Nigeria, April 26 -- A nation does not declare its own decline. It performs normalcy - until the performance can no longer hold. What follows is not an announcement, but a pattern - visible to those willing to look beyond the performance.

Last week, this column offered the definitive articulation of The Insecurity Triad - the convergent system through which kidnapping finances violence, banditry governs territory, and terrorism reshapes the ideological order. It also made a promise: that the Trinity of State Decay would follow as the macro-diagnostic lens - the theory that explains not merely what the Triad does, but why it is structurally possible - why the state does not stop it. Why, in important senses, the state cannot.

This is tha...