When the State is Weak, Narratives Conflate : John Onyeukwu

[John Onyeukwu]

When the State is Weak, Narratives Conflate 

 Nigeria’s moral and political crisis lies not only in violence, but in the confusion of truth and consequence. 

By John Onyeukwu (Published in the Policy & Reform column of Business a.m. newspaper on Monday, October 27, 2025). Page 6 attached 

Across Nigeria today, truth has become tribal and justice negotiable, symptoms of a state losing both its voice and its consequence. I have no doubt that when consequence dies, confusion reigns. Every grievance becomes its own truth. When the state is weak, narratives conflate. The line between victim and perpetrator blurs, truth becomes contested, and moral clarity dissolves under the weight of competing grievances. In today’s Nigeria, the cacophony of stories, from the victims and perpetrators of banditry and terrorism in the North, to divided voices over Nnamdi Kanu’s continued detention in the East, and from accusations of Christian genocide to the counter-chorus that “all Nigerians are victims”, reveals one deeper truth: the Nigerian state has lost control of the narrative because it has lost control of consequence.

We can examine how this collapse of consequence erodes moral order, undermines legitimacy, and distorts the political economy that sustains peace and justice.

Justice is the heartbeat of order; when it stops, every grievance becomes divine. Every functioning state rests on an implicit moral contract, that justice is predictable, truth has an arbiter, and violence carries consequence. When that contract collapses, everyone becomes both accuser and accused. In Nigeria, moral certainty has dissolved into moral confusion.

The herder who raids a village claims victimhood of poverty and historical neglect. The vigilante who retaliates insists he is defending his people. In the Southeast, Nnamdi Kanu’s followers invoke self-determination as an existential right, while the state brands it rebellion. In the Middle Belt, those decrying “Christian genocide” confront others who counter that “all Nigerians are victims.”

This moral fog is not a cultural accident; it is the direct product of institutional decay. When the state fails to enforce justice, grievance becomes gospel. Every group constructs its own theology of justification.

The result is not diversity of truth but anarchy of meaning, a society where no single moral compass can claim legitimacy because the state itself has abandoned moral authority. The philosophical cost is nihilism: a loss of faith in collective justice and the rise of competing absolutes.

A state that cannot punish crime or protect life loses the moral right to define justice. Political theory tells us that a legitimate state holds the monopoly of violence and the authority to define the boundaries of right and wrong. But in Nigeria, that monopoly is fractured. Bandits negotiate with state officials. Terrorists dictate prisoner exchanges. Militias impose local “laws.” Governors publicly plead with criminals they once vowed to crush.

In this climate, the state’s authority has become one voice among many, and often the least persuasive. Citizens no longer believe in the impartiality of government. They turn instead to identity, ethnic, religious, and regional, as their moral reference.

That is why debates over Nnamdi Kanu or Fulani banditry no longer unfold on grounds of law or national interest but on existential loyalty. The language of citizenship has been replaced by the language of siege: “our people,” “their people,” “our land,” “their terror.”

What we are witnessing is not merely political polarization, but fragmentation of legitimacy. Truth has become a commodity traded in the marketplace of fear and propaganda. Every faction constructs its own version of justice because the state no longer embodies it.

And when truth fragments, policy becomes impossible. How do you build consensus in a country where every truth is local and every grievance absolute? The weak state becomes not just a victim of division but the very engine of it.

In a weak state, violence becomes a business model. A state’s weakness is not just philosophical or political, it is profoundly economic. Violence thrives where consequence is cheap. Extortion, kidnapping, oil theft, and illegal mining now constitute parallel economies that rival legitimate commerce in many parts of Nigeria. These shadow economies are not hidden margins of crime; they have become mainstream economic systems, integrated into everyday survival and elite accumulation alike.

Banditry in the North, for instance, is not only ideological; it is a marketplace of survival and leverage. Young men without livelihoods, access to education, or social protection have found in violence both employment and status mobility. The gun replaces the degree as the currency of opportunity. Kidnapping has become the most efficient “tax” in an ungoverned economy, calibrated through ransom negotiation rather than legal frameworks. Each abduction; each negotiated release, signals both the collapse of deterrence and the emergence of a rational market for lawlessness.

