The death of Retired Major General Rabe Abubakar in the custody of bandits on June 13, 2026 is a national emergency dressed in the clothes of a news item. General Abubakar, a former Director of Defence Information, was abducted alongside his wife on May 30 while travelling along the Marabar Musawa-Kafinsoli road in Katsina State. He died from complications of diabetes and hypertension conditions or by snake bite exacerbated, without any doubt, by the conditions of his captivity. His widow was subsequently rescued by troops. He was not.
That a retired general of the Nigerian Army could be seized from a public road, held for two weeks, and returned to his home in a body bag should force every responsible authority in this country to stop and ask hard questions. We are asking them here.
The immediate answer we want from the Nigerian Army is an offensive operation against terrorist enclaves in the Katsina region. But a kinetic response, however fierce, does not answer the deeper question that General Abubakar’s death has placed before the nation: how did we arrive at a point where the men who once commanded troops, who wore the uniform of this republic, who gave careers and decades to its defence, cannot travel a road in their home states without becoming prey? That question demands a great deal more than bullets in answer.
This is not an isolated incident. It is the latest in a pattern of high-profile military casualties that has gathered pace with alarming speed. In April 2026, Brigadier General Oseni Omoh Braimah was killed in action at Benisheikh, Borno State, when ISWAP and Boko Haram insurgents launched a coordinated overnight assault on his camp. He was the Commander of the 29 Task Force Brigade under Operation Hadin Kai. He died alongside seven soldiers defending an outpost. A month earlier, in March 2026, an army Captain and two soldiers were killed during a clearance operation in Katsina State. Two prominent generals lost within six months. Several officers below them dead in the field. These are not statistics ,they are a verdict on the state of internal security in Nigeria.
The case of Brigadier General Maharazu Ibrahim Tsiga, abducted from his hometown in Katsina’s Bakori Local Government Area in February 2025, offered the country a preview of what was coming. General Tsiga spent 56 days in captivity while his colleagues mobilised on a WhatsApp platform more than 300 members, including serving generals, retired officers, ambassadors and university lecturers to secure his release. The Defence Headquarters subsequently insisted no ransom was paid and that troops of Operation Fansan Yamma conducted a search-and-rescue operation. Whatever version of events one chooses to accept, the episode revealed a chilling reality: the military establishment had no reliable mechanism to rescue one of its own from bandit territory within a reasonable timeframe. Fifty-six days is not a rescue operation , it is a hostage negotiation conducted under another name.
Now General Abubakar is dead, and the question of mechanisms has become urgent once more.The public deserves answers to questions that have gone unanswered for too long. Who gave the order for soldiers to vacate their post before the abduction of schoolgirls in Kebbi State? That question has been asked repeatedly. It has not been answered.
There are persistent reports that elements within the security apparatus are complicit in the activities of the same bandits and insurgents they are deployed to neutralise. These allegations have circulated long enough that official silence on the matter now constitutes its own form of answer. The military leadership owes Nigerians a transparent accounting. Internal investigations, if they are happening, must produce results that the public can see and evaluate.
There is also a deeper moral weight to this moment. If a retired general ,a man with institutional connections, a man whose colleagues had recourse to phones and platforms and the full attention of the Defence Headquarters could not be extracted alive from bandit captivity, what protection does an ordinary Nigerian have? The millions of farmers, traders, students and commuters who travel Katsina roads, Zamfara roads and Sokoto roads every day have no WhatsApp group of generals mobilising on their behalf. They have no press conferences announcing rescue operations in their names. They die in the bush, and the news, if it arrives at all, arrives as a number in a tally that nobody in power appears to be seriously counting.
This newspaper has said before, and will say again, that the security of citizens is the foundational obligation of any government. It is not an aspiration or a policy goal. It is the basis of the social contract. When that contract is this visibly broken,when generals are kidnapped on public roads and die in captivity the authorities cannot respond with press statements and operational deployments alone. They must account for failures of intelligence, for lapses in force protection, for the complicity that keeps being alleged and never being prosecuted, and for the abandonment of security posts that allows mass abductions to proceed unimpeded.
The Nigerian Army’s pride has been wounded by the death of General Abubakar. That wound will not be healed by a show of force alone. It will heal when the military and the civilian authorities it serves demonstrate that they understand what has gone wrong not just tactically, but structurally and are genuinely prepared to fix it.
The generals who devoted their lives to the service of this country deserve better than to die in the hands of bandits on Nigerian roads. The citizens who never wore a uniform deserve the same protection and the same urgency. Nigeria has long since run completely out of time for anything less than that commitment. The wound will also heal when this country decides, once and for all, that the men and women it sends to face its most dangerous enemies must never be left to die alone.
