By Jeff Godwin Doki Ph.D
Nigeria, Africa’s giant, is once again in the global headlines and not for any good reason but for the tragic. In just one week, in the month of November, 2025, gunmen have abducted school children in Kebbi State, gunmen have attacked and killed worshippers in a Catholic church in Niger State, and they have abducted about 64 people in Zamfara State and many school children in Plateau State. The list of abductions in Nigeria in the past few weeks is as long as a railway line. And in the wake of these abductions, religious sentiments have soared in the country especially with threats from Washington to intervene and protect Christian populations from genocide and mass atrocities. Right now, majority of Nigerian citizens are feeling very unsafe and unsure to the extent that schools have all been shut down in States like Plateau, Niger and Kebbi. The whole thing looks like a return to Thomas Hobbes ‘State of Nature’.
Apart from insecurity, the other issue which has dominated public discourse in the past few weeks in Nigeria is University education. But let’s begin with security. When Thomas Hobbes, one of the intellectual founding fathers of political philosophy, expounded the ‘Social Contract’ theory in his 1651 book Leviathan, he maintained that individuals in a ‘State of Nature’ shall agree to give up some of their freedoms to an absolute sovereign in exchange for security, order and protection from chaotic, violent existence. In other words, states exist primarily to protect the security of their citizens. It is only in this regard that the security of the state is considered important and worth protecting because it is the primary responsibility of the state to provide security for individuals. But there are times when states (like Nigeria) cannot provide security for its citizens. And this is the biggest nightmare that Nigerian citizens are living with today.
Apparently, some states (like Nigeria) are simply incapable of protecting their populations because they lack the capacity to defeat or make peace with rebel groups. And this willful incapacity on the part of the government is simply because the political class in Nigeria is obsessed only with the acquisition of political power to the detriment of the lives of the citizens who shall legitimize such power through the ballot on election day. Every day you find on Nigerian roads y one Governor or Senator with more than 100 policemen and soldiers on a convoy of more than fifty cars while there is no single policeman or soldier to check the activities of bandits and terrorists in the rural villages. What a deliberate and shameful act!
Over the last decades, kidnapping and abduction have become second nature to Nigerian citizens. Leaders both past and present, including retired Generals, have promised action but have failed to muster the political will to match their words with action. Quite often, Nigerian leaders both past and present, have chosen the path of delusion, denial or outright falsehood. Meanwhile, the security situation has deteriorated to alarming proportions even as international pressure continues to mount. To say the least, no Nigerian leader, in recent times, has dealt with the problem of security decisively and sincerely. Take a look at these frightening figures. Under the regime of Jonathan Ebele Goodluck, 276 school girls aged 16-18 were kidnapped by the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram from a Government Secondary school in Chibok, Borno State in the year2014. This was one of the most notorious cases in that year. Under the regime of late President Muhammadu Buhari, 3,478 people were abducted across the country from December, 2021 to June, 2022.
According to The PUNCH, these figures were obtained from the daily incidents recorded by the Nigerian Security Tracker—- a project of the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think- thank during the period under review. And while celebrating the National Day of Mourning in Nigeria, the Civil Societies Organization declared that 4,416 people have died in the last 24 months since Bola Ahmed Tinubu came to power. More worrisome is the CSO’s declaration that Nigeria is the most insecure state in the world in 2024. These kind of statements and figures are not only frightening and dangerous but also shameful especially for a country that brags to be the giant of Africa.
And just like security, education is also a function of the state and it remains a basic human right as outlined in the following documents: article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights, article 28 of the Convention on the rights of the child and article 11 of the African charter of the rights and welfare of the child. All these Conventions emphasize the need for the state to provide free and compulsory basic education. But instead of doing this, the Nigerian leadership is more interested in establishing new universities in the country rather than burnishing the existing ones to international standards. It is twenty -six years today since the military have retired to the barracks and civilians, who are supposed to be more tolerant and democratic, have been in power. It is the height of irony that all the civilian regimes in Nigeria since 1999 have refused to obey the collective bargaining principle as enshrined in the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 98 of 1949 and Convention No. 154 of 1981. Consequently, ASUU as a union of academics is gradually losing faith with democratic regimes in Nigeria because there is nothing democratic about them.
