THE RANSOM REPUBLIC

When the State Abandons Its Primary Duty, Survival Becomes an Act of Radical Rebellion – A Nation Waiting for an Election While Its Citizens Wait for Rescue

By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma | AI-KO

Published June 4, 2026

There is a strange trepidation in the air across Nigeria today. A weight that settles on the mind and crawls through the skin the moment you step outside. It is not the anxiety of a difficult economy, though the economy is difficult. It is not the frustration of erratic public services, though the services have long since surrendered to dysfunction. It is something older, more primal, more devastating than any of those familiar complaints. It is the feeling of living in a country where human life has become a negotiable commodity – where safety is no longer a right but a transaction, where the price of survival is counted in bank transfers, whispered negotiations, and the trembling voices of families begging, on their knees if necessary, for the return of someone they love.

This is the defining truth of the Nigeria we inhabit in 2026: we have become a nation suspended between fear and fatigue, where anyone – a child on the way to school, a commuter stepping into a bus, a farmer arriving at his own land at dawn – can be taken. Where the state has lost its monopoly on force, and where scattered armed groups now dictate the terms of daily life from forests, from highways, from the ungoverned edges of our cities, and sometimes from the very streets we share with them. Where the phone call you dread – the one that comes with a voice you do not recognise and a number you cannot trace and a demand that arrives before your heart has had time to process the horror – is no longer a remote possibility but a statistical reality for an increasing number of Nigerian families.

This is not merely insecurity. It is an economy. A system. A marketplace built entirely on human bodies, sustained by the coordinated failure of institutions that were created, funded, and mandated specifically to prevent it.

This is the Ransom Republic. And we are all living inside it.

The Industry We Refuse to Name

For too long, Nigerians have processed the kidnapping crisis as a series of isolated incidents – each one tragic, each one briefly trending on social media before being replaced by the next atrocity, each one ultimately absorbed into the numbing rhythm of a national consciousness that has been conditioned to endure what it cannot resolve. We speak of individual cases because individual cases are what we can hold in our minds and in our hearts. But what is happening in Nigeria is not a series of individual cases. It is an industry. A business model. A structured criminal enterprise with its own economics, its own logistics, its own seasonal patterns, its own price ranges and profit margins, and its own deeply rational understanding of the state it operates within.

When we see the real numbers – not the sanitised summaries that appear in government briefings, but the raw data from the security analysts and intelligence trackers who are actually counting – the industrial scale of what is happening becomes impossible to dismiss. Independent organisations including SBM Intelligence and Beacon Security & Intelligence have documented a crisis that is not plateauing or declining but accelerating. In one of the most chilling single-month comparisons in recent Nigerian security data, abductions reportedly surged from 345 in March 2026 to 709 in April 2026 – an increase of over 100 percent in a single calendar month. In that same period, fatalities climbed from 777 to more than 1,000.

A recent public commentary by security scholar Professor Oyesoji Aremu referenced an estimate – attributed to the National Bureau of Statistics – suggesting that Nigeria may have recorded millions of kidnapping incidents in a single year. That specific figure is almost certainly inflated; no verified national database currently supports a number that high. But the fact that such a number feels plausible to millions of Nigerians is itself the story. When a people can hear a claim of millions of kidnapping incidents in a year and respond not with disbelief but with exhausted recognition – that sounds about right – the state has already failed in ways that statistics alone cannot capture.

What is not in dispute is the money. Analysts estimate that Nigerians paid more than ₦100 billion in ransoms between 2011 and 2020 alone. That figure covers only what is known – the reported cases, the verified payments, the families who were willing to speak. When you fold in the unreported payments, the private negotiations conducted under threats of silence, the amounts transferred out of accounts that no bank or government agency will ever audit for this purpose, the total climbs into the trillions. The most comprehensive recent analysis puts the cumulative ransom economy at ₦2.2 trillion. That is money that should have gone into school fees, hospital bills, rent payments, and small business capital. That is investment stripped from the legitimate economy and redirected into the hands of armed networks that terrorize communities and progressively destabilize entire regions of the country.

