By Sir Demola Aladekomo
A very humble response to Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, through the Lens of Predator or Prey.
The author is, in several ways, too lowly to respond to the erudite, globally acclaimed Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi, my beloved Egbon. We crave his indulgence to write and speak where the welfare and future of our nation and people are concerned.
Few Nigerians have earned the moral authority to speak on foreign policy and national destiny as much as Prof Bolaji Akinyemi. As a former Minister of External Affairs and one of Africa’s most respected international relations scholars, his recent reflections in The Guardian, expressing hope that former U.S. President Donald Trump’s intervention might help end what he describes as internal colonialism in Nigeria, deserve thoughtful, respectful engagement.
Hope, after all, is not a weakness in nation-building. It is often its starting point.
Yet hope must also be tempered with history, data, and caution, especially when it concerns external power acting upon an internally fragile society. This is the central concern of my Predator or Prey trilogy: that Nigeria, particularly Northern Nigeria, risks being misread, and that misreading, whether domestic or foreign, can worsen the suffering of the innocent rather than restrain the guilty.
Where We Agree: Naming the Real Problem
Professor Akinyemi’s phrase internal colonialism is both powerful and unsettling, and rightly so. Nigeria has indeed suffered from a form of elite domination in which access to power, opportunity, and security is unevenly distributed, often to the detriment of the poor and the peripheral.
On this, we are aligned.
The Predator or Prey essays argue the same truth in different language: that Nigeria’s crisis is not driven by ordinary people, Northern or Southern, Christian or Muslim, but by elite failure, state absence, and structural injustice. Millions of Nigerians are not perpetrators; they are victims.
Where I urge caution is in assuming that external pressure, however well-intentioned, can dismantle this internal colonial structure without inflicting collateral damage on those already trapped within it.
From Warning to Reality
When I wrote the first Predator or Prey: Being Specific and Constructive, my appeal was simple:
Punish the guilty, not the poor; identify perpetrators, not regions.
In Predator or Prey II, data from security agencies confirmed what conscience already knew: insecurity in Nigeria does not respect religious boundaries. Churches and mosques have both been attacked. Christians and Muslims have both died. Poverty and ignorance, not faith, have been the accelerants of violence.
Today, developments in global posture toward Nigeria tightened visa scrutiny, heightened security framing, and increasingly blunt external language suggest that the misreading I warned against is no longer theoretical. It is beginning to shape policy.
This is where hope must be interrogated.
The Limits of External Correctives
Visa denials, sanctions, and the threat of kinetic responses do not land on abstractions. They land on people.
They land on:
•students seeking education,
•families seeking medical care,
•clerics and scholars engaged in peace-building,
•small entrepreneurs seeking markets and capital.
The true architects of Nigeria’s internal colonialism, the elites who profit from dysfunction, are rarely affected. They have mobility, buffers, and alternatives. History shows that collective external pressure rarely reaches the guilty few; it overwhelmingly burdens the innocent many.
This is not an argument against partnership. It is an argument against substitution, the idea that external action can replace internal reform.
You cannot bomb poverty.
You cannot sanction ignorance.
You cannot isolate a people into peace.
Northern Nigeria Is Not the Predator
One of the most dangerous consequences of external pressure is the reinforcement of a false narrative: that Northern Nigeria itself is the problem.
The data says otherwise.
Northern Nigeria contains:
•the largest concentration of Nigeria’s poor,
•the highest number of out-of-school children,
•the communities most exposed to banditry, terrorism, and displacement.
To punish the North broadly is to punish victims twice, first through neglect, and then through misattribution of blame.
If any foreign action, diplomatic, economic, or military, fails to distinguish between perpetrators and populations, it risks deepening the very internal colonialism it seeks to cure.
Sovereignty Is Not Defiance
To question external intervention is not to reject cooperation. Nigeria needs friends. But friends do not simplify one another’s pain into policy slogans.
True partnership respects agency.
Nigeria must:
•define its own narrative clearly to the world,
•confront elite capture honestly at home,
•accelerate education, economic inclusion, and justice,
•and ensure that accountability is surgical, not sweeping.
External actors can assist, advise, and support, but they cannot outsource Nigeria’s conscience or leadership.
Leadership at This Moment
This is a moment that demands statesmanship, not excitement.
If Nigeria reacts to foreign pressure with:
•regional resentment,
•religious polarization, or
•performative nationalism,
We risk splintering an already fragile social fabric.
If, however, we respond with clarity, acknowledging internal failures while resisting collective punishment, we strengthen both our sovereignty and our credibility.
From Hope to Responsibility
Professor Akinyemi’s hope that external pressure might finally confront internal injustice is understandable. But hope must not blind us to consequence.
Internal colonialism will not be dismantled by foreign leverage alone. It will be dismantled when:
•education replaces neglect,
•opportunity replaces despair,
•justice replaces impunity,
•and leadership replaces rhetoric.
The Predator or Prey trilogy ends where it began: with a call to specificity, construction, and empathy.
Let us welcome goodwill but not surrender agency.
Let us seek support but not outsource reform.
Let us correct injustice without multiplying victims.
For if one part of Nigeria is punished unjustly, the whole nation will pay the price.
Again, with due respect to Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi
God bless Nigeria.
Sir Demola Aladekomo D.Sc. (H.C., Ife)
The Predator or Prey trilogy can be made available if of interest. DM please