Pat Utomi, a chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress, has raised the alarm that Nigeria is experiencing its first real civil war.

According to him, more people are killed in Nigeria every day than died in “Iraq in a week during the height of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

He also explained that Nigeria could not afford a war because the damage would terrible, sparing nobody.

“No country affords a war. The damage from war is always so terrible that nobody can afford it. I read a few statements as a result of public opinion about how we, as a country, can’t afford another war, but the naked truth is that we are already at war,” Mr Utomi admitted.

Emphasising that the country is already in a civil war, the professor of Political Science asserted, “Nigeria is in a civil war. So, let us not deceive ourselves – Nigeria is in a war. Unfortunately, the victims of that war, preponderantly, are the powerless. So, we don’t count its toll well enough. But, technically, Nigeria is in a rolling civil war countrywide.”

He shared an experience of the country’s civil war in 1967 and how it was largely unknown in some parts of the country.

“When I was a young person, I grew up inside of Biafra, when the civil war began. One year later, I was in Nigeria, still growing up. I was living in Lagos, going to school in Ibadan; we did not even know there was a war going on a few kilometres from where we were.

“All we saw were clips on TV while the normal war propaganda was going on with ‘One Nigeria! Gowon, go on with one Nigeria!’ We were dancing away with James Brown’s music in Lagos. But this particular war we are in now, everyone in Nigeria is at war, and it is everywhere,” Mr Utomi pointed out in an interview published on Sunday in Punch.

Corroborating his point, he further stated, “It was just like when the Boko Haram insurgents started, people down South were saying, ‘There is one funny thing going on in the North-East; who are those ones killing each other?’

“But now, people are being killed everywhere. So, this is the first real civil war in Nigeria.”