This is not petty crime operating in the margins of society. It is a structured ransom economy, run by networks with logistics, informants, financiers, and supply chains. These networks have learned the rhythms of Nigerian life with frightening precision – when people travel and when they return, when they are most exposed, when the state is most distracted. They have studied the terrain, both geographic and political. And they have drawn a conclusion, repeatedly confirmed by experience, that the Nigerian state cannot stop them. In some cases, as we are about to see, they have drawn a further and more dangerous conclusion: that the Nigerian state will eventually pay them.

These are not warnings from an alarming future. These are the early chapters of a collapse that is already in progress.

The Capital That Could Not Protect Its Own

To understand how completely the rules of Nigerian geography have been rewritten by the kidnapping industry, you need to understand what happened to Nabeeha Al-Kadriyah.

In January 2024, Nabeeha, her father, and her four sisters were abducted from their home in Abuja – not from a remote community in a state the national media rarely covers, not from a farming village hours from the nearest security installation, but from the Federal Capital Territory. The city we are told is the most secure in Nigeria. The place ringed by checkpoints, patrolled by multiple overlapping security agencies, home to the government and the military high command and the diplomatic corps and every institution of the Nigerian state that claims to be managing our security. Abuja. The kidnappers took a man and his five daughters from their home in the capital of the nation.

Her father was released to negotiate. He went out into the city and began trying to raise money he did not have, because that is what Nigerian families do when the state cannot help them – they improvise, they beg, they sell what they own. Before the family could raise the full amount being demanded, the kidnappers murdered Nabeeha. They called the family and told them where to find her body.

Her sisters were still in captivity.

What happened next is the part of this story that must not be forgotten, because it tells us something more important than any government statistic or security briefing. Nigerians who had never met this family – strangers, ordinary people, people with their own economic pressures and their own fears – organised crowdfunding campaigns on social media to raise ransom money for the surviving sisters. The state had failed. Citizens filled the gap. A murdered girl's family had to crowdfund on the internet to buy the freedom of their surviving daughters, in the capital of Africa's largest economy.

That moment broke something in the national psyche. It shattered, permanently and irreversibly, the last credible argument that the problem of kidnapping was someone else's problem, located in someone else's geography, explainable by someone else's poverty or ethnicity or political misfortune. The violence was not "out there." It was in the Federal Capital Territory. It was bold enough to take five girls from their home in Abuja. It was confident enough to kill one of them and leave the body for the family to collect. It was spreading, and it feared nothing.

The road to that moment was long. It was paved slowly, painfully, through tragedies that showed us – one family at a time, one community at a time – that the Nigerian state had quietly, incrementally, almost without public announcement, stepped back from its most fundamental obligation. The obligation that justifies the existence of the state in the first place: the protection of the people who constitute it.

The Government That Speaks from Both Sides of Its Mouth

Nothing has done more damage to Nigeria's ability to confront the kidnapping industry than the gap between what its government says publicly and what it does privately. This gap is not a nuance or a matter of competing narratives. It is a documented, verified, internationally reported chasm that has made the government's stated policy incoherent and its credibility on security matters essentially zero.

The official position of the Nigerian government on ransom payments is clear, firm, and frequently stated: it does not negotiate with terrorists or criminals. It has passed legislation criminalising ransom payments. Senior officials appear on national television with visible conviction to lecture the families of kidnapping victims about the dangers of paying ransoms and the way in which every payment funds the next abduction. The message is consistent and unambiguous: we do not pay, and you should not pay either.

Then there is what actually happens.

In late 2025, nearly 230 children and staff were abducted from St. Mary's Catholic boarding school in Niger State, in one of the largest single school kidnapping operations in recent Nigerian history. The scale of the operation, the number of children involved, and the location – not in the deep North-East where such attacks have become grimly routine, but in Niger State, closer to the centre of the country – produced an international outcry. After two weeks of captivity, the hostages were released. The government praised the response of its security agencies, declared no ransom had been paid, and the State Security Service repeated the same reassurance.

An AFP investigation, citing intelligence sources, then reported what the government had denied. A large ransom – with estimates ranging from tens of millions of naira per hostage to a total running into the billions – was allegedly delivered by helicopter to a militant enclave in Gwoza, Borno State. The same investigation reported that two detained Boko Haram commanders were released as part of the arrangement that secured the children's freedom.

Consider what that means if the allegations are accurate. A Nigerian government helicopter – carrying taxpayer money, under cover of official denial – allegedly flew into one of the most notorious terrorist strongholds in the country to purchase the freedom of children the state had failed to protect, while the same government was simultaneously appearing on television to insist to the Nigerian public that it never pays ransoms.

