Last week, I came across an account on X, formerly known as Twitter, the haunting account by one Elder Oyin Zubair about Owa-Onire, a community once known for its celebrated waterfall but now reduced to silence and abandonment. His telling was not merely reportage; it read like an elegy for a place emptied of itself. What lingered was not only the fact of depopulation, but the image at its centre: a town that had become, in effect, a one-man village.
That account stayed with me because it illuminated, with unusual clarity, a reality that official language often fails to capture. There are moments in the life of a country when a single image says more than official briefings and ministerial speeches combined. Owa-Onire offers one such image. A whole town emptied of life. A man living by himself among abandoned homes. Churches without worshippers. Mosques with silent muezzins. Streets walked by one man because everyone else has fled. Security operatives arrive and discover that the place they came to protect has already ceased to exist in any meaningful civic sense. And it is not an isolated tragedy.
As The Guardian reported two years ago, “Most traditional rulers in Ifelodun Local Government of Kwara State have fled their communities for fear of being kidnapped by gunmen. The Guardian newspaper gathered that some communities in the local government have turned into ghost towns as residents have fled to safer areas outside the council and the state. Kidnappers in the area now address letters to the monarchs, informing them of when they would strike in their domain”.
That image ought to unsettle every Nigerian.
When officers drawn from the drone unit, the Mobile Police Force, and the Anti-Kidnapping Squad entered Owa-Onire as part of ongoing operations across the forest corridors of Kwara South, they encountered silence. There were no signs of ordinary life. No market activity. No communal movement. No evidence that people still regarded the place as home. Only Lekan remained.
His description of himself as “the landlord” carries a tragic irony. It is not the boast of a wealthy proprietor but the lonely designation of a man who has outlasted the social life of his community. His neighbours are gone. His king was abducted and held for months. The economy of the place he once called home has collapsed. His nearest market is elsewhere. His hometown exists only as geography.
What happened in Owa-Onire is neither accidental nor sudden. Communities do not disappear overnight. People endure hardship for long periods before abandoning their provenances. Rural Nigerians understand insecurity more intimately than security policies acknowledge. They know the sound of fear. They adjust their lives. They avoid certain roads. They avoid their farm lands. They stop travelling at dusk. They negotiate with danger until living itself becomes impossible. The story from Owa-Onire suggests precisely such a regression into the self when bandit incursions become recurrent. Kidnappings turn ordinary movements into calculated risks. The abduction of the monarch marks the decisive point of departure for the self. If the king could be taken and held in the forest for months, what protection remained for everyone else?
The ordinary people depart.
This is perhaps the most serious indictment of insecurity in Nigeria today. Death is devastating, but displacement creates another kind of wound. It empties communities gradually and normalises retreat. Citizens surrender territory without formal declaration. Villages become mere nodal points on security maps rather than places where people build lives. The reports that dozens of communities across Ifelodun and neighbouring areas have suffered similar abandonment should force national reflection. These are not isolated incidents. They represent a creeping alteration of Nigeria’s internal landscape.
Nigeria should treat this moment with greater urgency than it currently does. Security cannot remain an episodic response that appears after communities have already collapsed. The presence of armed personnel matters, but sustained territorial confidence matters more. Intelligence gathering must become local and continuous. Rural policing requires deeper integration with communities. Forest governance can no longer remain vague. State and federal authorities must clarify responsibility rather than trade blame.
The ruling class should recognise that insecurity is no longer confined to distant places that can be discussed with casual indifference. It should also recognise that empty villages alter migration patterns, strain urban centres, deepen poverty, create recruitment grounds for criminal networks, and weaken social cohesion. When these conditions persist, decline rarely announces itself with spectacle. Countries seldom collapse in dramatic scenes; they weaken through quiet accumulations that become normal enough to ignore.
A town without people should never become ordinary.
The details that linger most from Owa-Onire are not the deployment of one hundred security personnel, nor the donation of ten thousand naira to a solitary resident, it is Lekan’s account as told by Elder Oyin Zubair that unknown people entered the community during the night, and by morning nothing appeared different because there was almost nothing left to take. That sentence captures something larger than one deserted settlement. It describes a country confronting danger while behaving as though time remains abundant. Nigeria is playing with fire while sitting on its palms. It cannot continue losing communities, and normalising abandonment without eventually confronting consequences that exceed security language. Territorial presence means little when people no longer believe they can inhabit their provenances safely.
Owa-Onire should not become another passing headline.
It should become a dire warning.