is also not victory, and the country should stop being promised one.

The partition answer does not work. A sovereign northern Nigeria would inherit the insurgency with no oil revenue, a longer Sahelian frontier, a weaker army, and the same demography. A sovereign south would face an impoverished, radicalising neighbour of a hundred million people across a thousand-kilometre border, with no ability to influence it and no buffer. Secession does not relocate the almajiri cohort or drain Lake Chad’s swamps.

What the honest version of that argument supports is stronger: devolution, not dissolution. State policing, genuine fiscal federalism, resource control, an adjudicated answer to the Sharia question, and the dismantling of the population-weighted allocation formula that rewards elites for governing badly and counting generously. Those reforms are federalism’s repair, not its abolition, and they address the real mechanism: a centre too distant to police and too generous to hold accountable.

On the “Fulanisation” thesis. There is a real phenomenon underneath it: pastoralist expansion southward under climate pressure, the RUGA controversy, the ethnic concentration of security appointments under Buhari, and armed groups in the northwest that are substantially Fulani in composition. Those are documented grievances, and dismissing them is condescension. But the evidence does not support a single coordinated project. Northwestern bandits routinely kill Fulani communities. ISWAP and JAS kill Muslims in far greater numbers than Christians. Much of the violence is decentralised criminal enterprise responding to the collapse of pastoral economies. Treating a class-and-climate catastrophe as an ethnic conspiracy has one practical cost: it produces policy aimed at the wrong target, and it makes the cross-regional coalitions needed for the reforms above impossible to build. The grievance is real. The theory is too tidy for the violence it describes.

Conclusion

Nigeria has been fighting an insurgency for seventeen years with an army it underpays, a procurement system that profits from continuation, a police force recently discovered to have been guarding politicians, a northern education system generating recruits faster than casualties, a rival administration on Lake Chad collecting more tax than the state it displaced, a religious landscape in which no authority can excommunicate anyone, a constitutional question about religious law that no government has dared put to a court, a neighbourhood it has alienated, and a foreign patron whose strikes provide relief from the appearance of failure but not from failure.

The insurgency is not the disease. It is the fever chart of a state that never completed itself: a colonial administrative arrangement, inherited in 1960, never converted into a polity its citizens have reason to prefer to the alternatives on offer.

Jihadism in northern Nigeria will end when the Nigerian state becomes more useful to a poor young man in Damaturu than ISWAP is. Not before. Every strategy that does not begin from that sentence is theatre with a body count.

Geopolitics with Oladimeji Bolarinwa is published by The Thought Builders Institute. If this argument moved you, share it, and subscribe for the next instalment.

Who Was Muhammed Ali?

Muhammed Ali grew up in northeastern Nigeria in the late 1990s. By several accounts, he was an exceptionally bright student, seen by his teachers as a young man with a promising future some even expected he would become a medical doctor. Instead, he became one of the most consequential figures in the history of Islamist militancy in West Africa.

In the early 2000s, Ali led a group of hardline Salafi youths in Maiduguri, Borno State, who broke away from the established religious leadership in the city. They believed the mainstream Salafi scholars had grown too close to the Nigerian state and had compromised on core points of Islamic doctrine. This breakaway movement rejected secular governance entirely and pushed for a strict, puritanical interpretation of Islam.

Building the Network

Some researchers trace Ali’s radicalization to time he spent in Saudi Arabia, where he is said to have connected with a wider diaspora network of Nigerian jihadists, receiving both ideological guidance and, according to some accounts, financial support tied to figures associated with al-Qaeda. Other researchers dispute how much of Ali’s radicalization actually happened abroad versus at home, arguing the evidence for extensive foreign direction is thinner than commonly assumed.

What most accounts agree on is that Ali built connections with a broader network sometimes referred to in reporting as the “Nigerian Taliban” that fused local grievances over poverty, marginalization, and weak governance in the northeast with a transnational jihadist ideology.

It was through this period that Ali connected with Mohammed Yusuf, then a rising and popular preacher in Maiduguri. The two men initially worked together, with Ali as the moreradical, uncompromising figure and Yusuf as the more pragmatic, gradualist voice within the movement. Their alliance was not always smooth: by 2003, Ali reportedly denounced Yusuf as an apostate after Yusuf argued that armed jihad was premature.