That is not a security failure. That is a policy that has been deliberately designed to deceive the people it governs while actively sustaining the criminal economy it claims to be fighting. Every covert payment validates the kidnapping business model. Every public denial insults the intelligence of the families who have been told they are on their own. Every contradiction between the official statement and the reported action sends an unmistakable message to armed groups across the country: the government's public posture is theatre, and behind the curtain there is always a deal to be made.

The November 2025 abduction of 25 schoolgirls from a school in Kebbi State made the architecture of this duplicity even more explicit. The abduction was not random opportunism. According to multiple security sources, it was engineered by notorious bandit leader Ado Aleru specifically to pressure the government into releasing his nephew and ten associates who had been arrested after returning from Saudi Arabia. The girls were freed within a week. Sources reported that the eleven individuals Aleru had demanded were released. The government denied paying ransom, as it does reflexively after every such incident, but the pattern had by this point become a template – a publicly legible script that armed groups across the country were reading and applying.

The Kebbi incident did not end a crisis. It created a playbook. It demonstrated to every armed group with a forest and an ambition that mass abductions of children – specifically children, specifically in schools – could be used as precise political and financial leverage against a government that will always, under sufficient pressure, blink first. And once a tactic succeeds, it proliferates. The question is no longer whether other groups studied the Kebbi case as a model. The question is how many are now implementing it.

When a state repeatedly capitulates under pressure and then lies about the capitulation, it does not just fail to deter violence. It teaches its adversaries exactly where its breaking point is and how to reach it every time.

The Men Who Rule the Forest

The boldness that now characterises armed groups in Nigeria's North-West did not appear suddenly or without precedent. It grew slowly, fed by years of weak enforcement, political hesitation, selective accountability, and a security system that has been stretched so far beyond its functional limits that it can no longer be accurately described as a security system at all.

Today, in the deep forests of the region, men who call themselves bandits – pointedly not terrorists, a distinction that carries legal and political significance in the Nigerian security architecture – operate with a level of confidence and visibility that would be surreal in any functioning state. In the Rugu forest reserve, which spans much of Katsina State and reaches across the border into Niger Republic, gang leaders such as Abu Bello – known by the name Abu Radde – move openly. They receive journalists under tree shade with rifles laid casually beside them. They issue demands to state officials as though conducting diplomatic correspondence between peer governments. They explain themselves in interviews with the ease of men who have no fear of consequences, men who have calculated – correctly, on the available evidence – that the state cannot reach them.

These groups present themselves, in these interviews, as products of government neglect. They argue that corruption, poverty, and state abandonment pushed them into a life of violence, and that the real responsibility lies not with them but with the system that failed them. It is a narrative that contains enough truth to be seductive and enough dishonesty to be dangerous. Yes, the Nigerian state has failed its rural populations in the North-West in documented and scandalous ways. Yes, poverty and governance failure create conditions in which armed groups recruit effectively. But none of that moral complexity excuses the abduction of two-year-olds from classrooms, the murder of girls whose families could not raise ransom in time, or the systematic terrorisation of communities that are themselves the victims of the same state neglect these groups claim as their justification.

The truth, as always, is more complicated than any single narrative. The line between banditry and violent extremism in Nigeria's North-West has blurred to the point of disappearance. Some groups operate purely as criminal enterprises, motivated by the extraordinary profitability of kidnapping in a state that consistently fails to punish it. Others have ideological ties to networks responsible for mass atrocities, including Boko Haram affiliates whose theology of violence extends far beyond any plausible grievance against inadequate governance. Together, these hybrid threats have repeatedly and demonstrably outmaneuvered the Nigerian military and security forces, not because those forces lack soldiers or equipment, but because they operate within a political structure that has never fully committed to eliminating the threat rather than managing it.

The forest is not separate from the city. The men under the trees are not contained by geography. The same networks that operate in the Rugu forest have demonstrated, repeatedly and with increasing range, that they can reach into state capitals, into the suburbs of major cities, and – as we are about to see – into the South of a country that had convinced itself it was watching the North's problem from a safe distance.

