So it has come to this. A Nigerian general, a man who presumably swore an oath to defend his nation, is now a bargaining chip for some faceless band of brigands. And his wife, dragged along for the spectacle. The news that UK special forces are on standby tells us everything we need to know about the state of the post-colonial world. We are watching the slow motion collapse of a state, and our response is to twiddle our thumbs and whisper about ‘assistance’.
Let us not pretend this is an isolated incident. Nigeria, that great hope of African democracy, is rotting from within. The military, once a symbol of order, is now a sieve. Every week brings another kidnapping, another village razed, another oil pipeline sabotaged. The government in Abuja fiddles while the country burns. And what does the West do? We send in the experts. We offer logistics. We stand by.
This is the tragedy of the modern age. We have abandoned the old certainties of empire—the gunboats, the district commissioners, the stiff upper lip—but we have replaced them with nothing. Instead, we have a doctrine of ‘capacity building’ and ‘stabilisation operations’. It is a recipe for endless chaos. The general and his wife are not simply victims of local insurgency. They are symptoms of a deeper rot, a systemic failure that echoes the fall of Rome’s periphery.
Consider the parallels. In the late empire, Roman generals were regularly captured by barbarian confederations. The empire would send a legion to negotiate, pay a ransom, and hope the problem went away. It never did. The barbarians learned that kidnapping paid better than farming. Sound familiar? Today, the ‘barbarians’ are Boko Haram, bandits, or whatever label the press chooses. They know that a general is worth more dead or alive than a dozen oil wells. And the UK, playing the role of Constantinople, dithers.
The real scandal is the intellectual decadence that prevents us from naming the problem. We cannot say ‘Nigeria is failing’ because that would be racist. We cannot say ‘the post-colonial project has collapsed’ because that would be defeatist. So we talk about ‘asymmetric threats’ and ‘civil-military cooperation’. It is the language of decline, a vocabulary designed to obscure rather than illuminate.
What would Lord Lugard say? He would recognise that order requires a firm hand, not a hand-wringing seminar. But we have rejected that model. Instead, we have the United Nations, the African Union, and a thousand NGOs, all of them producing reports that gather dust. Meanwhile, the general sits in a mud hut, waiting for a ransom that may never come.
Let us be clear. The UK has no business deploying special forces to rescue a Nigerian general. We have our own problems: a hollowed-out military, a border crisis, a sense of national drift. But the very fact that the option is being discussed reveals our continued psychological dependence on imperial responsibility. We cannot save Nigeria. We cannot save ourselves. And yet we posture.
This is the endgame of the liberal international order. We have created a world where states are too weak to protect their own citizens, too proud to ask for help, and too chaotic to be helped. The general’s abduction is a microcosm of a broader tragedy. We will wring our hands, offer our condolences, and move on to the next crisis. And the rot will continue.
The only question is whether we have the courage to admit the truth. Probably not. We are too busy standing by.
