Nigeria on the Ropes: Bring back our mercenaries, please! By Ugoji Egbujo

Nigeria is bleeding. Our soldiers fight with courage, but they are spread perilously thin across multiple fronts. Goats are now eating palm fronds on our heads. 

From the Sambisa Forest to the Kotangora thickets of Niger and  the vast rangelands of Zamfara and the valleys of Orsu, violence lurks and consumes lives and livelihoods. It is better to swallow national pride and live in a secure but humbled country than to swagger in denial toward Somalia 2.0. The clock is ticking. Our leaders are fiddling and scavenging. A man with elephantiasis of the scrotum has no private parts, shouldn’t bother with pride

Bandits and jihadists now hold swathes of Nigerian territory. They are collecting obeisance and gathering taxes. Since Boko Haram’s emergence in 2009, the country has known no lasting peace. What began as one insurgency has metastasized into more than twenty armed factions operating like medieval warlords. Tinubu is not the problem and he doesn’t look like the solution.

Our borders are porous, our state is weak. Every desperado in the Sahel now dreams of Nigeria’s ungoverned spaces. But we cant blame it on our mad neighbors either. Because most of vampires  are our own youths. Disillusioned and unemployed youths. Derived and depraved, stripped of faith in the idea called Nigeria. Our chickens are home to roost. 

The bumbling political class has normalised opportunism and brigandage. Those who came to renew hope have broken it. The churches and mosques are as  dissolute as they are complicit . The moral compass is shattered. The nation is drifting. Monkeys are working , baboons are frolicking. The dreams of our forefathers have become a nightmare. Tribes and tongues have divided us. Politicians now want us to ‘stand on their mandate’, not in brotherhood. The fatherland is no longer sovereign. Bandits are seated on the high table. Which way, Nigeria?

Make no mistake: our crisis is hydra-headed. Moral decay is real, but the deeper wound is the evaporation of nationhood. For millions, Nigeria is an abstraction that stirs emotion only when the Super Eagles score or D’Tigress dunk. Our leadership recruitment is flawed. Those who emerge are often intellectually barren beyond the compulsion to loot. The federal system has obscured accountability and bred indolence. Without vision, there is no mobilisation of the citizens and resources for the common good. So millions languish in the midst of plenty. Anomie spreads like wildfire. Doomed by bad leadership and floundering , the youths are jumping ship into foreign lands. Many trapped by joblessness are jumping into crime.  The American president calls us a Disgraced Country. 

There is no probity at the top, no long-term development plan, no jobs, and precious little food—yet the population explodes. In 2025 we still lack reliable electricity. Manufacturing is on life support. What we have in abundance are treasury looters, corrupt policemen, and compromised judges.

And still the killings continue.

In a single week in November 2025:

• Brigadier-General Musa Uba, one of our finest, was ambushed, wounded, captured, and executed on camera by ISWAP in Borno. Three of his subordinates were killed too. We had hours—perhaps days—to rescue him on our own soil, yet we could not. 

•.Dozens of school girls  were abducted in Kebbi. Their vice principal was killed. Echoes of Chibok eleven years on.

•.A hundred school children are taken from a catholic school in  Niger state.  Gunmen stormed a Catholic school in Papiri, Niger State, carting away over a hundred souls. 

•.Heavily armed JNIM jihadists walked into a CAC church in Eruku, Kwara  and killed 3 worshippers, and marched 35 parishioners, including aged women, into the forest on foot. Kwara used to be the home of tranquility. Now it’s the home of Alqaeda surrogates  called JNIM. Many communities have fled.  The gunmen that visited the church are asking for 4 billion naira. With whatever they are finally paid by the weak state, they will recruit fighters and buy weapons. That was how Bokoharam  grew wings. 

• Sixty-four villagers kidnapped in Zamfara. Fifteen people, including nursing mothers and infants, seized in Sokoto. Four  rice farmers cut down in Kwara. The list is numbing. All in one week. 

Nigeria is on the ropes. Our leaders oscillate between denial (“Nigeria is safe”) and deflection (“insecurity is global”). President Tinubu once promised to recruit and train millions of youths to crush the insurgents. Since he became president and fell for Paris and st Lucia, insecurity has become an inevitable global phenomenon which the country must learn to live with .  The ’50 million youths’ pledge has gathered dust. Only when a foreign leader threatened intervention to halt the slaughter of Christian communities did the man  briefly fret.

Communities now pay taxes to bandits. At one infamous “peace meeting” between local authorities and terrorists in Katsina, a bandit leader waltzed into the meeting wearing  the uniform of an Assistant Commissioner of Police he had murdered months earlier. The bandits had set the agenda of the meeting precluding our policemen from attending in their uniforms. So our officers sat powerless in mufti as children took selfies with killers in our police uniforms— one of them in  the uniform of a murdered Police Area Commander,  his name tag displayed on the chest of the celebrity  bandit. 

The country is immunocompromised. A political culture that rewards mediocrity and dishonesty .  A steady slide into a one party state. Elections destined to recycle incompetence. The endemicity of corruption draining resources and sabotaging crime control efforts.  The surge of joblessness and  youth unemployment.  A population bomb. Massive brain drain.  Deep religious and ethnic fault lines. Climate change. Nigeria is vulnerable. 

We need help. Now.

The military requires re-equipment, retraining, and reinforcement to counter asymmetric threats. We need surveillance drones, strike drones, night-vision capability, and real-time intelligence fusion. We need to put the enemy on the back foot so farmers can return to their fields and miners to their pits.

One pragmatic option—however unpalatable—is the temporary, tightly controlled deployment of professional foreign contractors (mercenaries by another name). We have done it before. In early 2015, South African and Eastern European specialists, flying attack helicopters and conducting night operations, recaptured dozens of towns from Boko Haram in weeks—what regular forces had failed to achieve in years. The operation worked. It was ended not because it failed, but because it bruised egos. Governor Zulum of the terror ravaged Borno has called for it. 

Mercenaries are not a panacea. They are expensive, politically toxic, and carry risks of abuse. Yet they can deliver rapid tactical breathing space, train our forces, and pilot high-intensity operations in the worst-affected areas. We can start with the South-East if the North is wary of the Western Powers. Alternatively we can beg Egypt for help if that would suit the Muslim brethren  in North-West kingdoms ravaged by bandits.

Kinetic action alone, however, will not suffice. It must be paired with:

Genuine negotiation and social re-engineering where appropriate to douse tensions

Regionalisation and devolution of power and resources to regions

Overhaul of the criminal justice system and electoral process

Above all, a political class that chooses patriotism over plunder

The fish rots from the head. President Tinubu must become the moral example the nation hungers for.

First, though, we must stop the daily funerals. National pride is important, but the lives of our children are infinitely more precious. If our leaders cannot or will not protect us, we must set ego aside, bend down low and invite whatever foreign nation or military contractors to staunch the bleeding.

A humiliated living dog is better than a dead lion. The Giant of Africa is on the ropes. The time for action is now.

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