At least half of termite studies used to be about how to kill them. But science is discovering their extraordinary usefulness
by Lisa Margonelli
In July 2008, I rented a small yellow car in Tucson, Arizona, and drove it south towards Tombstone. My passengers included an entomologist and two microbial geneticists, and I was following a white van with government plates carrying nine more geneticists. We also had 500 plastic bags, a vacuum flask of dry ice, and 350 cryogenic vials, each the size and shape of a pencil stub. We had two days to get 10,000 termites.
The goal was to sequence the genes of the microbes in their guts. Because termites are famously good at eating wood, those genes were attractive to government labs trying to turn wood and grass into biofuels (“grassoline”). The white van and the geneticists all belonged to the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute. Perhaps by seeing exactly how termites break down wood, we’d be able to do it too.
We stopped in the Coronado national forest, near the border with Mexico. I lifted a rock and saw a glint of glossy exoskeleton flowing into some little tunnels. I dropped to my knees and began sucking on an aspirator, a disgusting process that stimulated saliva production and made me dizzy. Two minutes later, there were no more termites on the ground and I had about 25 in the test tube attached to the aspirator.
But my pale termites were disappointing. When I separated one from the clutch, it was less substantial than a baby’s fingernail clipping. Doddering around blindly, it waved the flimsy antennae on its bulbous head. In its stubby, translucent body I could almost see its coiled guts – and presumably whatever it had eaten for lunch. Ants have snazzy bodies with three sections, highlighted by narrow waists, like a pinup model’s, between the segments. Termites, which are no relation to ants or bees, have round, eyeless heads, thick necks and teardrop-shaped bodies. And they long ago lost cockroaches’ repulsive dignity, gnarly size and gleaming chitinous armour. I put the termite back in the test tube.
What had I just sucked up? My little gang of 25 was incapable of doing much of anything. Without a colony, they had nowhere to bring food to, and thus no reason to forage. Without a crowd of soldiers, they couldn’t defend themselves. Without a queen, they couldn’t reproduce. Twenty-five termites are insignificant in the scheme of life and death and reproduction. Meaningless. What’s more, they were clinging to one another, making an icky beige rope of termite heads, bodies and legs reminiscent of the game Barrel of Monkeys. In the miniature scrum I couldn’t even see a single termite – they looked like a clot, not a group of individuals. Or perhaps I had found a single individual who happened to have 25 selves.
I had stumbled into one of the big questions termites pose, which is, roughly, what is “one” termite? Is it one individual termite? Is it one termite with its symbiotic gut microbes, an entity that can eat wood but cannot reproduce on its own? Or is it a colony, a whole living, breathing structure, occupied by a few million related individuals and a gazillion symbionts who collectively constitute “one”?
The issue of one is profound in every direction, with evolutionary, ecological and existential implications. By the end of that day I had a basic idea that the fewer I saw, the more termites there might be. Where I had thought of landscapes as the product of growth, on that afternoon they inverted to become the opposite: the remainders left behind by the forces of persistent and massive chewing. The sky was no longer the sky, but the blue stuff that is visible after the screening brush and cacti have been eaten away. Termites have made the world by unmaking parts of it. They are the architects of negative space. The engineers of not.
Nobody loves termites, even though other social insects such as ants and bees are admired for their organisation, thrift and industry. Parents dress their children in bee costumes. Ants star in movies and video games. But termites are never more than crude cartoons on the side of exterminators’ vans. Termite studies are likewise a backwater, funded mostly by government agencies and companies with names such as Terminix. Between 2000 and 2013, 6,373 papers about termites were published; 49% were about how to kill them.
Every story about termites mentions that they consume somewhere between $1.5bn (£1.1bn) and $20bn in US property every year. Termites’ offence is often described as the eating of “private” property, which makes them sound like anticapitalist anarchists. While termites are truly subversive, it’s fair to point out that they will eat anything pulpy. They find money itself to be very tasty. In 2011 they broke into an Indian bank and ate 10m rupees (then £137,000) in banknotes. In 2013 they ate 400,000 yuan (then £45,000) that a woman in Guangdong had wrapped in plastic and hidden in a wooden drawer.
Another statistic seems relevant: termites outweigh us 10 to one. For every 60kg human you, according to the termite expert David Bignell, there are 600kg of them. We may live in our own self-titled epoch – the Anthropocene – but termites run the dirt. They are our underappreciated underlords, key players in a vast planetary conspiracy of disassembly and decay. If termites, ants and bees were to go on strike, the tropics’ pyramid of interdependence would collapse into infertility, the world’s most important rivers would silt up and the oceans would become toxic. Game over.
By the end of our termite-collecting trip we had 8,000 termites in plastic tubs and bags, but they needed to be labelled and stored in dry ice before going to California to be sequenced. Once frozen in the vacuum flask, the termites were on their way to immortality: a collection of genetic code sitting in some database on a server somewhere, intellectual property, a sequence of nucleotides that might solve a wicked problem some day.
We were on the border between natural history and an unnatural future. We weren’t alone: all over the world, scientists are trying to find biology’s underlying rules and put them to use. They’re doing it with genes, behaviours, metabolisms and ecosystems. They’re seeing nature in new ways, and at the same time they’re trying to reinvent it and put it to work for us. In the future, we will harness nature’s tiniest life forms – microbes and insects – both their systems of organisation and control, and their genes and chemical capabilities. This fits with our paradoxical desire to have a lighter footprint on the Earth while having greater control over its processes.
