The constitution at gunpoint: Tinubu, Aiyedatiwa, Ogbomoso and the Owo verdict

The reverberation of the gavel that fell in the Abuja Federal High Court on Wednesday, June 3, 2026, carried far beyond the courtroom walls.

It signalled not merely the conclusion of a harrowing criminal trial but a profound moral reckoning for a nation fatigued by grief and insecurity.

On that day, four men were sentenced to death for their roles in the St. Francis Catholic Church massacre in Owo, a fragile triumph for the rule of law.

Yet, as Ayodeji Adedipe (SAN), lead counsel to the DSS, revealed following the judgment, this was no mere local skirmish. Investigations confirmed that these men were foot soldiers of Al-Shabaab, an affiliate of international terror networks.

The South-West is no longer merely confronting banditry; it has become a theatre of operations for global terror franchises.

Four years have passed since that crimson Sunday, June 5, 2022, when the sanctuary of St. Francis was desecrated and its floors stained with the blood of 41 worshippers.

These names must not be reduced to sterile entries in a ledger of tragedy but remembered as irreparable voids in our social fabric: the Umunnakwe family, extinguished in its entirety; the young bride-to-be whose aspirations perished in a pew; and survivors such as Father Andrew Abayomi, who still endure the auditory ghosts of grenades.

For these souls, justice is not an abstract legal construct; it is an outstanding debt the state is morally and constitutionally obliged to discharge.

Nigeria has been under siege since 2009. What began as the shadow of Boko Haram in the North-East has metastasised into a pervasive existential threat.

Marauding networks of northern bandits have secured porous gateways through the Kwara corridor, transforming the lush forests of the Middle Belt into staging grounds for carnage in the South-West. From the Sahel to the Atlantic, the canopy of fear is near total.

As the ghosts of Owo demand closure, a new mutation of this monster has emerged in the Ogbomoso axis. But the horror of the kidnappings is now compounded by a secondary trauma: the chaos of the digital forest.

Within the last 48 hours, a viral wildfire of reports claimed that the 46 kidnapped students and teachers had been released. For a brief, shimmering moment, a battered nation exhaled.

Then came the whiplash.

The Oyo State Police Command and the Ministry of Information spent hours frantically debunking the reports as false and misleading. This informational fog is not an accident; it is a weapon.

The ensuing confusion serves a dual purpose: it gaslights the families of the victims and exposes the government’s inability to control even the narrative within its own territory.

This is psychological warfare, where the “breaking news” of a rescue is used as a cruel mirage to deepen despair when the truth, that the victims remain in the bush, inevitably crashes down.

The abduction of these schoolchildren and the barbaric beheading of Michael Oyedokun, the mathematics teacher, are chilling enough. Yet the demands of these “Ogbomoso bandits” have shifted from the pecuniary to the political: N1 billion, the release of high-profile terrorists from Agodi and Abolongo prisons, and the amendment of Oyo State laws to suit their ideological interests.

This is not negotiation; it is legislative kidnapping. When non-state actors demand that a State House of Assembly amend laws under the shadow of a gun, they are not merely taking hostages; they are holding the Constitution itself to ransom.

The ordeal of Olaide John-Paul, sister to the former Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, and her twin sons in Ibadan, occurring on the very day of the Owo verdict, felt less like coincidence and more like a defiant counter-signal from the underworld.

I daresay that even if the schoolchildren and their teachers are released, that should not be the end of the story but the beginning of a manhunt. To allow the perpetrators to vanish back into the shadows with their spoils is to invite the next strike.

We must ask: Is this a resurgence of the political blackmail that hollowed out previous administrations? As the 2027 election cycle looms, the “Chibok playbook” is being dusted off. In the markets of the South-West, the APC is already being derisively tagged a “Bandit Party.”

This calculated narrative aims to erode President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Yoruba support base. The strategy is simple: create a canopy of fear, portray the government as indifferent, and watch the democratic health of the region haemorrhage.

Tragically, the state’s response has often been a cocktail of political correctness and technical failure. While the Ministry of Communications touts NIN-SIM linkage, the Ogbomoso syndicates deploy advanced call-routing and network-masking devices to bounce signals across the Old Oyo National Park, evading military surveillance.

