In human history, and in recent times, we have seen the likes of Nze Tobe Osigwe – brilliant, well-intentioned men who have looked directly at a gathering storm and, with breathtaking intellectual confidence, announced to their people that there is nothing to worry about. But in the end…?
For full disclosure, I am Osinakachi Akuma Kalu, an Igbo man from Isu, son of a titled man, formed by the Catholic intellectual tradition, and consciously returned to Omenala (the religion of our forefathers). Please underscore that.
I write today not to attack Nze Tobe Osigwe whom I respect as a fellow thinker, but to dismantle, with evidence and history, an argument that is dangerously incomplete and potentially catastrophic for Alaigbo if left unchallenged.
Let me be unmistakably clear from the beginning.
This is not an anti-Muslim argument. It is not anti-Christian. It is not anti-religion. It is pro-truth, pro-evidence, and pro-Igbo (and other ethnic groups) survival.
The Islam of the scholar, the mystic, the trader, the ordinary faithful neighbour; for sure that Islam deserves every protection that religious freedom guarantees. What I am interrogating is something categorically different: the intellectual posture that disarms a people’s historical consciousness precisely when that consciousness is most needed.
Nze Osigwe makes three points that deserve honest acknowledgment.
He is correct that Christianity is not the birthright of Ndi Igbo, gbam! In truth, it arrived in 1857 when the Church Missionary Society established its mission at Onitsha, followed by the Holy Ghost Fathers, both arriving in the slipstream of colonialism, entangled with the destruction of our Ozo institutions, the criminalisation of our masquerades, the burning of our shrines.
Chinua Achebe documented this in “Things Fall Apart.” Elizabeth Isichei documented it in “A History of the Igbo People.” Adiele Afigbo documented it in “The Warrant Chiefs.”
He is also correct that no Igbo person’s conversion to Islam is constitutionally or morally impermissible. Well, even a child knows this because it is evident in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And Martha Nussbaum argued brilliantly in “Liberty of Conscience” that a just society must protect every citizen’s spiritual journey.
Osigwe is also correct that ordinary Muslims, that is the overwhelming majority of Nigeria’s approximately 100 million Muslim citizens, are not jihadists and have lived peaceably alongside other Nigerian peoples, including Igbos, across many generations.
All of this I grant without hesitation. Indeed, I have loving Muslim friends from all across Northern Nigeria and beyond, and I still work with many to this day. So, I have a personal testimony of the latter truth.
But here is where the argument collapses at its very foundation.
Nze Osigwe has taken three valid observations and drawn from them a conclusion that does not logically follow.
1. The fact that Christianity also arrived externally does not mean all external religious influences carry identical civilizational implications.
2. The fact that forced conversion is wrong does not mean non-violent ideological expansionism is harmless.
3. The fact that ordinary Muslims are peaceful does not mean that organised Islamic movements with documented histories, documented financing, and documented body counts in our own country are mere criminal enterprises equivalent to armed robbery.
This leap, from valid premises to catastrophically wrong conclusions, is precisely what Karl Popper warned us about in 1945 in “The Open Society and Its Enemies, when he articulated the Paradox of Tolerance: a society that extends unlimited tolerance even to those whose programme is the destruction of tolerance will ultimately be destroyed alongside its tolerance.
Popper was not advocating intolerance. He was demonstrating that unlimited tolerance is philosophically self-defeating, that force is merely the final chapter of ideological conquest, and that before the sword comes the school, before the school comes the worship center, before the worship center comes the demographic strategy, before the demographic strategy comes the ideology – patient, historically self-aware, institutionally organised, and committed across generations.
To say we will only resist force is to say we will resist nothing until it is too late to resist anything.
The history that Nze Osigwe has dismissed as propaganda is, in fact, the most important intellectual inheritance available to us.
In 1804, Usman dan Fodio, a scholar, a theologian, a genuine intellectual, launched what he explicitly called a jihad across the Sudan-Sahel belt. His Kitab al-Farq and Bayan Wujub al-Hijra, analysed by Murray Last in “The Sokoto Caliphate” and Mervyn Hiskett in “The Sword of Truth”, were not merely theological texts.
