The logic of His Excellency is: “better dead under lawful silence than alive in an unruly resistance”. In Nigeria today, the line between order and chaos has grown dangerously thin. A retired general – T.Y. Danjuma – publicly urges citizens to protect themselves in the face of rampant killings and kidnappings, arguing that the government alone can no longer keep them safe. Meanwhile, a sitting governor, insists that if citizens take up arms in self-defence, it would “cause anarchy”. The absurdity of this exchange is glaring: in some regions, civilians are already being slaughtered and abducted for ransom as casually as sacks of potatoes are sold in the market. Danjuma’s call is not a call to chaos but a desperate gospel of survival: “We cannot continue to sit and watch while bandits, terrorists, and criminal gangs massacre our people unchecked… the government alone cannot protect us. We must stand up and defend ourselves…”. In other words, if the official watchmen are asleep on duty, the villagers will have to become their own watchmen.
Consider the current state of affairs confronting ordinary Nigerians under threat. Entire farming communities have been driven off their lands; the unlucky ones who remain have been slaughtered, and their families carried away into captivity. In many villages, bandits now act as the government. Appointing local leaders and extorting homage and taxes from surviving residents. Elsewhere, terrorized towns strike grim deals with warlords for a modicum of peace.
In some cases, fathers are ordered to surrender their daughters, and husbands their wives, to appease the bandits’ whims. Refusing such demands is perilous when no authority can shield you from the consequences. From the plains of Sokoto to the hills of Taraba, insurgents and bandits strike with impunity, rendering vast swaths of the country effectively lawless.
This is not a hypothetical dystopia but the daily reality for many. Against this backdrop, labelling community self-defence as “anarchy” sounds like a cruel joke. Is it truly anarchy for villagers to do what they must to survive? Let’s examine this crisis through the lenses of four great thinkers – John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, and Socrates – with, perhaps, a satirical wink from Orwell. Each offers a perspective on whether citizens are morally entitled, or even duty-bound, to take up the mantle of their own security when the state fails to do so.
Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, champions of utilitarianism, would begin by asking which course of action produces “the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.”
In this blood-stained landscape, the choices are stark. On one hand, communities could remain passive and hope the rampaging bandits show mercy. On the other, they could organize in self-defence, risking further violence in the short term to prevent far greater suffering in the long term. The utilitarian calculus here is grim but clear. Every day of inaction adds to the body count and the sum of misery. Allowing massacres to continue unchecked is plainly catastrophic in its consequences, whereas resisting those massacres, even at the cost of upheaval, promises at least a chance of reducing the overall harm. Bentham famously wrote that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”
By that measure, what yields more happiness (or less misery) for society: a stance of docile victimhood, or active self-defence? His Excellency’s preference is that citizens quietly awaiting rescue that never comes has produced nothing but funerals, refugees, and traumatized survivors. In utilitarian terms, this status quo is failing spectacularly. The “greatest number” of people in these regions are not experiencing any happiness or security at all; they live in constant fear, their lives and livelihoods at the mercy of roving killers.
If arming themselves and forming vigilante groups could even slightly tip the balance toward safety, a utilitarian would find it not only permissible but morally obligatory. As Mill would remind us, individual liberty and order are crucial, but preventing vast suffering comes first. When dozens of villages lie in ashes and thousands of families mourn their dead, concerns about theoretical civic order start to ring hollow. Indeed, evidence from the ground already suggests that self-defence can dramatically reduce suffering. In Azare for instance, when Boko Haram terrorists went calling, the residents refused to be passive victims. They fought back fiercely. Thus, sending a clear message to all gangsters, that fire-for-fire remains the only effective medium of communication between the citizens and the rampaging savages.
Likewise in Biu, the youth of the town collectively rose up to defend their homes . These communities saved themselves through action, likely preventing countless kidnappings and deaths that would have occurred had they “sheepishly” surrendered. A Benthamite analysis would tally up the lives saved and terror averted by such actions and conclude that, despite the regrettable necessity of violence, the net good (or net reduction in evil) is immense.
By contrast, in places where villagers did nothing but pray and wait, the very worst outcomes unfolded; massacres, enslavement and the total collapse of wellbeing. The utilitarian logic practically screams in favour of self-defence: when the only alternative is slaughter and subjugation, taking up arms to defend the community produces the “greatest good” by far.