At the core of this project is the provocative dream of changing biology into a predictive science, much the way physics started as the observation of phenomena such as gravity and then became the science of making plans for the atom bomb. Will there be termite bombs?
Termite colonies begin theatrically on rainy evenings. Small holes open in the sides of existing termite homes and largish, winged termites emerge, shake out their sticky wings, and fly. In northern California, termites of the genus Reticulitermes suddenly appear on the sides of buildings they inhabit. In South America, Nasutitermes shower down from nests in the trees. In New Orleans, Formosan termites, of the genus Coptotermes, burp from colonies in the ground and take to the air in swarms so dense they show up on weather radar. In Namibia, giant Macrotermes mounds seem to spring a leak, spilling froths of winged termites down their sides.
In the mound, most of the termites are eyeless and wingless, but the fertile termites who leave the mound on this night have eyes and what at first appears to be one single translucent teardrop-shaped wing. When they are ready to fly, this single wing, still soft and moist, fans out into four. Called “alates”, these termites are like fragile balsa-wood glider planes: just sturdy enough to cruise briefly before crash-landing their payloads of genes.
Male and female find each other and scuttle off to dig a burrow where they will mate. At first the two termites will be alone in their dark hole. Christine Nalepa, Theo Evans and Michael Lenz have written that termite parents bite off the ends of their antennae, which may make them better at raising their young. Antennae give termites lots of sensory information, and biting off the segments toward the ends could reduce that stimulation, making it easier to live in a tiny burrow with a few million children.
After she has laid her first eggs, the queen cleans them often to remove harmful fungi until they hatch as nymphs about three weeks later. The nymphs will moult grow and develop, but under the influence of the queen’s pheromone, most of them won’t fully mature, remaining permanent stay-at-home preteens – eyeless, wingless helpers.
Males and females alike will spend their time gathering food, tending eggs, building the nest deeper into the ground and eventually tending a fungus. As the family grows bigger, some morph into soldiers; their heads grow larger, dark-coloured and hard in a distinctive way, depending on their species. Thereafter they must be fed by their siblings the workers. Soldiers appear to return the favour by dosing the colony with antimicrobial secretions that help it resist disease.
Over time, in the small smooth dirt room where she lives, the queen’s body becomes “physogastric”, her abdomen swelling to the size of my thumb, constricted by taut black bands remaining from her old exoskeleton so she looks like a soft sausage that has been carelessly bound with string. Her head, thorax and legs remain tiny. Immobilised, except for the ability to wave her legs and bobble her head, she lays eggs at the rate of one every three or so seconds. The king stays by her. Her children lick off the liquid that appears on her skin, feed her and care for the eggs.
Or at least, that’s life for some Macrotermes queens (the genus found in Africa and south-east Asia, that builds its mound around a massive fungus). There are, however, at least 3,000 named termite species, and thus at least 3,000 ways to be termites. Some have multiple queens; some have cloned kings or queens; some are, improbably, founded by two male termites. One species doesn’t really have workers. Different species eat wood, others eat grass and some eat dirt. Macrotermes tend a fungus, but most others do not. All termites, though, live in their own version of a big commune.
Zebras by a termite mound in Okonjima, Namibia. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
The South African writer Eugène Marais spent many years peering into their mounds and wrote The Soul of the White Ant, originally published in English in 1937. Marais called the termite mound a “composite animal”, uniting the millions of sterile workers, the soldiers, the fat queen and the king with the dirt structure of the mound itself into a single body. “You will need to learn a new alphabet,” he warned his readers before leading them in. The hard-packed dirt on the outside of the mound, he said, is a skin constructed by termites, which build passageways inside that allow the mound to breathe – like a lung. The organism’s stomach is the symbiotic fungus that sits in catacombs under the mound, digesting grasses delivered by termites. The mound’s “mouth” can be found in the hundreds of foraging tunnels the termites construct through the surrounding landscape. Because they carry nutrients and rebuild the mound, the sterile workers resemble blood cells. The mound’s “immune system” is the soldiers, who rush to defend the space whenever it is invaded.
To Marais, the queen was no Victoria, but instead a captive ovary, walled into a chamber no bigger than her swollen, sweating body. Marais imagined that eventually the mound would evolve into a being that could move across the veldt – very slowly in its dirt skin – a monster hybrid of soil and soul. Marais’s insight wasn’t original, and many scientists had taken to calling such social arrangements of termites, bees and ants “superorganisms”. The originator of the term was the entomologist William Wheeler, the founder of the study of ants in the US, author of a 1911 article called The Ant-Colony as an Organism.
For a time, superorganisms were all the rage. The concept dealt neatly with what Charles Darwin had called the “problem” with social insects. Darwin’s theory of evolution proposed that natural selection worked on individuals and the fittest individuals bred with others similarly fit to their ecological niche, while the less fit were less likely to reproduce. The problem with social insects was that while single termites seem to be individuals, they do not function as such. Only the queen and king of a colony breed, so who was the “individual”? By declaring the whole colony the individual, Wheeler said its members made up “a living whole bent on preserving its moving equilibrium and its integrity”.
In the late 1920s and early 30s, the paradigm of the superorganism grew colossal. Instead of studying individual trees, biologists studied forests as superorganisms. By 1931, the concept snuck into popular culture when Aldous Huxley reportedly based the dictatorship in Brave New World on humans as social insects, with five castes. Wheeler proposed that “trophallaxis” – a word he invented for the way insects regurgitate and share food among themselves – was the secret sauce, the superglue of societies both insect and human, and the foundation of economics. But even during the superorganism’s heyday, Marais was alone in his assertion that the mound had a soul.
