Cry, My Beloved Kwara

Olusegun Adeniyi

What distinguishes me from my siblings is that I was the only one to be born in a hospital. My brothers and sister were more traditionally born at home. Since my mother (of blessed memory) loved telling the story of the circumstances that conspired for me to end up with such a ‘privilege’, I wore it as a special badge while growing up. But then, which hospital? Oke-ode Maternity Hospital in Ifelodun local government area of Kwara State. Yes, the same Oke-ode where on 28 September 2025, armed bandits murdered no fewer than 15 members of a local forest guard and others. I know the contours of that community, the compound architecture, the communal rhythms, etc. And for those reasons, the brutal killings hit me hard.

So, the more details I learn about last week Tuesday’s massacre in Kaiama local government of Kwara State, the more difficult it has been for me to remain detached from the tragedy. When heavily armed militants stormed these twin communities on the evening of 3rd February, systematically executing residents who dared to reject their strange doctrine, they were announcing the opening of a more sinister insurgency front in a country already reeling from two active theatres of jihadist warfare. And they were doing it in my Kwara, a state that has prided itself on its relative peace, harmonious coexistence of diverse faiths and status as a bridge between the North and South.

The details emerging from Woro and Nuku are horrifying. Survivors describe hundreds of gunmen arriving at dusk on motor cycles, binding the hands of villagers, and executing them at close range. Some were burned alive. Others had their throats slit. The chief Imam of Woro, a school principal, a headmistress, and schoolchildren are among the dead. No fewer than 38 people were abducted, predominantly women and children. The village head of Woro, Alhaji Salihu Umar, lost three children while his wife and two others were kidnapped. His palace was razed to the ground.

The identities of perpetrators are still contested, which itself tells a troubling story. The State House of Assembly member representing the constituency, Mohammed Omar Bio attributes the massacre to Lakurawa, an affiliate of the Islamic State-West African Province (ISWAP) that has been making incursions from Niger Republic since 2018. President Bola Tinubu blamed Boko Haram. Researchers at the Hudson Institute point to Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad that has established what security analysts call the ‘Shiroro cell’ in neighbouring Niger State. One Abubakar Saidu, a protege of the late Abubakar Shekau who goes by the name Sadiku, is said to be the leader of this group that has made the Kainji National Park, which covers an area of about 5,341 square kilometres, (far more than the total landmass of Lagos State) its operational headquarters. The confusion about perpetrators reflects the convergence of multiple jihadist networks: Boko Haram splinter factions, Lakurawa fighters, ISWAP and Ansaru elements that are now operating with increasing coordination across Nigeria’s North Central region.

This convergence represents a strategic threat of the first order. But let me be clear about what that means in human terms. For about two decades, we watched the Northeast burn. We sympathized, wrote editorials, called for government action. But there was psychological distance; Borno seemed far away, the Lake Chad Basin felt like another country. The Northwest’s descent into banditry was more proximate, alarming, but still somehow containable in our minds as a regional crisis. But we can no longer pretend that we don’t face a clear and present danger. The North Central zone serves as Nigeria’s strategic hinge, connecting the North to the South. If Jihadist groups consolidate their presence in Kwara State, as they clearly intend to do, they will have achieved what has eluded them in the northeastern insurgency: a strategic position from which to threaten not just Nigeria’s political capital and economic heartland, but our national cohesion.

This is not abstract for those of us from these communities. This is about whether we can go home. Whether our children can visit their grandparents. Whether the funerals we attend will be of elders who died in old age or young relatives massacred for refusing to submit to extremism. The religious dimension cuts particularly deep. The Woro and Nuku are predominantly Muslim communities practicing the tolerant, syncretic Islam that has characterized Kwara for generations. These were not Christian villages caught in sectarian warfare but Muslim communities that rejected militant extremism. The attackers demanded submission to ‘Sharia’, as if the residents were not already Muslims living according to their faith. This is the cruel irony that outsiders often miss: Jihadists enjoy targeting Muslims who refuse their perverted interpretations.

Meanwhile, growing up in Kwara State, we learned that Islam was capacious enough to accommodate diverse practices, that Yoruba identity and Muslim faith were not contradictory, that we could be Nigerians without surrendering our particularities. My late mother was Munirat before she married my father and then became Felicia. Every year, I still buy Sallah rams for members of that side of my family. It is the state where a Bolaji could be fathered by an Abdullahi (apologies to the late Pa Abraham Adesanya). Therefore, the militants attacking our communities represent everything we were taught to reject: intolerance and violence as religious expression.

What makes the North Central expansion particularly alarming is the infrastructure already in place. According to recent research, the Shiroro cell has been operating since at least 2021. Lakurawa has grown to approximately 2,000 members drawn from multiple countries. These groups have established indoctrination schools, developed financial networks, and created supply chains connecting theatres. They are not coming; they are already here, building capacity while we sleep and make political permutations about a tomorrow not guaranteed.

