Category: Campus Life

By LaBode Obanor

There comes a moment in the life of a nation when denial becomes complicity, when silence matures into surrender, and failure to act is tantamount to endorsement of the very horrors that civilisation is meant to prevent.

Over the past 90 days, Nigeria has been  subjected to attacks, kidnappings, and so on. From the ravaged farmlands of Benue to the charred compounds of Borno, from the blood-soaked villages of Plateau to the mass graves of Nasarawa, what has unfolded across the country is nothing short of a national emergency.  The League for Social Justice (LSJ) has documented 24 major atrocities across multiple states within this period, accounting for over 350 deaths, hundreds of abductions, massive property destruction, and the complete erasure of entire communities.

Yet these incidents represent only a fraction of the violence. In Yelewata, Benue State alone, more than 150 people were burned alive in their sleep, an atrocity so gruesome that it defies the boundaries of language.

A nation under siege

The LSJ report paints a terrifying picture of systemic, patterned violence. Across the north-west, north-central, and north-east regions, armed groups, bandits, Fulani militant factions, jihadist insurgents, and transnational criminal networks have unleashed coordinated attacks with devastating precision.

The LSJ report leaves  no ambiguity:

More than 350 civilians killed, hundreds abducted, including schoolgirls. Villages burned, churches and mosques desecrated.

Security personnel ambushed and executed

Over 5,000 displaced in a single attack in Kirawa, Borno.

On page 4 of the report, a graph entitled:  “Number of Major Atrocity Incidents by Month” shows October as the deadliest month, with nine major attacks, nearly double the incidents recorded in August.

Alongside it, a “heat map” of documented incidents ranks Borno, Plateau, Benue, Nasarawa, and Taraba as the epicentres of bloodshed, indicating a premeditated geographic concentration.

The method behind the scourge

The LSJ analysis reveals a devastating pattern, a convergence of factors that signal deliberate strategy.

It is a war against rural communities across Plateau, Benue, Nasarawa, Taraba, southern Kaduna, and parts of Katsina, attackers employ identical tactics including, night raids, multi-directional assaults, door-to-door executions, burning of homes, killing of farmers in their fields.

The report notes that both Christian farming settlements and Muslim communities have been targeted, a fact that underscores the complexity of the conflict but does not reduce its brutality. The signature of these attackers is uniform, chilling, ideological, territorial, and organised.

 It is an economic warfare through farmland destruction. The occupation, seizure, and burning of farmland is quite strategic. They destroy food sources, cripple livelihoods, and displace families.

The LSJ report emphasises that, in a nation already plagued by food inflation and widespread hunger, this targeted destruction strikes at the heart of the country’s existence, posing a palpable threat to life and survival. Destruction of farmlands and attacking food supply goes beyond destruction of property; it is a deepening poverty, amplifying instability, fueling displacement, and driving the young toward desperation or exploitation by armed groups. You cannot starve a region without destabilising a nation.

And you cannot destabilise a nation without threatening its survival. And Nigeria’s survival is its food supply.

 Expanding geographies of terror

Areas of hotbeds, which were confined to insecure zones, have metastasized far beyond their original epicentres.  States that were once considered relatively safe, such as Kwara, Kebbi, Kogi, and large portions of Bauchi, are now absorbing the same patterns of mass killings, kidnappings, farmland seizures, and nighttime raids that previously defined the crisis corridors of Plateau, Kaduna, Zamfara, and Borno.

These murderous marauders take advantage of porous borders, weak policing, and the total absence of deterrence to inflict their mayhem, emboldened by networks of militias, bandits, and extremist factions.

The moral question before Nigeria is stark and unavoidable: Will we continue to drift toward a future in which the most dangerous men dictate the fate of the most vulnerable, or will we summon the courage to reclaim the republic from the jaws of lawlessness?

Symbolic and sacred spaces  under attack

Schools, churches, mosques, traditional palaces, and military bases. These are the nerve centres of our identity, continuity, and sovereignty; however, they have become random soft targets, struck with impunity by the very forces a functioning state is meant to repel. Schools are there to safeguard the future, churches and mosques shape the moral conscience of the people, traditional palaces preserve our heritage and communal legitimacy, and military bases embody the coercive authority of the state. To attack, burn, or overrun them is to attack Nigeria’s essence, erase our collective memory, and plunder the very idea of the republic.

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The abduction of schoolgirls in Kebbi, the burning of palaces in Borno, and the overrunning of military checkpoints are disturbing.

The Nigerian Constitution is unambiguous in its sections. Section 33 guarantees the right to life. Section 14(2)(b) defines the security and welfare of the people as the primary purpose of government.

Section 44 protects property. Every one of these provisions is violated daily.    

The  African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which was domesticated into Nigerian law, prohibits extrajudicial killing, torture, and forced displacement. Yet villages are burned, civilians slaughtered, and families uprooted in their thousands.                                                                        Under international law, Nigeria is obligated to prevent widespread or systematic attacks on civilians.

To reverse this trend, Nigeria must confront this crisis with the urgency it demands. The LSJ report recommends rapid-response security deployment, constitutionally regulated state policing, intelligence reform, judicial overhaul, and the establishment of a National Commission on Mass Atrocities and Internal Displacement. A Certified True Copy of this report has been sent to both houses of the National Assembly for immediate action.

We cannot keep burying victims or counting the dead.

History will remember this moment.

The world is watching. And so are the graves.

. Obanor is president of League for Social Justice (LSJ)