By Hannatu Bilyaminu
Arewa is tired. Not the kind of tiredness that sleep can fix, but the kind that settles into the bones and shows itself in lowered voices and in how mothers count their children before dawn and again before dusk.
We are tired of bad news arriving before morning prayers. Tired of names turning into numbers. Tired of asking where it happened before asking who, because the where already tells us how likely justice is to follow. Tired of knowing which roads to avoid, which hours are dangerous, and which villages have learned to sleep lightly.
Recently, news broke that a woman and her six children were killed in Charanci, Kano. Not long before that, we heard of a boy who killed a mu’azzin, ending a life in a place meant for prayer. Across Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Niger, and Katsina, banditry has become a constant drumbeat of fear. Schoolgirls are taken at will, as though schools have become human donor centres where armed men arrive, choose as many children as they wish, and leave without consequence.
Phone snatchers have killed, maimed, and injured people over devices not worth the weapons used to take lives. Gang fights erupt without warning. Ethno-religious violence feels perpetually imminent. We have normalized living on edge. We now grieve consistently and collectively.
Fear has become ordinary here. It rides with us on highways, sits beside us in markets, and follows us into spaces that once felt sacred. Schools, farms, mosques, and homes are no longer guaranteed places of safety. We no longer announce fear. We simply adjust our lives around it.
A mother waits by a school gate in Niger State, her hands trembling as she whispers prayers until her children return. In Katsina, a farmer digs a grave for his brother, only to receive news that another village has been attacked. In temporary shelters across Zamfara, children grow up believing that fear and flight are the natural rhythm of life. These are not isolated stories. They are the shared language of grief in northern Nigeria, where banditry and terror have turned mourning into a collective experience.
Grief is usually private. It is the tears shed behind closed doors and the silence around a dinner table with one chair missing. But here, grief spills into the open. It is carried in the hush of emptied classrooms, the silence of deserted markets, and the weariness of camps where families wait for a return that may never come. Loss arrives too fast and too often for individual mourning to suffice, so communities grieve together.
For some time now, two stories have haunted me, robbing me of ease during the day and sleep at night. The first is of a young girl who was violated and then groomed to revere her assaulter. The second is of a toddler among the 53 people kidnapped from a village close to home. Frightened in captivity, he cried often, as toddlers do, perhaps from hunger, fear, loneliness, or all three. Unable to endure it, the kidnappers ended his life in the presence of his mother. I was told she lost her sanity after witnessing the horror.
How did we arrive at a society that snuffs out the lives of its weakest so quietly, so mercilessly? How safe are we really, when we believe these horrors only happen to other people?
Behind every statistic is a wound. More than two million people have been displaced in the northeast. Tens of thousands have been killed by insurgency and banditry. Over 11,000 schools have closed because it is no longer safe for children to learn. On paper, these numbers appear cold. In reality, they are empty chairs, abandoned farms, and the haunting quiet of children robbed of laughter.
What makes this grief especially heavy is its relentlessness. One man told me, “We dig graves in advance now. We do not even have time to mourn properly. Before we bury one person, news comes that another village has been attacked.” This is what collective grief feels like: an unending wave that allows no pause to breathe and no space to heal.
Yet this grief is not only emotional. It is the seed of a looming humanitarian crisis. Families displaced from their land cannot plant or harvest, deepening hunger. Schools that remain shut deny a generation the chance to grow beyond this cycle of violence. In overcrowded camps, children learn trauma before they learn to read. Left unaddressed, this grief will shape not only memories, but entire futures.
What frightens me most is the numbness settling in. When killings become headlines we scroll past and funerals grow so frequent they no longer shock us, we risk normalizing the unacceptable. A society that stops mourning begins to lose its humanity.
Northern Nigeria does not need sympathy. It needs responsibility. This is not a regional problem; it is a national failure. Government must move beyond statements to visible and sustained action. Justice must prevail in cases of murder, abduction, and serious injury. When crimes go unpunished, violence learns that it can wait out outrage. Hanifa was murdered over four years ago, and justice has yet to be served. That delay sends a dangerous message to both victims and perpetrators.
The government must also confront, honestly and decisively, the crisis of drug trafficking and substance abuse. Many of these crimes are committed by people who have lost, or at least suspended, their humanity under the weight of addiction and desperation. Policing without rehabilitation will fail. Rehabilitation without accountability will fail. We need both. This includes stronger border control, community-based intelligence, functional rehabilitation centres, and the serious prosecution of traffickers, not just users.
Protection of schools, farms, and roads must be proactive rather than reactive. Early warning systems must be strengthened. Security presence must be consistent, not episodic. Communities must be engaged as partners, not treated as afterthoughts. As we have learned to grieve collectively, we must also learn to guard our communities collectively, supporting local vigilance structures while ensuring they operate within the law and with respect for human life.
Humanitarian response must also recognize that this is not only a security crisis, but a mental health emergency. Trauma care and psychosocial support are not optional add-ons; they are necessities. They are needed for the young girl who survived sexual violence and now lives with pain that follows her into every waking moment. For the woman who watched her child die in her presence and must now live with a memory no mother should carry. For the man who left home in the morning after saying goodbye to his wife and six children, only to be called back by midday to learn that all seven lives were lost in a single moment.
These are not isolated tragedies. They are accumulating wounds. Without accessible mental health support, trauma festers into silence, rage, illness, and further violence. We need trauma-informed care embedded in temporary shelters, primary healthcare centres, schools, and communities. We need trained counsellors, culturally sensitive support systems, and long-term follow-up, not one-off interventions that disappear when headlines fade.
If we continue to ignore the psychological toll of this violence, we risk raising a generation shaped more by untreated trauma than by hope. This cannot be the inheritance we pass on. Our children deserve safety that does not require courage and peace that is not temporary.
Arewa is tired, but it is still breathing. Still hoping, even if quietly. I write this not as an observer, but as a mother, a daughter, and one of the tired ones, wondering what kind of tomorrow we are being asked to accept, and whether exhaustion will ever be allowed to rest in this land.
•Bilyaminu is a writer and storyteller focused on activism, mental health, and social issues affecting her community. She writes from Dutse, Jigawa State.
