A retired Nigerian general and his wife have been abducted in the north-west of the country. British security sources are, we are told, alarmed. Alarmed! One almost wishes for the crisp, confident prose of a Victorian colonial dispatch, where such an event would be met with a stiff upper lip and a swift punitive expedition. Instead, we have alarm. The language of the modern security establishment: passive, fearful, devoid of any notion of agency.
Let us place this incident in its proper historical context. The north-west of Nigeria is not some remote, lawless frontier. It is a region that has, over the past decade, become a laboratory for the collapse of the post-colonial state. Banditry, kidnapping for ransom, and jihadi insurgency have turned it into a landscape that Hobbes would recognise: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The abduction of a retired general and his wife is not an isolated crime. It is a symptom, a running sore that speaks to a deeper rot.
We are told that the abductors are likely criminal gangs, not ideological insurgents. But does that distinction comfort anyone? The Nigerian state, for all its pretensions to regional power, cannot secure its own territory. Its military is bogged down in a perpetual counter-insurgency that resembles less a campaign than a grim ritual. The generals retire to gated communities guarded by private security, the very symbol of a state that has ceded its monopoly on violence. And now even those enclaves are permeable.
The British security sources are alarmed, no doubt, because this reverberates beyond Nigeria. The Sahel is a cascade of failing states. From Mali to Chad, the fabric of governance has been torn by corruption, climate change, and the metastasis of armed groups. Nigeria, the supposed giant of Africa, is now a source of instability that washes onto European shores. The abduction of a general is a reminder that the virus of anarchy has no respect for rank.
What is to be done? The usual bromides: strengthen security forces, tackle corruption, invest in development. But these are the incantations of a priesthood that has lost its faith. The Nigerian state is a hollow shell, a Potemkin village of ministries and bureaucracies that exist to extract rent, not to provide security. As long as the political class treats the state as a personal fiefdom, no amount of British alarm will change the trajectory.
We have seen this before. The late Roman Empire was full of such incidents: retired generals kidnapped, provinces slipping from imperial control, frontier tribes becoming bolder. The response was always the same: alarm, then frantic diplomacy, then a slow retreat into fortification. But the empire did not fall in a day. It fell in a thousand small surrenders. Nigeria is making those surrenders now, one abduction at a time.
Perhaps the lesson is that the nation-state, as conceived by Europeans, was never truly rooted in Africa. It was a colonial imposition, a suit of clothes that never fit. And now, with the stitches coming undone, we see the raw flesh beneath. The general and his wife are not just victims of criminals. They are victims of a failed idea. And British alarm, however sincere, is about as useful as a parasol in a hurricane.
