The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • The vulnerable divide

    The vulnerable divide

    On May 28, Saratu and sons retired to bed amid the pitter-patter of rain that fell through the night. On Thursday, May 29, she woke up mangled by the floodwaters, reduced to destitution.

    First, the flood took her sons: three heartbeats that once pulsed into the seams of her world. The night before, they had prattled around a varnished lantern, planning imminent expenses and household chores. By dawn, Saratu was rid of her sons – aged 12, 15, 18 respectively. Three promising males, gone in one fell swoop.

    The torrential downpour of the previous night had triggered a flood. As the flood swept through Tiffin Maza and other parts of Mokwa Local Government Area (LGA) of Niger State, Saratu’s children drowned, one after another, as if the river intended to drink her womb dry.

    “All my valuables, my sons, gone…Where do I start from?” lamented Saratu, as she relived the deluge that turned her and about 416,600 residents of Mokwa into helpless refugees. Officials later confirmed at least 207 people dead and over 1,000 missing. The flood submerged farmlands, destroyed about 500 homes, and injured more than 500 people. The recent disaster is simply one among many in a country fast becoming familiar with floodwaters; in 2024 alone, flooding killed over 1,200 people across Nigeria.

    The impact of the recent flood hit hardest on Mokwa’s vulnerable divides: women, children and the elderly. This is not to underplay the impact on the male divide, but as I noted in last week’s edition, the consequences of such environmental disasters are usually more devastating on the vulnerable divide.

    Indeed, water may be the defining crisis of the country if great care is not taken. While we contend with ruination by drought and degrading water quality, Nigeria now has to do battle with and defeat the hydra-headed monster of incessant flooding.

    But as we grapple with conflicts triggered over scarcity of water and the now ubiquitous deluge, the government and other humanitarian actors must dig beneath the layers of Nigeria’s water crises and extend much-needed interventions to the most vulnerable divides.

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    There is no gainsaying that women and children compose the heart of the afflicted, bearing a unique burden of hardship. They are not only displaced from their physical homes but also pushed from the fragile balance of survival. Arjun Jain, UNHCR’s representative in Nigeria, observed that the floods are a fresh wound upon open scars inflicted by years of displacement and conflict on affected communities. “Communities which, after years of conflict and violence, had started rebuilding their lives were struck by the floods and once again displaced,” he said.

    According to the UNFPA’s 2022 estimate, about 6.7 million people – 80 per cent – of the 8.4 million people requiring humanitarian assistance in Nigeria are women and children and are in the three most affected northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe. While more casualties are added, in real time, from other flood-prone regions in Mokwa, Niger State, Benue State among others.

    Within these population groups, some of the most vulnerable people with special needs are housewives and girls who, in some cases, face a triple burden of finding ways to survive, caring for their families and protecting themselves from sexual violence

    According to the Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO) for 2022, an estimated 1.4 million individuals (46% IDPs, 23% returnees, 31% host communities) will require Gender Based Violence (GBV) prevention and response services in the affected states.

    After the May deluge, an unwieldy social crisis manifests in Mokwa, accentuating rising gender inequalities. The risk for women and girls caught in such a situation often multiplies in real time, said social worker Omolara Odila, stressing that women are more vulnerable during emergencies and are left to navigate hardships that men rarely face in the same way. Many of them are poor, and the flood has rendered them even more vulnerable than most can truly comprehend.

    There is no gainsaying that several females face the brutality of survival on multiple fronts, battling natural calamities and the malevolence of males emboldened by a void of law and order. Health services are scarce; when available, they are stretched too thin to provide the care so urgently required. The risk of maternal mortality grows perilously high for expectant mothers, unable to access safe labour conditions amidst ruin.

    No doubt, the impact of floods often surpasses the loss of lives and damage to critical infrastructure. Not often highlighted is its impact on female health, as noted by experts. Damaged infrastructure may impede access to health resources, and pregnant women could be at a higher risk, thus leading to a rise in maternal deaths.

    Flooding, conflict and other humanitarian crises have only worsened the pre-existing severe reproductive health and GBV situations. Data from the 2018 NDHS show that a disaster-prone zone like the northeast, for instance, has a very high Maternal Mortality Rate of 1,546 per 100,000 live births as compared to the national value of 546 per 100,000 births.

    Teenage pregnancy is also high at 32%, a major health concern because of its association with higher morbidity and mortality for both the mother and the child. Only 22% of deliveries are assisted by a skilled birth attendant, exposing women and newborns to increased risk of death and complications.

    While the statistics are currently indeterminable for flood-ravaged parts of Mokwa, humanitarian needs remain critical and inaccessible to women and children, among other vulnerable segments of the displaced residents, despite interventions.

