By Okoi Obono-Obla
THE STATE MUST NOT NEGOTIATE WITH TERROR: LEGITIMACY, POWER AND THE HOBBESIAN ABYSS
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has disclosed that some of the terrorists who kidnapped the children in Orire demanded the release of their colleagues already in detention. His response was unequivocal: the criminal gangs we have already arrested will not be released. No deal. We are not going to negotiate with criminals. We are not going to negotiate with murderers. They committed murder and the government is ready to square up with their families.
I admire the tough and bold manner in which the President spoke. It is the voice of a leader who is conscious of the power and authority bestowed upon him to lead, to energize, to galvanize and to charge those he leads.
This is precisely what Max Weber meant by legitimacy in his theory of legal-rational authority. For Weber, the authority of the modern state does not rest on tradition or charisma, but on rational grounds — “resting on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands.”
Weber defined the state itself as the institution that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. That monopoly is the foundation of order. When a leader begins to succumb to the inferior methods and antics of criminal gangs, criminal syndicates, despicable terrorists, and soulless and conscienceless thugs and miscreants, the government invariably delegitimizes itself.
When a government begins to negotiate with blood-curdling secret cultists and criminals, it invariably delegitimizes itself and sends the wrong signal that society has returned to the state of nature — to that solitary, brutish, and short existence Thomas Hobbes theorized about.
Hobbes warned us in Leviathan (1651) what life without effective sovereign power looks like. According to him, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” — a condition of “continual fear and danger of violent death” where there are “No arts; no letters; no society.” That is the abyss into which any state that negotiates with terror inevitably slides. It is the beginning of the collapse of society.
That is why I was alarmed when a Vice-Presidential candidate, on 20th July 2026, openly said on television with relish that if his party wins the election and forms the government, it would negotiate with terrorists, bandits and kidnappers. Indeed, Dr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso stated that a future administration under him and Peter Obi would use dialogue and talk with everyone, including terrorists and criminals, as part of a strategy to end insecurity in Nigeria. He made this remark during an interview on Channels Television, stressing that the government would still deploy military force when necessary.
To openly propose dialogue with murderers is not strategy; it is abdication. A state must not negotiate with terror. Once it does, it forfeits its legal-rational legitimacy and invites the Hobbesian abyss.
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