By Sen. Tolu Odebiyi

Today, during what should have been a season of reflection and goodwill, Nigeria was once again confronted with a preventable tragedy. A fatal road accident involving a globally celebrated boxer and members of his entourage during a visit to Nigeria has resulted in the loss of two lives. These individuals were visitors to our country, possibly experiencing Nigeria for the first time, and their deaths are both heartbreaking and deeply troubling.

While investigations into the circumstances surrounding the accident are ongoing, this incident exposes long-standing systemic failures in governance, emergency response preparedness, and healthcare infrastructure—particularly along the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway.

For far too long, critical governance attention has been diverted toward optics rather than outcomes. Successive administrations in Lagos and Ogun States have failed to prioritize the development of a first-class general hospital in the highly populated Mowe–Ibafo corridor, despite its strategic importance and persistent accident history. Equally concerning is the absence of ambulance points, trauma response units, and coordinated emergency medical services along one of the busiest and most dangerous highways in the country.

Repeated accidents along the Abeokuta–Sagamu and Lagos–Ibadan corridors have been extensively documented, yet no comprehensive or sustainable emergency response framework has been implemented. While the efforts of the Ogun State Traffic Compliance and Enforcement Agency (TRACE) and the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) during this incident are acknowledged and commendable within their operational limitations, these agencies cannot substitute for a properly resourced emergency healthcare system.

This tragedy raises urgent and legitimate questions that demand answers:
•   How long had the stationary truck involved in the accident been stranded on the highway?
•   What emergency warning systems or precautionary signals were in place to alert oncoming motorists?
•   Who is responsible for continuous highway monitoring and enforcement of speed regulations?
•   Why does a major international corridor still lack a dedicated, joint emergency medical response structure?

The broader concern is the disturbing normalization of avoidable loss of life in Nigeria. We are witnessing a gradual erosion of human dignity, where victims are left exposed in public view, and tragedy is reduced to fleeting online content. This reflects a deeper governance failure and a misplaced prioritization of social engagements over public safety.

At a time when Nigeria continues to seek foreign confidence, tourism, and global goodwill, such incidents place the country in an unflattering international spotlight. It is unacceptable that while preventable deaths occur daily on our highways, leadership attention appears more focused on ceremonial and social functions outside the country.

This moment must not be reduced to another reactive cycle of condolences, procurement announcements, and press briefings. What is required—urgently—is the development and execution of a holistic emergency response and healthcare master plan for the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, jointly driven by Lagos and Ogun States in partnership with federal agencies.

Nigeria cannot continue to operate a governance model that reacts to tragedy instead of preventing it.

We extend our deepest condolences to the families of the deceased. May their souls rest in peace, and may those injured receive full recovery, dignity, and care.

Tolu Odebiyi, CON was a former Senator representing Ogun West

If you are wise, you won’t disrespect Bobdee in my mentions. I can respect someone as much as I respect him, but it is impossible for me to respect anyone more than I respect Chief Dele Momodu. If he became President today, I couldn’t respect him more.

Hate him or love him, everyone should learn from him. I’ll tell why. The real story is in the last half of what I sense could become a long post, so you can just skip and go there, if you aren’t a reader. This is intended for readers though. It’s for reflection.

I have known him for longer, like all of us who grew up in the world of Ovation magazine, but we only connected physically at an event in Lagos in 2012. He offered access from the go. But people offer me access all the time. That was great but it is not what stands him out.

Since then, he has gone out of his way to look out for me. He once told a billionaire (billionaire who treats money as money loves to be, not the honorary media title) that I was the only one he could recommend. He didn’t have to. There is nothing I can do that no one else can’t. And this isn’t just about me, this is who he is. But whilst this is rare in a world where people only care for what you can do for them, this isn’t also why he stands out.

He stands out because, for a few years now our politics haven’t aligned. If he passes left, I go right. Not intentionally. We just happened to not be on the same side. However, he has done more for me since that misalignment than even when we were. It just has never been an issue. Ever. Sounds normal, but it isn’t.

I have lost a mentor because I disagreed with them on Twitter. Especially on an issue said person would have been vocal about if it wasn’t their ally taking deserved shots for corruption at the time. Lol. One for which said person was later removed from office during the last administration.

At a time when some powerful friends and allies were deemed to be my source of wealth and opportunities- despite contributing less than zero opportunities but 1000 vibes as politicians often do- he was dropping my name in big rooms (Bobdee has direct access to every billionaire in Africa and everyone else that matters). He did all these whilst we publicly disagreed on politics, 2019, 2023 and as of today, 2027 too lol.

