The Terror Situation in Northern Nigeria: A Religious Scheme

By Nwafor Oji Awala 

There is something deeply unsettling about the terror situation in Northern Nigeria. It has persisted for far too long, and the more one studies it, the more it begins to look less like a failure of governance and more like a deliberate design. One cannot help but suspect that the crisis is an Islamisation project in disguise, a slow but sustained campaign to bend Nigeria toward a particular religious and cultural ideology.

When Boko Haram first emerged, the claim was that it was an anti-Western education movement. Later came the bandits: faceless, gun-wielding militias who turned villages into slaughterfields and highways into hunting grounds. Yet, when these groups began to terrorize the nation, the reaction from Northern leaders and Islamic clerics was not outrage, not condemnation, but pampering and accommodation. While they were burning schools and displacing farmers, you could hear some of these leaders preaching “dialogue” with murderers, “amnesty” for killers, and “understanding” for extremists.

Remember that President Muhammadu Buhari, himself a retired General, a Northerner, and a Fulani man with a formidable 12 million-strong support base, had everything at his disposal to end Northern insecurity. He had the ethnic advantage, the religious trust, and the military credentials to command obedience across Arewa. He also had the goodwill of the Sheikhs, Imams, and Ulamas: those who could have used their pulpits to declare a spiritual war against terrorism. Yet, in eight long years, Buhari did nothing conclusive. Instead, the situation festered, and the terrorists grew bolder.

Why? Because Buhari and men like Mallam Nasir El-Rufai treated the matter with kid gloves, as if those wielding AK-47s and kidnapping schoolgirls were wayward sons in need of forgiveness, not criminals in need of justice. Under their watch, bandits became businessmen. Ransom became the new oil. Terrorism became a tolerated enterprise.

And now, Nigerians expect President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to succeed where Buhari failed? Tinubu does not have Buhari’s ethnic access. He does not command the trust of the Northern clerics. He cannot summon Fulani bandit commanders for dialogue. So, if Buhari, with his cultural alignment and military background, could not extinguish the flames, what miracle is expected from Tinubu, an outsider to that intricate northern web of religion and politics?

Until the North itself decides to end terrorism, it will never end. The day the Sheikhs and Imams of Arewa declare a Fatwa against the bandits and terrorists, that same day, the guns will fall silent. But as long as religion is given more value than development, as long as politics bows to clerical authority, and as long as the terror enterprise serves hidden agendas, this theatre of blood will continue.

So, I am tempted, or compelled, to believe that the terror situation in Northern Nigeria is not an accident but a programme, carefully sustained to achieve religious and political dominance. Until that truth is confronted, Nigeria will keep pretending, as it always does, that Arewa cares more about progress than about power and piety.

©️ Nwafor Oji Awala

Prime Heritage Magazine