Every society lives with bad arguments. But some arguments are not just bad; they are lethal. The arguments become Weapons of Mass Distraction (WMD). They divert attention from existential threats. They blur distinctions. They elevate irrelevancies. They collapse the hierarchy of urgency. They confuse categories until the national psyche becomes too fogged to distinguish between the essential and the peripheral. This is how civilizations decay – not always from external conquest, but from internal cognitive collapse. That is when lousy arguments become instruments of national suicide!
Nigeria today is not merely under attack from ISWAP, bandits, and other violent non-state actors. It is under attack from puerile and inane arguments, the kind that conflate issues, confuse causes, and convert life-and-death dilemmas into petty philosophical bickering. Psychologists call this displacement, focusing on the wrong fight because the right fight is too frightening. Political theorists call it mis-framing, shifting the locus of debate until national priorities dissolve into abstractions. Cultural critics call it escapism, avoiding reality by debating its shadows. Whatever we call it, the effect is the same – a nation bleeding from its vitals, yet arguing over its vocabulary – whether President Donald Trump’s framing is accurate, or whether his tone is diplomatic enough. A ‘high-powered’ delegation sent to push the Federal Government’s narrative succeeded perhaps only minimally. The Washington brick wall birthed a re-strategization – a 2-day training programme for 50 lawmakers on how to navigate ‘American Foreign Policy under the Trump Administration: New Realities for African Negotiators’. Yes; the weekend talk shop was another intellectual hair-splitting. Nigeria has no luxury for this; at least, not now. Not with the blood still warm on the soil. Not with a nation’s children in captivity. Not with its generals hunted and executed like prey.
An Army-General that falls an easy prey to ‘rag-tag’ non-state actors clearly sends out a distressful symbolic and strategic shock wave. The killing of Brigadier General M. Uba is not merely another tragic entry in Nigeria’s endless security ledger. It is an earthquake in the national psyche. This was a Brigade Commander, a top-tier officer responsible for strategic operations in the heart of Borno State. Hours before his death, he had overseen a successful joint air-ground offensive that neutralized insurgents. Confidence was high. Morale was rising. The momentum seemed to be shifting. Then, boom! And the unthinkable happened.
His communications were intercepted.
His live location was traced.
His convoy was ambushed.
His team was overwhelmed by a surge of ISWAP fighters.
He was abducted alive.
Forced into video calls under duress.
Interrogated by terrorists.
And executed.
This was not battlefield chaos. This was a coordinated assassination engineered through sophisticated intelligence gathering. It sends a cold, unmistakable message: ISWAP has evolved from a ‘ragtag militia’ into a techno-savvy insurgency with the capability to hunt Nigerian officers as targets of war. The implications are chilling:
Operational reach has expanded.
Terrorists can track troop movements, jam communications, and infiltrate command structures.
Psychological warfare is escalating.
Killing a General is not just violence; it is messaging.
It demoralizes troops, terrifies civilians, and emboldens insurgents.
State authority is being symbolically decapitated.
Once Generals are hunted, the myth of state invulnerability collapses.
Nigeria’s tactical vulnerabilities are widening.
The insurgency has moved from guerrilla warfare to hybrid warfare, mixing terrorism, intelligence, propaganda, and battlefield manoeuvres.
This is not the time to debate semantics. This is the time to ‘fight to finish’ – or perish. It is profoundly ironic, almost tragically comic, that in a country drowning under the weight of insurgency, mass abductions, and systemic insecurity, some of our most thunderous political grammar is still reserved for intra-party quarrels. When Mr. Nyesom Wike vowed to “fight to finish” over the emergence of the Turaki-led faction of the PDP national leadership, many observers took note of the familiar theatre of Nigerian politics – chest-thumping, verbal slugfests, and gladiatorial pageantry. But if Nigeria needs a fight-to-finish at all – and indeed she does – it is certainly not in the service of partisan turf wars or factional supremacy. The real fight-to-finish – the one deserving every decibel of political bravado – is the existential confrontation with Boko Haram, ISWAP, banditry, mass kidnappings, and the metastasizing terror economy devouring the Federal Republic piece by piece. A country, where an Army General falls in combat, 25 schoolgirls in Maga (Kebbi State) and another set of indeterminate number of students in Papiri (Niger State) vanish into the night, has no room for political warriors sparring over party secretariats while the country burns from its perimetre to its core. If we are desperate for a fight worthy of this rhetoric – let it be the fight for Nigeria’s soul. Let Wike’s fire, Trump’s fire, Tinubu’s fire, and every fire available in all cylinders be redirected toward the only battle that matters – the one against terror; the one against mass death; the one against the slow-motion disintegration of the Nigerian state. In truth, the only legitimate ‘fight-to-finish’ is the fight that ensures Nigeria itself does not finish.