In Namibia, I went to meet J Scott Turner, an American biologist who has spent decades studying how and why termites build their mounds. It took Turner years of experiments to show that mounds could work a bit like lungs, with interconnected chambers taking advantage of fluctuations in wind speed. Air moves back and forth through the porous dirt skin of the mound by two systems: in big puffs driven by buoyant gases rising from the hot fungus nest (like the sharp intake of breath from the diaphragm), and in small puffs, the way air wheezily diffuses between alveoli in your lungs. Turner suspected that the termites themselves circulated air as they moved, like mobile alveoli. This insight was an entirely new way of thinking about the problem. The mound was not a simple structure where air happened to move, but a continuously morphing complex contraption consisting of dirt and termites together manipulating airflow.
Termites who spend a year building an average mound of 3 metres have just built, in comparison to their size, the Empire State Building. Those who build taller mounds, at nearly 5 metres, have just built the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – 830 metres and 163 floors of vertigo – with no architect and no structural engineer. Such unthinking, seat-of-the-pants design is not possible for humans, who required squads of professionals, advanced equipment and 7,500 people working for six years to build the Burj Khalifa. Working with Turner, engineer Rupert Soar hoped to harness the powerful constructive groupthink that comes from the tiny mouths of termites and their even tinier brains to build structures in remote environments such as Mars. But there were issues: termites, he said, engineer to the point of collapse.
One morning a JCB arrived and Turner directed it to a mound. The JCB’s great blade came down on the top of the mound with a hollow whomp, the first note of a funny little concert. Half the mound fell away with a tumbling clinking clatter – as the shards hit different layers of cured mud they played a tune like a soft xylophone. We pushed in close, enveloped by the familiar smell of socks and bread.
What was left of the mound was a ruined hierarchy. Dirt shards and fungus combs and sculpted mud plinked downward, while termites ran every which way, at first as a sort of gauzy net. Soon they had organised themselves into small streams, and within 10 minutes those streams had consolidated into rivers of running insects. As order was restored, I could see the elaborate scheme of tunnels, rooms, chambers and fungus hidden under the dirt exterior. The spectacle was genuinely awesome – as in jaw-dropping and appalling.
The top of the mound was hollow, with wide vertical tunnels. The interiors of these tunnels were very smooth, and they segued in and out of each other in ropey vertiginous columns like a sloppy braid. Termites make the mounds by first piling up dirt and then removing it strategically in the tunnels. Eyeless, they use their antennae to feel for smoothness, and in the big tunnels they remove everything that is rough. They may even hear the tunnel’s shape.
Termites are often compared to architects for the way they build their mounds, but that is misleading because they don’t have plans or a global vision. What they really have is an aesthetic, an innate sense of how things should feel. When the top of the spire was first ripped off, there were just a few termites in the solitary tunnels at the top, probably listening to the clopping of their own six feet. But cutting into the top allowed in lots of fresh air at once, and activated an alarm system. Some termites ran away from the hole, agitating their brothers and sisters so they could help with repairs. Thousands of worker termites followed the smell of fresh air to find the hole, carrying balls of dirt in their mouths. Within minutes of the JCB strike, streams of termites canvassed the broken side of the mound, moving in a frantic start-stop pattern like a shaky old animated cartoon. I leaned in further and could see that each termite put its ball of dirt down on a ball left by the previous termite, wiggled his or her head, perhaps to get the ball to stick, and then backed away. Where there were two balls there were soon 20 and then 200, then 2,000. Some of these stacks joined up with other stacks at the perimeter of the breaks in the mound to form little bumpy, frilly walls.
Once the area was walled off, the signal from the fresh air would stop and the termites would fill the internal space with more dirt balls and small tunnels, making a sort of spongy layer. Later they would either block it off entirely or would hollow it out and remodel it. The JCB came back in for another swipe, taking away the dirt below the mound to reveal the system of horizontal galleries, tunnels and chambers where the termites live. It reminded me of those diagrams of cruise ships, visualised from the side, with small rooms packed together in a strict hierarchy of function and status from ballrooms and cafeterias to VIP staterooms and steerage bunks. The colony’s hierarchy is not money, of course, but the things that enable its survival: reproduction, child care, food supply and food processing. Some rooms are large, with vaulted ceilings, and walls and floors the texture of tortilla chips. When I looked closely, I could see that they were not so much rooms as places where many foraging tunnels crossed, like the grand concourses of old train stations. Deep within this area was a small capsule where the king and queen lived, making eggs, which were carried to nearby nurseries.
Below the mound lives the fungus, digesting grass. All termites use symbiotic collectives of bacteria and other microbes to digest cellulose for them, but Macrotermes outsource the major work to a fungus.
In some senses the fungus functions as a stomach, but it also has power reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz. Under the mound and around the nest sit hundreds of little rooms, each containing fungus comb. This comb is made of millions of mouthfuls of chewed dry grass, excreted as pseudofaeces and carefully assembled into a maze. The comb roughly resembles graham cracker pie crust, although it varies in colour from delicious beige to decrepit black. The termites inoculate it with a fungus that they have been cohabiting with for more than 30m years.
You can pull the fungus combs out of their little rooms as if you were pulling drawers from a doll’s wardrobe. The comb maze wiggles like the folds of a brain, with the hard, wrinkly piles of chewed grass making the gyri and leaving sulci-ish gaps in between. This is not an accident: as with a brain, the comb design increases the surface area of the structure. Within the gaps are what look like tiny white balloons, which is the fungus blooming. There is nothing accidental about this relationship either, or the construction that holds it: the details are so fine we can barely take them in. The bottom of the fungus comb stands on peg-like legs, little nubbins that hold it up just enough to let air circulate through. One of the grad students beat a small stick against the floors of the fungus galleries, playing something that was almost a tune.