In the East, the “sit-at-home” enforcement has turned fear into currency, costing businesses billions weekly while rewarding the informal networks that profit from paralysis. Shops shutter not from ideology but from calculation, because the cost of defiance outweighs the gain from work. A political demand morphs into a monetized system of compliance, sustained by coercion and silence.

In the oil-producing Niger Delta, illegal bunkering and artisanal refining have become structural features of the local economy. State agencies, security officials, and political actors often collude in this underground commerce, turning criminality into a rentier system that feeds patronage networks. The same logic applies to illegal mining across the North-West and North-Central, industries governed not by markets or ministries but by militias.

Without credible deterrence, the Nigerian economy becomes a distorted ecosystem in which insecurity is monetized and impunity rewarded. Investors withdraw, supply chains fragment, and communities self-arm to create private order in the vacuum of public protection. Informal actors, warlords, local “security committees,” and ethnic militias, replace formal governance. Even humanitarian aid and ransom payments circulate through the same channels of disorder, enriching the intermediaries of chaos.

The consequence is a vicious economic equilibrium: the state’s inability to enforce consequence fuels disorder; that disorder becomes profitable; and those who benefit from it have no incentive to restore order. Violence becomes not an aberration of governance but its most lucrative substitute.

Ultimately, in a weak state, the price of peace exceeds the profit of instability, and until that balance shifts, violence will remain Nigeria’s most predictable economic activity.

There is no contesting the fact that when everyone is a victim, no one is responsible. Every nation has grievances, but only weak states allow grievances to replace governance. In Nigeria today, competing narratives, religious persecution, ethnic marginalization, economic injustice, each contain fragments of truth, but the absence of a credible arbiter turns those fragments into weapons.

This conflation is not just social confusion; it is institutional failure. The judiciary, the police, and even the media no longer command enough trust to define truth or consequence. In this vacuum, every side tells its story as absolute and moral responsibility evaporates.

The consequence is the normalization of confusion, a moral economy where emotion outweighs evidence, propaganda replaces policy, and collective outrage substitutes for civic responsibility. The weak state thus produces not only insecurity but incoherence: a country unable to agree on what justice means, or who deserves it, and when and how to dispense it.

To restore the Nigerian state, we must first begin by restoring consequence. If Nigeria must heal, it must re-anchor its governance on consequence, the certainty that actions produce predictable outcomes. That requires rebuilding institutions that can enforce justice impartially and transparently. It means ending the transactional approach to security and replacing it with structural reforms that restore citizens’ faith in fairness.

Nigeria must recover a shared moral language. Justice should not depend on geography or identity. The state must become once again the moral center that distinguishes between grievance and crime, protest and anarchy, truth and convenience. Legitimacy must be rebuilt through inclusion and accountability. The government must not only wield power but explain it, making transparency the first act of leadership. Public trust grows not from propaganda but from fairness that is felt at the grassroots. Nigeria must dismantle the incentive structures that make violence profitable. That means addressing rural poverty, youth unemployment, and elite impunity, the triple engines of chaos. Development cannot thrive in an economy where disorder is lucrative and governance unprofitable.

Finally, the Nigerian elite, political, religious, and intellectual, must abandon the comfort of selective empathy. The nation cannot heal when leaders treat every crisis as “regional” until it touches their doorstep. Justice must once again be national in principle and personal in consequence.

What the Nigerian crisis demands is not another slogan or summit but a return to moral seriousness. No state can survive long when it becomes neutral between order and chaos. The purpose of law is not to silence dissent but to prevent vengeance from becoming justice.

Until Nigeria re-establishes consequence as the foundation of governance, our public debates will remain a tragic theatre of conflated narratives, where victims and perpetrators exchange roles, where every grievance becomes gospel, and where truth, stripped of authority, becomes another casualty of a state that forgot its own moral duty. We must understand and internalize that a nation survives not by its power to punish, but by its capacity to mean something.

John Onyeukwu
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/

 http://about.me/onyeukwu
“Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation.”
-- James D. Wolfensohn
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