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President Bola Tinubu has ordered a total security cordon over the forests in Kwara State following recent kidnappings and terrorist activities.

 

The President also directed the Air Force to expand its air surveillance across the innermost parts of the forests in Kwara State, where it is believed the terrorists are hiding.

The Special Adviser to the President on Media and Public Communications, Sunday Dare, disclosed this on Tuesday on his X handle.

He said the presidential directive also applies to the Kebbi and Niger States axis, where many people are expected to be rescued.

According to him, the 24-hour air surveillance is to be maintained to complement the boots on the ground.

 

“Communities are also urged to provide timely information about strange movements and activities to aid the work of the security forces,” he said.

 

Terrorists attacked St. Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary Schools, Papiri, in Niger State, abducting more that 300 school children and staff in a resurgence of the mass kidnappings that have long harrowed Africa’s most populous country.

The same week, 25 schoolgirls were taken from the Government Comprehensive Girls Secondary School, Maga, Danko Wasagu Local Government Area in Kebbi State, and 38 worshippers were seized from a church in Eruku in Kwara State.

 

At least 50 taken from St Mary’s Catholic school managed to escape, but more than 265 children and teachers are still being held.

Nigeria’s first high-profile mas kidnapping was that of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014, when Boko Haram forced 276 girls from their dormitories in the country’s northeast.

More than a decade later, about 90 of those girls are still missing.

Nigeria suffers from a persistent security crisis fuelled by jihadist attacks and violence by “bandit” gangs that raid villages, kill people, and kidnap for ransom.

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FirstBank, West Africa’s premier financial institution and financial inclusion services provider, is pleased to announce its upcoming SMEConnect Webinar scheduled to hold on Wednesday, 26 November 2025.

 

The SMEConnect Webinar is one of the ways FirstBank delivers its capacity building of its value propositions to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It is designed to empower SMEs with the knowledge, tools, and resources needed to thrive in today’s competitive business landscape.

 

The upcoming webinar themed “Strategies for SMEs: Securing Your Business Under the New Tax Law” will guide participants through the upcoming changes in tax regulations, ensuring they are well-equipped to comply with the new requirements. Industry experts and thought leaders, including Taiwo Oyedele, Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms (Keynote Speaker), Yemi Adesanya, the Financial Controller, FirstBank (Guest Speaker) and Dr. Abiodun Famuyiwa, Head of SME Banking at FirstBank (Host) will share insights on overcoming challenges, leveraging digital tools, and accessing financial opportunities designed to support SME growth.

 

Speaking ahead of the event, Chuma Ezirim, Group Executive, e-Business and Retail Products at FirstBank, said “SMEConnect Webinar is an initiative to ensure that SMEs are not only equipped to survive but positioned to scale sustainably in the competitive marketplace. The implementation of the new tax policy is fast approaching; hence we want to provide all businesses with adequate information and insights on the new requirements, to help them navigate the regulations.”

 

The webinar will also focus on the benefits of formalisation and the suite of banking solutions available to registered and unregistered businesses, especially the FirstSME accounts for businesses.

 

To register for the webinar, interested participants are encouraged to visit  https://firstbanknigeria.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QyFwBS9LRuOu6NGTaujb0A

 

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President Bola Ahmed Tinubu stood on a stump in opposition and hurled a simple demand at then president Goodluck Jonathan: act to protect Nigerians or step aside. He invoked competence, honor and the primal duty of the state to keep its children from harm. That admonition, delivered with righteous impatience, was the music of accountability. Nigeria’s children are disappearing again; vanishing into the ungoverned night, swallowed by the geography of state failure. Their abductions are no longer national shocks; they have metastasized into a grim civic routine. Let us be blunt about the stakes. A nation that normalizes school kidnappings normalizes the theft of its future. The children abducted today are the teachers, nurses, engineers and judges of tomorrow. Today, with more than 300 schoolchildren, mostly girls, snatched from classrooms across the country, that music has become an unbearable, hollow echo. The question is no longer rhetorical: if Tinubu once asked Jonathan to resign for failing to secure the nation, why does he not resign now for failing to secure the students?  

 

This is not hyperbole. The mass abductions that have scarred towns in Kaduna, Niger, Zamfara, Katsina, and elsewhere are not isolated acts of criminality; they are an indictment of policy, capacity and will. Kidnapping schoolchildren is not merely a security failure. It is a civilizational failure. When a state cannot guarantee that classrooms are safe sanctuaries; when lessons are interrupted by fear and corridors become conduits to ransom, the compact between citizen and government is being steadily, gruesomely dismantled. Tinubu ran on a promise of competence. He promised that his stewardship would restore order and rekindle economic life. He promised decisive action against insecurity. He promised that he would not be the president who looked away. Yet the country watches as abductions multiply, as parents barricade their children at home, and as communities barter safety for survival. The president who once wielded moral thunder from the sidelines must now answer the fundamental question of governance: What plans, what resources, what urgency has he brought to bear to stop this hemorrhage of childhood?

