I have just finished reading General Lucky Irabor’s book. Irabor was Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff during the Buhari government. The book reveals something troubling: the level of understanding many of our senior government officials bring to their positions.
Forget all the fancied degrees from this or that university. Many of those called to lead this nation see their positions as credentials to collect — “Former Chief of Defence Staff of Nigeria,” “Former Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”— titles to enhance their personal prestige. They do not see themselves as adding their names to the honour roll of those who built Nigeria. They want Nigeria’s name to embellish theirs, not their work to embellish Nigeria’s future. The lack of understanding displayed in this book, poorly titled “Scars” at a time our country is bleeding, is scary.
Our leaders simply cannot think beyond blame and responsibility to grasp systems. So to speak to them, we have to reach for categories that shock.
Hence: Is Somalia today our future?
To understand how Somalia got to where she is today, you may have to consider key features of its people and key moments in her history.
Somalia’s path to collapse
The pattern began in 1978. Somalia had just suffered a catastrophic defeat in the Ogaden War. Military officers attempted a coup against President Siad Barre’s dictatorship.
Barre’s response set the template for the next thirteen years. He ordered his elite Red Berets to destroy water reservoirs in Majeerteen clan areas. Over 2,000 people died of thirst. The coup plotters fled to Ethiopia and formed the first armed opposition group.
Over the next decade, clan-based rebellions multiplied. The Somali National Movement represented the Isaaq in the north. The United Somali Congress represented the Hawiye in the south. Others emerged across the country, each operating from Ethiopian bases.
Then came 1988. Somalia signed a peace accord with Ethiopia that would have closed rebel bases. The SNM launched a desperate offensive and captured Somalia’s second and third largest cities — Hargeisa and Burao.
Barre’s response was genocidal. Aerial bombardment destroyed 70 percent of Hargeisa. Between 50,000 and 200,000 Isaaq civilians were killed. Half a million fled to Ethiopia.
By January 1991, armed groups drove Barre from Mogadishu. The state collapsed immediately.
Somaliland declared independence in May 1991. Puntland declared autonomy in 1998. Thirty-five years later, the country remains permanently fractured. Somaliland operates as a de facto independent state with its own government, currency, and security forces. Puntland maintains semi-autonomy. Southern Somalia struggles under a weak federal government propped up by the largest peacekeeping mission in African history while al-Shabaab controls vast territories.
And now the fracture deepens. In January 2025, Israel formally recognized Somaliland as an independent state — the first country to do so. This opens a new chapter that further weakens any possibility of Somali reunification.
The Somali paradox
What makes Somalia’s collapse so instructive is that Somalis share far more in common than Nigerians ever have. They speak the same language —Somali— across the entire territory. They practice the same religion —Islam— with overwhelming uniformity. They share common culture, customs, and ethnic identity. There are no deep religious divides like Nigeria’s Christian-Muslim fault lines, no hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages, no fundamental differences in social organisation like the Yoruba-Hausa-Igbo distinctions. If ethnic homogeneity, linguistic unity, and religious cohesion were sufficient to hold a nation together, Somalia should have been among Africa’s most stable states.
Yet it was precisely this “same people” who spent thirteen years tearing themselves apart until the capacity for collective coordination dissolved entirely. The difference was colonial legacy: British Somaliland in the north received minimal infrastructure and hands-off governance that left traditional clan structures relatively intact, while Italian Somalia in the south experienced direct rule, extensive development, cultural assimilation efforts, and deliberate disruption of traditional Somali governance systems. When these two incompatible administrative zones merged at independence in 1960, and when Siad Barre’s dictatorship later tried to violently suppress clan identity rather than work with it, the result was the weaponization of the very clan system that had once coordinated Somali society.
The country that emerged from collapse in 1991 was not one nation struggling to govern itself, but three separate entities —Somaliland, Puntland, and southern Somalia— each following different trajectories, with external powers now exploiting these divisions by selectively recognising breakaway regions. This international recognition of Somaliland doesn’t represent progress toward stability — it demonstrates how thoroughly the indigenous capacity for national coordination has been destroyed. And Somalia’s collapse hasn’t remained contained within its borders— al-Shabaab operates across East Africa, Somali pirates disrupted global shipping for years, refugee flows destabilize neighbouring countries, and the failure provides a template for terrorist organisations and foreign powers seeking to exploit state weakness throughout the region.
Nigeria, with all its deeper diversity and fragmentation, has survived sixty-five years as a single country. Somalia, essentially one people, collapsed in thirteen, fragmented into three, and after thirty-five years continues to export its instability across the Horn of Africa and beyond.