To drive the point home, one might even apply Bentham’s famed felicific calculus here. A morbid exercise. On one side of the scale: the pain of continued bandit tyranny (murder and pillage unopposed) affecting thousands. On the other side: the pain of a community skirmish if people resist, perhaps a shorter period of fighting and the death of some aggressors, possibly some defenders too, but thereafter a chance at peace. The calculation is unequivocal. No sane utilitarian would argue that it’s better for 100 villagers to be killed in their sleep than for 10 bandits to be killed by those villagers in self-defence. The greatest good in this dire situation is achieved by allowing people to preserve their lives and livelihoods. Even if citizen self-defence looks messy or “anarchic” on the surface, it clearly results in far less aggregate suffering than the so-called order of mass graves and burned houses. As a moral philosophy of outcomes, utilitarianism finds ’s stance – essentially, “better dead under lawful silence than alive in unruly resistance” – to be perversely out of touch with human welfare. In plainer terms: if the only way to stop the carnage is to fight back, then fighting back is the moral choice. Mill, with his refined utilitarian lens, would likely add that the quality of the outcome matters too. A life with dignity and security is qualitatively better than a life lived in servitude to terror. Thus, empowering communities to defend themselves not only increases the quantity of lives saved, but the quality of those lives. It’s a grim business, but to do otherwise is to prefer widespread misery over the possibility of hope. By the principle of the greatest good, self-defence isn’t just allowed; it’s virtually mandated by common sense and compassion.
Utilitarians focus on outcomes, but Immanuel Kant would approach this moral dilemma from the standpoint of duty and principle. Kant’s deontological ethics insists that some actions are right or wrong regardless of consequences, and that we must always act according to moral laws that we will want everyone to follow. So, what is the moral law when it comes to protecting innocent life? And what duty do people have when the institutions tasked with upholding that law fall apart? First, consider the duty of the state: by any social contract or constitutional measure, a government’s primary obligation is to safeguard the lives and rights of its citizens. In Kantian terms, the state has a duty to protect each person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means. But here we are faced with a state grossly failing in that duty either out of incapacity or negligence. Bandits and terrorists roam free, treating human beings as mere tools for extortion and violence, violating the fundamental moral law that human life must be respected. Kant would be horrified at how persons are being used as means to the bandits’ ends – as bargaining chips for ransom, as objects to be violated or killed at will. Such actions are the antithesis of any universal moral principle. Now, what of the citizens’ own duty in this vacuum of authority? Kant’s most famous imperative says: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time wish that it become a universal law.”
We can apply this test to the question of self-defence. Could we wish a universal law that “people should never defend themselves, even when under lethal threat and when lawful authorities cannot or will not protect them”? It’s hard to imagine any rational being endorsing that as a universal law it amounts to willing universal victimhood. A world where evil is given free rein as soon as it strikes outside the reach of elites. Such a maxim fails the universality test spectacularly. If everyone followed it, the concept of moral duty to preserve life would evaporate, and society would descend into a predators-and-prey nightmare which, in parts of Nigeria, is exactly what happened when people failed to resist.
On the other hand, consider a maxim like: “When no official justice is forthcoming, individuals may band together to protect the innocent from lawless violence.” Could that be a universal law? One might argue yes. It embodies a duty to defend life and uphold justice when no one else will. It is essentially saying you should not stand idly by and watch your neighbours be slaughtered. That principle is much more aligned with our moral intuition and Kant’s requirement of respecting persons. In fact, choosing to defend the innocent in such dire circumstances could be seen as an extension of the duty not to murder, by preventing murders if it is within one’s power. Kant emphasized that we must treat humanity, in ourselves and others, always as an end, never merely as a means.
What could be a more direct way to treat someone as an end than to value their life enough to defend it, even if at risk to your own? Conversely, to refuse to act in the face of clear evil is, in a sense, to treat those victims as if their lives do not merit the effort. As if they were expendable means or, worse, nothing at all. Of course, Kant was also a stickler for law and order. He believed in the importance of legitimate authority and would normally insist that people obey the laws of their state out of duty. But this assumes the state is functioning as a guardian of the moral law. In the scenario we have, the state’s shield is manifestly absent. The laws against murder exist on paper but not in practice. Does a duty to obey authority still hold when that authority utterly fails to fulfill its side of the moral contract?