Clashes with the State and Ali’s Death

Tensions between the group and Nigerian security forces escalated quickly. In 2003, the movement’s early confrontations with the state culminated in violent clashes, sometimes referred to as the “Nigerian Taliban” uprising, along Nigeria’s borders with Niger and Chad.

These clashes proved disastrous for the young movement. Muhammed Ali was killed in 2004, reportedly by vigilantes, while Yusuf managed to avoid the fighting by fleeing to Saudi Arabia.

Yusuf’s Rise and Ali’s Legacy

With Ali dead, Yusuf returned to Nigeria and took control of what remained of the movement, absorbing Ali’s followers along with his own. Over the following years, Yusuf built the organization into what the public would eventually come to know as Boko Haram, a name derived from Hausa phrase meaning “Western education is forbidden,” although Yusuf himself never gave the group that formal title.

For years, the standard narrative credited Yusuf alone as Boko Haram’s founder, largely because he was the group’s most visible leader in its early, formative years and the one who directly triggered the 2009 uprising that brought the group to international attention. But scholars examining declassified intelligence documents, interviews with founding members, and accounts from Nigerian Salafi communities have increasingly pointed to Ali as the movement’s true originator, the one who first organized the breakaway faction, set its uncompromising ideological tone, and built the early networks that Yusuf later inherited and expanded.

Understanding Ali’s role is more than a historical footnote. It reshapes how researchers and policymakers understand the roots of the insurgency not as the product of one preacher’s radical turn, but as the outcome of a longer process of factionalism, transnational jihadist influence, and unresolved socioeconomic grievances in northeastern Nigeria that predate Yusuf’s rise to prominence.

This article draws on academic research and journalistic accounts of Boko Haram’s origins, including work published in the journals Terrorism and Political Violence and The Journal of the Middle East and Africa, as well as reporting from War on the Rocks and the History News Network.

On June 30, 1989, a military coup led by Colonel Omar al-Bashir overthrew Sudan’s elected government. The coup was engineered in close coordination with the National Islamic Front (NIF), an Islamist political movement founded in 1976 and led by Hassan al-Turabi, a lawyer and Islamic scholar affiliated with the broader Muslim Brotherhood tradition. The result was one of only two twentieth-century cases of an Islamist revival movement actually seizing state power the other being Iran after 1979.

Turabi and the NIF pursued what has been described as a “top-down” strategy of Islamization: placing loyalists throughout the government, judiciary, and security services, and gradually reshaping Sudanese law and society along explicitly Islamist lines, including the enforcement of hudud punishments. Turabi became, in the words of Human Rights Watch, “the power behind the throne” through much of the 1990s, even as Bashir formally held the presidency.

Crucially, Turabi did not see his project as confined to Sudan. He envisioned Khartoum as a launching point for a broader, transnational Islamist revival and he had both the ideological ambition and the state apparatus to pursue it.

Khartoum as a Gathering Point for Global Jihad

In April 1991, Turabi convened the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress in Khartoum, an initiative explicitly designed to unite Islamist and mujahideen networks in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 1991 Gulf War, and to offer an alternative to the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Islamic Conference. The conference drew a striking roster of attendees, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, along with representatives connected to Somali factions an early sign of how Sudan was positioning itself as a crossroads for militant movements from across the Arab and African worlds.

That same year, bin Laden himself relocated to Sudan after leaving Saudi Arabia, where he had fallen out with the monarchy over its reliance on U.S. troops during the Gulf War. Over the next five years, bin Laden built a business empire in Sudan spanning construction, agriculture, and trade ventures that also functioned as financial infrastructure for al-Qaeda. By 1994, he had established training camps in the country, hosting fighters, many of them “Arab Afghan” veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad, who would go on to play roles in militant movements across multiple continents. It was during this Sudanese period that al-Qaeda began to formulate its broader campaign against U.S. interests, and operatives linked to bin Laden’s camps were later tied to attacks including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996 under sustained U.S., Saudi, and Egyptian pressure, relocating to Afghanistan under Taliban protection but the networks and relationships built during his Sudan years, along with the training and financial infrastructure he had developed, endured well beyond his departure. A smaller, lesser-known regional offshoot, later referred to as “al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Two Niles,” traced its roots directly to this period.