The above two books mentioned were political manifestos outlining a programme of territorial conquest and state-building under Islamic law.
By 1808, the Sokoto Caliphate was established, stretching across what is today Northern Nigeria, parts of Niger, and Cameroon, governing an estimated ten million people across thirty emirates.
This was not criminality. This was a deliberate, ideologically coherent civilizational project. Its flags were planted in Kano, Katsina, Zaria, Nupe, and critically in Ilorin, where in 1823 the jihad destroyed Old Oyo, the greatest Yoruba empire, permanently altering the civilizational identity of the entire Middle Belt.
The people of Ilorin today, Yoruba by geography and ancestry, are still governed by an emirate system established by that jihad. That is not ancient history. That is living institutional consequence.
When the British conquered Sokoto in 1903, Frederick Lugard made a promise that shaped Nigeria’s entire civilizational architecture permanently. He assured the Sultan that Islamic institutions, the emirate system, the alkali courts, the waqf system, the entire framework of Islamic governance, would be preserved under Indirect Rule (underscore that in the voice of Prof. Izu Marcel Onyeocha).
The truth is that, that was not generosity. It was political calculation and we can see that in the body language of the British and the leadership flow and floating of Nigeria.
Meantime, the consequence was that Nigeria arrived at independence in 1960 not as a clean slate but as a country with a structurally embedded, institutionally preserved, politically ambitious Islamic governance tradition in its northern half and of course a tradition that had never been philosophically reconciled with the idea of a plural secular state.
Read slowly now.
Billy Dudley documented this in “Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria”, Richard Sklar documented it in “Nigerian Political Parties”, John Paden documented it in “Ahmadu Bello: Sardauna of Sokoto”…. If you have read those works, please reflect again… Can you imagine? This is the institutional DNA that Nze Osigwe wants us to treat as irrelevant context. Odi mma!
It is within this exact historical architecture that Boko Haram was born. And this is where Nze Osigwe’s argument is most dangerously wrong. He writes that there is nothing jihadic in what Boko Haram represents, that it is pure local criminality.
This claim does not survive contact with the academic literature, does not survive contact with Muhammad Yusuf’s own recorded sermons, and does not survive contact with Abubakar Shekau’s own video statements.
Muhammad Yusuf founded the movement in Maiduguri around 2002. His founding ideology, extensively documented by Alex Thurston in “Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement” and by Brandon Kendhammer and Carmen McCain in their study of the movement, was explicitly theological – that Western education was forbidden, that democracy was un-Islamic, that the Nigerian secular state was illegitimate, that the only valid political order was an Islamic state governed by Sharia.
Nze Osigwe, these are not criminal propositions. They are theological-political propositions with a 1,200-year intellectual genealogy in Islamic jurisprudence, directly traceable to the same tradition that produced the 1804 jihad.
When Nigerian security forces killed Yusuf in extrajudicial custody following the 2009 Maiduguri uprising, an uprising that left over 800 dead according to Human Rights Watch, they did not kill an ideology. They martyred it.
Between 2009 and 2020, Boko Haram killed an estimated 36,000 people according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Nigeria Security Tracker.
It displaced 2.4 million people in the Lake Chad Basin according to UNHCR.
In April 2014 it abducted 276 Chibok schoolgirls, and Shekau appeared on video stating explicitly, in theological terms, that the girls would be sold as slaves because Allah permitted it. That is not a kidnap-for-ransom criminal explaining himself. That is an ideologically committed actor explaining his actions in the vocabulary of a specific theological tradition.
When ISWAP split from Boko Haram in 2016, they disagreed not about whether to wage jihad but about tactics.
ISWAP today governs territory in the Lake Chad Basin, taxes it, adjudicates disputes under its interpretation of Islamic law. That is not criminality. That is state-building in the precise image of the original Sokoto project.
Nze Osigwe’s most rhetorically powerful claim is that since Alaigbo was Christianised by outsiders, there is nothing morally wrong with allowing another outside influence.