Kant respected law, but he was no advocate of allowing unjust chaos for the sake of procedural purity. In fact, Kant wrote about the duty of self-preservation and the permissibility of self-defence against an unjust aggressor. One has the right to use force to stop someone trying to kill you, because the moral law (respect for life) is on your side. So, a Kantian might argue that citizens organizing to protect one another is an extension of their moral duty. A tragic but necessary assumption of responsibility in line with the highest moral law: “thou shalt not stand by as thy or thy neighbour is murdered”, one might phrase it. The governor’s position, that citizens should do nothing and leave all force to the government, becomes ridiculous if the government is incapable of exercising that force rightly.
To insist on that duty (non-resistance to evil) as absolute is to turn the form of law into an idol while the substance of law – justice – is desecrated. A Kantian outlook would rather have people obey the moral imperative to preserve life and dignity. Thus, in this lawless land, it is arguably the duty of good people to do what they can to establish some justice on the ground. Far from being anarchy, this is people collectively enforcing the very moral law that the state claims to uphold but isn’t actually upholding. In short, the citizens’ right, even duty, to self-defence stands on solid Kantian moral ground. It respects the infinite value of human life and could be willed as a universal principle of action when official institutions collapse.
Where Bentham and Kant lay down principles, Socrates would pose uncomfortable questions. True to his method, he would start by examining definitions and exposing contradictions. Governor says community self-defence would be “anarchy.” Socrates might raise an eyebrow and ask: What is anarchy? Who is truly causing disorder in this situation? Is it the villagers who take up arms to defend their homes, or the bandits who murder and pillage without restraint, or the government that either unable or unwilling to defend the law abiding citizens? If the laws of the land exist only on parchment and not in the field, can we even speak of a lawful order being disrupted? One can almost hear Socrates in a village square, engaging a modern interlocutor in dialogue.
Socrates: “Governor, you claim that citizens defending themselves would create anarchy. Tell me, what do you call the condition where armed gangs rule over those citizens, unchallenged by any law? Is that not already anarchy, in fact something worse – lawlessness combined with terror?” The governor might respond that violence must be monopolized by the state.
Socrates: “Ah, but if the state’s agents are nowhere to be seen when the violence occurs, or worse, if they arrive only to count the bodies, in what sense is the state monopolizing anything besides perhaps the right to bury the dead?” By such questioning, Socrates would strip the argument to its bones. Is the law truly being upheld in these areas? Clearly not. The “law” exists in name only, while reality is governed by the bandit’s whim and the sword. Socrates was famous for claiming to know nothing, but here even his feigned ignorance would point to obvious truths. He might innocently ask, “Should a man refrain from defending his children because someone far away, who neither arrives to help nor shares the peril, tells him it’s unlawful? Which is the greater crime: to break the law of self-defence, or to allow one’s family to be butchered?” These pointed questions highlight the moral absurdity of condemning self-defence under conditions where the authorities, despite their titles and offices, are effectively absent.
It recalls that classic Socratic scenario of exposing ignorance: the official line “only the government should handle security” falls apart when the next question is “and where is the government security when the marauders come at night?” There is no good answer, and that is exactly Socrates’ point. By the end of Socratic cross-examination, what His Excellency calls anarchy starts to look more like courageous citizenship, and what he calls order is revealed as a cowardly euphemism for inaction in the face of evil.
Socrates might even employ a bit of his famous irony, congratulating the leaders on maintaining “order”: “So, by ‘order’ you mean a predictable order of events; bandits attack, citizens die, officials condemn the violence in speeches, and nothing changes. A very stable pattern, to be sure. And you fear self-defence would disrupt this order?” Such withering irony would not be out of place in an Orwellian satire, and indeed it lays bare the doublethink at work. The notion that allowing murderers free rein is somehow preferable to people resisting murder. Let’s not forget, Socrates ultimately cared about justice. He accepted his own death sentence from Athens because he believed in the rule of law, but Athens’s laws were at least functioning and his choice harmed no one but himself. Would Socrates counsel these Nigerian villagers to go quietly to their graves for the abstract ideal of law, when in fact law and justice have already crumbled around them? Unlikely. He might instead recall a simple moral insight: it is better to stop a wrong than to let it continue. If the only way to stop it is for ordinary people to take extraordinary measures, then maybe those measures are not so unthinkable after all. Through questions and logic, Socrates would lead his interlocutors to realize that self-defence in this context is not a breakdown of morality, but a fulfillment of it. It is the community asserting that justice must still mean something, that they will not meekly accept a world where the wicked dominate the righteous unopposed. In the end, the Socratic method would likely turn the tables: instead of asking whether citizens have a right to defend themselves, we end up asking what right any government has to demand people’s obedience while failing to secure their lives. That is a question neither His Excellency nor any official would enjoy answering. And that, of course, is precisely why Socrates would ask it.