Spillover into East Africa

Sudan’s significance extended beyond hosting foreign militants it also helped seed a new wave of religious revivalism among East African Muslim communities more broadly. Prior to the late 1980s, leftist and nationalist currents, alongside traditional Sufi orders, had dominated Muslim political life across much of East Africa. Sudan’s NIF-led state offered an alternative model: an explicitly Islamist government willing to fund, train, and ideologically support like-minded movements in neighboring countries. Analysts researching the origins of Salafi-jihadism in the region point to 1990s Sudan as the epicenter of this shift, a period in which new revivalist currents took hold that would later feed into more radical offshoots, including groups active in Somalia and Kenya.

An Important Node, Not the Sole Source

It’s worth being precise about the claim, since it’s easy to overstate. Sudan in the 1990s was a genuinely important hub, a place where financing, training, and transnational networking for militancy converged in ways that had lasting downstream effects on Somalia’s al-Shabaab and other movements. But scholars generally treat it as one significant node in a wider web of factors driving extremism across the region, rather than as the singular point of origin. Other major currents fed into the same phenomenon largely independently of Sudan: Saudi-funded Wahhabi and Salafi proselytization networks (of the kind that separately took root in Nigeria through figures like Abubakar Gumi), the returning fighters and ideology of the Afghan jihad more broadly, and local political, economic, and governance grievances that militant groups have exploited in each country where they’ve taken hold, from Nigeria to Somalia to Mali.

Legacy

Sudan’s overt role as a state sponsor of transnational jihadist activity declined sharply after bin Laden’s 1996 expulsion, as international sanctions and diplomatic isolation pushed Khartoum toward a more cautious foreign posture, and Turabi himself was marginalized within Sudanese politics by the end of the decade, eventually splitting from Bashir’s ruling party in 1999. Yet the decade in which Sudan served as a hub hosting bin Laden, convening pan-Islamist conferences, and exporting revivalist ideology to its neighbors left a durable imprint on the trajectory of militancy across the Horn of Africa and beyond, one that outlasted the specific government that enabled it.

Sources consulted: International Crisis Group; Hudson Institute; Wikipedia; Council on Foreign Relations; Al Jazeera; Britannica; FBI; EBSCO Research Starters; Asharq Al-Awsat.

On the morning of April 13, 2007, gunmen walked into the Dorayi Juma’at Mosque in Kano and shot Sheikh Ja’afar Mahmud Adam dead as he led dawn prayers. He was 47. It would take more than a decade, several competing theories, and a confession from inside the movement itself to get close to why.

Who he was

Born February 12, 1960, in Daura, Katsina State, Adam built his authority the traditional way: as a Salafi scholar inside the Izala Society, Nigeria’s leading religious reform movement, delivering Ramadan tafsir lectures broadcast across the north to audiences other clerics could only envy.

But Adam wasn’t a purist gatekeeper. He argued Islamic and Western education belonged together, not in competition, and he took that argument into universities, hospitals, and prisons, well outside the mosque’s four walls. That same reformist instinct put him in the room with Mohammed Yusuf, the man who would found Boko Haram. Adam mentored him, then watched him radicalize past the point persuasion could reach, and became one of the few clerics with the religious standing to say publicly that Yusuf’s movement was dangerous.

The killing, and the wrong questions first asked

Adam died where he preached, mid-prayer, with no warning. The timing, days before Nigeria’s 2007 presidential election sent the initial investigation down the wrong road. U.S. embassy officials suspected a political hit tied to the vote. They weren’t alone in guessing wrong.

Three theories competed for years:

• Sufi adherents, whom Adam had criticized doctrinally. Dismissed quickly Nigerian Sufi groups had neither the history of organized violence nor the operational capacity for a targeted killing.

• Local politicians, including allies of then-Kano governor Ibrahim Shekarau, whom Adam had accused of cronyism.

• Boko Haram, the movement he’d publicly broken with.