    In addition to population displacement, there are pressing public health concerns, as many women struggle to live in overcrowded and unsanitary IDP camps, without access to clean water, toilets, bathrooms, and emergency healthcare. Many women hitherto reliant on their missing or now incapacitated husbands and children suffer social exclusion and discrimination that limits them from education, employment and other social benefits.

    And when tragedy strikes, sometimes, its silhouettes prowl in government uniforms. The distribution of the relief materials has let loose a tide of distrust, prejudice, and unseen borders. In Wurin Gangare and Gudun Ruwa, for instance, resentment festers among bereaved families and displaced survivors of the flood as they trade accusations over relief workers and government officials’ perceived partiality in distributing relief materials.

    The Mokwa tragedy necessitates urgent reform. Emergency response must shift from reaction to prevention. Relief efforts must extend beyond provision of food to include menstrual hygiene kits, psychosocial services, and safe spaces for women and girls.

    The National Adaptation Plan and its outcrop, the proposed National Flood Insurance Programme, should include gender-specific coverage. These initiatives must be seen to truly provide a financial safety net for individuals, businesses, and communities. This will reduce the financial burden on the government.

    It’s about time we shifted focus from reactive emergency responses to proactive and sustainable flood risk management. Traditional flood management wisdom must be sourced from natives who have read rivers all their lives, and integrated into formal strategy.

    Gender-based violence prevention must be embedded in every resettlement effort. Water bodies must be desilted before the rains, not after the dead are counted, and drainage regulations must be enforced, not postponed.

    More importantly, the Mokwa flood disaster should not be a death sentence for the poor, nor must it be seen to impoverish otherwise solvent survivors. Women should never be treated as human junk, to be patronised for clout and exploited for political capital, only to be swept away with the silt afterwards. Rather, they must be co-opted as active partners in the recovery process.

  • Death flow at dawn

    Death flow at dawn

    There is the likelihood that the Niger River got straightened along its spine and tributaries to make room for houses and livable acreage. When nature fights back, flood becomes the shibboleth of horror across areas submerged. Yet, it is hardly “flooding” as Toni Morrison would say, it is “remembering.” It’s the water simply “remembering where it used to be.”

    Let’s assume, on the flipside, that the case in Tiffin Maza was remarkably different; that its land tract was never underbed to a rippling river. Let’s assume that the tragic flood that overran the once vibrant agrarian township, tucked in the heart of Mokwa, Niger State, was triggered by human infestation of nature’s waterway, does it justify the devastation wrought by the May 28 – 29  downpour?

    Not by a smidgen, I’d say, irrespective of the Federal Government’s claims otherwise. The government’s attempt to assign blame was

    telling. The Minister of Water Resources and Sanitation, Prof. Joseph Utsev, denied allegations that the Kainji and Jebba dams’ discharge caused the flood, attributing it instead to “torrential rainfall, climate change, and blocked waterways.”

    Unregulated building activities and encroachments, he said,  blocked a seasonal tributary of River Dingi, which normally remained dry except during periods of heavy rainfall. The absence of efficient alternative drainage channels also worsened the situation, he claimed.

    What has been omitted, whether deliberately or negligently, is that just weeks earlier, in April, the Jebba dam released water, flooding farmlands and killing 13 people. There had been warning signs, yet no precautions were taken. There was no coordinated evacuation plan. No community-level awareness drive and pre-flooding simulation. Just the same bureaucratic shrug that always follows a Nigerian tragedy: “We regret the loss. We will investigate.”

    Such devil-may-care attitude neither assuages the bereaved nor corrects the faultlines that triggered the disaster. And Mokwa, still reeling from the devastation of the May flood, can only wait with bated breath for the next deadly wave of flash flood.

    Ask the beleaguered residents of Tiffin Maza. Between the dirt paws of the Mokwa, Niger State township, a persistent draft of misery leapfrogs across the ruins, as if to reenact the tragedy caused by the heavy rainfall that started on the night of May 28, resulted in the deadly deluge of May 29. By the time the water reached Madarasatul Tarbiyyatul Islamiyya, a Quranic school hosting about 870 almajiri boys in Tiffin Maza and the mosque opposite it, it was no longer a river but a maw. A cold, muscular predator that peeled boys from sleep like overripe fruit and flung them into its mouth.

    AbdulMalik, 15, from Sokoto, screamed his mother’s name until the flood washed it from his tongue. Abba, also 15, from Sokoto, thrashed in the dark until his frail limbs stilled. Lawwali, 16, from Niger, equally got swept away, vanishing beneath the serpentine tide. Salamanu, 18, from Niger, had barely opened his eyes when the water closed its mouth around him. Muhammadu, 20, from Niger, equally drowned. The harder he fought, the deeper he sank. The sixth boy, unnamed, was found with a body battered beyond identity, yet no less mourned.