The symbiotic relationship between Macrotermes and the fungus is tight: workers scour the landscape for dry grass, quickly run it through their guts, then place and inoculate each ball to suit the fungus’s picky temperament, tend the comb and snarfle the fungus and its sugars before distributing the goodies to the rest of the family. Then the workers run off to gather more grass for the fungus. Termite and Termitomyces fungus are so interrelated that it’s hard to tell where the mushroom ends and the termite picks up, but within their codependence is a sort of frenemy-type rivalry. (Fungi are capable of deliberately tricking termites. One invasive fungus in termite colonies in the US and Japan pretends to be a termite egg, going so far as to secrete the chemical lysozyme, which the termites use to recognise their eggs. For reasons that are not clear, colonies filled with impostor “eggs” are no less healthy than those without them.)
Prejudiced by our human sense of a hierarchy of the animate termites over inanimate mushrooms, we would be inclined to believe that the termites control the fungus. But the fungus is much larger than the termites – both in size and energy production: Turner estimates that its metabolism is about eight times bigger than that of the termites in the mound. “I like to tell people that this is not a termite-built structure; it’s a fungus-built structure,” he says, chuckling. It is possible that the fungus has kidnapped the termites. It’s even possible that the fungus has put out a template of chemical smells that stimulates the termites to build the mound itself. As I peered at the white nodules, I began to sneeze violently, sometimes with big gasping whoops, and something – it’s hard to even call it a thought, but a particle of one – flitted through my subconscious before flying out of my nose: the fungus is very powerful.
My admiration for the fungus only grew when I learned that Namibian farmers estimate that every Macrotermes mound – which contains just 5kg of termites – eats as much dead grass as a 400kg cow. Late in the day, one of the scientists used a pickaxe to pop the royal chamber out of the nest – the whole complex was the size and shape of a squashed soccer ball, but made of hard-packed finely grained dirt. He cracked it open, revealing the king and queen in a hollow space the size of a cough-drop tin. The chamber had holes on the sides, allowing air and smaller termites to pass through. The king was large and dark compared to the workers, but the queen was huge – as big as my finger. Her legs and upper body waggled but barely budged the fluid-filled sac of her lower body, which pulsed erratically, as though she was a toothpaste tube squeezed by an unseen hand. Her skin was shiny and translucent and the fats inside her swirled like pearly cream dribbled into coffee.
Everyone shuddered: the queen is viscerally repulsive. She offends our sensibilities and she is monstrous. I think the first stimulus to shudder is a reflexive reaction to her body’s pulses and swirls. But then a more intellectual sense of her horror kicks in. “She’s not a queen; she’s a slave,” said Eugene Marais, a Namibian entomologist working with Turner (no relation to the writer of the famous work on termites). Captive of her body, of her children, of the structure of the mound she conspired to build.
Even then, the queen’s more shocking aspects are hidden from us. Her truly stupendous fertility – creating millions of eggs over as long as 20 years – is something we can only infer. Some species of termite queens can clone themselves by producing eggs with no entry-ways for sperm, which then mature into sexual queens with only their mother’s chromosomes, duplicated inside the egg nucleus, to furnish a full set. Imperfect copies of the queen, these knockoffs are good enough to get the job done. Parthenogenesis allows the queen to live, in insect years, pretty close to for ever.
‘A different dimension of loss’: inside the great insect die-off
And yet we do refer to her as a queen. I wondered why. Marais said that when early European naturalists looked into beehives and termite mounds, they saw the monarchies they came from – with workers, soldiers, and kings and queens. It was misleading, he said, and kept us from really understanding what was going on with termites. For scientists, the great danger of seeing social insects anthropomorphically is that it obscures their true insect-ness. In the 1970s and 80s, when the ant scientist Deborah Gordon began studying massive ant colonies in the American south-west, scientists described the ant colony as “a factory with assembly-line workers, each performing a single task over and over”. Gordon felt the factory model clouded what she actually saw in her colonies – a tremendous variation in the tasks that ants were doing. Rather than having intrinsic task assignments, she saw that ants changed their behaviour based on clues they got from the environment and one another. Gordon suggested that we should stop thinking of ants as factory workers and instead think of them as “the firing patterns of neurons in the brain”, where simple environmental information gives cues that make the individuals work for the whole, without central regulation.
And so, these days, one scientific metaphor for the inscrutable termite is a neuron in a giant crawling brain.
Back in the 1930s, the other Marais didn’t write a termite science book, but a book about how humans could understand termites – as a bug, a body, a soul, a force on the landscape. Looking at termites this way changed how I see the world, science, the future and myself.
This is an edited extract from Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology by Lisa Margonelli (Oneworld, £16.99). To order a copy for £14.61 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. P&P charges apply in the UK only to orders by phone.
On many fronts, America is showcasing the many burdens and benefits of democracy. Most Washington politicians are united in their support for Israel. But out on the streets, many Americans are opposed to Israel’s raging genocidal onslaught on Gaza and other Palestinian enclaves. While Congress had little trouble approving a further $20 billion in military aid to Israel, there is anger on the streets and mostly on university campuses. Opposition to the naked aggression against Palestinians has united the American streets and campuses against political Washington. A gale of anti-Semitic protests has recently endangered lives and interests associated with Israel. This has now been followed by a whirlwind of campus protests all over America and even beyond.