The complication: in 2007, “Boko Haram” wasn’t yet one thing. Mohammed Yusuf led the core faction, with Abubakar Shekau as his deputy but a related, distinct faction of former Nigerian Taliban fighters (also called the Kanana Taliban) operated alongside it, with its own grievances and its own capacity for violence.

The most credible account today points not at Yusuf’s core group but at that Nigerian Taliban faction, targeting Adam in retaliation for backing government operations against their camps. The corroboration came from an unlikely source: Abu Musab al-Barnawi, Yusuf’s son and himself a former Boko Haram leader, wrote in a 2018 book that the Kanana/Nigerian Taliban faction carried out the killing, effectively clearing the mainstream leadership of it.

A fracture, years before the split had a name

History remembers Boko Haram’s factionalism as a later chapter, Shekau’s break, the rise of ISWAP under al-Barnawi. Adam’s assassination says the fracture was there from the start. Long before Shekau declared jihad in 2010, the movement was already a coalition of cells with overlapping ideology and separate chains of command, capable of coordinated, targeted violence years before the insurgency proper began.

Adam’s killing in 2007, Yusuf’s killing in police custody in 2009, and Shekau’s formal declaration of jihad in 2010 aren’t three separate events. They’re one escalation, with the first killing a warning nobody in power acted on.

Legacy

Adam’s death was mourned as the loss of a rare figure who could challenge both Sufi orthodoxy and violent extremism from inside the same religious tradition, a middle path that might have slowed the radicalization to come, had he lived. Admirers still describe it as the felling of the tallest tree in a forest of knowledge.

More than a decade on, researchers and journalists keep returning to his assassination as the pivotal, underexamined moment that foreshadowed everything that followed in northern Nigeria’s insurgency, not because Adam caused what came next, but because his death is the clearest proof that the fracture, and the danger, were visible years before the world was paying attention.

From Colonial Judge to Religious Authority

Abubakar Gumi was born on November 7, 1924, in Gummi, in what is now Zamfara State. He rose through Nigeria’s Islamic judicial system during the late colonial period, eventually becoming Grand Khadi of the Northern Region of Nigeria from 1962 to 1967, the highest authority in interpreting and applying Sharia law in the region, a post that no longer exists today, having been abolished in 1967.

In this role, Gumi became a close ally of Ahmadu Bello, the powerful Premier of Northern Nigeria and Sardauna of Sokoto. Together, the two men helped shape Bello’s “Northern Policy,” an effort to unite the diverse peoples of northern Nigeria under a shared Islamic and Hausa identity, partly as a counterweight to the political influence of southern Nigeria. Gumi and Bello also cofounded an organization aimed at combating what they saw as superstition and ignorance and promoting a more standardized understanding of Islamic practice across the region.

Even in this early period, Gumi believed that political unity among northern Muslims had to rest on what he considered doctrinally “correct” Islam, a conviction that would define the rest of his career.

Northern Nigeria’s religious landscape in the mid twentieth century was dominated by Sufi brotherhoods, chiefly the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya orders, whose leaders were deeply intertwined with the traditional emirate ruling class. Gumi came to see these Sufi orders, with their veneration of saints, elaborate ritual practices, and hierarchical structures, as corruptions of authentic Islam.

Starting around 1969 and into the early 1970s, Gumi began using government linked media platforms, including the Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo newspaper and Radio Kaduna, to broadcast his anti Sufi teachings to a mass audience. His regular columns and his popular Ramadan tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) broadcasts brought him into direct, public conflict with Sufi leaders across the country. In 1972, he crystallized his position in a book, al ‘Aqida al Sahiha bi Muwafaqat al Shari’a (“The Correct Creed in Accordance with Sharia”), which explicitly rejected Sufism as a legitimate expression of Islam.

This was a sharp break from the religious status quo. Gumi’s theology drew heavily on the eighteenth century Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, along with the medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyya, the same intellectual lineage underpinning Saudi Arabia’s official Wahhabi doctrine. Gumi deepened this connection through his own time in Saudi Arabia, where he served on the Supreme Council of the Islamic University of Medina and on the legal committee of the Muslim World League, a Saudi backed international Islamic organization. He returned to Nigeria in 1987 to formally lead the reform movement his preaching had inspired, presiding over a period of rapid growth accompanied by internal splits over leadership and doctrine.

