Kwame Ture was talking about Palestine. He said the struggle is not a humanitarian issue. He said reducing it to food parcels and ceasefire appeals strips it of its political core. He said what is happening there is settler-colonial expansion: land confiscation, forced displacement, enclosure, militarized governance, the integration of territory into a global security and arms economy. He said this is not accidental. It is structural.

Then he named the structure. Capitalism.

I watched the video and I thought of Nigeria. We do the same thing here. We reduce our own struggle to a humanitarian issue. To poverty. To corruption. To bad leadership. To the need for more foreign aid, more investment, more prayers, more youth programs, more anti-corruption agencies. We name the symptoms and miss the disease. We ask for food parcels when the land is being stolen. We ask for ceasefires when the structure that produces the violence is still standing.

This is the trap Ture was naming. The humanitarian trap. The trap that turns a political struggle into a charitable appeal. The trap that makes you feel the pain without seeing the architecture. The trap that lets you weep for Gaza and still invest in the arms economy that bombs it. The trap that lets you mourn Nigeria and still deposit the profits in the banks that keep it poor.

Ture's line is uncompromising: anti-colonialism is nothing but anti-capitalism. He means that colonialism was not a moral failure. It was a property machine. Land seizure. Labor extraction. Resource extraction. The expansion of markets. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a global elite while dispossessing the many. That is not a side effect of capitalism. That is capitalism doing what it was built to do.

And Nigeria? We got the flag without getting the answer. The British lowered their flag and raised ours. The land remained seized. The labor remained extracted. The resources remained exported. The markets remained someone else's. The only thing that changed was the color of the administrator.

We have been debating capitalism and socialism ever since, as if the question is which imported ideology to wear. But the real question is whether we have ever had a Nigerian economy. A Nigerian currency. A Nigerian budget. A Nigerian decision about who owns the oil beneath the Niger Delta, who controls the ports, who sets the price of the naira, who decides whether a child in Kano learns in Hausa or in English, whether a farmer in Benue can sell her yams without a middleman taking everything, whether a young person in Aba can build a factory without begging a generator for light.

If the answer is still "someone in London, someone in New York, someone in Abuja who does not use the roads they build," then neither capitalism nor socialism will save us. A socialist party that controls the oil from the center and sends the profits through the same patronage network is not socialism. It is colonialism with red flags. A capitalist economy that allows foreign companies to own the mines and pay local workers in survival is not capitalism. It is colonialism with a stock exchange.

Ture was not asking us to pick a label. He was asking us to name the system. Because once you name it, you can no longer pretend that charity or elections or foreign investment will dismantle it. You have to ask the harder question: who controls the land, the labor, the currency, the state?

Sankara asked: what is enough? Nyerere asked: what did we already have before they told us we had nothing? Ture asked: what is the opposite of the system that made you poor? They did not agree on everything. They did not have to. They were asking the same question from different rooms.

I think Nigeria needs to ask the question in its own room. Not as a humanitarian appeal. Not as an investment pitch. Not as a debate between capitalism and socialism imported from Europe. As a question about power. In Lagos, in Kano, in Enugu, in Port Harcourt, where the people who will live with the answer are the people who get to speak.

Kwame Ture is dead now. He died in 1998 in Conakry, Guinea, still saying the same thing. The video is still there. The question is still there. And Nigeria is still here, rich in everything except the will to name what is hurting it.

I hope we name it before the next generation inherits our silence.