The response to the Kwara massacres followed a now-familiar script: presidential condemnation, troop deployments, promises to “checkmate the barbaric terrorists.” These are necessary. But are they sufficient? We have been deploying military battalions for almost two decades. Yet the insurgency has metastasized from one state to half the country.

I write this with both anguish and anger. Anguish for the almost 200 lives cut short in communities that deserved protection. Anger at the government—at all levels—that has systematically failed its most basic obligation. We have had years to disrupt financial networks, revive regional cooperation, reimagine forest policy, reform the Nigeria Police Force, resource our military properly and address the governance vacuums that make rural communities vulnerable. But we have squandered every opportunity as our country increasingly becomes one vast ungoverned space. In the course of the assignment as a member of the ‘Facts Finding Committee on the Incessant Attacks, Killings and Destruction of Plateau Communities’ established last year by Governor Caleb Mutfwang, I was privileged to see the vulnerability of our rural communities. Which is why we must rethink our national security because we do not have, and cannot have, enough military troops to police all of them.

My fear is that the recent massacres in Kwara State may not be the last, that we may have normalised this horror and mass burials. Beneath the fear is a stubborn insistence that it does not have to be this way. Kwara should not become another front in Nigeria’s endless wars. The people of Woro and Nuku, like all Nigerians, deserve a state that protects them. We owe the massacred people more than our grief. We owe them a reckoning with the choices that brought us here, and the political will to make different choices going forward. Anything less is complicity in the next massacre.

I apologise to my readers if I sound emotional today. The Woro and Nuku massacres are not distant tragedies for me. They are personal. They are an assault on my home. These are my people. And I am writing this as a son of Kwara who can no longer pretend that the crisis afflicting Nigeria is happening somewhere else. It is happening to me. It is happening to us. And unless we confront that reality with the urgency it demands, we will run out of people to bury in our rural communities.

Senate and ‘Real Time’ Wahala

‘Bandits and terrorists are transmitting live videos from Nigerian forests but the Senate says INEC cannot transmit election results from polling booths’—WhatsApp message

The altercation between the African Democratic Alliance (ADC) National Chairman, Dr David Mark and Senate President Godswill Akpabio over an amendment to the 2022 Electoral Act may have been mild but it was quite revealing. Speaking in Abuja at the unveiling of a book by a former senator (Effiong Bob), titled ‘The Burden of Legislators in Nigeria,’ Akpabio said the phrase “real time” was the only thing removed from the provision on the electronic transmission of results. But those two key words make all the difference. And Akpabio knows this!

To be fair, Akpabio also explains why the Senate decided to retain the provision as contained in the Electoral Act 2022. “All we said during the discussion was that we should remove the word ‘real-time’ because if you say ‘real-time’, then there is a network or grid failure, and the network is not working. When you go to court, somebody will say it ought to have been real-time. That was all we said,” Akpabio said to justify the Senate decision. “Real time means that in over nine states where networks are not working because of insecurity, there will be no election results. Nationally, if the national grid collapses and no network is working, no election results will be valid.”

In his reaction, Mark, who spent 24 years in the senate and presided for eight years, said INEC should be allowed to “decide whether they can do it (real-time electronic transmission) or not. Don’t speak for INEC…If INEC cannot do it, it’s their own problem, and it’s not for you to speak for INEC. It’s as simple as that.” Instructively, Mark then dismissed his own call as “just a by-the-way issue; it’s not a serious issue.” But for most Nigerians, it is.

The proposed amendment now jettisoned by the Senate but accepted by the House of Representatives requires the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) presiding officers to electronically transmit results from each polling unit to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IREV) portal in real time, after the prescribed Form EC8A had been signed and stamped and counter-signed by candidates’ agents. But this controversy is not new. When it arose in the process of amending the 2022 Electoral Act, then INEC chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, had argued that the provision was “long overdue, doable, achievable and inevitable.” The then INEC National Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, Mr Festus Okoye amplified that: “We have uploaded results from very remote areas, even from areas where you have to use human carriers to access. So, we have made our own position very clear, that we have the capacity and we have the will to deepen the use of technology in the electoral process.”

It is interesting that the view of INEC was not even sought before Akpabio and colleagues began inventing excuses as to why the electronic transmission of results would be problematic for the commission in the 2027 general election. The question is: What exactly is the Senate afraid of?

The NFI Story

​Last Sunday’s column, Left Behind But Not Forgotten – THISDAYLIVE by my friend, Simon Kolawole has drawn considerable attention to an initiative started by my wife eight years ago which targets out-of-school children, especially in Kpaduma Hill in Asokoro District of Abuja. Because I have received several messages, below is what I wrote five years ago which explains how it all started, Amatala and Other ‘Unforgotten’ Children  – THISDAYLIVE. My hope is that all stakeholders will collaborate to take the education of children from disadvantaged background more seriously in Nigeria.

• You can follow me on my X (formerly Twitter) handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com