Notably, Gumi’s own history complicated his image. Clerics who rejected any cooperation with the secular Nigerian state had once dismissed him and others like him as malamai boko or malamai zamani, “Western” or “modern” clerics, because of his role within the colonial and post colonial government legal system. His later turn toward a stricter, Saudi style fundamentalism marked a genuine ideological reinvention.

Izala: Institutionalizing the Movement

Gumi’s anti Sufi preaching did not remain a matter of sermons and newspaper columns for long. On February 8, 1978, followers of his teachings founded the Jama’at Izalat al Bid’a wa Iqamat al Sunna, the “Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reestablishment of the Sunnah,” known simply as Izala, in Jos, Plateau State, under the leadership of Sheikh Ismaila Idris.

Izala explicitly defined its mission around opposition to the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya, framing many of their practices as bid’a, unlawful religious innovation bordering on heresy. In place of Sufi ritual, Izala promoted an austere, scripture focused, mildly Wahhabi form of Islam that also embraced modern institution building: hospitals, schools, and da’wa (proselytization) networks became central to its approach, giving the movement the character of a kind of reformist “Muslim Protestantism” adapted to twentieth century Nigeria.

Izala grew rapidly, aided by connections to well funded international Salafi organizations linked to Saudi Arabia, including the Muslim World League. Nigerians who traveled to study in Saudi Arabia often returned as committed Salafi preachers, further reinforcing the movement’s reach and its doctrinal fidelity to Gulf based religious institutions. This gave Izala, and by extension Gumi’s original vision, an institutional and financial backbone that traditional Sufi orders, rooted in local emirate patronage, generally lacked.

Religion as Politics

Gumi’s project was never purely theological. His alliance with Ahmadu Bello had always carried a political dimension, and the broader conflict between reformist and Sufi Islam in northern Nigeria repeatedly intersected with struggles for political power, including tensions between the Sultanate of Sokoto, competing emirate authorities, and post independence party politics. The 1963 deposition of the Emir of Kano, a Tijani aligned ruler, by Bello’s administration is one clear example of how doctrinal rivalry and political maneuvering reinforced one another during this era, weakening Tijani religious authority and reshaping the balance of power in Kano.

By channeling religious reform through state media and cultivating ties to wealthy pan Islamic organizations abroad, Gumi effectively fused religious revivalism with a broader political project: consolidating a unified, doctrinally “purified” Muslim identity across northern Nigeria that could serve as a base of political cohesion. This blending of Salafi religious reform with regional political consolidation is what later scholars point to as the origin of “political Islamism” in the modern Nigerian sense, religion mobilized not just for personal piety, but as an organizing force in public life and governance.

Legacy and Consequences

Gumi died in London in September 1992 at the age of 67, but the movement he set in motion far outlived him. Izala remains one of Nigeria’s largest Islamic organizations today, and the broader Salafi current he helped import continued to expand through the 1980s and 1990s, aided by ongoing Saudi funding and the return of Nigerian graduates from Gulf universities.

That same current, however, also gave rise to more radical offshoots. Scholars researching the roots of Boko Haram have traced a direct genealogical line from Gumi’s original anti Sufi Salafi wave through Izala and into the more hardline Salafi networks of the 1990s and 2000s, some of whose members split off entirely, rejecting engagement with the Nigerian state (which Gumi and Izala had always accepted) in favor of violent rejectionism. In that sense, both Sheikh Ja’afar Mahmud Adam, the reformist Salafi scholar assassinated in 2007, and the founders of Boko Haram itself emerged, in different and even opposing directions, from the same religious current Gumi first brought into Nigeria decades earlier.

Gumi’s own movement, Izala, explicitly rejected jihadist overthrow of the state and instead sought to work through Nigeria’s existing political and legal institutions. But by displacing centuries of Sufi religious authority with an imported, Saudi aligned puritanism, and by demonstrating how religious mobilization could be fused with political organizing, Gumi opened a doctrinal and institutional space that later, more radical actors would exploit for very different ends.

