Mr President this morning, I write about the spiraling bloodletting across the country. It has reached a level that calls for rethinking the strategy to overcome the terrorists. On the penultimate Tuesday, February 3, 2026, it was the turn of the Woro community in the cumulative bloodletting. In the massacre, over 200 people were murdered by the jihadists/terrorists with links to ISIS.

It was a massacre forewarned as the terrorists had apprised the community that they would be coming to proselytise, and the community accordingly notified Department of State Security.

As happened in Yelwata in Benue state, nothing was done to avert the Woro massacre. One uncanny aspect of the Woro massacre is that the community saw a white helicopter before and after the massacre. Where did the helicopter come from? This begs for an answer. Mr President, I hope a response will come.

I would say a conquest is unfolding. The indigenous black people of Nigeria and by extension indigenous Africans are on the verge of being caged and cleansed in yet another historic slavery by a minority state-nation that is non-indigenous to the geographical area known as Nigeria.

If this slavery succeeds, it would be goodbye to the black people known to history. As a consequence, they will become a historical footnote in conversations among other races.

Therefore, while the sun is still in the middle of the sky, the oppressed indigenous people need to unite and shake off this enveloping yoke of extinction by every means necessary. To succeed, they must make the utmost sacrifice; the self must yield to the collective, while eternal vigilance and resistance to the wiles of the marauders are a necessity.

It is well-known that the black race has been the subject of every imaginable form of oppression and repression in modern history. It has been the subject of the Arab slave trade, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and neocolonialism.

I shall summarise each of these historical epochs and underline the horrible sufferings and deaths of black Africans. Professor Wole Soyinka once observed that Nigerians suffer from ‘partial amnesia’. Soyinka was even economical with words. Nigerians, to be sure, live in self-denial and are accustomed to forgetting the facts of history, and therefore go through its cyclical rituals in greater misery.

Stride and Ifeka, in their co-authored work, Peoples and Empires of West Africa, noted that at the beginning of the eighth century, the Arabs had conquered the whole of the coastal strip of North Africa and imposed Arab ruling dynasties.

In their in-road into Africa, the trans-Saharan trade routes dominated by the Berbers served the dual purpose of trade and Islamic proselytisation. The Fatimids heldsway in Egypt and other parts of what is today’s North Africa.They undermined much of indigenous African civilisation.

The Omani Arabs subsequently seized the coastal strip of East Africa, especially Zanzibar and Mombasa, under the compass of weather. Besides, the foray of Islam, which is writ large in the literature, there is a conspiratorial silence about the evils of Arab penetration into Africa, especially the Arab slave trade.

By some accounts, between 1500 and 1900, about 5 million African slaves were transported by Muslim slave traders via the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Sahara Desert to other parts of the world.

African slaves worked the salt mines of Mesopotamia and the sugar cane plantations of the Tigris-Euphrates delta in what is today’s Iraq. Besides, they fought the Arabs wars as soldiers and were equally used as sex slaves.

They reached a critical mass that they could revolt in Basra as far back as the 9th century AD. The total number of Africans carted away in the Arab slave trade is put at about 17 million, not to mention the over 50 percent that died in transit and on arrival at their final places of thralldom.

The Arab slavery lasted for about 1400 years, and the racial ideology of blacks being an inferior race oiled their subjugation. German explorer, Gustav Nachtigal, testifies to the horror of the Arab Slave trade in the following words:
“The poor children of the black countries seem to meet death here, at the last stage of a long, hopeless, and painful journey.

The long journey accomplished with insufficient food and scarce water, the contrast between the rich natural resources and the humid atmosphere of their homeland and the dry and anemic air of the desert, the fatigue and the privations imposed by their masters and by the circumstances in which they find themselves, all this has gradually ruined their young strengths.

The memory of their homeland that has disappeared along the way, their fear of an unknown future, the endless journey under the blows, hunger, thirst and deadly exhaustion have paralysed their last faculties of resistance. If the poor creatures lack strength to get up and walk again, they are simply abandoned, and their minds slowly fade under the destructive effect of the rays of the sun, hunger and thirst.” Tidiane N’Diaye’s Le genocide voile is also very insightful on Arabs cruelties against Africans.

It is to be noted that their incursion into Africa birthed the murderous religious ideology that is being instrumentalised by a state-nation, the Fulani, which is non-indigenous to Nigeria, to occupy and take over the country.

The uprising of April 22, 1990, underlined their goal of domination. According to Major Gideon Orkar: “Our history is replete with numerous and uncontrollable instances of callous and insensitive dominatory repressive intrigues by those who think it is their birthright to dominate till eternity the political and economic privileges of this great country to the exclusion of the people of the Middle Belt and the south…

They have almost succeeded in subjugating the Middle Belt and making them voiceless and now extending same to the south… This clique has an unabated penchant for domination and unrivalled fostering of mediocrity and outright detest for accountability—all put together have been our undoing as a nation.”

To defeat this prevalent internal colonialism, the unity of the oppressed nationalities is imperative. Priming them for self-defence is no less imperative. For those fixated on class analysis of the Nigerian crisis, a resolution of this secondary contradiction has assumed a principal status.

Its resolution is paramount to posing the question of the primary contraction—the divide between the rich and the poor in our country.

Let me end this brief reflection with a conviction and a prayer. In the words of William Temple (1981-1944), may we be inspired to “break down all tyranny and oppression, to gain for every man his due service that each may live for all, and all may care for each.”