Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, former spokesperson for the Northern Elders Forum, delivered one of the most pointed indictments yet of President Bola Tinubu’s handling of the country’s security crisis on Monday, accusing the administration of churning out empty press statements while soldiers and civilians are slaughtered, abducted, and displaced at a pace he said exceeded what a country formally at war would typically endure. Speaking on Trust TV, Baba-Ahmed cited the Borno attack — in which Boko Haram overran military bases, killed commanding officers, abducted over 100 women and children, and filmed themselves inside a mosque to taunt the Nigerian state — as only the latest evidence of a federal government that has become disturbingly unruffled by catastrophic security failures across the north-west, north-central, and north-east. He said Nigeria had become so desensitised to mass killings that even the audacity of terrorists claiming to have taken over villages no longer appeared to alarm those in authority into decisive action.
Baba-Ahmed’s language was unusually unsparing for a figure who has historically sought to work within formal political frameworks rather than resorting to populist condemnation. He told the Tinubu administration directly that the blood of the dead was on the hands of every official who had sworn an oath to protect Nigerian citizens and then retreated to issuing statements of condemnation while waiting for the next attack. He invoked the sacred character of the Ramadan and Lent seasons currently being observed by millions of Nigerians to heighten the moral charge of his indictment, describing as particularly obscene the fact that so much blood was being shed during a period of fasting, prayer, and spiritual reflection. He added that Nigeria’s failure to stop the killings was handing outside powers — he referenced the United States — a justification to intervene in Nigeria’s affairs under the banner of protecting Christians, even if such interventions ultimately worsened the situation on the ground.
The former presidential aide called on Tinubu to take direct personal responsibility for fixing the military, the internal security architecture, and the intelligence services — three institutions he described as fundamentally broken in their approach to the threat environment the country faces. He argued that the visible haemorrhage of military personnel killed alongside civilians was not merely a tactical problem but a systemic one rooted in leadership failure at the highest levels, and that citizens who felt abandoned by the state were being pushed toward a dangerous loss of faith in the entire framework of governance. His remarks did not spare any segment of the political class, noting that Muslims were killing Muslims and Christians killing Christians in different theatres of conflict, making the crisis irreducible to any single ethnic or religious narrative that politicians might exploit to avoid accountability.
