Nigeria’s Crisis Is Not Illiteracy. It Is the Dishonesty of the Educated Elites.

By Citizen Bolaji Oluwayanmife Akinyemi

1. When a Professor Becomes a Weapon.

Nigeria is not being destroyed by illiterates, but by the learned who have acquired golden fleeces in educational attainment.

At the centre of every malfunction in Nigeria, you will find not the subsistence farmer with a hoe, not the market woman that speaks pidgin English, not the vulcanizer by the road side among many more artisans— but a university degree holder, man or woman, with a title that depicts their social status.
When elections are rigged, it is not the motor park tout who signs off the forged figures. It is a Returning Officer — usually a professor.

When courts are misled with doctored affidavits, it is not a bus conductor who swears to lies. It is a learned person, usually a lawyer who should be a servant of the temple of justice.
When a public policy is dressed in religious cum ethnic garb and sold to the nation as “economic destiny,” it is not an almajiri who drafts the policy blueprint. It is an aide, possibly with multiple University degrees.

Now we have one more example of a professor who wants to lecture a bleeding nation on truth without first presenting the truth; Professor Yusuf Usman’s piece, “From ‘Christian Genocide’ to ‘Coup Attempt’: Tread Carefully,” is not a truth telling piece. It is an indictment — not of the people he attacks, but of the class he represents. He is Exhibit A of the rot of Nigerian intellectualism: eloquence without evidence, confidence without conscience.

2. The Trick: Call People Liars, Present No Data
Let us start with his opening move. He begins by quoting verses of the Scripture from the Holy Bible about lies, specifically citing, Proverbs 12:22a KJV; that “Lying lips are abomination to the LORD …” — then he calls the reportage of Christian genocide in Nigeria as “unfounded,” “false narrative,” “mischief,” “pandering,” “fundraising propaganda.” Curiously, the first part of the cited verse is selectively deployed to malign his targeted audience and to shroud self indictment by avoiding the last section of the verse in Proverbs 12:22b KJV; “… but they that deal truly are his delight. The entire verse conveys very Strong words of admonition.

The selective deployment of the cited quotation has thrusted before the jury the revelation of a professor whose research lacks data and his pursuit of truth is done without conscience. Besides, where is his data to support his vault face quotation that Christians are lying?

His disjointed understanding of a verse of the scripture is a proof of the misadventures of his early years to missionary schools as a pupil.
He says the story of Christian persecution is driven by lobbying by “powerful Israeli interests,” “Christian Evangelicals,” “American senators seeking office,” “mercantile mischief makers,” “gullible American donors,” and Nigerian pastors “who profit when a Muslim is President.”
Again: strong accusations; emotional, dramatic, but hollow. Where is his comparative data of killings under a Muslim and Christian President? The author writes like a prosecutor and argues like a gossip.

When Prof Yusuf Usman declared before the world that there is no Christian-targeted killing in Nigeria, and that what we are seeing is just politically motivated hysteria, he shouldn’t be waving his hands, shouting “Lobby! Lobby! Lobby!”
You owe us numbers, including disaggregated figures: Massacres by location. Identity of victims. Identity of attackers. Pattern of attacks. Worship-centre attacks. Clergy abductions and executions. Forced displacement of specific faith/ethnic populations from specific ancestral homestead. You owe us timelines. You owe us geography. You owe us trend lines. Yet, you gave us none! You made sweeping claims about life and death, and then hid behind your title: “Professor.” That is intellectual fraud and civic ineptitude.

3. The Most Dangerous Sentence in your Article is:
“More Muslims have been killed, maimed, raped or displaced… More Muslim clerics have been killed… More Mosques have been burnt… More Muslim traditional rulers have been killed or kidnapped… More Muslims including children kidnapped…”

This underscores the invidious rhetorical device in our national conversation today. Why? Because it tries to say this: “If more Muslims have been killed, then Christians must stop describing what is happening to them as persecution. It is not genocide. It is politics. Sit down.” That argument is sick at three levels.
(i) It presumes numbers he does not prove.

He throws comparative claims (“more Muslims,” “more mosques,” “more…”) without a single source, field log, forensic dataset, or cited review. No security briefing, no human rights audit, no independent casualty register. Nothing, nothing! Except your prejudices and you are a professor? Not even a native doctor will do that in today’s communication.
Curiously you professorial courage that emboldened you deny Christian genocide in Nigeria, nudged you to declared that “More Muslims are dying [Nigeria]. Believe me.”

