By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Let us be precise about what Babachir Lawal was entirely comfortable with while he sat as the most senior civil servant in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. As Secretary to the Government of the Federation, he served an administration under which post-election violence following the 2011 contest had claimed over eight hundred Nigerian lives and displaced more than sixty-five thousand persons across a dozen northern states, ten serving NYSC corps members among the dead. The principal he served had publicly warned that if 2011 repeated itself in 2015, by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood. That blood rhetoric was not whispered. It was documented and condemned at home and abroad. And through all of it Babachir Lawal said nothing. He issued no statement. He registered no protest. He drew his salary, attended his meetings, and remained serene in the service of power until his own president found his grasscutter conduct too scandalous to keep and cast him out in disgrace.
This is the man who sat across from Seun Okinbaloye on Channels Television to tell Nigerians that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar never spoke against the killings perpetrated by Boko Haram. We do not have to argue with that claim. We only have to date it to death.
THE TWO DATES THAT END THE ARGUMENT
Begin where it hurts Babachir most, in his own Adamawa State, in his own faith. On the fifth of February 2020, President Buhari published an article rationalising the toll of Boko Haram by religious arithmetic, occasioned by the murder of Lawan Andimi, the Christian Association of Nigeria chairman slain by the insurgents in Michika, Adamawa State. On that same day, Atiku Abubakar answered him in public and without equivocation. Atiku said plainly that we must not rationalise killings, that the killing of any human being, Christian, Muslim, Traditionalist or Atheist, by Boko Haram or any misguided group, was wrong and must be condemned unequivocally, and he closed with scripture: there is no compulsion in religion, only love.
Hold that fact to the light until it burns. The chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, a Christian leader, was murdered in Babachir Lawal’s own home state. Babachir, a Christian from Adamawa, said nothing. The man he now brands a Fulani Muslim hegemonist condemned that very killing, in writing, on the record, on a date that can be checked, and reached into the Qur’an to do it. Let every Christian in Adamawa weigh which of these two men spoke for the murdered CAN chairman, and which one held his tongue.
And this was not the first time. On the sixth of July 2015, at the very dawn of the administration Babachir would soon serve, Atiku condemned the attacks in Jos, Maiduguri and Potiskum, called the perpetrators blood-sucking vermin, and declared that there could be no justification for so wicked an assault on worshippers and on our common humanity. Two clean condemnations, both inside the Buhari era, both before Babachir found his voice. The silence in that period belonged to Babachir Lawal, not to Atiku Abubakar.
A RECORD UNBROKEN ACROSS THE YEARS
The condemnations did not stop when the cameras moved on. They form an unbroken chain. On the eleventh of January 2019, Atiku’s campaign declared his only plan for Boko Haram to be the total defeat of the sect, every captured terrorist tried under the law, the military properly equipped, and the reckless release of so-called repentant insurgents ended. In April 2025 he condemned the massacres in Plateau and the Boko Haram attacks in Borno, insisting that the protection of life is the first duty of any government. In June 2025, over the Benue massacre, he declared that enough was enough and that the people of Benue had suffered for too long. On the seventh of September 2025, over the slaughter of soldiers and civilians at Darajamal in Borno, he called the senseless violence a painful reminder of the price our people pay to terror and urged the nation to rise and confront it. On the sixth of March 2026, over the Ngoshe killings and abductions in Gwoza, and again on the seventeenth of March 2026 over the resurgent suicide bombings in Maiduguri, he condemned the attacks and demanded a review of a failing security strategy. On the twenty-eighth of May 2026, over the mass abduction of schoolchildren in Oyo and Borno and the murder of a teacher, he condemned the impunity that emboldens terrorists and demanded the rescue of every captive.
That is a documented chain reaching from the sixth of July 2015 to the twenty-eighth of May 2026, across the Buhari years and the Tinubu years alike. A man who has condemned terrorist killing in public, in print and on his platforms, again and again across two administrations and more than a decade, has not been silent. Babachir Lawal has not merely been unfair. He has told a falsehood, and the calendar refutes him date by date.
WHAT ATIKU PROPOSES, WHILE BABACHIR PROPOSED ONLY HIS OWN COMFORT
It is one thing to condemn. It is another to come with a remedy, and here too the slander collapses, because Atiku Abubakar has placed a security programme on the public record while Babachir placed nothing there but his silence and his contracts.
Atiku has called for the total military defeat of Boko Haram and ISWAP rather than the hollow comfort of technical victories. He has demanded that the armed forces and the police be massively expanded, properly equipped with modern hardware, better trained, better paid, and better coordinated in their intelligence. He has called for an end to the discredited reintegration of so-called repentant terrorists. He has pressed for justice that actually functions: special courts to fast-track the trial of terrorists and bandits, and the full weight of the law brought to bear once guilt is proven, because impunity, he has warned, is precisely what emboldens the killers to strike again. And he has traced the long war to its roots, urging the restructuring of the federation, the devolution of policing closer to the communities under attack, and the expansion of education and economic opportunity that drains the swamp in which extremism breeds. That is a plan. Babachir Lawal never offered the nation one.
Set the two men side by side and the picture completes itself. One man served a blood-threatening administration in silence, devoured the funds meant for the very displaced victims of Boko Haram, and then sat in a television studio to accuse the wrong man of indifference to the dead. The other condemned the killings on the record while that administration still ruled, condemned the murder of a Christian leader in Babachir’s own state when Babachir would not, has condemned the slaughter again and again ever since, and has placed before the nation a documented plan to end it. Babachir Lawal consumed the IDP fund. Atiku Abubakar demanded the IDPs be protected and avenged. That is the whole difference between these two men, and no resignation letter and no studio appearance will ever wash it away.
So let Babachir Lawal return to Seun Okinbaloye’s studio on Channels Television, sit in the same chair, and answer one question. On what date, in what year, did Alhaji Atiku Abubakar ever excuse, rationalise, or stay silent on the killing of Nigerians by Boko Haram? He cannot name the date, because the date does not exist. Every date that does exist, the sixth of July 2015, the fifth of February 2020, the eleventh of January 2019, the seventh of September 2025, the sixth and the seventeenth of March 2026, the twenty-eighth of May 2026, runs the other way, and every one of them testifies against him.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
June 1, 2026
