9/11 Anniversary: Twenty Five Years After The Towers Fell, The World Still Hasn’t Learned The Right Lesson

by Damian Ugwu

Twenty five years is long enough for a wound to close and for a scar to form in its place. It is also long enough for the meaning of an event to be quietly rewritten by the people who survived it. When the twin towers collapsed on a clear Tuesday morning in September 2001, nearly three thousand people died in under two hours, and the world that woke up the next day was not the same one that had gone to sleep the night before. A quarter of a century on, it is worth asking honestly what that day actually taught us, as opposed to what governments, including my own in Nigeria, found convenient to claim it taught us.

The immediate lesson, the one etched into memorials and repeated in solemn ceremonies every September, is about grief and resilience. That lesson is real and it deserves its place. But there is a second lesson, less comfortable and far less often spoken aloud, about what fear does to institutions that are supposed to protect rights rather than suspend them. In the years after 2001, dozens of countries passed emergency and counterterrorism legislation modeled loosely on measures introduced in Washington and London. Many of those laws are still on the books today, long after the emergency that justified them has faded from memory. Indefinite detention, expanded surveillance powers, and the criminalisation of vaguely defined “terrorism related” speech became normal features of governance in places that had never experienced anything resembling an attack on that scale. The war on terror did not stay in Afghanistan or Iraq. It became a template, and templates travel.

For human rights advocates, this is the anniversary’s sharpest lesson. Rights are rarely taken away all at once through dramatic confrontation. They are eroded gradually, through laws passed in a moment of genuine public fear and then left quietly in place long after the fear itself has passed. Guantanamo Bay remains open a quarter of a century later, holding men who have never been charged with a crime, a standing monument to the idea that security and due process were once treated as opposites rather than partners. Advocates who work on detention, torture, and due process know this pattern intimately, because it repeats itself in every region of the world under different names and different justifications.

Nigeria has its own version of this story, and it did not need September 11 to write it, though the post 2001 security architecture certainly shaped how it was told. The Terrorism Prevention Act and its amendments, passed in response to real and devastating threats from Boko Haram and other armed groups in the north east, contain provisions on detention and evidence that rights groups have flagged repeatedly for their breadth. Security agencies have at times used counterterrorism powers against journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens whose actual offence was inconvenient speech rather than violence. This is not a uniquely Nigerian failing. It is the global pattern working itself out in a Nigerian context, proof that the lessons of 2001 travelled far beyond the countries that were directly attacked.

There is a third lesson, and it concerns the world beyond the countries doing the legislating. The war on terror reshaped how the international community talks about intervention, sovereignty, and whose security counts. Civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia over the past twenty five years number in the hundreds of thousands, a toll that rarely receives the ceremony or the annual remembrance given to the victims of that September morning in New York and Washington. That asymmetry of grief is itself a lesson about whose lives are treated as newsworthy and whose are treated as an unfortunate cost of doing business. Any honest accounting of the last twenty five years has to hold both truths at once, that the attacks were a monstrous act of mass murder against civilians, and that the response to them produced its own enormous and largely uncounted civilian toll elsewhere.

None of this is an argument against remembering the day itself, or against the genuine grief that still surrounds it for the families involved. It is an argument for remembering it accurately, which means resisting the temptation to treat the anniversary purely as a story about heroism and recovery while quietly setting aside what the response to that day cost, and continues to cost, in places far from Manhattan.

For Nigerians in particular, the anniversary offers a specific and useful discipline. We know from our own history, from the Civil War era decrees to the more recent counterterrorism statutes, how easily emergency powers outlive the emergencies that produced them. The task for civil society here is not simply to oppose security legislation on principle, since real threats do exist and deserve a real response. The task is to insist, loudly and repeatedly, on sunset clauses, judicial oversight, and independent review, so that the exceptional measure of today does not quietly become the permanent architecture of tomorrow. That insistence is not disloyalty to the victims of terrorism. It is loyalty to everyone else who might otherwise become collateral damage in the effort to prevent the next attack.

Twenty-five years is enough distance to see a pattern clearly. The question now is whether governments, advocates, and citizens choose to act on what that pattern shows us, or whether we simply wait for the fiftieth anniversary to ask the same questions again.

SOURCE: SAHARA REPORTERS