By Adekunle Adekoya
Right now, the 80th United Nations General Assembly, UNGA is holding in New York, the United States. This year, unlike on previous occasions, our president is not attending. Instead, Vice President Kashim Shettima is standing in for the president and has already delivered the Nigerian national address to the UN body.
The key takeaways from the speech made at UNGA is the renewed call for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, and the proposal for a two-state solution to the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I will quote certain sentences from the speech delivered by Shettima, and relate it to our peculiar circumstances.
Apparently speaking of the Palestinians, Shettima said: “They are human beings, equal in worth, entitled to the same freedoms and dignities that the rest of us take for granted.”
Shettima continued, saying Palestinians are not “collateral damage in a civilisation searching for order…..The community has borne the weight of moral conflict. For too long, we have been caught in the crossfire of violence that offends the conscience of humanity.
“We come not as partisans, but as peacemakers. We come as brothers and sisters of a shared world, a world that must never reduce the right to live into the currency of devious politics,” he said further.
Well said. I assume that the stance taken by the Federal Government was duly arrived at after diligent appraisal of the entire Middle East conflict, its history, its trajectory, and possible implications in the future. That will be the limit of my commentary on government position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for now. It is Nigeria’s words, delivered through Shettima at UNGA that really worries me.
Our people say that charity begins at home. What does the Federal Government have at home in terms of peace and security to make it go to a global forum and moralise?
Is Benue State not part of Nigeria? Have the killings in Benue abated? Or Katsina? That is a state where killers and gunmen, declared wanted by security agencies are attending meetings called by the Katsina sub-national to negotiate peace. Do you negotiate with bare-faced, deliberate, unrepentant killers?
What will you be discussing with somebody that is determined to profit by taking away your God-given right to life and living? Or Zamfara? Or Sokoto, Niger and Kogi states? Are these states no longer part of the Federation of Nigeria? Is it not in these states that outlaws decided to take over some of the functions of government? Don’t they levy taxes on the people they are holding in bondage? Generally, has kidnapping for ransom, which is the level this government took Nigeria and Nigerians to, since 2015, ended?
As Shettima was delivering the speech given him at UNGA, Chairman of the Plateau State Fact-Finding Committee on Incessant Attacks and Killings, Major General Nicholas Rogers (rtd), revealed that no fewer than 11,000 people lost their lives with at least 420 communities destroyed in the state over the last two decades of violence.
General Rogers spoke while presenting his committee’s report, which was submitted last week to Governor Caleb Mutfwang at the Government House, Jos. The 10-member panel was inaugurated in May 2025 to investigate the root causes of the crisis that has plagued Plateau State since 2001.
Imagine! 11,000 precious lives — men women, children, old aged, infirm killed like that, with 420 towns and villages destroyed. We have not even spoken of the Boko Haram carnage that has turned the entire North-Eastern part of the country into a war zone. That was the same Boko Haram that Buhari’s Information Minister, the redoubtable Lai Mohammed told us gleefully has been “technically defeated.”
After the technical defeat, the insurgent group has launched blistering attacks on military formations and civilian settlements too many times that people have lost count. It was after the technical defeat, that Boko Haram secured assistance from international terror groups to the extent that we now have ISWAP — Islamic State West Africa Province. To the North-West, the Lakurawa have since emerged to compound our security woes, terrorising Zamfara, Niger, Kebbi, and Sokoto States. Down South, marauding herdsmen militia continue to unleash terror on farmers, all the while killing, maiming, raping and plundering, and grabbing land.
All those killed, fellow Nigerians, are they not “human beings, equal in worth, entitled to the same freedoms and dignities that the rest of us take for granted,” as Shettima spoke of Palestinians at UNGA? How can we be exporting what we don’t have and bid to import what we have? How can you go to UNGA to say such things when your own house is virtually on fire? From East to West, North to South, it is one tale of woe or the other as a result of insecurity.
It is the same attitude that is ruling the oil industry, but that is for another day. I implore the Federal Government to do the needful by worrying more about the welfare of Nigerians for which they have direct responsibility, rather than weeping over the plight of people whose leadership and followership don’t give a damn whether you exist at all. More than enough of our people have “been caught in the crossfire of violence that offends the conscience of humanity.” Unless the people who constitute federal authorities are not offended, or do not have conscience.
*Adekoya is a commentator on public issues
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