 

Nigeria is now an obituary-in-progress; an unfinished eulogy to a nation that has forgotten its children.

President Tinubu, once the most flamboyant critic of presidential inertia, now presides over its masterpiece. From the comfort of Lagos drawing rooms and campaign podia, Tinubu once thundered that a president unwilling or unable to protect Nigerians should resign. Jonathan, he said, had failed the most basic test of leadership: securing the lives of citizens. Tinubu did not hedge, soften, contextualize or philosophize. He demanded resignation. So, let us resurrect his own logic since memory, like governance, appears to have decayed in this administration: If abducted schoolchildren were grounds for resignation in 2014, what then, sir, shall we call this era; this theatre of serial kidnappings, military withdrawals under suspicious timing, school closures spanning entire states, and a national psychology permanently rewired by fear? If Jonathan’s failure was intolerable, is Tinubu’s merely inconvenient?

 

The president now reads riot acts to terrorists, delivered not even by his own voice, but by a legislative surrogate in Kaduna. Through the Speaker of the House of Representatives, he offered mournful poetics about a North “bleeding,” a nation “paralyzed,” a moral compass “distorted.” Tinubu spoke of inherited complexities, institutional decay, and historical dysfunction, as though insecurity were geological rather than governmental. And then, with stunning abstraction, he promised highways, endowment funds, and emerging oil prospects. One wonders what abducted children will do with a superhighway. Tinubu praises the Arewa Consultative Forum as “a reservoir of patriots, thinkers, moral leaders.” Yet it is schoolgirls - hungry, frightened, barefoot - who now embody patriotism, courage and sacrifice. They have been abandoned to negotiate survival in forests while the state negotiates semantics in conference halls. He warns leaders not to “sleep comfortably while millions sleep hungry or travel in fear.” But this president sleeps. Soundly.

Yes, the crisis is complex. But complexity is not exculpation. A Kebbi governor is demanding answers after soldiers reportedly withdrew from a school less than an hour before bandits arrived. The Christian Association of Nigeria and the Catholic Diocese of Kontagora accuse state officials of peddling propaganda to evade responsibility. School administrators insist no warnings or shutdown directives were ever issued. Their students are gone. Their buildings have been abandoned. Their windows sealed. Their playgrounds silent. Yet we are told the administration is “determined,” “committed,” and “urgent.” Determined speeches, committed platitudes, urgent nothingness.

 

Meanwhile, at least 180 schools across northern Nigeria have closed, not for renovations, not for reforms, but because the state cannot ensure the physical survival of students. We have entered the age of educational exile. Learning has become a gamble; knowledge a hazard; childhood a crime scene.

Nigeria, the so-called Giant of Africa, now trembles before men on motorcycles. The president insists “no region will be left to bleed.” But Northern Nigeria is already hemorrhaging; human capital, trust, confidence, investment, stability, dignity. The North has been consigned to perpetual mourning: Chibok, Dapchi, Kankara, Jangebe, and now Paipiri and Maga. A decade of mass abductions, and still no structural prevention, no coordinated rescue framework, no transparent security doctrine, no accountability for military lapses. Children kidnapped in 2014 are still missing. Today’s abductees may join them in the archive of unresolved national shame.

 

Tinubu has inherited this insecurity crisis, yes; just as Jonathan inherited Boko Haram before him. But leadership is not inheritance; it is responsibility. A president cannot forever govern from the safe penthouse of excuses. Nigeria’s security failures are not immutable; they are the predictable consequence of under-policing, fragmented intelligence, bureaucratic turf warfare, militarized corruption, and a unitary command structure designed for ceremonial pageantry, not counterterrorism.

Banditry has become an industry because ransom has become a revenue stream. Kidnapping has become a profession because governance has become a theoretical suggestion. Criminality thrives in the vast space where the state has retreated, not only territorially, but morally. And while citizens bury their hope alongside their children, the president promises oil exploration in Kolmani. Oil, Nigeria’s eternal lullaby for unsolved problems.

 

What, precisely, does President Tinubu intend to do about this escalating war on children? Not philosophically. Not metaphorically. Not someday. Specifically. Will he reform Nigeria’s broken security architecture? Will he decentralize policing? Will he punish military negligence, such as unexplained troop withdrawals hours before abductions? Will he establish permanent school-protection units? Will he deploy technology - drones, surveillance mapping, communication intercepts - not as rhetorical decoration, but as actual instruments of rescue and deterrence? Or is the presidential strategy to wait, condemn, promise, repeat?