Well, this has the satisfying ring of consistency but it rests on a logical fallacy so fundamental it has a name — false equivalence. Two things can both be external and still be categorically different in their current civilizational implications.
In 2024, Christianity in Igboland is indigenous. The Igbo Catholic Bishop, the Igbo Anglican Archbishop, the Igbo Pentecostal pastor, they are our people, they preach in Igbo, they marry Igbo, they bury Igbo, their institutional loyalty is to this land. They are not receiving financing from a foreign sovereign WITH A TERRITORIAL PROGRAMME.
Now contrast the specific strand of Islamic expansion currently active across sub-Saharan Africa.
The Wahhabi-Salafi movement which funds most new mosque construction, Islamic education programmes, and scholarship sponsorships across the region originates in Saudi Arabia, is backed by Saudi petrodollar foundations, and carries a theological programme explicitly hostile to the kind of African Islamic “syncretism” that historically coexisted peacefully with indigenous culture.
Alex Thurston documented this transformation in “Salafism in Nigeria”, Ousmane Kane documented it in “Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria’.
The Saudi government has spent an estimated $100 billion exporting this specific ideology globally since the 1970s, according to data cited by former CIA director James Woolsey and corroborated by multiple academic studies.
The above financing has transformed Northern Nigerian Islamic practice from a diverse, Sufi-influenced, culturally syncretic tradition into a more rigid, Arabised, politically assertive movement over four decades.
To treat this specific, financially traceable, ideologically explicit movement as equivalent to the CMS missionaries who arrived at Onitsha in 1857 is not balance. It is a failure of analytical precision that a consciousness teacher cannot afford.
The positive examples are also instructive, but not in the way Nze Osigwe implies. Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, is genuinely pluralist, but it has a strong constitutional framework, a government that has repeatedly suppressed Islamist movements threatening the constitutional order, and a centuries-old indigenous Islamic intellectual tradition that was not imported wholesale from Arabia.
Senegal has a 95% Muslim population and stable democracy, because its Sufi brotherhoods, the Mouride and Tijaniyya, absorbed and adapted Islam to West African culture over centuries, creating an authentically African Islamic practice fundamentally different from the Wahhabi-Salafi strand now active in Nigeria.
What neither of the above two countries did was announce that all influences are equivalent and vigilance is unnecessary. Every one of them built institutional safeguards, constitutional, security, intellectual, cultural, because their leaders understood that good outcomes in plural religious societies do not happen by default. They happen by design and by the willingness to make hard distinctions.
We all know that our ancestors always say that, “the child who refuses to ask questions misses his way”, but of course, if you ask the wrong person, you will disappear from the surface of the earth, and it’s happening so much today. Alaigbo must ask if possible (I don’t even think or see the possibility): who is financing the new mosques being built in our communities? What curriculum is being taught in the new Islamic schools? What is the theological tradition of the imams being sent into our land, and who is sending them?
These are not questions of persecution. They are questions of civilizational responsibility that the Indonesian government asks, the Senegalese government asks, the French government asks about all foreign-funded religious infrastructure.
The greatest protection against any form of cultural colonisation is a people who know who they are, and if we know Omenala, if we understand Odinala, if we teach our children the philosophy of Ofo and Ogu and the jurisprudence of Ala, then no external religion can colonise our consciousness. They can convert some of our people. They cannot convert our civilizational identity.
Nze Tobe Osigwe asks us to stop being afraid. I am asking something harder and something more honest. I am asking us to be awake. Fear closes the eyes. Wakefulness keeps them open. Alaigbo should remain open but not naive, tolerant but not amnesiac, welcoming but never surrendering the critical consciousness that is the most sacred inheritance our ancestors left us.
We must defend religious freedom absolutely for every human being in our land while remaining vigilant, with evidence, with history, with scholarship, with political organisation, against every form of coercive ideology that aims not at living with us but at transforming us.
The person who forgets who they are has already lost themselves. A people with open eyes, rooted in their history, armed with evidence, and honest about the world as it actually is, not as we wish it to be, that is a people no force can extinguish.
About the author:
Osinakachi Akuma Kalu writes from Isu Okeke, Abia State.