Worse still is the internal rot: when a vice-chairman of a local government in Ekiti, Mrs Grace Ogunleye, is arraigned for allegedly staging her own kidnap, and students like Adeleye Ayomide are caught using victims’ phones to facilitate ransom payments, we must admit that the enemy is not only in the forest; the enemy is in the room.

The legal response must be swift and unsentimental. Under the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act 2022 and the Oyo State Kidnapping (Prohibition) Law 2016, these acts are capital offences. There can be no concession of future law. To amend statutes under duress is to dissolve the state itself.

Justice, in its highest form, serves a trinity: retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation. Yet terrorism, by its very nature, forecloses rehabilitation. When a man enters a house of God to slaughter worshippers, he has unilaterally annulled the social contract.

In such instances, retribution is the only coherent language of justice, and deterrence the only mechanism for national survival.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr observed, “The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life.” If our laws refuse to act against those who seek to extinguish that life, the law itself becomes a corpse.

Yoruba wisdom is equally unsparing: “Bí a kò bá pa igi tí ó ń gbé inú igbó, igbó kò ní simi”, if the parasitic tree choking the forest is not felled, the forest will suffocate.

For too long, the Nigerian state has behaved like a paper tiger, roaring in the hallowed chambers of the courts and in press releases, yet proving toothless in execution. Security experts remind us that deterrence is born of certainty, not merely severity.

By signing these death warrants, Governor Aiyedatiwa would reclaim the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, which Max Weber identified as the hallmark of a functioning government.

History offers stern lessons for those who hesitate. In 2013, the then-Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole, confronted a similar crossroads. Despite intense pressure from international NGOs, he signed the death warrants of convicts found guilty of heinous murders.

His position was crystalline: “God can have mercy on them, but I am unable… I cannot be afraid to sign the death warrant of a man who has been found guilty of murder.” Oshiomhole understood that he was not an independent moral agent but a constitutional officer bound by oath.

Governor Aiyedatiwa and his colleagues across the federation must realise that withholding assent is not humanitarianism; it is executive subversion. To leave a death sentence unsigned indefinitely is to transform the judiciary into a theatre of the absurd.

A society cannot negotiate its laws under the barrel of a gun without surrendering its soul. As the proverb cautions: “Àgbà tó bá fi ọwọ́ gbé èèpo, ó fi ọwọ́ rẹ̀ gbé àkúnya”, when an elder lifts the palm kernel, he also lifts the stone beneath it. To yield once is to yield forever.

The terror industry thrives on the oxygen of indecision. Kidnapping and banditry have become a parallel economy, a tax on existence itself. Leaders must not hide behind personal convictions while the bush burns. As Yoruba wisdom cautions: “Agbalagba tí ó sọ yanga mọ́ ìdí, ti di ojúgbà adìyẹ”, when an elder stoops to vanity, he becomes the peer of chickens. In other words, when leaders trivialise their duty, they reduce themselves to the level of the powerless.

We owe it to our soldiers and police officers who have paid the supreme price. To hesitate in enforcing the penalty for the Owo massacre is to dishonour the graves of those who died trying to prevent it.

Governor Aiyedatiwa stands at a crossroads. To delay is to embolden the next cell of attackers lurking in the forest shadows.

The Governor must sign. He must sign for the children of Owo who will never grow old. He must sign for Michael Oyedokun, whose chalk fell silent in Ogbomoso.

He must sign because, as Martin Luther King Jr reminded us, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

The President, too, must act. The children of Ogbomoso must be rescued and their captors unmasked in the light of day.

A presidential tour of the South-West, followed by a transparent media parley with security chiefs, is needed to puncture the “Bandit Party” narrative before it hardens into the concrete of public perception.

The bush is ablaze. Justice is the only water that can quench these flames. If our leaders continue to hide behind the veil of political correctness while the sanctuary is desecrated, they leave the nation to burn. The state must reclaim its monopoly on force or surrender its right to lead.

I rest my case.