June 17, 2026
Last week ended on another note of triumph for the terrorists who are sworn to make life unlivable for Nigerians while the rest of the country mourns. We all came to the sad realization of the death in captivity of General Rabe Abubakar. He had been abducted with his wife about four weeks ago by terrorists along the Marabar Musawa-Kafinsoli highway in the Matazu LGA of Katsina State.
General Abubakar was from Katsina, a state whose government was quick to let the whole world know that the unlucky general died of natural causes, namely a deadly combination of high blood pressure and diabetes. In the skewed logic of the government’s definition of what constitutes a natural ailment — the ‘tag-team’ disease of hypertension and diabetes has been so described — it makes no difference to them that these ailments might have been either complicated or triggered by the General’s detention in the forest without access to medication.
As things stand, General Abubakar’s family has rejected the government’s account of how their father died. An untreated snake bite, not diabetes or hypertension, was the cause of his death, they say. Whose word do we believe in this situation? That of a grieving family or a government that has shown itself helpless in the face of a home-grown terror, one that has not done enough to deserve our trust? At any rate, a man with General Rabe Abubakar’s health condition, if not his age, would probably be on some kind of medication. If then he dies without access to those medications under the conditions in which he was held, such death cannot be described as natural. It was inflicted. But it is in the nature of a government and a people who mollycoddle terrorists and call them family to downplay the heinous crime of terrorism with euphemistic language.
