Retired Nigerian Army Colonel Tony Nyiam has raised a chilling alarm: Nigeria, he says, is edging dangerously close to the kind of collapse that tore Sudan apart under former President Omar al-Bashir.
Nyiam, once part of a failed coup against the Babangida regime, didn’t mince words. He pointed to the growing insecurity in parts of northern Nigeria and drew parallels to Sudan’s descent into chaos—where government-backed militias were used to silence opposition and enforce ethnic control.
Nyiam warned that the country was on a gradual but dangerous decline, pointing out a familiar pattern: local militias are empowered, authorities look away when vulnerable communities are attacked, and before long, control slips away entirely.
His comments come amid rising concern about how the Nigerian state is responding to armed violence, especially where ethnic or religious lines are involved. To Nyiam, the writing is on the wall—and ignoring it, he says, would be a tragic mistake.
He gave the warning while delivering a lecture titled: “A Justifiable, Justiciable, and Result Oriented National Security Architecture for Nigerian People” at the Pan-National summit.
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Nyiam, a former member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue, recalled how the al-Bashir regime armed Arab Janjaweed militias to unleash terror on Black African populations in Sudan’s Darfur region.
The campaign led to widespread killings, displacement of millions, and what many international observers, including the International Criminal Court, described as genocide.
He accused the Nigerian government, particularly under former President Muhammadu Buhari, of enabling policies that sought to resettle Fulani pastoralists from across West Africa into ancestral lands of indigenous Nigerian communities, without the consent of those affected.
According to Nyiam, this situation echoed the dynamics of Sudan’s Janjaweed militias, who were supported by the state in what later became known as the Darfur genocide.
“We are dangerously close to repeating the tragedy of Sudan under Omar al-Bashir, where Arab Janjaweed militias were armed to displace Black Sudanese communities.
“A similar dynamic emerged under President Buhari’s administration, where policies subtly aimed to resettle Fulani pastoralists from across West Africa into indigenous Nigerian lands without the consent of the host communities”, Nyiam said.
For Colonel Tony Nyiam (Rtd.), Nigeria’s security woes aren’t just about bandits or insurgents—they’re rooted in something much deeper: a military culture that has never truly evolved beyond its colonial DNA.
“Our military still functions like a colonial force—arrogant, top-down, and dangerously out of touch with the people it’s supposed to protect,” Nyiam said bluntly.
In his view, the core of the problem lies in the structure of authority itself. The armed forces, he argues, remain uncritically loyal to the President, not the people or the Constitution. And that, he warns, is a dangerous distortion.
“When you build a system where the military answers only to one man, you open the door to authoritarianism,” Nyiam said. “It undermines the constitutional principle that sovereignty rests with the people.”
According to him, this structural flaw is what allows successive governments to turn national security into a tool for political control—shielding the powerful while leaving citizens exposed.
Nyiam believes the solution lies not in top-down reform, but in reimagining the entire system from the ground up—starting with the people.
He emphasized that lasting security in Nigeria could only be achieved through a framework crafted by Nigerians themselves—one grounded in open, inclusive, and genuinely democratic processes.