The Illusion That Collapsed in Oyo

For years, many Nigerians living south of the traditional kidnapping hotspots permitted themselves a comforting if dishonest geography of risk. The North-West, with its vast ungoverned forests and its decades of insurgent activity. The North-East, with the legacy of Boko Haram and the ongoing destabilisation of the Lake Chad basin. These were the dangerous places. The South – with its commercial density, its infrastructure, its political proximity to the current administration, its economic weight, and its media power – was different. Insulated. Protected by its own significance, if by nothing else.

That illusion died in May 2026.

Gunmen attacked three schools in the Esiele and Yawota communities of Oyo State, in the South-West. According to the Christian Association of Nigeria, 46 people were taken – mostly children between the ages of two and sixteen, alongside their teachers and a vice principal. Two years old. The youngest victims of the Oyo State school abductions were toddlers who had not yet learned to read, whose entire conception of the world was still bounded by their parents' voices and their classrooms' walls, who had no framework for understanding what was happening to them as they were taken from the only safety they had ever known.

We must resist the temptation to process this as another data point. We must resist the exhausted impulse that reaches for context and proportion and the analytical distance that keeps us from fully inhabiting the horror of what this means. We must sit – uncomfortably, for as long as it takes – with the specific reality of what it means for a man to walk into a nursery school, survey a room full of children, and see not human beings deserving of protection but inventory. Bargaining chips. Units of leverage in a negotiation with a state he has already correctly assessed as weak enough to break.

What kind of moral collapse produces that calculus? What does it tell us about the condition of a society when that calculus has become not just possible but routine?

The attack in Oyo was not an isolated event or a regional anomaly. It was a declaration. A signal, read clearly by every armed group in the country, that the South-West – with all its wealth and influence and political connections – had been assessed and found equally vulnerable. The mental map of safe and unsafe Nigeria no longer exists. The old certainties about which populations the violence would respect have been systematically dismantled. Every region is now inside the same national emergency, whether it has accepted that reality or not.

The government's response to Oyo followed the now-familiar script with deadening precision. High-powered delegations visited grieving families. A belated announcement was made about deploying forest guards. The President's representatives appeared on television to assure the public that he "cannot sleep" until the children come home. Weeks passed. The children were still missing. The President continued, presumably, to sleep.

What does a President's insomnia mean to a father in Oyo State who has sold his car and borrowed from relatives and is being told through a phone that the amount he has raised is still not enough? Nigeria has satellite intelligence infrastructure. It has a standing army. It has multiple security agencies with overlapping mandates and combined annual budgets that should, on paper, make the location and rescue of a convoy of kidnappers moving through a known forest corridor an achievable operation within hours. It repeatedly fails to locate and rescue toddlers taken in broad daylight from their classrooms.

At some point – and we are long past that point – we must ask the question that the political culture of cautious deference has been suppressing: is this failure, or is it a choice? Because when a government consistently arrives too late, consistently deploys too little, consistently explains away each catastrophe with the same recycled language of concern and determination, the distinction between failure and choice does not just blur. For the families waiting for phone calls that will tell them their children are alive, it becomes irrelevant. The outcome is identical.

Two Governments, One Country

The question of who actually governs Nigeria in 2026 is not a provocative rhetorical flourish. It is the operational question on which every other assessment of national life depends. And the honest answer, when it is given honestly, is that Nigeria is being governed by two parallel and increasingly competitive systems.

The first is the official state: the presidency in Abuja, the National Assembly, the state governments, the multiple tiers of security agencies, the courts, the ministries with their budgets and their annual reports and their press releases and their carefully maintained appearance of institutional functioning. This system holds elections, signs treaties, sits in international forums, issues bonds, and produces the administrative paperwork of a sovereign republic.

The second is the shadow system: the men in the forests and on the highways and in the ungoverned urban margins who dictate, through violence and the credible threat of violence, the actual terms of daily existence for millions of Nigerians across multiple states and multiple regions. This system does not issue press releases. It issues demands. It does not hold elections. It holds people. But for the populations it controls – and it does control populations, not just territories – its authority is more immediately real than anything produced in Abuja.

You can hear the existence of this second system in the economy, where businesses in affected states have quietly shuttered and transport companies have abandoned entire routes because the cost-benefit analysis no longer supports operating in spaces the state cannot secure. You can hear it in the labour market, where teachers refuse postings to rural schools in insecure states regardless of salary incentives because no salary compensates for the probability of abduction. You can hear it in the diaspora conversation, where Nigerians abroad track the security news with a nauseating combination of guilt, grief, and the specific fear of people who are trying to calculate whether the country they left is still the country they could return to.