In American courts, Donald Trump has kept the judiciary busy with legal arguments which now sound more like staged one-man campaign talk shows. The court appearances for Trump’s multitude of criminal and civil transgressions have become opportunities for a rehash of his boring campaign messaging. In a sense, Trump and his advisers are testing the legal limits of liberal democracy. It is all about trying to justify the right of an authoritarian demagogue to impose his private ambition on America’s long established democratic institutions and traditions. Simply put, a political deviant and serial transgressor wants to return as president. Twice impeached, severally accused of infractions ranging from campaign fund malfeasance to dubious business records and dodgy book keeping, Mr. Trump insists on his entitlement to the throne. Whichever way the legal outcomes go, a lot of issues in American democracy are likely to come under severe test with each verdict in Trump’s litany of court cases.
By far the more concerning issue in the United States now is the series of pro-Palestinian protests and demonstrations now sweeping through the campuses of American universities. These are not just ordinary universities. They are mostly Ivy League universities. From Colombia to Yale, from Harvard to New York University, UCLA, University of Southern California to University of Pennsylvania, and Emory University, large groups of students of diverse nationalities have trooped out daily to protest against Israel’s violation of the rights of the Palestinian people in its prolonged war on Gaza and other Palestinian enclaves.
So far, the protests have disrupted normal academic and other activities on the various campuses. The police has made numerous arrests of the protesters in a bid to restore normalcy. Some of the universities have opted for closure and discontinuation of academic activities to avoid the protests degenerating into violent encounters and disruptions.
The pro-Palestinian protests have multiple implications for America’s democratic culture. The right to freedom of association and expression remains inviolable. But the responsibility of the political leadership to pursue foreign and domestic policies in line with the national interest are sacrosanct. The students have a right to protest actions and policies of government that run counter to their convictions. Normal civility demands that such protests should not be violent or infringe on the rights of those who do not share these convictions to go about their business.
In the affected campuses, however, the groundswell of these protests have been so huge that no normal academic and social activities can proceed on these campuses. While police and law enforcement have a responsibility to maintain law and order and protect the rights of students who may not share the beliefs and convictions of the protesters or want to join the protests, the scope and spread of the protests indicate a clear political line on the part of the student population. While no one expects the protesters to have carry the day, it is also true that no responsible political establishment can ride rough shod on the feelings of such a large body of protesters.
Throughout American history, the university campuses have served as theatres for the expression of political views and beliefs that often run counter to the political temper of Washington. On the Vietnam war, on Civil rights, on Black Lives Matter, on police brutality and systemic racism and variety of other sensitive public issues, the University campuses in the United states have consistently indicated an independent line of thinking that often runs counter to the main current of official Washington. Through these protests and demonstrations, the university campuses have been able, over time , to pressure politicians in Washington to at least listen to contrary views. At critical moments, such protests have succeeded in getting the government to reconsider aspects of foreign and domestic policy.
Already, some key politicians from Washington have visited a number of protesting campuses to appeal for calm and press home their perspective. The students have however stood their grounds just as the pro-Israeli politicians have pressed their arguments. It is not likely that any argument will be strong enough to justify the long standing oppression of the Palestinians especially the blockage of their right to a free and independent homeland.
The present scene on America’s university campuses is reminiscent of happier days on Nigeria’s university campuses. There was a time from the immediate post independence days to the days of military rule when Nigerian university campuses served as the catalyst of social and political ideas for national unity and progress. For instance, It was Nigerian students at the University of Ibadan who staged massive protests to compel the newly independent Nigerian government against signing a defense pact with the departing British colonial government.
In the days of military dictatorship, Nigerian university students served as the remaining voice of democratic instincts. Students campaigned for the rights of common people, against authoritarian impositions and the habitual arbitrariness of military rule. Students protested against frequent petroleum price increases, against unlawful detentions of opposition figures. When in 1978 General Obasanjo’s education minister, Colonel Ahmadu Ali, tried to increase university tuition frees, in Nigerian universities, students rose in unison during the “Ali Must Go” demonstrations and pressed for his removal from office.
From the 1960s to early 1990s, the Nigerian university campus remained a litmus ground for testing public policies. Political and military leaders sought a certain degree of acceptability among university students and their lecturers. Understandably the Nigerian university campus also became the hotbed of radical ideas. During the ideological polarization of the Cold War era, our universities became a friendly terrain for radical progressive anti bourgeois ideas. This led to an understandable radicalization of student union politics and even the politics of organized unionism among academics. The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) became an arrowhead of radical student unionism. These were the origins of ASUU’s aggressive trade unionism which has largely survived to recent times.
There was consequently a certain unanimity of perspectives on national issues among students in campuses all over the country. From Ife to Nsukka, from University of Ibadan to Ahmadu Bello University, from Port Harcourt to Calabar and Ilorin, Nigerian students and academics were united in their perspectives on military rule, corruption, and the plight of the poor and the commonality of poverty among underprivileged Nigerians.
As undergraduates then, we shared a common ideal of a better nation. We trooped out to protest unkind policies. We faced police truncheons and tear gas and even military jackboots and live bullets. We did not habour these silly divisions along ethnicity, religion and region. We did not despise the poor but fought for the smashing of the chains of poverty. We thought our youth and idealism was enough to transform the country into a happy place for all. For us then, the Nigerian revolution was an achievable and imminent possibility. Our idealism contrasted with whatever ideas were fueling the policies of politicians and military leaders in Lagos and later Abuja. We held strong views on contemporary issues and most times embraced alternative truths to those of governments of the day.
