The Nigerian Baptist Convention has issued an urgent call on President Bola Tinubu to confront the country’s security crisis with far greater decisiveness, describing the ongoing wave of killings across Nigeria’s Middle Belt and northern states as totally unacceptable and demanding that impunity come to an end.
NBC President Dr. Israel Akanji delivered the address at the organisation’s 113th annual session in Abuja, themed around entering into newness through the fruit and gifts of the Holy Spirit, but the gravity of the security situation dominated much of his remarks.
Akanji acknowledged that the current administration inherited a deeply compromised security architecture but stressed that this context did not reduce the moral and constitutional obligation on President Tinubu to act. He described what Nigerians were witnessing in states such as Plateau, Benue, Niger, Kogi, Kwara, Katsina, Kebbi, Zamfara, and Borno as a humanitarian catastrophe that had gone on for far too long.
“The menace of insecurity in the country, occasioned by the seemingly endless, senseless, brutal, torturous and unprovoked killings, which has been termed genocide; kidnapping, terrorism and banditry, have become totally unbearable for us in Nigeria,” he said.
He noted with particular alarm the role of technology in amplifying the terror, pointing to perpetrators who were brazen enough to share video footage of their atrocities on social media, deepening the psychological toll on communities already living in fear.
Akanji called on the judiciary and the police to match the urgency of the moment through accelerated arrests and prosecutions, warning that the country could not afford to continue paying lip service to a crisis of this scale. “This is not the time to pay lip service to the inadequate security situation of the country or continue to allow impunity to fester,” he said.