You can hear it most clearly in the private conversations of middle-class families in cities across the country, who now discuss personal security the way previous generations discussed the weather – comparing neighbourhoods, routes, times of day, the relative reliability of different commuting options – as though the determination of safety is a matter of individual strategic calculation rather than a collective right guaranteed by the state. When citizens must perform daily risk assessments just to move from one point to another in their own country, the republic has already, in the only sense that matters, ceased to function as one.

Nigeria is not on the edge of this reality. It is inside it. The parallel government of armed non-state actors is not a future threat that good policy might prevent. It is the present condition of millions of Nigerian lives, operating openly and with demonstrable confidence in the institutional vacuum that the official state has left behind.

Until this reality is named honestly, in the political discourse, in the public conversation, and in the strategic thinking of every Nigerian who still believes the country is salvageable, nothing that follows can be taken seriously.

What We Must Do Before We Are Swallowed

The painful reckoning that this essay demands is not productive unless it culminates in something beyond well-articulated grief. Grief, in a country that has been grieving this particular grief for over a decade, is not sufficient. What is required now is the disciplined conversion of grief into strategy, of outrage into organised civic action, and of the exhausted endurance that has been Nigerians' default posture into a sustained and uncompromising demand for structural change.

The first honest statement that must be made, as the foundation of any realistic response to this crisis, is this: Nigerians have been effectively orphaned by the state on the question of personal security. To wait for a federal security rescue that has shown no signs of arriving – to continue placing primary reliance on institutions that have not only failed to contain the crisis but have in some documented cases actively sustained the criminal economy that produces it – is not patience. It is a dangerous gamble made with lives that deserve better odds.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is the starting point for honest, practical, community-rooted action that does not depend on Abuja remembering its obligations.

Where community vigilante structures exist and function effectively, they must be resourced, organised, and given the institutional backing of local government authorities that can provide legal cover and coordination. Where they do not exist, they must be built – with the same seriousness and sustained financial commitment that communities bring to school fees and hospital bills, because the security of the family is as fundamental as the education and the health of its members. Neighbourhood watch programmes must be funded with real money, not nominal endorsements. Local intelligence networks – the community-level, street-level, compound-level awareness of who is present, who is new, what has changed, what feels wrong – must be formalised and connected to rapid-response communication systems that can mobilise a community response before kidnappers have had time to disappear into the next tree line.

We must also invest in information security at the household level. These networks have informants. They know our routines because someone who moves among us has told them our routines. Predictability is a vulnerability. Varying travel times, verifying vehicles, scrutinising unfamiliar faces around schools and churches and markets – these are not paranoid overreactions. They are the survival adaptations of a people living in a state of low-intensity conflict, which is what Nigeria's security reality now constitutes for tens of millions of citizens.

We must have the conversations with our children that we have been postponing because they feel premature or frightening. They are neither. The two-year-olds taken from Oyo State classrooms were not prepared for what happened to them because nobody thought preparation was necessary. Preparation is necessary. Children need to know – in age-appropriate, non-terrifying, practically useful terms – who to trust and who to question, what to do if they are separated from trusted adults, how to ask for help, how to identify danger. These conversations do not steal innocence. What steals innocence is the failure to have them.

And beyond the community, beyond the household, beyond the individual strategies of survival in an insecure state, there is the political response – which is not a secondary option but the primary one, the one without which everything else is temporary damage limitation in a worsening situation.

The kidnapping industry does not exist in a political vacuum. It exists in a specific political environment, shaped by specific policy choices, sustained by specific patterns of impunity, and enabled by specific failures of governance that specific elected and appointed officials are responsible for. The bandits in the Rugu forest are the symptom. The politicians who have allowed this environment to develop over fifteen years, who have made their political calculations while communities were terrorised, who have managed security as a public relations problem rather than a governance emergency, who have negotiated privately while denying publicly – these are the disease.