This brings us to another sore point of the insurgency – secondary school students abducted, another generation stolen, a gory rewind of Chibok, Dapchi, and Kankara tragedies. Barely had the nation processed the execution of a general when another tragedy struck. 25 later reduced to 24 schoolgirls abducted from an all-female boarding school in Maga Kebbi State. The Vice Principal was shot dead. The girls were marched into the horrendous womb of the night. Parents screamed in helplessness. Then came Friday morning, 21 November, it was the turn of St. Mary’s Secondary School Papiri when an unconfirmed number of students was abducted. Yes. It was another Chibok, another Dapchi, another Federal Science College tragedy unfolding in slow motion. So, within a short span of four days, 145 Nigerians disappeared, according to Punch newspaper headline news. Effectively, Nigeria has become a country where classrooms are hunting grounds, schools are abduction markets, and girls’ education resembles a dangerous gamble with death. The moral urgency of this moment is beyond dispute. Yet, here we are – still arguing whether Trump’s framing exaggerates Christian persecution, still debating labels rather than solutions, still engaging in the academic luxury of philosophical hair-splitting while children weep in hidden camps, hopeless and hapless in captivity. When a sovereign state reaches this point, arguments stop being intellectual exercises. They become accomplices to terror.
Then, enters Donald Trump’s ‘guns-a-blazing’ notice, one variously interpreted as a threat, a warning, an opportunity. In the first week of November 2025, President Donald Trump did what African leaders rarely do: he called out the carnage publicly, angrily, and without euphemisms. He demanded answers, accountability, and most dramatically, military action, rhetorically code-named ‘guns-a-blazing’. He instructed the Pentagon to prepare for possible deployment. He floated the idea of U.S. troops on Nigerian soil. He threatened “fast and vicious” strikes against ISWAP. And predictably, Nigeria’s public discourse splintered, – not into strategic evaluation but into semantic warfare:
Is it really Christian genocide?
Is Trump exaggerating?
Is the language appropriate?
Is this neocolonialism?
These questions may have merit in a seminar room. But they are meaningless in a morgue. A country losing generals and school children daily is not a country with the privilege of debating adjectives. The appropriate question is simple: Will decisive action save Nigerian lives now? If yes, then the moral case is clear. If no, then propose something better – urgently, concretely, and realistically. Neither silence nor state-sponsored counter-narratives is an option. Debate without alternatives is cowardice. Opposition without solutions is complicity.
Central to the moral urgency of Nigeria’s security collapse is the Ezikeọba proverbial canon, which captures the brutal clarity of war: “Kẹẹ eshile chie egiji mẹ meyi fome.” It doesn’t really matter how a war is prosecuted so long as the ultimate aim of shedding blood (i.e., neutralizing the enemy) is achieved. Its philosophical core is stark but brutally honest; in existential wars, the end justifies the means. This proverb is not barbaric. It is civilizational realism. It means: survival first, strategy second, semantics last. Civilizations that survive apply this logic. Civilizations that collapse debate when they should fight. Nigeria must decide which one it wants to be. This is not a celebration of violence for its own sake. It is a recognition that when a sovereign state is under siege; when generals are ambushed, troops decimated, schoolgirls abducted, civilians massacred, and entire communities turned into ghostly shadows, arguments about style, method, or whose war doctrine is more elegant become decadent distractions. In such contexts, what matters is results, not rhetoric.
Thus, when critics nitpick Trump’s “guns-a-blazing” threat or question whether President Tinubu should accept external boots, hardware, or intelligence support, they commit the fatal error of prioritizing semantics over survival. They frame the debate as “Christian genocide” vs. “Muslim genocide,” thereby pursuing shadows while substance bleeds at their feet. The proverb warns against exactly this kind of folly. What the Ezikeọba elders were saying, and what Nigeria urgently needs to relearn, is this: When a war becomes an existential struggle, the legitimacy of any method is determined solely by whether it ends the bloodshed inflicted on the innocent – not by whether it aligns with our political sensitivities or ideological decorum. The jihadists killing Nigerians are not debating labels. They are not quibbling about doctrinal nuance. They are prosecuting war – with determination, strategy, and cruelty. Meanwhile, Nigeria is bogged down by verbal hygiene and political delicacy. By the logic of the proverb, if Trump’s guns-a-blazing – or Tinubu’s – can end this reign of carnage, then arguing about optics or theological framing is intellectual self-indulgence. Nigeria’s villages are not burning because people used too much force; they are burning because too little force was applied for too long. In this moral calculus, the Ezikeọba wisdom stands firm: the war must be won; the method is secondary. Statist sovereignty is meaningless if the sovereign cannot protect the governed. Human rights become hollow platitudes when human lives are routinely erased. Policy sophistication means nothing when secondary school students remain in chains. In short, the urgency of the moment demands action, not philosophical dithering. And when action is overdue, the end justifies the means that bring safety to the living and justice to the dead.
To this end, let me round off this part on a note of optimism in the light of Mr. Hegseth’s tweet after meeting with Nigeria’s national Security Adviser, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu. According to the US Defence Secretary in a post on X on Friday, ‘DOW is working aggressively with Nigeria to end the persecution of Christians by jihadist terrorists…’ Also, a Defence Department statement noted that Hegseth and Ribadu discussed ‘tangible progress’ on curbing violence against Christians and curbing jihadist groups operating in West Africa. Let both sides ensure that this ‘tangible progress,’ which suggests mutual understanding, is sustained as a veritable basis for further engagements in this regard.
.Prof Agbedo is of the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN)
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