By Seyi Gesinde
July 29, 2026
History has an amusing habit.
It enjoys embarrassing certainty.
Yesterday’s loudest conclusions often become today’s quietest apologies.
For months, Oyo’s proposed surveillance aircraft flew only in public arguments.
Not in the skies.
They became political ghosts.
Some insisted they never existed.
Others declared that the approved N7.763 billion had simply vanished into another familiar Nigerian story.
Where are the aircraft?
That question echoed across radio stations.
Television studios.
Newspaper columns.
Social media.
Beer parlours.
Political platforms.
The verdict, in many quarters, had already been delivered.
There were no aircraft.
Only headlines.
Then history intervened.
The aircraft arrived.
Quietly.
Without arguing with anyone.
That is one of history’s oldest habits.
It rarely debates.
It simply appears.
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Yet before asking what these aircraft will achieve, fairness demands one acknowledgement.
Governor Seyi Makinde deserves credit for deciding that Oyo’s security challenges should not remain Abuja’s burden alone.
For years, many governors have responded to insecurity largely with appeals to the Federal Government.
Makinde chose a different path.
He responded with an investment.
Whether history ultimately judges it a wise investment will depend not on the purchase itself, but on the peace it delivers.
He invested in an intelligence capability few state governments have attempted to acquire.
History has never mocked initiative.
It has only insisted that initiative eventually submits itself to results.
The arrival of Governor Seyi Makinde’s surveillance aircraft therefore does not end the conversation.
It begins another.
A more important one.
Perhaps a more uncomfortable one.
Now that Seyi’s surveillance jets are here…
What exactly changes?
That question deserves more than politics.
It deserves philosophy.
The aircraft themselves are innocent.
Machines possess neither ideology nor ambition.
They merely obey the hands and institutions directing them.
A surveillance aircraft has never arrested a kidnapper.
It has never prosecuted a terrorist.
It has never convicted a bandit.
It sees.
It tracks.
It reports.
Human institutions must complete the story.
Thomas Hobbes argued that people establish government because security is too important to be left to chance.
More than three centuries later, his argument still refuses to grow old.
Security has never depended merely on better instruments.
It has depended on better authority.
Nigeria is hardly unfamiliar with military aircraft.
President Muhammadu Buhari inducted twelve A,29 Super Tucano aircraft into the Nigerian Air Force.
President Bola Tinubu has continued expanding the nation’s aerial capability with additional surveillance aircraft, helicopters, and combat platforms.
Yet Nigerians still ask anxious questions before embarking on many journeys.
Bandits still negotiate territory.
Kidnappers still negotiate ransom.
Terrorists still negotiate fear.
One begins to suspect that humanity has become remarkably successful at inventing machines.
It is still struggling to perfect institutions.
Then comes another question.
Oyo is no small jurisdiction.
Ibadan.
Oyo.
Ogbomoso.
Oke Ogun.
Ibarapa.
Five geopolitical zones.
Thousands of square kilometres.
Millions of people.
Can two surveillance aircraft watch them all?
Perhaps not.
Must they?
Perhaps that is the wrong question.
The better one is whether those aircraft can become the eyes of an intelligence system capable of seeing danger early enough for those on the ground to act decisively.
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Governor Makinde is an engineer.
Engineers understand systems.
Pilots fly aircraft.
Governments do something far more demanding.
They make institutions work.
An aircraft that spots a kidnapper has completed only half its assignment.
The remaining half belongs to intelligence officers.
Amotekun.
The police.
The military.
Prosecutors.
The courts.
Otherwise, surveillance merely produces better pictures of crime.
History has watched nations buy impressive machines before.
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It has also watched determined governments transform those machines into public confidence.
The difference has rarely been technology.
It has almost always been leadership.
The aircraft have finally answered yesterday’s question.
They existed.
They must now answer tomorrow’s.
Not with elegant flights across Oyo’s skies.
But with quieter forests.
Forests no longer serving as sanctuaries for criminals.
Safer highways reclaimed by law abiding citizens.
Kidnappers with nowhere left to hide.
No kidnappings.
More confident farmers.
More secure communities.
Communities living without the shadow of abduction.
Fear giving way to freedom of movement.
History has already recorded the purchase.
It now waits to record the outcome.
For civilisation has never measured the greatness of a people by the sophistication of the machines they acquired.
Only by the wisdom with which they used them.