We took a stand on most domestic and foreign policy issues that were burning central at different times. We took a stand on Southern Africa; on independence for Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola. We vehemently stood shoulder to shoulder with the Murtala and Obasanjo governments on Apartheid. We stood with the world on the Palestinian struggle and the heroic stance of the then Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) of Yasser Arafat.
Key politicians understood the crucial place of the campus as a vital platform for the galvanization and aggregation of ideas for national development. Key politicians therefore often chose to deliver the annual Convocation lectures of the various key universities as a way of generating novel ideas for the development of the nation. Such strategic lectures also served as means of bridging the distance between town and gown and as praxis in the struggle for a better society.
It would be recalled that at the height of the debate of how best to accommodate the military in future power arrangements, Nigeria’s first President Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe used the opportunity of the convocation lecture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, to advocate the theory of Diarchy as a power sharing arrangement between civilian politicians and military leaders. Similarly, Chief Obafemi Awolowo used one of the convocation lectures at Ife to question the efficacy of fruitless probes of past governments as an anti corruption tool. Those were the glorious days of the Nigerian university campus. Then they were universities. There were scholars, patriotic students and as Achebe lamented, there was once a nation.
In today’s Nigeria, the campus is virtually dead either as a centre of national consciousness or an incubator of new ideas. The universities have died as cultural laboratories or as the breeding ground of a responsible national elite. The Nigerian university campus has died as a center of serious positive thinking or purposive national action for progress. In place of fiery nationalism and idealism, we now have a student unionism that apes and imitates the decadent culture of our nasty politics.
Contest for NANS leadership has become a sad replica of the politics of ‘stomach infrastructure’ and money bazaars. When elected into office, the leadership of our students unions want to drive huge SUVs like Abuja politicians. They appoint innumerable personal aides with nomenclatures borrowed from our wasteful national political culture and idiom. The broad mass of our students are now united by cultism, cyber crimes, bloody rituals and killer squads in a hunt for human body parts for ritual.
Our student population has degenerated into conclaves of cults, cyber crimes and a descent into the dark precincts of occultism, witchcraft and ritual. Places established to pursue enlightenment and modernism have now become covens of modern day witches and ritual murderers. At other times, the only language that flies around our campuses is that of quick mega cash fuelled by the hunger for designer clothing, outrageous automobiles and luxury mansions. Every undergraduate aspires to become an internet ‘influencer’, stage musician, and naked model or narcotics courier irrespective of the courses they are registered to study.
Among the academics themselves, we now have serial racketeering for contracts, a thriving trade of blackmail of ‘sex for marks’. Professors are now standing trial for openly blackmailing their female students into sexual rumps sometimes in open offices. The deployment of juju and cultism for promotions and appointments have replaced the previous dedication to merit, national good and the pursuit of academic excellence.
As America’s university campuses continue to witness a wave of protests of universal moral condemnation of America’s support for Israel’s systematic genocide in Palestine, we need to look again at what has killed the Nigerian university. Three ugly forces have invaded our university campuses: dark money, bad politics and godless religion. To rescue our universities and redirect them back to being factors of national unity, progress and progressive development, we require a political leadership with the will to chase away and neutralize this trinity of negativity.
Dr. Amuta, a Nigerian journalist, intellectual and literary critic, was previously a senior lecturer in literature and communications at the universities of Ife and Port Harcourt.
Nigeria’s now perennial insecurity has been damaged by political laziness. Every two- penny politician has developed a habit of weaponizing insecurity as political language. In the process, very little effort or rigour is devoted to the reality of what we are dealing with. Even those who are paid to keep us safe tend to resort to simplistic solutions to what is clearly a complex problem. Everyone seems to be mimicking politicians, talking frequently about insecurity as if the problem will go away the more we talk about it.
National insecurity as we have come to know it has grown in dimension and scope over the last twelve years or so. When factions of jihadist terrorists invade local governments in parts of Borno or Yobe state, we are dealing with threats to Nigeria’s sovereignty by an adversary that may indeed be ‘external’ with inputs from ignorant local zealots. They take and hold territory, convert citizens into dissidents and collect taxes and levies and in the process extract loyalties that ordinarily belong to a sovereign authority. This level of national insecurity belongs in the realm of external aggression by a concerted foreign adversary. It does not matter whether it recruits and arms our citizens to do its bidding or draws inspiration from an external multinational ideology such as fanatical Islamist fundamentalism. We must call it its real name and design and deploy containment instruments and strategies that befit an external aggression.
With the onset of the Boko Haram insurgency in parts of the North East, Nigeria can be said to have been involved in a counter insurgency war for the better part of the past twelve years. In the process, Boko Haram has sometimes been degraded, reinforced, splintered or been acquired by ISWAP and other franchises born and bred in the Middle East and nurtured in the turbulent Sahel. Have we been winning or losing that war? Yes and no. We have at least retaken most of the local governments that the terrorists initially acquired as part of an evil caliphate in the hot days of Al Qaida and ISIS. But the fact that twelve years after the inauguration of Boko Haram, factions of this movement are still taking huge numbers of hostages and razing buildings is an indictment of whatever effort we have exerted so far.
