Dear Dr. Olagunju,
The Kako and Bako Story Is Incomplete:
Your article, published in the Nigerian Tribune on Monday, June 22, 2026, was a masterclass in literary craft. The fable of Kako and Bako was beautifully told, the metaphors of collapsing dams were elegant, and your command of Yoruba proverbs was, as always, impressive.
However, I must respectfully submit that your narrative, however artfully constructed, tells only half the story of Nigeria’s affliction. And in telling only half the story, it risks becoming part of the very problem it seeks to solve. You asked Northern Nigeria to “save Nigeria from a catastrophe.” You likened the North to a collapsed dam flooding the South. You spoke of “the factories that manufacture despair, ignorance, criminality and extremism” in a manner that suggests that these factories are uniquely northern enterprises. You praised Dr. Zainab Suleiman Buhari for her courage while implying that Northern Nigeria alone produces the human raw material of Nigeria’s criminal underworld.
With all due respect, sir, that is a dangerous oversimplification.
The Children of Bako—and the Children of Everyone Else
You wrote that “the children in Bako’s home are Nigeria’s bandits.” But who, then, are the young men in Lagos, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Benin, Port Harcourt, Onitsha and other cities who have turned cyber-enabled fraud, trafficking, cultism, kidnapping, oil theft, ritual-related violence and other crimes into organised criminal economies? Are they not also children of failed parenting, failed communities, failed institutions and failed governance? The point is not that cybercrime is the same as banditry. It is not. Rural banditry and terrorism involve mass murder, territorial control, mass displacement, illegal weapons, cross-border movements, ransom networks and grave failures of security. Cybercrime has its own networks, incentives and victims. But both reveal a deeper national problem: unemployment, impunity, weak institutions, social breakdown, poor education, corruption and the attraction of illicit wealth. In one place, criminal networks recruit young men into armed violence. In another, they recruit young people into fraud, trafficking, cult gangs, oil theft or other illicit enterprises.
The crimes are different. The underlying national failure is not.
What is the moral difference between a northern child abandoned to street begging and vulnerability, and a young woman from Edo, Delta, Rivers or Lagos who is trafficked, sexually exploited or deceived into a life from which she cannot easily escape? Both are victims of broken systems. Both are products of poverty, weak social protection, unemployment, exploitation and the failure of adults and institutions charged with protecting them. The fact that Nigeria’s regions produce different forms of criminality should not become an excuse for sectional self-righteousness. It should compel every region to examine its own failures.
The Problem With the Bako Analogy
The fundamental weakness in the Kako-and-Bako analogy is that it turns “the North” into a single father with a single household, a single will and a single system of control.
But Northern Nigeria is not Bako.
It is a vast and diverse region of poor farmers, displaced families, traders, traditional institutions, state governments, religious leaders, security personnel, political elites, victims, collaborators and criminals. It contains communities that have lost fathers, mothers, children, homes, farms, markets and schools to banditry and terrorism. It contains villagers who have resisted armed gangs, local vigilantes who have died defending their communities, clerics who have condemned extremist violence, and families whose only demand has been for the Nigerian state to protect them. To say that “the North” must take responsibility is meaningful only when we identify who exactly failed in what duty. Was it the political elite that neglected schools, jobs and rural development? Was it officials who enabled impunity? Was it criminal financiers, arms traffickers, illegal-mining networks and ransom intermediaries? Was it security institutions that failed to protect remote communities? Was it federal authorities responsible for border security, intelligence coordination, firearms control and national defence?
These are not the same people.
Without that distinction, a call for responsibility can easily become collective stigma. And collective stigma is not a solution to insecurity. It is merely a more polished form of blame.
The Dam Did Not Collapse in the North Alone
Your central metaphor, the collapsed dam, is powerful, but incomplete. You write that the dam has collapsed and that those downstream, especially in Southern Nigeria, can no longer sleep peacefully. But the dam did not collapse in the North alone. It collapsed everywhere. There are cracks in every geopolitical zone. There are criminal economies in every region. There are abandoned young people in every state. There are communities where poverty, greed, unemployment, impunity and the absence of law have created markets for human misery. The North has banditry, terrorism and kidnapping. The South-West has cyber-enabled fraud and increasingly serious kidnapping threats. The South-East has suffered separatist violence, criminal gangs and ritual-related killings. The South-South has long struggled with cult violence, oil theft, kidnapping, piracy, illegal bunkering and environmental devastation. Human trafficking has affected communities across Nigeria, particularly in states where poverty, migration pressure and organised networks exploit vulnerable women and children.
No sensible Nigerian should deny these realities.
But neither should any Nigerian reduce one region to the worst crimes committed within it. The problem is not that one house in the village has collapsed while every other house stands strong. The problem is that the entire village has neglected its foundations.