Your declaration is bereft of comparative data of Christian/Muslim death in Nigeria, but just symatic by your effusive posturing. Your professorial disposition should make you a better mourner of the Muslim deaths in Nigeria. Please, dignify your mourning with data rather than dwelling on Christians who are grieving their loses.
Professors don’t get to make arithmetic a matter of loyalty. You bring evidence or you sit down.
(ii) It tries to turn grief into competition.
When a community says, “We are being targeted for our faith,” and your response is “Well, we have suffered more than you,” you have not disproved their claim. You have merely announced that you resent their pain. That is not scholarship, especially from a so-called trained Physician. That is grievance politics. This is how national tragedies get trivialized into ethnic scorecards and faith scoreboard arguments: “Who died more?” That is the language of a man who wants denial, not healing. Murder is not a contest.
(iii) It is morally perverse.
If at any point in time, more Muslims are found to be victims of bandits killing than the Christians that are often targeted in faith-marked massacres, the difference in numbers is not suddenly erased or ignored. It is clearly a difference of magnitude and idiosyncratic motivation for the killings of both faiths. Thus, “More Muslims died” does not cancel “Christians were targeted.”
Anything that looks like extermination of a defined group — by identity of faith or ethnicity — is genocidal in all ramifications, whether or not someone else of a different faith is also being killed elsewhere. It is possible for multiple atrocities to coexist. To say, “Christians are not victims because Muslims are also victims,” is like saying, you were not robbed because I was also robbed. It is logically empty and morally obscene. But this is what our elite in Nigeria of your genre keep doing to us.
4. As a professor and by your posturing you are a reflection of the category of Academics who should count our Votes but would rather declare their sentiment as winners.

Let me remind Nigerians: this same pattern — confident assertion with no verifiable data — is exactly what we see at election collation centres. Who are the State Returning Officers for presidential and governorship elections? Professors. Who are many of the Resident Electoral Commissioners advising INEC, including heads of extra-ministerial departments and agencies of government that serve as CEO? Professors.

Who swears to an oath of office for a “free, fair and credible elections” when in effect, it is often to preside over obvious votes suppression, ballot seizure, mutilated result sheets, and declare numbers that don’t reconcile with accreditation data? Professors.
It is not the Okada rider who stands before the nation to launder electoral sin into institutional grammar. It is Professor, the “distinguished scholar” who will at the end of their manipulation of votes counsels citizens to go to court.
When a man projects himself as a “Professor of Haematology-Oncology and Bone Marrow Transplantation,” and then proceeds to make national security claims, demographic fatality claims, religious persecution claims, geopolitical claims — with zero data — what he is really saying is: Respect me, not because I proved anything, but because I am a professor.

We have seen this movie. We know how it ends: Truth dies. Citizens lose trust. The street radicalizes. The state blames the victims. The same professor returns to TV to warn against “destabilization.” This cycle is killing the country, incrementally, slowly but surely.

5. The False Calm Around “No Genocide”
Let us step into the Christian genocide question plainly. Is the language “Christian genocide” serious language? Yes. Should it be used carelessly? No. But is it “false,” “manufactured,” “foreign-sponsored,” “pandering,” as Professor Yusuf declares? No, and that is where he crosses the line. Let us lay out what is actually happening in specific places, in plain terms:

Systematic invasion and killings of Christian in their homestead, worship centres, schools and festivals in the Middle Belt and across the country exhibits a pattern-specific pursuit or agenda execution. Abduction and execution of Christian clergy/officials as well as conversion and forceful marriage of Christian girls represents a pattern-specific agenda execution.
Videos, audios, pictures, clips of reportage by diverse news services and field testimonies where attackers use explicit religious framing for their killings abound as evidence that buttresses the cited pattern-specific killings.

Now ask yourself, Professor: is a community that has faced such pattern-specific killings not entitled to use the term “genocide” to describe what it believes is happening to it? And to cry out for international help when local help has failed to show up in decades?
It is noteworthy that the cited patter-specific killings of Christians is Not “incident.” Not “clash.” Not “banditry.” Not “farmer-herder misunderstanding” but explicit extermination by faith cum ethnic identity. Even if you disagree with the label, you do not have the moral right to sneer at the vocabulary of their survivors while they bury their dead grief their irreparable loses.

You certainly don’t have the right to call their tears, sweat and blood “a business model.” Yet this is what you Professor Yusuf Usman is fond of doing. You accuse Nigerian Christian voices — even survivors including widows who have become ‘ambassadors’ of their own trauma — of doing it “for foreign money?” That is not analysis. That is contempt. And contempt expressed from the safety of senior status is depravity.