In the immediate neighboring precincts of the insurgency war- Katsina, Kaduna, Zamfara- hybrid forms of insurgent insecurity have taken shape. Banditry, quantum abductions and kidnapping for ransom are now recognized forms of national insecurity. Initially, these hybrid forms acted as retail arms of the larger jihadist insurgency. They used to supply them with hostages, sha ransoms and collected revenue and hide under their ideological umbrella for greater political relevance. Over time, however, the bandits and other downstream criminal gangs have come unto their own. They mostly now operate as independent criminal enterprises with a purely commercial purpose. This form of insecurity has graduated into a criminal enterprise. They carry out daring raids, collect huge ransoms which is reinvested in more arms for further raids. The industry grows.
In this form, agents of insecurity have sometimes reached for recognition by state governments and agencies of national security. Some local bandit squads have in the recent past reached understandings with individual state governments and even posed for photo opportunities with them after these meetings. Implicit in such unholy alliances is a certain illicit power sharing arrangement. Under these arrangements, embattled state governments are known to have ceded parts of their territory to bandit squads, allowing them to collect revenue from locals and to wield authority over some local governments literally unchallenged.
This form of national insecurity is inherently dangerous because it cedes parts of the national sovereign space and authority to non -state actors and in the process accords them space and scope to disturb the peace, make lots of money and whittle down the capacity of security agencies to exercise total control over the national sovereign space. More dangerously, illicit non -state actors partake of national resources to make the nation even more ungovernable while also compromising segments and aspects of national security structures and personnel.
The atmosphere of insecurity created by the proliferation and free reign of bandit squads and roving armed cartels has led to a spread in the supply of small to medium scale arms. Retail editions of trouble makers like armed robbers, small time kidnappers and urban cults have found an atmosphere of general insecurity that is both lucrative and in vogue. An industry of sorts has been born. Herdsmen that were originally engaged in herding and the livestock trade have since found kidnapping, armed robbery and abductions more lucrative than escorting scraggy herds around the nation.
We cannot fail to add to this picture the thriving political industry and its inherent criminal offshoots. Political thugs, licensed state militias and all manner of private armies have in the last twenty four years of democracy come into being. Political supremacy in most parts of the country has come with the help of armed thugs generously supplied with weapons, narcotics and other dangerous substances. In post election periods, these political agents of violence tend to find work for their hands anduse for their weapons in sundry criminal undertakings. In an atmosphere where employment is scarce and easy money quickly runs dry, the political industry has perhaps inadvertently been fueling the atmosphere of national insecurity which the same politicians return to convert into campaign issues in the next election cycle.
The fierce competition for political vantage placement has also led to the growth of ethnic, regional and other separatist movements. They generally start out by shouting for recognition and relevance in a national space that deliberately ignores extant disquiet. When no one seems to be listening, the rhetoric of separatist agitators assumes an incendiary tone. Soon enough, the more determined ones set up armed militias since the authorities tend to listen more when their monopoly of violence is challenged by an equally fierce contender for power and political space. Armed separatist movements have in the last ten years therefore added their voice and muscle to the spread of violence as a means of political expression in the country. IPOB, ESN and the various Niger Delta militias belong in this sphere.
This is the effective backdrop to the current situation in which governments at nearly every level seem to have been held to ransom by all these forms of insecurity all over the country. The sheer expanse of the insecurity landscape is more vast than the entire security asset base of the country can deal with. Therefore, bandits and all sorts of criminals are fairly certain that the security agencies cannot easily interrupt their operations let alone effectively trail or arrest them.
There is no lack of response from government. Endless meetings have taken place between politicians and service chiefs. The two chambers of the National Assembly have met severally with the service chief. State governors have met repeatedly with the president with the matter of insecurity topping the agenda of every meeting. The Federal government has gone to considerable length to acquire weapons of war from all corners of the globe to combat what has become a systemic insecurity. It has become systemic because it has become self- regenerating, having become an economic sub sector which requires self sustainability to drive itself as a series of economic activities.
Last month, however, an emergency meeting of the president and state governors was prompted by an increase in incidents of insecurity in and around the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja. The most consequential decision of that meeting was a decision to begin the implementation of the long canvassed introduction of State Police as a silver bullet to end insecurity in the country.
One of the strongest arguments advanced by advocates of a State Police system is local knowledge and proximity to the community origins of criminality around the country. This argument is not new. Nor are we just being introduced to perspectives about how to solve insecurity in the country.
Given the picture of the multi dimensional nature of our insecurity, no single item agenda can deal with the problem. State Police is fraught with many weaknesses. It is likely to be commandeered by ambitious state governors into private political weapons. The operatives could become terror squads who use their new found power and uniforms to torment innocent people. State Police can further divide the country, terrorize the people they are supposed to protect and reduce the effectiveness of the existing national police force. Misuse of the powers of the State Police can further divide the country. After all, before the civil war, we had regional police formations. They became part of the divisive forces that had to be neutralized to reunify the country in 1970.
It is undeniable that one of the benefits of over four decades of military rule and the civil war is the emergence of a unified police and military command. That benefit cannot be wiped away by the present anxiety over insecurity. Nothing has so far happened in our national security situation that invalidates or overrides the advantages of national integration in matters of police or military command and national security control. On the contrary, what our situation requires is a serious interrogation of the overall internal security situation in the country to determine why the existing structure has not quite served us well enough.
We are under policed. The police has been overwhelmed for years in terms of personnel and equipment. Equipment and recruitment in the police has not matched our population growth and the rate of sophistication of the criminal enterprise. Similarly, the military has in the post civil war era found itself in roles that have degraded its operational capability and professional advancement. The involvement of the military and entire gamut of national security apparatus in internal security has militated against real professional development of the various services. Our military is today involved in civil security operations in all of our 36 states and Abuja.
