Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s 2023 presidential candidate, has again accused President Bola Tinubu and the Nigerian ruling class of maintaining a deafening silence as terrorists continue to kill soldiers and civilians across multiple states, describing the country as clearly under siege and warning that the scale of insecurity had become unbearable. In a statement issued on Monday, Obi cited the Ngoshe attack in Borno State, where terrorists overpowered soldiers, killed them alongside several civilians, and abducted more than 100 women and children, as the most recent example of what he described as government indifference to the loss of Nigerian lives. He stated that the primary responsibility of any government was to secure the lives and property of its citizens, yet the response from those in power had been dead silence, as though Nigerian lives no longer mattered.
Obi reserved particular contempt for what he described as the political class’s preoccupation with elections at the expense of governance. He accused politicians of being devastatingly more concerned with how to snatch, grab, and run away with the 2027 elections than with addressing a security crisis that was claiming lives across the country daily. The sacrifice of Nigerian soldiers, he said, was being passed in silence by the very government those soldiers served. He pointed to Borno as only one theatre of a nationwide emergency, noting that the pattern of killings, abductions, and displacement had spread well beyond the north-east into states that had previously experienced relatively lower levels of organised armed violence.
Obi cited Nasarawa, Kogi, and Benue as evidence that the terrorist footprint was expanding, saying residents were reporting that armed groups were now moving freely across farms and forests, disrupting economic activities and forcing entire villages to flee. He disclosed that in Nasarawa’s Kadarko area alone, 14,318 civilians were now registered as internally displaced persons — a figure that, he argued, illustrated the human cost of what he characterised as governmental neglect. Benue State, which has suffered persistent violence from armed herders and militia groups for years, continued to generate casualty reports with little federal response, while Kogi’s security situation had deteriorated in ways that rarely attracted national headlines.
The statement is consistent with Obi’s sustained post-election posture as a critic of the Tinubu administration’s governance record, but it draws renewed attention to a security landscape that has worsened considerably in 2026. ISWAP’s coordinated assault on four Borno bases, Boko Haram’s filming of itself inside Ngoshe’s central mosque, and the simultaneous deterioration in the north-west and Middle Belt represent a multi-front crisis that no single administration could easily reverse.