6. The Coup Section Exposes the Same Carelessness:

In the “coup attempt” commentary, you vouched that “… maybe this is a purge of northern officers by a southern (Yoruba) president ahead of 2027.” Therefore, President Tinubu is “Yorubanising.” Serious allegation. Ethno-political allegation. Security allegation. Where is the evidence? Timeline correlation of arrest-to-shuffle of officers that is more than coincidence and conjecture? You give nothing but suspicion, then sends that suspicion into the public bloodstream like kerosene. This is not responsible.
Haba Professor, you condemn genocide narrative as “false” for being incendiary, and in the same breath feed an “ethnic purge in the army” narrative with no hard evidence — in an already volatile, already suspicious nation. So, let us be clear: your own method fails your own sermon. What you denounce in others regarding “Christian genocide” — generalization, loaded accusation, instability-threatening rhetoric — is exactly what you practice about “coup attempt”, only wearing a lab coat. That is why I call this depravity. Because it is not ignorance. It is will.

7. “Our Illiterates Are Not the Problem”
We must say this loudly for history: The herdsman in Zamfara is not Nigeria’s biggest danger. The mechanic in Aba is not Nigeria’s biggest danger. The fisherman in Bayelsa is not Nigeria’s biggest danger. The woman selling potatoes in Bokkos is not Nigeria’s biggest danger. The real danger is the university degree-wielding person who launders injustice, blesses imbalance, and baptizes oppression with grammar.
The real danger is the university degree-holder who is a professor that tells violated communities that their pain is “manufactured;” tells the world that Nigeria has no religious persecution problem, only PR problems; tells Nigerians to “tread carefully” while he himself pours accelerant on ethnic and regional suspicion by implying the Commander-in-Chief is purging the military along North/South lines without showing the public a single verifiable data. The village illiterate is bearing the bullet; the city professor is defending the shooter; that is Nigeria’s tragedy.

8. What a Responsible Intellectual Owes the Country
An honest intellectual class would do four things:
1. Name all suffering — Christian, Muslim, traditionalist — without erasing any. You can say “Muslims are also dying in Zamfara” without denying “Christians are being massacred in Plateau for their identity.” Both can be true. In fact, both are true.
2. Demand protection for all, not protection for one and silence for the other. Security must not be negotiated as a tribal benefit.
3. Refuse to serve as a megaphone for any presidency — Christian or Muslim — when the presidency is behaving recklessly. When I warned that branding a “National Halal Economy Strategy” from Aso Rock, under a Muslim-Muslim presidency, during a season of Christian grief, is combustible, some “intellectuals” tried to paint me as alarmist. That is how countries explode: the intelligentsia protects optics instead of protecting peace.
4. Bring evidence or hold your tongue. If you claim “more Muslims have died than Christians,” show us verifiable logs. If you claim “no genocide,” show us trend and pattern analysis. If you claim “ethnic purge in the military,” show us internal orders. Otherwise, step aside. The country is too fragile for a professorial ego posing as analysis.

9. My Closing Word to Professor Yusuf Usman
Professor, Nigeria does not need one elder with a microphone and no mirror. When you say Christians crying “genocide” are lying for money, you are not healing anything. You, as physician, are salting an open wound.
When you tell Nigerians that “the problem is not religion,” while ignoring the obvious religious framing of many massacres, you are not calming tension. You are gaslighting the bereaved.
When you warn that rumours of a coup could destabilize the nation — and then you yourself inflame ethnic suspicion inside the military without offering proof — you are not preventing crisis. You are drafting its script.
And when you wrap all of these in the robe of “Professor,” you are proving my point: the threat to Nigeria is not our uneducated poor. It is our well-credentialed untruthfuls.
This country will not survive if its intellectuals continue to act as political bouncers, emotional manipulators, and ethnic alarm bells.
Nigeria needs scholars, not syndicates; Teachers, not tribal marketers; Healers, not handlers. Nigeria is tired of educated men who weaponize their literacy against the people.

The blood on the ground is real — Christian and Muslim; The anger in the barracks is real — North and South; The distrust in the streets is real — across all lines.

We cannot manage any of that by insulting victims, mocking their vocabulary, or inventing “facts” without evidence and calling those facts “truth.”
The illiterates in our villages are hostages; The real captors are the wicked intellectuals.

Citizen Bolaji Oluwayanmife Akinyemi
Apostle & Nation Builder. Convener Apostolic Round Table.