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    They were almajirai, mostly underage boys, but the water devoured them and swept them away in its tide. More than 500 homes were destroyed. Some 121 were injured. More than 3,000 individuals, were displaced in the flood that impacted over 9,000 people in total, according to the Director of Information, Niger State Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Dr. Ibrahim Audu Hussaini. Hussaini.

    But beyond the scale of the Mokwa disaster lies the scandal of who died. Not just how many. The almajirai, a floating population of underage boys subjected to religious training, are among Nigeria’s most systemically neglected citizens. They rarely feature in demographic data and public safety planning. They are educated without infrastructure, sheltered without walls and raised without parental care. Thus, their vulnerability when disaster strikes—be it fire, flood, or famine.

    The reasons for their vulnerability are manifold but not mysterious. Almajiri children live in open, low-lying, and often unsanitary spaces: mosque courtyards, abandoned buildings, under market stalls, and bridges. They often lack any form of early-warning safety nets. 

    Sources living close to the Madarasatul Tarbiyyatul Islamiyya, the Quranic school in Tiffin Maza, claimed that about 120 pupils died in the flood, but the school’s proprietor, Mallam Hassan Alhaji Umar, claimed that only 48 almajirai were missing, of which six have been certified dead.

    A 2024 study conducted across Kano and Kaduna found that three out of every six almajiri boys die before adulthood, exposed to hunger, violence, disease, and now, environmental disaster. The study concluded that for every six almajirai, three die, two get lost, and only one survives to adulthood. These numbers depict our national shame in flesh.

    At the heart of the Mokwa calamity lies a double failure: of infrastructure and imagination. The first is concrete: bridges not maintained, dams poorly managed, and urban planning left to guesswork. The second is cultural: a failure to imagine children like the almajirai as deserving of the same dignity, safety, and future as any other child.

    The flood exposed both failures. The town’s arterial bridge collapsed. Emergency workers were cut off, and recovery was delayed. An excavator had to be brought in to retrieve bodies from the wreckage. And when, days later, the authorities declared rescue efforts suspended, their words were chilling in their finality: “There is no one left to find.”

    But perhaps the greater tragedy is that most Nigerians have accepted and moved on, while bracing for the next catastrophe. In a country where disaster is regularised, death becomes ambient. Nigeria has learned to tuck children into unmarked graves while ignoring their names. This is scary.

    The Mokwa flood is not merely an act of God but the culmination of decades of state failure, misgovernance, and strategic neglect.

    To prevent future tragedies, Nigeria must radically rethink its approach to disaster preparedness and the structural neglect of vulnerable populations, like almajirai. The almajiri system requires a complete overhaul driven by a proprietor-government partnership. All almajiri schools should be registered, and the pupils must be provided with proper shelter, healthcare, and psychosocial support.

    Equally urgent is the need for climate-resilient infrastructure. Flood-prone states like Niger must invest in embankments, efficient drainage systems, and elevated housing designs built with the realities of a changing climate in mind. Disaster preparedness should begin at the grassroots and involve both secular and non-secular schools. Community-based early warning systems, whether through SMS alerts, local radio broadcasts, or traditional town criers, can offer lifesaving seconds of notice and foster a generation capable of responding more intelligently to emergencies.

    We cannot respond to crises effectively if we do not know who lives where. Every almajiri school and informal community must be mapped and integrated into a digitised database and national emergency frameworks.

    The government must also must also account for poor urban planning decisions: settlements allowed in floodplains, blocked drainages left unchecked, and warnings ignored. Only through such coordinated, humane, and forward-looking action can the memory of those drowned in Mokwa, especially the unseen almajirai, be honoured beyond lip service.

    After the flood, there were no marble tombstones or state funerals in their wake. Just quick burials in shallow, anonymous graves. Nigeria has already forgotten them. But their memory lingers in a sandal half-buried in mud. In a slate smudged with rain. In the eyes of those who scurried from death that they might collapse into life.

  • Remember when we grew food in our gardens

    Remember when we grew food in our gardens

    There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm, notes Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac; one is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other, is that heat comes from the furnace.

    For the benefit of the superficial Millennial or Gen Z-er, the Curmudgeon paints a more fascinating picture of the source of all wealth. And in the true spirit of his portraiture, I’d say: Imagine yourself a ghommid, standing smack in the centre of Nigeria’s groundnut pyramids, animal ranches, and cocoa plantations, several decades ago.