I’d keep stuff like this between me and him. But I decided not to at this time. Not just because of the unwise people taking shots at him in my mentions whilst expecting my roses. Because upon reflection, knowing what I now know, Chief Dele Momodu is rare.

We live in a world where people expect you to agree with everything they agree with, disagree with everything they disagree with and any signal that you aren’t aligned means they’d either disengage with you or stop supporting you. On account of that, we have become a country with more than one country’s fair share of zombies per capita.

Bobdee thrives socially as he has over the last 4 decades because he holds nothing against anyone for disagreeing with him. In a world where people are only comfortable with keeping robots as aburos, friends and allies, he’d rather you are a person of yourself. That may not mean much to some, but to some of us, that is everything.

Everything. Because I know people who can’t even support another football club just because their ‘oga’ supports one. Football. Soccer. A meaningless subject that holds meaning only as an important thing amidst the unimportant things. Lol. People be laughing like fools and the joke isn’t even funny. I get it. Trust me, I do. Thank God for people like Dele Momodu. I don’t have to laugh if the joke isn’t funny.

Hello to all the independent thinkers out there, and welcome back.

We need to cut through the noise immediately. If you open your newspapers today or scroll through your feeds, you are being bombarded with a very specific, very seductive narrative. You are reading about American power on display. You are reading that President Trump has ordered a powerful and deadly strike against Islamic militants in Nigeria to protect Christians.

You are hearing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declare that the killing of innocents must end and that the Department of War is always ready.

The media paints this as a righteous thunderbolt, a demonstration of resolve, a reassertion of American strength. Let me be blunt: this is not strength. This is a strategic hallucination.

What we are witnessing in West Africa is not the reawakening of a superpower. It is the strategic convulsion of a hegemon that has lost its mind. We are watching the United States once again fall into the trap of liberal hegemony, or in this case, a strange hybrid of moralistic crusading where we believe we have the right, the duty, and the capacity to socially engineer outcomes in a region that is of zero strategic importance to the vital national interests of the United States.

Let’s look at the mechanism of what actually happened. Stripped of the emotional rhetoric, the United States Navy fired more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Gulf of Guinea. These are premier, high-end assets. Each one of those missiles costs roughly $2 million.

And what did we hit? We hit two camps in Sokoto State in northwestern Nigeria. We hit insurgents who drive pickup trucks and hide in the bush.

Think about the cost-exchange ratio here. It is clinically insane. We are using multi-million-dollar munitions to destroy targets that are worth, at best, a few thousand in material assets.

But the financial cost is the least of our worries. The real cost is the strategic opportunity cost. I have been arguing for decades that the world is anarchic. There is no night watchman. States must prioritize their survival above all else.

And in the 21st century, the United States faces one and only one true existential threat. That threat is a rising China. China is a peer competitor. It has the population, the wealth, and the technological sophistication to dominate Asia and push the United States out of the Western Pacific. That is where the history of this century will be written.
Every hour that U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM, spends planning strikes in Nigeria, every Tomahawk missile we fire into the Sahel, and every ounce of political capital we spend coordinating with the Nigerian military is a resource that is not being focused on the Indo-Pacific. It is a distraction.

And in the ruthless world of great power politics, distraction is death.

Beijing is watching this. They are looking at us firing cruise missiles into the Nigerian scrubland to avenge sectarian violence, and they are laughing. They see a superpower that is easily baited, easily distracted, and incapable of ruthless prioritization.
Now, let’s dissect the justification. The president stated explicitly that this was to protect Christians from Islamic slaughter. While the sentiment may be humanely understandable, relying on it for foreign policy is a recipe for disaster.

This is the logic of the Crusades, not the logic of realpolitik.

When the United States explicitly frames a military intervention in Africa as a defense of one religious group against another, we are not putting out a fire. We are pouring gasoline on it. We are validating the very propaganda of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, who claim the West is at war with Islam, by stepping into this sectarian quagmire where the conflict is driven by deep-seated ethnic divisions, competition for land, and economic banditry in the Northwest.

We are Americanizing the conflict. We are turning a local insurgency into a global target. Those Tomahawk missiles did not solve the problem. They just ensured that the next bomb that goes off might be aimed at an American embassy or an American business.

We are manufacturing enemies in a region where we should have no enemies because we should have no presence.

Furthermore, consider the moral hazard we are creating with the Nigerian government. We are told this was done in coordination with the Nigerian military. The Nigerian government, of course, loves this.

Why?

Because it allows them to buck-pass. In the offense of realism, buck-passing is when a state tries to get another state to fight its battles for it.

