Oloroogun Sola Ajisafe, Esq.
Yesterday Lasisi Olagunju wrote what many are afraid to say out loud: “Northern Nigeria will soon kill Nigeria.” He buried General Rabe with questions, not eulogies. How did a General die in captivity? How did his corpse return from the forest and even his son doesn’t know how? Why did a state government call murder “natural death”? What are his colleagues in the Army doing? A popular Yoruba saying says” Iku to pa ojugba eni, owe lo n’pa fun ni” meaning ” a death that kills your colleague is telling you something”
Read Lasisi, then read Awolowo. They are saying the same thing from two different decades.
Awo did not write about General Rabe. He died in 1987. But he wrote about the conditions that killed Rabe. In Path to Nigerian Freedom 1947, Awo warned; self-government without food, schools, jobs for the masses is building on quicksand. In Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution 1966, he said power without social justice equals revolution. At UNIFE (now OAU) in 1982, he said it plainest: _“If you build a nation where only the rich can breathe, don’t be surprised when the air becomes too thin for everyone, including the rich.”
Lasisi just showed us the air getting thin. A General. Kidnapped. Murdered. Corpse returned like a parcel. No arrests. No fatwa. No national reckoning. Only a state press release inventing diabetes and hypertension for a man murdered in the forest by non state actors. Worst of all, the military kept quiet. That’s peace of the graveyard.
Awo called this “political reciprocity”. Lasisi calls it “denial”. Both mean; when the elite incubate poverty, ignorance, and ungoverned space, those things eventually incubate bullets aimed at the elite.
Lasisi’s Kalahari analogy nails it. Rain falls in the Kalahari but the sand swallows it. The land stays thirsty. Northern Nigeria has received power, they have controlled the institutions, they had budgets, military operations, development commissions for decades. Yet the water sinks. Because the deeper defects were never confronted, namely; educational backwardness, elite manipulation, millions of out-of-school children, Almajiri, religiousity instead of social upliftment, and the forests turned to criminal empires.
Awo diagnosed that 70 years ago. He said neglect is a policy choice. Underdevelopment is not “no money.” It’s “we chose private jets over public schools, convoys over clinics, gates over governance.” Lasisi shows the receipt for that choice. As we speak, 46 Yoruba schoolchildren spending 31 days in the bush. A General dying with in front of his wife in captivity. Buratai warning that ministers and governors are next. But why now is Buratai talking. As Chief of Army staff and an elite in the North, have they agreed that the North is the issue and not Tinubu or his policies of three years?
So where do we place blame? Awo would place it where Lasisi placed it at the feet of choices. Not on “the North” as people. On the Northern elite who, as Awo put it, chose to live like lords while 95% lived like paupers. On a national elite that refused to “point fingers” because crime “has no ethnicity.” Crime may have no ethnicity, but poverty has an address. Insecurity has a nursery. Awo asked us to name the nursery.
And where are the solutions? Awo already wrote them. Lasisi restates them. Three strings on the cage, like Thorndike’s cat:
- Education as counter-insurgency. Awo funded free education in the West by taxing himself and his party. He knew an educated child doesn’t pick up a gun easily. Lasisi says it today; open classrooms where there are now recruitment grounds. An employed youth is cheaper than a drone.
- Elite sacrifice. The Northern elite must stop explaining away the crisis and start reforming it.;They must stop putting it at the feet of the reforms and the politics of Tinubu. Awo taxed his own class. He asked; if you won’t invest in people when times are good, people will invest in taking from you when times are bad. The walls are coming down. Now is the time for sacrifice, not denial.
- Truth before treatment. A physician who would not diagnose for fear of offending the patient kills them both. Lasisi says name the address of the danger. Awo says name the law of political reciprocity. Nigeria cannot solve a problem it refuses to locate. The cure is hidden in the cause. Let the North that had mad itself the enabler of evil shelve the roga of deceit and irresponsible elitism they wear like their babanriga.
General Rabe’s death is not karma. It is consequence. Awo predicted it. Lasisi is documenting it. The question for 2026 is the one Awo left us; will the elite keep testing political reciprocity, or will they finally read the blueprint? Rabe is the sign to the elite. The enemies in the forest are no longer far away. They are close to the front gate manned by another unfortunate and traumatised northerner. We call him aboki in the city. He won’t waste too much time to open the gate for an Aboki from the forests.
Because as Lasisi ends, and as Awo began; the desert takes. The desert knows no giving. Unless we change the choices that made the desert always hungry and thirsty for more rains.
Oloroogun Sola Ajisafe, Lawyer writes from Akure
