On Sunday morning, Senate President Godswill Akpabio stood at the National Christian Centre in Abuja and said something that deserved more questioning than a Sunday service usually allows.
“If they are in government, they will be exposed,” he said, talking about the sponsors of terrorism, kidnapping and violent attacks across Nigeria. “Those funding it, whether political or not, may they never know peace until they are defeated.”
It was a bold statement, however ironic, for reasons Akpabio didn’t touch or expand on.
Akpabio isn’t a civil society voice or an opposition senator challenging those in power. He’s the President of the Nigerian Senate, the third highest office in the country. He sits at the top of the same government he was promising to expose. If he believes officials inside that government are bankrolling terrorism, the issue isn’t whether they’ll be “exposed in Jesus’ name.” The issue is: what has he actually done about it, and why hasn’t it been done already?
This is platitude and overused statements of passion that Nigerian politics has perfected over decades. The acknowledgement of a problem, delivered with enough passion and rhetorical force to sound like action, while the actual mechanisms of accountability remain untouched. Akpabio’s speech on Sunday was full of genuine feeling. He spoke movingly about children in captivity, about farmers too scared to go back to their fields, about parents lying awake through the night not knowing whether their children are alive. He even referenced his own childhood during the Civil War. The feeling seemed genuine.
But feelings is not legislation. Passion is not prosecution. And a vow made before a congregation, however sincere, is not the same as a referral to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, a motion on the Senate floor, or a formal demand for investigation into the security services and political networks that have allowed banditry and terrorism to flourish for years under successive administrations, including this one.
Nigeria’s insecurity crisis did not arrive without warning and it does not persist without enablers. That much is widely understood. When a man of Akpabio’s seniority and access confirms, from a pulpit on Democracy Day, that the enabling is happening at government level, the appropriate response is not applause. It is a follow-up question.
You said they will be exposed, Mr Senate President.
By whom? Through what process? On what timeline?
And if you already know who they are, what exactly are you waiting for?