While he was campaigning as the flagbearer of the ruling All Peoples Congress (APC), the current Nigerian President declared on the pulpit that if he wins election there would be no more strikes in the Nigeria university system. But that promise for now seems to be grossest falsehood and another chilling copy of a dish of lies. The current regime has done nothing about university funding. The present government has done nothing about revitalizing public universities. Nigerian university teachers are still owed a salary arrears of three and a half months. The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is still struggling, with little success, to get the Federal Government of Nigeria to implement the renegotiated FGN-ASUU 2009 Agreement which commenced since March 2017. The entire Nigerian public university system is rotten and smelly.
And this is true because Nigerian universities if properly funded would motivate university teachers to conduct research in libraries and well- equipped laboratories. If properly funded, both the university teacher and the student could have access to electronic and physical journals, books, chemicals and reagents. Undoubtedly, University funding and revitalization is all about these and many more.
More than that, the huge irony is that in Nigeria, universities are established not for pragmatic reasons but just to score some cheap pollical points. In Nigeria, the idea of the university as the ‘ivory tower’ has been completely eroded and we fear that one day every Nigerian Senator shall have a university located at his very backyard. From the 1990s to date, the rot in the University system has continued unabated; from 1990s to date the University teachers have embarked on several warning strikes and sometimes indefinite strikes all in an attempt to press the Nigerian government to tread the path of honor by respecting its promises. From Obasanjo to Yaradua to Jonathan, from Buhari to Tinubu the Nigerian public has only been fed with a dish of lies concerning the real problems in Nigerian public universities. At some point, there are even some attempts by the political class to privatize all Nigerian public universities. Should that happen one day, education in Nigeria shall be for only the rich and ignorance for the poor. Tufiakwa! We shall resist this move stiffly, resolutely and consistently!
Finally, to the question: what has happened to the security situation and university education in Nigeria? It is simple and straight-forward. Nigeria as a country has endured a tortured history and has continued to persevere under the burden of, bad leadership, corruption, hypocrisy, deceit and incompetence all of which have given rise to poverty, hunger, disease, political instability and religious, social and ethnic strife. But at the same time, Nigeria is a blessed country only tormented by unresolved puzzles and paradoxes. Nigeria is rich but at the same time it is poor because the rich people in Nigeria did not become rich through invention or manufacturing. Rather, they are rich through contract fraud, embezzlement and outright theft of public funds. What is lacking in Nigeria is leadership with vision and integrity; leadership that has the interest and welfare of the people at the center of all its policies and actions. Nigeria is not lacking in educated politicians and leaders, what is in short supply is a crop of incorruptible statesmen and stateswomen who will not sell Nigeria and its citizens to amass wealth and property in leading capital cities of the world at the expense of the much- needed development at home. It seems it is only in Nigeria that Presidents, Governors and Ministers have immunity from persecution in crimes against their people and humanity while in office. It seems only in Nigeria that politicians who could hardly afford money to fuel their beat-up cars (if they owned any at all), become owners of private jets soon after getting into office. It seems only in Nigeria that leaders use security votes to make themselves billionaires while their countries number among the world’s most poverty-stricken, and their citizenry are at the mercy of armed robbers and daring terrorists.
In the final analysis, it could be perceived that the problem of insecurity and university education is a creation of the political class in Nigeria. The ruling class has clearly demonstrated a willful incapacity to solve the problems of security and education. The political class is only interested in winning elections; the class is simply re-grouping to continue to plunder our treasury. It is two clear years before election year but the political atmosphere in Nigeria is already charged with innumerable defections to the ruling party; with political rallies and conventions; with politicians goose-stepping on a red carpet of blood in broad daylight at political rallies. We are confronted with a government that has utter contempt for its intellectuals and revels in the systematic decimation of its youth. We have a government that has made the universities a target of its animosity. It is becoming apparent that we Nigerian citizens are simply trapped in a vicious and endless cycle of human stupidity. Our lives have become playthings in the hands of our rulers and terrorists. We receive the same litany of excuses every day and night from the government. We are cloyed with the same dish of lies every week. It is a clear case of motion without movement even as we dissipate so much energy flogging dead horses.