Sources consulted: Wikipedia; Qiraat Africa; Pambazuka News; The Conversation (Sheikh Gumi’s Ramadan tafsir/Izala scholarship); Mohammed VI Foundation of African Oulema; academic research on Sufi Wahhabi conflict in Nigeria and Senegal, and on Salafism in Nigeria.

That is the first fact worth holding: Yemen is not a periphery of Arabia. Arabia is, in a sense, a periphery of Yemen. The Gulf states are modern constructions built on hydrocarbons discovered in the 1930s. Yemen is a three thousand year old civilisational zone that fell out of the money.

But it was never one polity. The Marib dam collapsed around 570 CE and the irrigation civilisation with it. In 897 CE, a descendant of the Prophet named al Hadi ila’l Haqq Yahya arrived in Sa’dah in the far northern mountains, invited in to arbitrate a tribal dispute, and founded a Zaydi imamate that would rule the northern highlands in one form or another for the next thousand years. Zaydism is a branch of Shia Islam, but a peculiar one in matters of law and daily practice it sits closer to the Sunni Shafi’i school than to Iranian Twelver Shi’ism. It was a highland aristocracy of sayyids, claiming descent from the Prophet, ruling over a tribal confederacy that never fully submitted to anyone.

The coast was always a different country. The Tihama plain along the Red Sea, the port of Aden, the Hadhramaut wadis stretching east toward Oman these were Shafi’i Sunni, mercantile, oriented outward to the Indian Ocean. Hadhrami merchants built trading dynasties in Singapore, Java, Malabar and East Africa. The highland imam’s writ and the coastal merchant’s world were two separate civilisations occupying one map.

Empire then made the division legal. The Ottomans occupied the north in the sixteenth century, left, and came back in 1849. The British seized Aden in 1839 as a coaling station on the road to India and gradually assembled a protectorate out of more than twenty sultanates, emirates and sheikhdoms in the hinterland. In 1904, London and Constantinople drew a line between their spheres the so called Violet Line and that arbitrary imperial boundary became, in time, the border between North and South Yemen. It is roughly the line the country is fighting over today.

II. Two States, One Flag, No Nation

The twentieth century gave Yemen two entirely different political experiments.

In the north, the Zaydi imamate survived Ottoman withdrawal and ran a deliberately sealed, medieval theocracy until 1962, when Nasserist officers overthrew it and declared the Yemen Arab Republic. What followed was the peninsula’s first great proxy war: Egypt poured tens of thousands of troops in to defend the republic, Saudi Arabia armed the royalist tribes to restore the imam, and eight years of mountain warfare bled Nasser so badly that historians call it Egypt’s Vietnam. Note the pattern, because it recurs: Riyadh’s instinct, from the very first moment, was to fund the northern highland tribes against a central Yemeni state.

In the south, the British were driven out of Aden in 1967 by Marxist guerrillas who established the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only avowedly communist state the Arab world ever produced. Soviet aligned, secular, with a nationalised economy and a women’s code more liberal than anything in the Gulf. In 1986, the PDRY’s ruling party tore itself apart in ten days of street fighting in Aden that killed thousands, including much of its own leadership. The south’s tendency toward internal fracture predates the current war by four decades.

Saleh himself described governing Yemen as dancing on the heads of snakes. He meant it as a boast. It was actually a diagnosis: he never built a state, he built a patronage machine that rented the loyalty of tribes, generals and clerics with oil revenue. When the oil began running out in the late 2000s, the machine had nothing left to distribute and the snakes stopped dancing.

III. Why Unity Keeps Failing

The conventional reading is that Yemen is broken by foreign intervention. That is half true and analytically lazy. Yemen is broken because the thing being held together was assembled from parts that have never shared a single political logic.

Geography. The highlands, the Tihama coastal plain, Aden’s port hinterland, and the Hadhramaut east are four distinct economies. Mountains make insurgency cheap and central taxation expensive. Any force that takes Sanaa still does not control the wadis.

The southern question. The 2013 to 14 National Dialogue produced a six region federal blueprint that collapsed precisely because it satisfied no one: it would have left the Houthi heartland landlocked and resource poor, and it split the south into two units, killing any path to southern statehood. Both losers rejected it. Within months the Houthis took Sanaa.