Nigeria’s slow march down the same path
Nigeria in 2026 exhibits the same warning signs that marked Somalia’s journey from 1978 to 1991, only stretched across a longer timeline. The First Republic collapsed in 1966 — just six years after independence — in a military coup followed by counter-coup and civil war that killed over one million people. Like Somalia’s Ogaden defeat, the Biafran War should have been Nigeria’s breaking point, but the “No Victor, No Vanquished” policy and oil revenue allowed the country to survive what destroyed Somalia.
Since then, Nigeria has experienced the same pattern of escalating violence that consumed Somalia: Boko Haram’s insurgency in the Northeast has displaced millions and made vast territories ungovernable; bandit armies control the Northwest, collecting taxes and operating as de facto governments; herder-farmer conflicts in the Middle Belt have killed tens of thousands; kidnapping has become an industrial economy; and separatist movements — IPOB in the Southeast, Yoruba Nation agitators in the Southwest, and increasingly vocal northern voices — grow bolder with each failure of the federal government to provide security.
The difference is tempo, not trajectory. Where Somalia’s clan militias emerged over a decade, Nigeria’s armed groups have proliferated over decades. Where Barre’s dictatorship actively weaponized clans against each other, Nigeria’s democratic governments have passively allowed the erosion of indigenous peace technologies through neglect, elite discourse that delegitimizes them, and policies that treat symptoms while the foundations crumble. The international community watches Nigeria the way they watched Somalia in the 1980s — concerned but assuming the country is too big, too important, too resource-rich to actually collapse. Somalia taught us that assumptions about what holds countries together mean nothing when the indigenous technologies that generate coordination have been damaged beyond their capacity to function.
Nigeria has been walking this path for sixty-five years. The question is not whether we are on Somalia’s trajectory — we are. The question is whether we recognise it while there is still time to step off.
I was still a student at university in 2002. In those days, a Nigerian government could summon any president across this region. Within 24 hours there would be a meeting in Abuja. As a nation and as individuals, we Nigerians were poorer then. But the name meant something.
Compare that to today. On December 8th, our military aircraft made an emergency landing in Bobo-Dioulasso. Burkina Faso detained the plane and our eleven soldiers. It took ten days. Ten days before our Minister of Foreign Affairs made a humiliating trip to Ouagadougou. Only then, on December 18th, were they released.
We spend more sending death to the farthest corners of the territory we claim as ours than we spend on schools and hospitals. And we cannot acknowledge that this is more than just a temporary state of emergency. We are at war.
Governments across our region have become so unpopular that many of our youth would consider welcoming military coups.
The question we must ask ourselves: Is there still something left in us capable of hearing the loud cries? The sacrifice made by those who died and are still dying for this nation to survive?
Or have we, like Somalia before us, already crossed the threshold? Has the capacity for national coordination been so thoroughly eroded that no amount of military spending, constitutional reform, or international intervention can restore it?
Somalia was once a name that commanded respect in the Horn of Africa. So was Nigeria in West Africa.
Somalia ignored the warning signs until it was too late. We are being given the same warnings now.
The lie we were told
In his famous “Wind of Change” speech delivered in Cape Town in February 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke eloquently about African nationalism:
“The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.”
He proclaimed that “this tide of national consciousness which is now rising in Africa, is a fact, for which both you and we, and the other nations of the western world are ultimately responsible.”
Many of those we like to call the founding fathers of our nations believed it was the nationalistic battles that earned us our independence. They cannot be more wrong.
In private conversations during that same African tour, Macmillan asked Governor-General James Robertson a question about Nigeria: “Can these people govern themselves?”
Robertson answered bluntly: “No.”
“When will they be ready?” Macmillan pressed.
“In fifteen, maybe twenty years.”
“What should I do then?”
Robertson’s answer: “Give it to them anyway.”
Here was the contradiction laid bare. Macmillan referred to us as “a people” in his public speeches — yet privately questioned whether we could govern ourselves.
But to be a people already assumes self-governance. The very term acknowledges some form of collective existence, some technology of coordination that makes “these people” a recognisable entity.
Both Macmillan and Robertson could not see what made these people a people. They saw only the borrowed institutions they were handing over — institutions they knew would not work. They could not see the indigenous peace technologies that had been holding Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani, and Igbo societies together for centuries before colonial rule. The systems that had been suspended but not destroyed during eighty years of Pax Britannica.
We have also ignored this for the past sixty-five years since independence.
My hope is that we don’t destroy them ourselves before we realize Abuja is a theatre, after all.
