by Mohammed Bello Doka
11 June, 2026.
There is no longer a comfortable distance between the horrors on the television screen and the cold dread that grips every village, every home, and every heart across this nation. The images are no longer just headlines. They are the screams of women being dragged into the bush, the silence of children whose throats have been slit, and the crimson rivers of blood flowing through the once-peaceful farmlands of Northern Nigeria. We are witnessing the unthinkable become routine. In 2025 alone, violent conflicts across the country claimed a staggering 4,654 lives and saw 3,141 citizens kidnapped in 1,274 incidents of pure, unadulterated terror. Banditry, now the deadliest driver of violence, accounted for 599 of those horrific incidents—a catastrophic surge from just 256 the previous year. From the massacre of 30 villagers in Niger State to the coordinated slaughter of 42 people in the Kontagora Catholic Diocese, the bloodshed is relentless. In one devastating cycle of vengeance, a family of 16 was burned alive in a reprisal attack, their screams serving as a fiery epitaph for a state that no longer cares. This is not merely crime; this is the complete and total breakdown of the sovereign contract. This is the consequence of a failed state.
And from the ashes of this failure, a dangerous chorus is rising. Across the North, from the ravaged hamlets of Zamfara to the besieged communities of Katsina, the call for citizens to arm themselves is no longer a whisper. It is a thunderous demand. Traditional rulers, respected elders, and desperate fathers are openly declaring that the people have no choice but to take up rifles in defense of their own lives. The Emir of Argungu, Alhaji Muhammad Samaila Mera, has given voice to this desperation, invoking the primordial right of self-preservation. Community leaders in Sokoto and Kebbi have followed suit, arguing that when the government fails to protect, protection becomes a personal duty. This is the premise we must stare squarely in the face: there is a sustained, growing, and unambiguous call for mass civilian armament across the North. And if that call is heeded—if every household turns into an arsenal, every farmer into a fighter, every village into a militia camp—then we must ask the most urgent question of our time. What happens next? What are the implications of unleashing a armed populace of angry, hungry, and largely illiterate civilians onto a landscape already drowning in blood? The answer is terrifying, and it is one the government cannot afford to ignore.
Let us stop pretending that arming the desperate is a viable solution. There is a monster currently wearing the mask of the vigilante, and if the government does not slam this door shut immediately, that monster will consume us all. The first implication is that these self-defense groups are not winning. In July 2025, over 70 vigilante members were ambushed and massacred in Plateau State’s Odare Forest—not by ghosts, but by the very bandits they sought to fight. Shortly after, an airstrike by the Nigerian Air Force, meant to target criminal gangs, mistakenly killed 16 members of local vigilante groups. The brutal reality is that untrained farmers with rusty rifles are no match for heavily armed criminal cartels. But far more terrifying is the second implication: what happens if, against all odds, they do win. History and logic show that once a starving man has tasted blood and felt the power of the gun, his appetite does not end with the bandit. It will turn inward. Having purged the outsiders, these armed mobs will turn on their own societies. The primary targets will inevitably be the wealthy. The politicians who sleep in fortified mansions in Abuja while the villages burn. The business class who profit from the economy of a bleeding nation. The landlords and the elites. When law dissolves, the mob moves from the bandit in the forest to the oppressor in the city. The Nigerian military analyst Colonel Hassan Usman (retd.) recently warned, An armed civilian with no training, no command structure, and no accountability is not a vigilante. He is a future warlord. We are breeding a thousand future warlords across the North, and we are pretending they will all be heroes.
We have seen this nightmare play out across Africa. In the brutal civil war tearing Sudan apart, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces—born from the Janjaweed militias of armed civilians—have laid siege to cities, forced 10,000 families to flee famine-hit camps, and internally displaced over 10 million people. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides understood this dark logic when he wrote, The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. Once the armed mob becomes the strong, the weak will be every man, woman, and child who owns more than a mud hut. That is the destiny of Nigeria if we continue down this path of lawless armament.
Perhaps the most damning evidence of the dangers of mass civilian armament comes from the United States of America, a country with ironclad institutions, a stable democracy, and an advanced, professionalized police force. Despite this, the proliferation of weapons among civilians has resulted in absolute carnage. In 2025 alone, the United States recorded at least 407 mass shooting incidents—defined as events where four or more people were killed or injured. Over 40,000 people were shot in the US in 2025, with nearly 15,000 dying from gun homicides or non-suicide shootings. Even the infant mortality of gun violence—224 children aged 11 and under—was higher than the total number of soldiers killed in some recent wars. If the world’s most powerful military and its most sophisticated police apparatus cannot stop a lone wolf with an assault rifle, how on earth will a destitute Nigerian villager control a mob of his neighbors once they have tasted the intoxication of firepower? The answer is simple: he will not. And the blood will be on the hands of those who opened this door.
There is no better time than this very hour for the government to act. The call for self-defense is a cry of desperation, not a solution. It is a symptom of a fatal disease: the loss of sovereignty. The government must marshal every resource, every intelligence asset, and every conventional weapon to annihilate the bandits in the North. Because if this festering wound is allowed to burst, it will not remain in the North. It will spill over and drown the entire country. In April 2025, security groups raised urgent alarms over a steady flow of terrorists and bandits dislodged from northern Nigeria spilling into the South-West states, including Ekiti, Oyo, and Osun. The Yoruba nations are already feeling the heat. The entire nation is a tinderbox. If security forces are already struggling to contain a few thousand criminals, we stand no chance against an armed populace of 200 million. The monster of arming civilians is a genie that cannot be put back into the bottle. It starts with killing the bandit, but it ends with brothers killing brothers, neighbors razing villages, and the complete collapse of the Nigerian project. Close the door. Kill the bandits. Keep the guns out of the hands of the mob. Do it now, or we will all be consumed.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
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Opinion