When African leaders, neck-deep in debts, go to borrow from foreign lenders, sovereignty is the last thing on their minds. Sovereignty connotes solvency, self-sufficiency, and security. For many African countries, it is no more than a sick joke—a tool for corrupt, despotic, and indolent leaders to stir up anti-Western anger. It fails to spark real change or strong leadership. Instead, it acts as a dirty curtain, blocking the world from seeing how local rulers exploit their people. This fake sovereignty protects internal looters and exploiters, allowing corruption and ineptitude to spread poverty and disease, secluded from international oversight or accountability.
In Nigeria, sovereignty has been the talk of the town since last week, when Trump threatened fire and brimstone. Yes, American soldiers on our soil would violate our sovereignty—if we had any left to violate. But our sovereignty is in shreds. Sovereignty should enable true autonomy. Some self-determination with real choices under effective governance. Yet what choices do the youths of Malumfashi in Katsina have when their families are left to bargain for survival with terrorists? These gunmen, dressed in military fatigues, ride up on motorbikes with rifles slung over their shoulders. They chat casually with local officials, even greeting our own soldiers and police. They take selfies with nervous locals like celebrities. And the pictures do not elicit any outrage, not even contrived outrage , in the presidency. How can such a display of diabolical fraternity and the capitulation that birthed it be compatible with concepts like autonomy and sovereignty.
Sovereignty assumes capacity for self-governance. In Borno, millions are stuck in IDP camps, living fractured lives for over a decade because of Boko Haram. The country has failed completely to control Sambisa Forest, the insurgents’ base since day one. There, ISWAP and Boko Haram fight openly while the government watches helplessly. The beleaguered government fills the gaps in battle strategy with a profusion of propaganda. One day, insecurity is a global phenomenon; the next, insecurity is a thing of the past. But the war drags on, draining the nation’s resources. More citizens now believe that both the insurgency and counterinsurgency have become too lucrative for the players to stop. Defense contracts, systemic opacity, and siphoned foreign aid by rogue NGOs. The country has been taken hostage. International reports now count up to 22 active insurgent groups across Nigeria. What kind of sovereignty survives in this chaos? How tattered can a sovereignty be?
In the Middle Belt, Christian communities face massacre after massacre from killer herdsmen, turning Benue and Plateau into landscapes of mass graves. Each attack ends the same way: the Fulani militias blamed by locals go unpunished and unchecked. To make it worse, the bandits in Katsina—now allowed to keep their weapons by piecemeal peace deals —may spread south, expanding the population of Fulani enforcers, militants and mediating the disputes between unarmed farmer communities in the middle belt and herder groups with greater vengeance. Yet the government wouldn’t allow the cries of these Christian communities who have suffered their peculiar atrocities and have become even more vulnerable to them to be heard unfiltered, without being muffled with a blanket of balance and crude equivalence.
On the western border, Kwara is under attack from Al-Qaeda’s proxies, JNIM. A far more sophisticated threat than Boko Haram. A group that has Mali on its knees with fuel blockades. Add that to the Lakuwara. Already, entire communities have fled to Kwara. A bad omen that jihadist violence could spread south. Yet the government offers no new plan. In the Southeast, IPOB’s urchins have left devastation. The epicenter of the IPOB scourge which has seen cannibals feast on fellow Igbo has a 50 kilometer radius. All the camps can be incinerated by a kitted helicopter gunship in two days if aided by minimal intelligence effort.
Yet children still haven’t gone to school on Mondays for over four years now. What sort of sovereignty do we still claim? If the military needs some time to catch up with the asymmetric methods of these groups, why can’t the government, even for the sake of regime protection, hire professional mercenaries? Rather than employ seasoned hands, the government hires local ekuke mercenaries from the Niger Delta. There is no sovereignty when the state ignores the problem and lets villages negotiate in secret with low-level terrorists. A weak regime like this has no place. If surrender is inevitable, leaders should handle it themselves—sit at those stained negotiation tables and own the shame. Not hide away in London, Paris, or St. Lucia, sipping drinks while their people suffer. How isn’t that disqualifying complacency?
There is no sovereignty when the state hides its head in the sand and allows local communities to negotiate with ragtag terrorists in the shadows of forgotten villages. Such a craven regime should never exist. If a puny state must capitulate, kneel to negotiate its survival with terrorists, then its leaders should have the sense of responsibility to undertake that humiliating task themselves. They must bear the stain. Let them sit at those bloodied tables themselves and soak it all in rather than cavorting in London, Paris, and St. Lucia, sipping rum punches while their people bleed.
Economically, it’s the same failure. The 133 million in multidimensional poverty has grown to 139 million by 2025, according to the World Bank, with six in ten Nigerians lacking basics like clean water, education, or jobs. We import rice from India on Chinese loans to mask the hunger, while our growing youth population becomes a burden. Jobless, turning to crime, or fleeing as refugees abroad. There’s no social safety net. Bandits block access to farms. Our best minds emigrate, leaving the worst to poison the system. We must face facts: only politicians, their families, and cronies gain from this so-called sovereignty. There’s no real sovereignty in a sham democracy where votes are meaningless, and the judiciary bows to the executive. Do I need to Fubara it out? A controlled, captured, cronied judiciary. That’s a captured state. Pastor Bakare called them political bandits. Our salvation must start from recovering the sovereignty from them. The sovereignty of a democracy is suspect when the legislature advertises a shameless subservience to the executive . It’s bad enough to have dimwitted lily-livered lawmakers who live for the moment. It’s horrific to have a parliament that is happy to be the lapdog of a president .
Sovereignty means full autonomy—a nation directing its own path without interference. Has Cameroon autonomy? When a leader can be blackmailed easily, or foreign powers sway decisions through threats, the country isn’t free. Leaders with shady pasts lack uphold any sovereignty. Sovereignty isn’t a costume for rulers to wear while citizens starve in slums. No one is trying to meddle in our sovereignty because, lately, we don’t have any. Where is it? The state is weak through and through – a syndicate feeding while the nation bleeds. States that depend on foreign loans or are dibilitated by crime, corruption or capture lack sovereignty.
First, rescue it from their control—then talk sovereignty later. Let’s swallow our pride and ask America for a pact. How has clinging to this sovereignty illusion helped? These are not the precolonial days when we were intoxicated with independence. We have seen it all. America shields Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar from the same insurgencies. Our oil output is meagre. Barely two million barrels a day, stolen and cut back. Let’s stop pretending. If they havent diluted Islam in Saudi and haven’t left them poor, why are we scared? We must stop sleepwalking. Rather than let jihadists and insurgents turn this country into Somalia, let’s ask for foreign protection and pick up the bill. Our people say it’s the coward who shows others where the brave man used to live.
It’s better to be a humbled state with secure borders than a “sovereign” Somalia 2.0, where caliphates sprout like weeds. This isn’t defeatism; it’s diagnosis. Nigeria’s sovereignty isn’t lost—it’s loaned out to the indolent. Time to repossess it, one hard choice at a time.