 

The tragedy is not merely that Nigeria has failed to protect its children. It is that the government appears intellectually bored by their suffering. Tinubu warns that “unity remains the North’s greatest asset.” But unity is not a security policy. Hope is not a defense mechanism. Speeches do not escort children safely to school. Nigeria is approaching a psychological breaking point. Families are relocating. Farmers are abandoning land. Entire communities are negotiating parallel governance structures with bandits. A generation is internalizing fear as citizenship. Nothing corrodes a nation faster. The president says he attends national events “bound by duty and conscience.” Conscience, however, demands action, not sonorous prose. And duty does not allow a leader to demand resignation when outside power, then recoil from accountability once enthroned.

 

Bola Ahmed Tinubu once believed Nigeria deserved better. Millions of Nigerians still do. But belief is collapsing, and a state that cannot protect its children does not deserve the ornamental dignity of sovereignty. Mr. President, you promised renewal. What we have instead is repetition. You once demanded better of others. The nation now demands better of you. And if you cannot deliver the safety you once treated as a presidential prerequisite, then, by your own doctrine, you know what honor requires – resign!

 

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The expulsion of Nyesom Wike from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) marks a dramatic but strangely anticlimactic turn in one of the most consequential political sagas of the Fourth Republic. For more than a decade, Wike has been a central force - sometimes stabilizing, often destabilizing - in Nigeria’s volatile opposition ecosystem. His rise from chief of staff in Rivers State to governor, kingmaker, financier, and eventually Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) is illustrative of a political culture where personal networks often overshadow institutional norms. His expulsion from the party he once bankrolled reflects the same dynamics in reverse: powerful individuals are tolerated until they become too costly to accommodate.

 

But the drama of the moment - voice votes in Ibadan, defiant press briefings, dueling NEC meetings -should not overshadow the deeper question: what does Wike’s expulsion say about the state of Nigeria’s parties, and what does his next move mean for the country’s fragile democratic equilibrium?

The short answer is that the expulsion rings hollow. It rings hollow because it is late; because it is procedurally muddled; because it reflects not the triumph of principle but the exhaustion of tolerance; and because Wike himself remains powerful enough to shape outcomes that the party he has just left may not be able to control. Yet the longer answer is more complicated, and more important.

 

A Political Trajectory Built on Paradox

Wike’s career has long been marked by contradiction. He is at once an unapologetic strongman and a consummate negotiator; a populist firebrand and a meticulous strategist; a defender of party loyalty who, when crossed, has shown little hesitation to burn bridges to the foundations. His influence in the PDP peaked between 2015 and 2022, when he became one of the party’s most reliable electoral assets. He funded campaigns, shaped alliances, and served as the de facto power center of the South–South bloc. But he also became the emblem of the PDP’s internal contradictions: a party seeking renewal but dependent on entrenched regional barons; a party preaching unity yet unable to rein in centrifugal forces within its own ranks.

 

The G-5 rebellion during the 2023 election cycle was the tipping point. The refusal of Wike and his allied governors to support Atiku Abubakar’s candidacy not only hamstrung the PDP’s strategy but also exposed its inability to enforce discipline across its internal coalitions. When Wike accepted an appointment from President Tinubu—a move unprecedented for a senior member of an opposition party; what remained of the relationship was little more than a cold peace. Given this history, Wike’s expulsion was predictable. What is remarkable is how long it took.

 

Why the Expulsion Rings Hollow

1. It Was Too Late to Matter Politically

The decisive moment to confront Wike was in 2022 or 2023, when his actions had immediate implications for the presidential race. By waiting until 2025 - long after the damage had been done - the PDP forfeited the moral high ground. The timing suggests not principle, but pent-up frustration. And for Wike, the impact is limited: he has already built an alternative base of authority in Abuja.

2. It Was Procedurally Weak, Undermining Its Legitimacy

Expulsion by voice vote, without a constituted disciplinary committee, without formal hearings, casts a long shadow over the PDP’s claim to be enforcing norms. Critics across the political spectrum have pointed to the inconsistency. If parties violate their own constitutions in the name of discipline, can they credibly demand obedience from their members? The PDP’s action raises uncomfortable questions about internal democracy across all Nigerian parties, not just the PDP.

3. It Has Provoked a Factional Counteroffensive

Within hours of the expulsion, Wike-aligned stakeholders convened rival NEC and Board of Trustees meetings. Several state chapters rejected the decision outright. Two sitting governors distanced themselves publicly. Instead of restoring order, the expulsion has deepened the crisis.