Banditry Is Not Merely a Parenting Failure
Banditry is not a village quarrel that can be explained only through parenting metaphors. It is a complex criminal economy sustained by illegal arms, cross-border movement, ransom payments, illicit mining, intelligence failures, weak rural policing, corruption, political protection and the inability of the state to maintain authority in ungoverned spaces. Parents and communities have duties, certainly. Religious leaders have duties. Traditional rulers have duties. State governments have duties. Political elites have duties.
But the Nigerian state has greater constitutional duties.
A farmer in Katsina, Zamfara, Niger or Kaduna cannot seal an international border. He cannot regulate the flow of assault rifles. He cannot dismantle criminal-financing networks. He cannot investigate ransom payments. He cannot reform the police. He cannot command the armed forces. He cannot secure forests spanning several states. He cannot prosecute the powerful individuals who benefit from illegal mining, kidnapping or arms trafficking. Those responsibilities belong principally to the state. It is therefore unfair to suggest that the crisis can be reduced to the moral failure of “Bako’s household.” The household may have weaknesses, but the state has failed to secure the entire village.
The North Must Reform—But So Must Nigeria
Let it be clearly stated: the North has serious problems that must be confronted honestly. The neglect of basic education, the vulnerability of children, rural poverty, weak social protection, elite irresponsibility, mass unemployment, the exploitation of religion for politics, poor family planning, and the failure to provide young people with practical skills and hope are real challenges.
The North must not deny them.
Dr. Zainab Suleiman Buhari was right to draw attention to the human consequences of poverty, irresponsible parenting and child abandonment. No responsible northerner should celebrate the spectacle of children begging at traffic lights, mothers struggling to survive with babies on their backs, or young people growing up without education, skills or protection. But acknowledging northern failures is not the same as accepting the suggestion that Northern Nigeria is Nigeria’s “criminal womb.” That description is neither accurate nor useful. The same poverty that drives a child into street begging in Kano or Katsina can drive another child into trafficking networks in Edo, cult violence in Rivers, fraud in Lagos, oil theft in the Niger Delta or kidnapping in the South-West. The manifestations differ. The underlying failures, weak institutions, broken homes, poor governance, corruption, inequality and the absence of opportunity, remain painfully familiar.
A Better Fable
Let me offer a different ending to your Kako-and-Bako story.
In the village, Bako’s children became bandits. But while the elders were condemning Bako, Kako’s children were running fraud networks from the village market. Another farmer’s children were trafficking young girls to the city. Another household was profiting from stolen village resources. Another was selling weapons to criminals. Another was vandalising the village well for quick profit. When the elders finally gathered, they realised that every house had its own version of Bako’s problem. The real question was not: “Who raised the worst children?” The real question was: “What kind of village have we built, where so many houses produce children who see crime as a path to survival, influence or wealth?” The elders stopped pointing fingers. They rebuilt the village school. They repaired the roads. They protected the market. They punished those who financed crime. They secured the well. They created work for the young. They made the village safer for women and children. They held every household accountable, but they also held the village leadership accountable. That is the Nigeria we must confront. Not a North that must be scolded into saving the South, but a country where every region is both victim and participant in a wider national failure; where every geopolitical zone has its own “children of despair”; and where the only lasting solution must be collective, not sectional.
The Real Enemy Is the System
You are right about one thing, and it is perhaps the most important thing in your article: security operations may kill terrorists, but only social reform can prevent their replacement. You are right that the market that recruits, trains and replenishes criminals remains open. You are right that Nigeria must close the factories that manufacture despair, ignorance and extremism. But those factories are not located in the North alone. They exist wherever public institutions fail, where children are left without education, where young people cannot find work, where wealth is worshipped without accountability, where corruption is rewarded, where criminal financiers operate freely, and where people lose faith that lawful life can bring dignity. Nigeria does not need a fable in which one region is cast as the reckless father and another as the innocent neighbour. That fable may be elegant, but it is too simple for a country as complex as ours.
The North must reform. So must the South.
Political leaders must reform. Religious leaders must reform. Parents must reform. Communities must reform. Security institutions must reform. The federal government must stop treating rural Nigerians as expendable citizens. Criminal financiers, arms dealers, traffickers, oil thieves, cybercrime syndicates, kidnappers, cult gangs and corrupt collaborators must be pursued wherever they operate. The question is not which region has produced the most frightening criminals. The question is why Nigeria has created so many criminal markets, so many abandoned young people, and so many institutions unable, or unwilling, to stop them. That is the complete story of Kako and Bako: not one broken house in a perfect village, but a village whose foundations have failed too many of its children.
Only when every farmer repairs his own house, and the village leadership repairs the foundations of the entire community, will Nigeria begin to rebuild its dam, not in the North alone, but everywhere.