As indicated earlier, the profile of our internal security challenges presents a complex picture that may not have fully dawned on the present state. At the end of the civil war, the enemy was either an external aggressor or internal criminals. The civil populace wanted to be at peace after the trauma of war. While a war -tested military was adequate for the former role, the police was more than adequate for the latter task of keeping the peace. The military is defined in its role. Its rules of engagement are self -defining: defend or be conquered. The police is a civil force with rules of engagement circumscribed by democracy and the civil rights of free citizens.
Towards the end of the Babangida regime, a different internal security picture began to emerge. A different type of civil unrest became more manifest. Inter communal violence began to feature among groups that had coexisted for years. Between the Jukun and their neighbours, in the Zango Kataf area of Southern Kaduna, in parts of the Niger Delta etc. Sections of the country began to witness problems of ethno national integration. Even within the newly created states, issues of inter communal co -existence began to show up. There was a perception then than the task of nation building was largely uncompleted and still needed to be fine -tuned. A different type of trouble maker was emerging. Armed militants intent on challenging the federal might were in the horizon.
The new forms of violent self -assertion were more than the police could deal with but a little less ferocious than what a full military engagement was required to deal with. The necessity was therefore for an intermediate force; something not as tame and civil as the police and also not as ferocious and terminal as the military. Thus was born the idea of the National Guard. Unfortunately, this idea came too late in Babangida’s troubled political transition programme. Opposition to the possibility of a Babangida self- perpetuation ploy also became part of the opposition to the idea of a National Guard. For the political class, no good or disinterested idea could come from the beleaguered military administration. Both were thrown away with the same birth water.
Here we are once again with an insecurity challenge that literally re-writes the challenge that was envisioned by the authors of the National Guard over 30 years ago. The idea of the National Guard was to have a uniform national organization but with substantial state government control on deployment. It should be a mid intensity force that is civil enough to realize that the criminals and trouble makers in each state are first and foremost Nigerians with full civic rights. It however needs to be taken more seriously than the police at the local government office who separates domestic fights and settles quarrels among siblings.
The National Guard should be under the ultimate control of the president as commander in chief without whose endorsement no state governor has the power to deploy the National Guard. But the National Guard needs to be composed of state contingents who are familiar with the local terrain.
In the United States, the National Guard is an offshoot of the army. It is made up of army reservists who are called up for specific tours of duty for specific lengths of time annually. In times of national emergency above the call of the police but less intense than requiring the military, the army can advise the president to call in the National Guard. The desirable Nigerian National Guard should be a variant of this format.
On no account must we establish and equip a separate state police force and place it under the control of our emergent crop of imperial governors. That would be an invitation to quick anarchy.
Dr. Amuta, a Nigerian journalist, intellectual and literary critic, was previously a senior lecturer in literature and communications at the universities of Ife and Port Harcourt.
In a significant move towards fortifying Nigeria’s economic strategies, Dr. Gazali Muhammad Abubakar has been appointed as the Technical Advisor to President Ahmad Tinubu of Nigeria on Development Finance. This announcement comes on the heels of his impactful tenure as the Executive Secretary/CEO of the National Agricultural Development Fund.
Dr. Muhammad, an alumnus of Bayero University, Kano (BUK), where he earned a B.Sc. in Economics, the Enugu State University of Science and Technology, where he bagged an M.Sc in Economics with distinction, further solidified his academic prowess with a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Bakhtalruda, Sudan. Notably, his interest in Islamic finance, coupled with a diverse array of professional qualifications, positions him as a thought leader in the realm of economic development.
Prior to this prestigious appointment, Dr. Gazali has held pivotal roles, including the position of Senior Special Advisor to the Managing Director of NIRSAL Micro Finance Bank. This experience reflects his commitment to navigating the intricate landscape of financial institutions, underscoring his ability to contribute significantly to the nation’s economic vision.
The expectations surrounding Dr. Gazali’s new role are nothing short of transformative for comprehensive national development. With a background steeped in agricultural development, he is anticipated to spearhead policies and initiatives that bolster national development, particularly focusing on sustainable growth strategies.
Dr. Gazali’s expertise in Islamic finance is expected to bring a fresh perspective to economic policies, potentially fostering financial inclusivity and ethical financial practices as integral components of Nigeria’s developmental agenda. No doubt, his strategic guidance is anticipated to extend beyond conventional economic measures, reaching grassroots levels and ensuring that development is inclusive and impactful across various sectors.
With this appointment Dr Gazali emerges as a key player in shaping Nigeria’s economic landscape, and its impact is poised to extend beyond the corridors of power and the urban centers of Nigeria, reaching the grassroots level and becoming a driving force for national development. Through his strategic guidance, Nigeria looks forward to a renewed emphasis on financial inclusivity, creating opportunities for a broader spectrum of the population to actively participate in economic activities.
Furthermore, the fight against poverty in Nigeria is set to receive a boost under Dr. Gazali’s leadership. His comprehensive approach, honed through diverse experiences in the financial sector, is expected to drive initiatives that uplift marginalized communities and create sustainable solutions to alleviate poverty.
As Nigeria charts its course towards economic resilience and inclusivity, Dr. Gazali’s appointment signals a strategic move by the Federal Government of Nigeria to harness the expertise needed for comprehensive and impactful economic development. His tenure as Technical Advisor is anticipated to leave an indelible mark on Nigeria’s pursuit of sustained growth, financial inclusivity, and poverty alleviation.