And then there is the most recent proof of concept. From December 2025, the UAE backed Southern Transitional Council seized much of the non Houthi south and announced it was consolidating toward an independence referendum by 2028 before a Saudi backed counter offensive in January 2026 reversed its gains almost as fast, expelled its ministers from the governing council, and forced the group’s apparent dissolution. The episode strained relations between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, which had been backing opposing factions within the same internationally recognised government, and the UAE announced the withdrawal of its remaining forces. The separatists have since relaunched under a new name and are back in the field as a “Southern Resistance” that fights the Houthis and ambushes government convoys in the same week.

That is the shape of Yemeni politics in one paragraph. Not two sides. A lattice of armed factions whose alliances shift by district and by month.

Worth naming an important nuance the headlines flatten: the current war is not formally a war of partition the Houthis in the north are not seeking a separate state. They want all of Yemen. It is the south that wants out. Unity fails not because everyone wants secession, but because the one faction strong enough to unify the country by force is the one the rest of the country will not live under.

IV. The Saudi Compulsion

Why does Riyadh care so much about the poorest country in the Arab world?

Start with the border. Saudi Arabia shares roughly 1,800 kilometres of frontier with Yemen, its longest land border by far, running through mountains it cannot seal. And that border is itself a wound: Asir, Jizan and Najran, three provinces now firmly Saudi, were taken from Yemen in the 1934 war and formalised in the Treaty of Taif. Yemeni irredentism over those provinces is not fringe. Every Saudi strategic planner knows it.

Then demography. Yemen holds something on the order of 40 million people comparable to or exceeding the Saudi citizen population, in a country with a warrior culture, mass conscription potential, and none of the Gulf’s dependence on imported labour. A Yemen that was unified, competently governed and economically functional would be the natural demographic and military centre of gravity of the Arabian Peninsula.

Riyadh’s policy for ninety years has been shaped by a simple preference: a Yemen weak enough to be manageable, divided enough to be purchasable, but not so collapsed that it exports chaos northward. That is an extraordinarily narrow target, and Saudi Arabia has missed it in both directions repeatedly.

Third, and increasingly decisive: the sea. Saudi Arabia’s oil exports historically ran through the Strait of Hormuz. Its Red Sea terminals at Yanbu and Jizan, fed by the east west pipeline, exist precisely as the hedge against a Hormuz closure. But a Red Sea route is only a hedge if the Bab al Mandab, the strait at Yemen’s southwestern tip, where Africa and Arabia nearly touch remains open. Whoever holds Yemen’s Red Sea coast holds the emergency exit.

In 2026, that stopped being theoretical. With Hormuz closed since the war on Iran began in late February, Saudi Arabia was routing more than half its daily oil production through Red Sea terminals until July, when Red Sea exports fell sharply after the Houthis declared a blockade on Saudi shipping. Both doors closed at once. That is the nightmare Saudi planners have war gamed for decades, and it arrived in a single summer.

The response has been to reach outside the Gulf entirely. In August, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a NATO style collective defence pact in Mecca, declaring that an attack on one is an attack on all, a new layer of protection beyond Riyadh’s longstanding reliance on Washington, amid growing regional doubt about whether the United States can still be counted on to defend its Gulf allies. Those doubts were not misplaced. On 10 September, Mohammed bin Salman reportedly called Donald Trump twice urging American strikes on the Houthis, and was refused; US officials said they did not intend to intervene directly, though over a hundred American advisers were already in the kingdom providing targeting and geospatial intelligence for the Saudi air campaign. Intelligence, yes. Ownership, no.

V. Iran’s Cheap War

Here the analysis has to be precise, because both sides of the propaganda war distort it.

The Houthis are not an Iranian invention. The movement emerged in 1990s Sa’dah as a Zaydi revivalist reaction to Salafi missionary expansion into their heartland and to the marginalisation of the highlands under Saleh. It fought six wars against the Yemeni state between 2004 and 2010 and received little Iranian support during that period. It is indigenous, and it would exist without Tehran.

