Why Nigeria Must Rise Beyond Ethnic Blame Game

By Amerijoye Donald Bowofade

Nigeria has survived coups, recessions, insurgencies and betrayals. Yet among all its afflictions, none is more corrosive to national reason than the quiet normalisation of selective morality. It is the intellectual virus that allows a people to see crime clearly only when it wears a rival’s ethnic costume, and to suddenly go blind when criminality speaks their own language. It is the disease that converts prejudice into “analysis” and dresses tribal resentment in borrowed moral robes.

Let us ask, calmly but relentlessly: when did criminal behaviour become hereditary? When did ethnicity transform into a police file? When did the accident of birth become a life sentence of collective guilt?

Nigeria’s insecurity is real. Corruption is real. Political deception is real. But what is even more dangerous is the rising culture of lazy thinking, where entire ethnic groups are placed on trial because of the crimes of isolated actors, while favoured groups are shielded by silence, excuses or intellectual dishonesty.

So let us dismantle this nonsense, not with emotions, but with facts, logic and uncomfortable symmetry.

Before anyone opens their mouth to generalise an entire ethnic group, let them possess at least one virtue: consistency. If a loud but shallow voice insists that “any aspiring Fulani for Nigeria President must first recall Fulani bandits,” then by that same moral arithmetic and intellectual honesty, every aspiring Igbo politician must first recall kidnappers, drug traffickers, organ-harvesting syndicates, IPOB-ESN militants, sit-at-home terrorists, arsonists and the faceless gunmen who have turned the South-East into a weekly obituary column.

But that burden is never placed on Peter Obi, is it?

Nobody demands that he “recall unknown gunmen” who torch police stations every Monday. Nobody asks him to apologise for kidnappers operating with terrifying ease from Anambra to Imo. Nobody compels him to explain why markets close weekly, businesses flee daily and economic life suffocates under self-inflicted lockdowns enforced by fear. Nobody nails the cross of faceless gunmen to his political forehead.

Why?

Is it because those crimes do not exist? Or because selective morality has chosen when to see and when to look away?

The South-East crime catalogue that no one weaponises against Peter Obi is not imaginary. It is documented. IPOB and ESN violent extremism and extortion. Sit-at-home terrorism crippling regional productivity. Brazen kidnappings across Anambra, Imo, Abia and Ebonyi. Internationally exposed organ-trafficking networks. Cybercrime syndicates recruiting desperate youths. Drug trafficking corridors exporting meth and synthetic poisons. Political assassinations and targeted killings of security personnel. Business exodus, capital flight and forced migration driven by fear.

Yet Obi is not reduced to these crimes. He is not made their custodian. He is not ethnically indicted for them.

And rightly so.

Because crime is not hereditary. Guilt is not transferable by blood. Ethnicity is not a criminal code. Millions of innocent Igbo are not responsible for a few violent actors. And millions of innocent Fulani are not responsible for bandits hiding in forests.

But since truth fears no symmetry, let us extend the same intellectual honesty to the Yoruba experience, because selective outrage collapses the moment consistency is introduced.

The Yoruba crime reality that nobody hangs on Bola Ahmed Tinubu is equally visible. Yahoo-Yahoo cybercrime empires with Lagos, Ibadan and Abeokuta as operational hubs. Ritual killings for money-making reported repeatedly across Ogun, Osun and Oyo. Area boys and transport thugs extorting commuters daily. Omo-Onile land-grabbing cartels terrorising homeowners. Transport unions weaponised as political machinery. Electoral violence, ballot snatching and organised thuggery in parts of the South-West. Drug peddling networks thriving in nightlife corridors.

Yet does anyone wake Tinubu every morning demanding he apologise for Yahoo boys in Ogun? Has anyone insisted he must first recall every agbero in Lagos before aspiring to power? Has anyone declared that Yoruba leadership is illegitimate until Oshodi is morally purified?

Nobody does.

Because deep down, Nigerians understand a truth they often pretend to forget: criminality is individual, not tribal. Behavioural, not ancestral. Leadership is about capacity, vision and record, not ethnic innocence.

If leadership were determined by tribal perfection, Obi would be stuck permanently in Onitsha managing regional implosion rather than aspiring nationally. Tinubu would be negotiating daily truces with park thugs in Oshodi. Atiku would be permanently camped in the North mediating between cattle rustlers and bandits.

But that is not how nations are built.

Serious countries judge leaders by competence, not by the crimes of people who have never met them.

This is where the conversation must become mature. Atiku Abubakar does not carry Fulani criminality on his head. He carries decades of national experience, bridge-building across regions, private-sector discipline and a pan-Nigerian outlook forged through exposure, commerce and governance. His political philosophy has never been ethnic enclosure but national inclusion. His investments, alliances and influence cut across every region of this country, because he understands a simple truth: Nigeria survives only when leadership rises above bloodlines.

Reducing Atiku to Fulani banditry is not analysis; it is intellectual fraud. It is the refuge of people who cannot contest ideas, records or competence, so they hide behind ethnic scarecrows.

Nigeria cannot progress on the fuel of tribal stereotyping. No nation has ever developed by turning prejudice into policy or bitterness into political theory. The world has moved to innovation, governance capacity, economic strategy and inclusive leadership, while some Nigerians are still quarrelling with ethnic shadows.

This country does not need ethnic saints. It needs competent leaders. It needs men and women who understand complexity, manage diversity and govern plural societies without hatred.

Judge Atiku by his vision. Judge Obi by his ideas. Judge Tinubu by his record. But stop indicting millions of innocent citizens for crimes they neither committed nor condoned.

Selective morality is not patriotism. It is sabotage.

And Nigeria can no longer afford intellectual sabotage.

*Aare Amerijoye Donald Bowofade, Director General, The Narrative Force, wrote in from Lagos