Twenty five years is long enough for a wound to close and for a scar to form in its place. It is also long enough for the meaning of an event to be quietly rewritten by the people who survived it. When the twin towers collapsed on a clear Tuesday morning in September 2001, nearly three thousand people died in under two hours, and the world that woke up the next day was not the same one that had gone to sleep the night before. A quarter of a century on, it is worth asking honestly what that day actually taught us, as opposed to what governments, including my own in Nigeria, found convenient to claim it taught us.
The immediate lesson, the one etched into memorials and repeated in solemn ceremonies every September, is about grief and resilience. That lesson is real and it deserves its place. But there is a second lesson, less comfortable and far less often spoken aloud, about what fear does to institutions that are supposed to protect rights rather than suspend them. In the years after 2001, dozens of countries passed emergency and counterterrorism legislation modeled loosely on measures introduced in Washington and London. Many of those laws are still on the books today, long after the emergency that justified them has faded from memory. Indefinite detention, expanded surveillance powers, and the criminalisation of vaguely defined "terrorism related" speech became normal features of governance in places that had never experienced anything resembling an attack on that scale. The war on terror did not stay in Afghanistan or Iraq. It became a template, and templates travel.