When we synthesize these perspectives, a clear conclusion emerges: the right of citizens to self-defence in the face of state failure is not only legitimate, it is morally compelling. By Bentham and Mill’s standard, it reduces overall harm and misery. By Kant’s standard, it upholds a fundamental duty to protect human life and dignity when no one else will. By Socrates’ standard, it is logically consistent and just, whereas the opposition to it is riddled with contradiction and hypocrisy. Even by plain common sense, it is hard to see how people refusing to be victimized is anything but virtuous. Orwell’s satirical eye would no doubt appreciate the dark irony in this situation. Here we have a government describing citizens’ self-protection as “anarchy,” while the real anarchy is flourishing precisely because that government cannot enforce the law. It has a whiff of doublethink: war is peace, freedom is slavery, self-defence is anarchy. Orwell once observed that people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf
In the present case, the “rough men” meant to guard the peace – soldiers, police – are either overwhelmed or nowhere to be found, and peaceful people are not sleeping safely at all. So, who will do the necessary violence on behalf of the innocent? The answer can only be: the people themselves, or no one. Thus, ordinary villagers must become those “rough men” and women out of sheer necessity, to protect their families and neighbours. This is not a betrayal of civilized values; it is a bitter defence of them against a descent into barbarism.
There is, of course, nothing ideal about this. In an ideal world, no farmer would need to swap his plow for a rifle to guard his home. But when the ideal guardians abdicate their role, reality leaves little or no choice. The philosophies we have discussed do not glorify violence. Neither do the people advocating self-defence. General Danjuma is not preaching vigilantism out of zeal; he is, as Kant might say, confronting the categorical imperative of survival.
Faced with the wholesale slaughter of innocents, inaction is a much greater sin than action. Communal self-organization for defence, far from being a descent into lawlessness, can be seen as citizens voluntarily upholding the very law of preservation that their government has failed to enforce. It is an act of social responsibility in extreme times. These communities are not trying to secede or usurp power; they are trying to stay alive and keep the fabric of society intact. In a sense, they take on the role of a “local government” in security because the real government isn’t present. If anything, they deserve praise for resilience and courage, not lectures about theoretical anarchy.
History and moral imperative are on the side of those who defend themselves against unjust aggression. It is a right as old as humanity. Older than any written constitution. And it doesn’t vanish just because a placard on the wall says “Keep calm and call the authorities.” When calling the authorities is futile, the calmest, most rational thing one can do is to organize one’s own defence. This is a truth that the likes of Mill, Bentham, Kant, and Socrates, despite their vastly different philosophies, would all acknowledge in their own way. And it is a truth written plainly in the Nigerian blood-soaked soil today. Let’s not forget, supporting the right of citizens to self-defence in the current context isn’t about promoting chaos; it’s about preventing a greater horror. It’s about communities asserting that they will not be mere cattle for the slaughter, that their lives have value. The philosophers lend intellectual weight to what is, ultimately, an elemental moral intuition.
As human beings, we cannot abandon those in peril, even if those in power have abandoned them. When constituted authority “despite its best efforts” proves grossly inadequate, then it falls to ordinary people to do what is necessary. This is not sedition; it is self-preservation. It is, in the fullest sense, defending civilization itself from collapse. And as long as the facts remain, villages overrun, innocents in peril, and a state that pleads potent impotence, the Gospel of Self-Defence will ring out as not just justified, but sacred. In the words of one embattled Nigerian who heeded that gospel: “You must rise to protect yourselves... if you depend on the Armed Forces to protect you, you will all die.”
That is not a call to anarchy; it is a call to honour. The most basic duty we owe one another as fellow human beings.
