A former Vice President of the World Bank and co-convener of the #BringBackOurGirls movement, Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili, thinks the administration of President Bola Tinubu is cuddling terrorists towards mindless criminality than making any effort to vanquish them.
She brands the stage as an “appeasement strategy” toward terrorists, accusing the government of enabling criminality rather than confronting it.
In a series of posts on her official X (formerly Twitter) handle, Ezekwesili argued that recent engagements between government officials and bandits, without decisive follow-up action, amount to rewarding terrorist behavior.
“It is accurate to state that our federal and state governments, led at this time by @NGRPresident @officialABAT, are, by their appeasement strategy, enabling terrorists by rewarding their criminal behaviour,” she wrote.
The ccomments of the former Minister followed the abduction and subsequent release of pupils and teachers from St. Mary’s Private Catholic School in Niger State, the latest in a series of kidnappings targeting schools in northern Nigeria.
Ezekwesili contrasted the current approach with what she described as the resolve of a capable state. “A capable Nigerian state of the past would never cuddle terrorists,” she stated. “All who persist in harming and killing our country and people, especially our children, would have long been finished off by a caring and competent government.”
She maintained that successive administrations since terrorism escalated in 2009 have neglected their constitutional duty to protect citizens.
“Our past and present governments, in escalating degrees, have basically failed to decisively and effectively tackle terrorists who take up arms against Nigerians and our country,” she added.
Ezekwesili attributed the failure to what she called systemic corruption that has weakened security agencies, leading governments to adopt appeasement as a default strategy.
“It now painfully appears that because grand corruption grossly weakened the capacity of our security establishments, all successive @NigeriaGov administrations implicitly adopted a policy of appeasing terrorists as the only way they know to secure Nigerians and Nigeria,” she lamented.
She also criticized what she described as the government’s tendency to celebrate the negotiated release of kidnap victims without transparency.
“Nothing exemplifies this anomaly more than the triumphal press releases and statements that gloating public officials often issue… without telling the public who the criminals they negotiated with were, at what cost, and under what conditions.”
