Nigeria, June 7 -- The terrorists want citizens to conclude the state cannot protect them. The blame game in Abuja is proving their point.

A mathematics teacher named Michael Oyedokun went to work in Oyo State last month and never returned home. Gunmen stormed three schools in Oriire local government area, seized dozens of pupils and teachers, and killed him. Days earlier, and a thousand kilometres north, bandits in Katsina ambushed Rabe Abubakar, a retired Major General who once served as the public voice of our armed forces, and took him and his wife at gunpoint on an open road. In Ekiti State, sixteen worshippers, two of them young boys, have now spent more than a month in a kidnappers' camp. A ransom was paid. The captors demanded mo...