The 2027 elections are approaching. The political class is already visible in its preparations – the alliance negotiations, the cross-carpeting, the zoning arithmetic, the carefully calibrated public positioning. Every candidate who wants the votes of the people who are currently living inside the ransom economy must be required – not asked, required – to give a specific, detailed, costed, accountable account of what they will do about the security crisis. Not a general statement of commitment to peace. Not a promise to "work with security agencies." A specific plan. A measurable target. A named accountability mechanism. And a frank acknowledgement of what has gone wrong under the governance of the people they are either defending or succeeding.

We cannot afford to reward leaders who treat the kidnapping of toddlers as a footnote in manifestos dominated by infrastructure and subsidy debates. We cannot participate in an electoral ritual that returns to power, in new configurations, the same political culture that produced the conditions we are now trying to survive. We must insist, as citizens and as voters and as people whose children go to school every morning in a country where schools have become targets, that security is not one issue among many. It is the foundational issue. It is the issue on which every other aspiration for Nigeria's future depends. A country where citizens cannot safely work, study, travel, and live is a country in which no other development goal can be meaningfully pursued.

The Nigerian spirit has always been resilient. That resilience is real and it is remarkable and it has sustained this country through multiple catastrophes that would have broken others. But resilience is not a national security policy. It is not a substitute for a functioning state. It cannot be, indefinitely, the answer to a structural crisis that is actively consuming the conditions for its own continuation. At some point – and we are at that point – resilience without strategic action becomes simply a more dignified form of accepting the unacceptable.

This Is Still Our Country

The ₦2.2 trillion ransom economy is the most honest number in Nigerian public life. It is not a projection or an estimate of potential harm. It is the documented evidence of what has already been extracted from Nigerian families – the quantified measure of our vulnerability, the financial record of the state's abdication, the invoice for a security failure that has been in progress for over a decade and that no administration has yet found the political will to address with the full force it requires.

But numbers, however damning, are not the deepest truth of this crisis. The deepest truth is human. It is in the face of a father who spent two weeks raising ransom for daughters who were already in captivity in Abuja while the government that was supposed to protect them was busy preparing for an election that is still a year away. It is in the two-year-old from Oyo who was taken from a classroom and who will carry the memory of that taking – if she is recovered – for the rest of her life, as a civic education in the unreliability of the state into which she was born. It is in the children growing up in affected communities across this country who are absorbing, before they can fully articulate what they are learning, the lesson that their lives have no inherent value to the institutions that claim authority over them. That they are not citizens to be protected. They are assets to be priced.

Once that lesson is fully learned by an entire generation, it is almost impossible to undo. The damage is not just physical or financial. It is constitutional, in the deepest sense – the destruction of the unwritten constitution by which a people believes in the legitimacy of the state that governs them and accepts the obligations that citizenship requires in return for the protections it promises.

Nigeria has not yet crossed the point of no return on this question. The country is wounded but it is not finished. The institutions have failed but they are not beyond reconstruction. The political culture is corrupt but it is not universally corrupt, and the citizens who are demanding better – the activists, the journalists, the community organisers, the grieving parents who have chosen to convert their grief into civic action rather than private despair – are evidence that the country still possesses what it needs to save itself.

But the window is not infinitely open. Every kidnapping that goes unpunished narrows it. Every secret ransom payment that is publicly denied narrows it. Every election cycle that passes without security accountability narrows it. Every child taken from a classroom while the political class is busy with alliance negotiations narrows it.

The government may have abandoned the script of governance. But the citizens still hold the pen. We can rewrite this. We can rebuild the community structures that the state has failed to maintain. We can construct the intelligence networks that the security agencies have failed to build. We can educate our children in the practical realities of the country they are growing up in. And we can go to the polls in 2027 carrying the weight of everything that has been taken from us – and make our votes count for something more than a change of faces in the same system that produced this crisis.

Because if we do not – if we absorb this and adapt and move on and normalise the abnormal one more time – the ransom demanded of us will not be money, or even our children.

The ransom will be Nigeria itself. The very possibility of a country where life has value and the future is not negotiated at gunpoint, in a forest, by men who have correctly concluded that the state will always blink before they do.

This is the Ransom Republic.

And only we can end it.

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO, is a Nigerian writer, editor, public speaker, and strategic consultant. He serves as Administrative Executive of Ndigbo Lagos and holds leadership roles in the South East South South Professionals of Nigeria. He writes on Nigerian politics, Igbo identity, governance, and the intersections of history, culture, and power.