Nigeria is the most populous nation in Africa. It has immense oil wealth. It should be the regional hegemon of West Africa. It should be capable of policing its own borders and dealing with internal bandits. But for over a decade, their military has struggled against Boko Haram and ISWAP. Corruption is endemic. Incompetence is rife.

When Uncle Sam steps in with cruise missiles to do the job for them, what incentive does the Nigerian military have to reform? None. What incentive do they have to fix their own broken command structures? Zero.

We are effectively telling them, “Do not worry about your failure to govern. The United States Navy will act as your air force.” We are fostering dependency. We are underwriting a dysfunctional state. And just like in Afghanistan, just like in Vietnam, we will eventually realize that no amount of American firepower can substitute for a functioning local government.

We are building a castle on a foundation of quicksand.

Let’s go deeper into the structural forces at play here. The violence in Nigeria is not just about terrorist scum, as the president put it. It is a complex web. In the northeast, you have the jihadists like ISWAP. But in the northwest, where these strikes happened, the violence is largely driven by bandits and gangs kidnapping for ransom. These are criminal enterprises mixed with communal violence.

Does Washington really believe that a dozen cruise missiles can solve the socioeconomic collapse of northern Nigeria?

This is the hubris of the American elite. They believe there is a military solution to every political problem. They believe that if we just kill enough bad guys, peace will break out. It is a childish delusion. We killed thousands of Taliban. We killed thousands of insurgents in Iraq. And what happened? The structure of the conflict remained. The underlying political realities did not change.
The moment we leave—and we always leave—the void returns.

And look at the timing. Defense Secretary Hegseth mentions this happened on Christmas. It is theatrical. It is designed for domestic consumption. But foreign policy should never be a performance art.
When you launch missiles to send a message or to satisfy a domestic political constituency that is angry about the persecution of Christians, you are decoupling action from strategic interest.

The hard truth, the tragic truth that no one in Washington wants to admit, is that the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, while horrific, does not affect the balance of power in the international system. It does not threaten the territorial integrity of the United States. It does not threaten our prosperity. Therefore, purely from a survival standpoint, it is not our fight.
But we cannot help ourselves. We have this liberal impulse, even in a Republican administration, to be the savior. We see a monster and we want to slay it. But in the international arena, there are monsters everywhere. If we chase them all, we will exhaust ourselves.

We are currently overstretched in Europe, propping up Ukraine in a lost war. We are entangled in the Middle East, protecting Israel and fighting proxies in Syria. And now we are opening a new kinetic front in West Africa. This is imperial overstretch in real time.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are building islands. They are securing supply chains. They are not firing missiles into Nigeria.

They are building infrastructure there to extract resources. They are playing the long game of realpolitik while we are playing the short game of moralistic whack-a-mole.
We must understand the concept of limits. The United States is powerful, but it is not omnipotent. We cannot impose our will on every corner of the globe. The more we intervene in these peripheral theaters, the more we weaken our core. We are bleeding credibility. We are bleeding resources. And we are bleeding focus.

What will happen next? It is predictable. The strikes will be hailed as a success today, but next week or next month, the violence will return. The bandits will regroup. ISIS will recruit the survivors. The Nigerian government will ask for more help.
“We need drones,” they will say. “We need advisors.”

And slowly, imperceptibly, the mission will creep. We will get sucked in. Five years from now, we will be asking ourselves why American soldiers are dying in the Sahel.
We have seen this movie before. We saw it in Mogadishu. We saw it in the Niger ambush in 2017. We act shocked when it goes wrong. But the mechanism for failure is baked into the very decision to intervene.
If we were serious—truly serious—about American security, we would pack up AFRICOM’s kinetic ambitions and bring those resources home or send them to the Pacific. We would tell the Nigerian government, “This is your country. These are your borders. You fix it.”

That is what a ruthless, rational great power does. It passes the buck. It conserves its strength for the decisive battle.

But we are not acting like a rational great power. We are acting like a crusader state, drunk on its own righteousness, flailing blindly in the dark. And in the unforgiving structure of international politics, such behavior is not just a mistake. It is a tragedy waiting to happen.

The tragedy is not just that we will fail in Nigeria. The tragedy is that, in our obsession with the periphery, we are losing the center. We are losing the ability to distinguish between what feels good and what is necessary.

So as you listen to the cheers from the establishment about these air strikes, I want you to keep your eyes on the horizon. Do not look at the smoke rising from Sokoto. Look east. That is where the storm is gathering.
And we are woefully unprepared for it because we are too busy playing policemen in a neighborhood that we do not understand and cannot control.

Stay safe, stay skeptical, and never stop asking the hard questions about where your blood and treasure are actually going. The truth is usually uncomfortable, but it is the only thing that matters.

I will see you next