What Iran did was recognise, after 2014, the highest return investment in the modern Middle East. Support has increased steadily since, as part of Tehran’s regional alliance network. For the price of smuggled missile components, drone technology, training cadres and targeting intelligence, a rounding error in Iranian military spending Tehran acquired the ability to threaten Saudi oil infrastructure, close a global shipping chokepoint, and bleed the wealthiest Arab state indefinitely. No Iranian conscript dies. No Iranian territory is exposed. It is the highest leverage ratio in contemporary geopolitics.

And in 2026 the relationship crossed a threshold from sponsorship to something closer to joint command. In July, Reuters reported that Iran had instructed the Houthis to be ready to close the Bab al Mandab if the United States struck Iranian power infrastructure. On 13 July, a Mahan Air flight carrying IRGC commanders and weapons attempted to land at Sanaa airport; Saudi and Yemeni government forces bombed the runway to stop it, and the Houthis declared the ceasefire dead. A week later they announced a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia and began striking Saudi tankers. The September offensive across the Tihama was reportedly guided and armed by the IRGC and led by Quds Force officer Abdolreza Shahlaei, with hundreds of IRGC personnel reported in country. Yemeni government forces claim to have recovered documents from a captured Houthi commander’s laptop detailing a four stage IRGC plan to take the Bab al Mandab.

The Houthis themselves have dropped the pretence of local grievance. Their deputy information minister said the movement had joined the war to support Iran, and described coordination with Iran, Lebanon and Iraq.

Understand what this means structurally. Iran’s strategy in this war has been to hold the world’s chokepoints. Having closed Hormuz, it has now, through a proxy, taken the other end of the Arabian trade system. Two straits, one hand.

VI. September 2026: The Door Closes

The military facts of this month are stark. Fighting that began on 3 September in Taiz became the deadliest in Yemen since the 2022 truce. The Houthis rolled up the entire Yemeni Red Sea coast Hays, Al Khawkhah, the Hanish Islands, the historic port of Mocha, then Dhubab and Perim Island at the mouth of the Bab al Mandab, with government forces confirming their withdrawal. These are the first changes in frontline control since 2022.

Houthi positions now sit roughly 130 kilometres from Camp Lemonnier, the American base in Djibouti, raising real questions about that base’s future.

Meanwhile the Mecca pact is being tested and found soft. Pakistan’s defence minister warned that Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia could activate the treaty, then Islamabad clarified that no military action had been discussed but that it would act when the time came. Some analysts read the absence of Turkish or Pakistani action as a violation of the agreement; others note that the pact requires parliamentary approval in those countries, while Saudi Arabia can act by royal decree. A mutual defence treaty that no signatory wants to trigger is a press release with letterhead.

VII. Why This Matters From Lagos

Africans should stop reading this as a distant Arab quarrel. The Bab al Mandab is an African strait as much as an Arabian one Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia sit on the far shore, and roughly a tenth of global seaborne trade passes through it.

Every container rerouted around the Cape adds cost to goods landing in Apapa and Tema. Egypt’s Suez revenue, already savaged, degrades further, with knock on effects across a continental economy where Cairo is a major player.

Yemen will not be unified by this war, and probably not by the next one. The Houthis can take territory but cannot govern a Shafi’i majority that will not accept sayyid rule. The Presidential Leadership Council cannot govern because it is a committee of rival patrons held together by Saudi money. The southerners want out and are too fractured to leave. Saudi Arabia cannot conquer Yemen and cannot abandon it. Iran does not want Yemen unified, a permanently bleeding Yemen is precisely the asset.

The honest analytical position is that the unitary Yemeni state created in 1990 is already dead, and has been since 2014. What remains is a contest over which armed authorities will control which fragments, and which foreign patron will pay for each. The international insistence on Yemen’s territorial integrity is not a policy. It is a refusal to write a new map, sustained by the fear that once one Arab border is redrawn, others will follow.

Arabia Felix is not happy. It is the pivot on which the Red Sea now turns, and it is being turned by hands that are not Yemeni.

Geopolitics with Oladimeji Bolarinwa — The Thought Builders Institute

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.

Subscribe now

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.

.

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 …

Read more

7 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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

8 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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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 🌴