4. It Exposes, Rather Than Resolves, Regional Fault Lines

The Southeast and South–South, regions where the PDP once enjoyed unquestioned dominance, are now the epicenter of revolt. Senator Samuel Anyanwu’s expulsion and the dissolution of multiple state working committees have turned existing grievances into open conflict. At a moment when the PDP needs unity to prepare for 2027, it is caught in a widening regional storm.

 

Scenario Matrix: What Wike’s Next Move Means for Parties and Democracy

Given this context, Wike’s future trajectory matters not just for the PDP but for Nigeria’s broader democratic landscape. Five plausible scenarios illustrate the stakes. 

Scenario 1: Wike Builds a Factional PDP Bloc

In this scenario, Wike insists he remains a bona fide PDP member, convenes parallel party organs, and creates confusion over which faction holds legitimacy.

• Effect on PDP in the Southeast: Severe fragmentation. Parallel structures in Imo, Abia, and Cross River could hollow out the PDP’s ground game.

• National Implications: Endless litigation, weakened opposition, and voter disorientation; an outcome that strengthens the ruling party by default.

Scenario 2: Wike Defects to the APC

This is the most straightforward path. Wike already works closely with APC leadership and has cultivated a functional relationship with President Tinubu.

• Effect on PDP in the Southeast: Catastrophic loss of Rivers State’s electoral machinery. Potential defections in neighboring states.

• National Implications: The APC consolidates southern influence; the PDP’s 2027 prospects shrink dramatically.

Scenario 3: Wike Forms a New Regional Party

This move would evoke parallels with APGA’s initial formation or the rise of the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force in past decades, but with far greater organizational and financial heft.

• Effect on PDP in the Southeast: A bleeding of votes among youth, women, and disgruntled party members.

• National Implications: Splitting of opposition votes; fragmentation of democratic competition; uncertain stability.

Scenario 4: The PDP Reconciles Under Legal or Political Pressure

In this outcome, courts challenge the legality of the expulsion or party elders intervene.

• Effect on PDP in the Southeast: Temporary stability, but long-term credibility damage.

• National Implications: A weakened PDP that appears hostage to powerful individuals—undermining its reform narrative.

Scenario 5: Wike Retreats Strategically While Undermining the PDP from Afar

This is perhaps the most politically sophisticated scenario. Wike stays in Abuja, uses federal resources to strengthen his networks, and allows the PDP to crumble under its internal contradictions.

• Effect on PDP in the Southeast: Persistent sabotage, weakening structures without open confrontation.

• National Implications: A disorganized opposition incapable of mounting a serious 2027 challenge.

 

The Broader Democratic Implications

Wike’s expulsion intersects with longstanding issues in Nigerian party politics:

1. Opposition Fragmentation Threatens Democratic Balance

A divided PDP reduces accountability for the ruling party. Nigeria’s democracy has historically functioned best when strong opposition coexists with strong incumbency.

2. Internal Party Democracy Remains Weak Nationwide

Expulsions without due process set harmful precedents. If major parties operate like fluid coalitions of patronage rather than institutions bound by rules, democratic consolidation becomes difficult.

3. Judicialization of Politics Is Intensifying

Courts are increasingly becoming arbiters of intra-party disputes. While judicial review protects rights, excessive reliance on litigation politicizes the judiciary and erodes trust.

4. Regional Tensions Are Becoming Politically Weaponized

The Southeast’s estrangement from national parties, combined with South–South grievances, risks deepening fragmentation at a time Nigeria needs political integration.

5. Yet, There Is an Opportunity—If Leaders Choose It

The expulsion could become the start of real party reform if followed by constitutional discipline, transparent processes, and inclusive reconciliation. But this is far from guaranteed.

 

Conclusion: Wike’s Next Chapter, Nigeria’s Next Test

Wike’s expulsion is neither the catharsis the PDP hoped for nor the humiliation some of his critics predicted. It is a prelude; a moment that reveals more than it resolves. For Wike, the path ahead is uncertain but full of options. For the PDP, the future is more precarious: whether it becomes a revitalized institution or a cautionary tale depends on how it navigates the fallout. And for Nigeria, the stakes are even higher. A weakened, divided opposition at this political moment risks creating a democratic imbalance that could persist for years. Wike’s trajectory from party pillar to expelled provocateur mirrors the story of Nigerian democracy itself: full of potential, weighed down by contradictions, and constantly at a crossroads. What he does next, and how the PDP responds, will shape not only their destinies but the health of Nigeria’s democratic project in the years ahead.

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