    You take your ghommid’s shears and cut down surrounding flora to make a clearing for a farm. As the crops flower and animals fatten, you harvest the best grains and herd all the supple livestock into a giant pile, wave a magic wand, and it’s all turned into industry, buildings, and people spattered across gated high society and sprawling boondocks. You name this ‘progress’ and feign mutation from ghommid to giant.

    Such is the relationship between cities and the countryside, the modern and out-of-date, the dwindling past, and the silicon age. We must understand, however, that mortal Nigeria, as the metaphorical giant, is nothing but a dispensable minion in the economics of life.

    A Nigerian prototype of America’s Silicon Valley is the Millennials and Gen Zers’ most astute retort to the declining world foisted upon all by the older generation. But this has done too little to improve our fortunes. Ultimately, the burgeoning IT sector fosters ephemeral growth; rather than giving relief, it delivers a Siamese bundle of utopia and dystopia in one birth.

    Young Nigeria, like the rest of the world, is besotted by this twin grotesqueness for its dazzle and espoused freedoms. More fascinating are the manifestations of the now ubiquitous start-up and fintech. A peculiar thing is happening: where the government fails to show up, foreign financiers or angel funders, if you like, are extending their interventions with curious funding.

    Of course, nobody sees anything wrong with this. How could anyone deem such interventions scary in a world where oligarchs maul promising youths into armed bandits, career assassins, political hooligans, murderers, arsonists, and so on, while they embezzle public funds to entertain their wives and educate their children abroad?

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    Thus, the argument is that angel funding is great for the economy. These seed monies – irrespective of their slush equivalents used for funding regime change and dubious political springs worldwide –  are filling a crucial void in empowering youths who would otherwise be unemployed and left out of the loop of social interventions.

    Not all ‘seed money’ is a slush fund; a few agricultural startups have sprouted from the seeds of angel funders with stakes in diverse sectors of the agricultural economy. Some of their interventions subsist in the production of palm kernel oil (PKO), which is still currently inadequate for the companies that use it as raw material.

    Then, some support farmers’ scale-up from peasant farming to commercial farming by providing extension services, quality seeds, access to finance, access to mechanisation, and general advisory services on new and innovative methods in farming.

    These appreciable interventions deserve a sustainable partnership between the government and the so-called angel funders of Nigeria’s Silicon Valley. But technology, like the crude oil boom, is Janus-faced, often manifesting as development’s womb and tomb.

    Little wonder Silicon Valley subsists as the playground of nerds and mindless herds on a leash. It is also the modern arena of the surveillance state, our private perversions and mob wars: government and the governed, husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and their sexual nemesis, politicians and electorate, clash like gladiators – their mismatched whims the tools of shredding and seizure.

    The history of technology has often been characterised by a debate between enamoured romantics and dismissive sceptics. Neither divide, however, projects a convincing response to the opportunities and challenges that new technologies present; both in turn often exaggerate or downplay the impact of technology, and this leads to entrenched positions and polarisation.

    Such entrenched positions can be harmful even if politically correct and more media-friendly than the highly differentiated analysis fostered by reality and careful, longitudinal research.

    Advocates of technology integration in agriculture must understand the discourses that drive it and, in some cases, harm its acceptance, and find a balance between the technological innovations that can be sustained by sound policies and those driven more by Machiavellian interests.

    Technology is useless if it isn’t humane and doesn’t improve life. Given the soil’s contribution to all life and wealth, technology must be deployed to enhance its healing and restorative properties by which disease passes into health, age into youth, and death into life.

  • For minds unfettered

    For minds unfettered

    It is sheer folly to watch a house burn while bickering over who should hold the bucket of water for quenching the fire. Such is the madness that has gripped Nigeria for decades; generations chanting placebo therapies prescribed by scheming colonists for the country’s behavioural cancer. The land is rich, but the minds are colonised.  The soil is fertile but poisoned by imported seeds of thought.

    Nigeria’s corruption, for instance, is not just a matter of flawed governance, but a crisis of ethics exacerbated by an inordinate lust for expedience. The 2023 National Bureau Statistics (NBS) corruption data reveal a worrisome trend: over 87 million bribes paid, amounting to over $1.26 billion, mostly money stolen by fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grannies, clergy, principals, and officials. How did we get here?

    We got here because Nigeria’s postcolonial elite, groomed in the mould of their colonisers, learned to loot with logic and a grin. They speak of “efficiency” and “modernisation” while defunding schools and pawning national resources to foreign interests. They are dangerous for their dexterity at dismemberment. It is not the devil that plagues Nigeria; it is a culture of systemic dysfunction rooted in the disintegration of social conscience.

    Nations do not emerge fully formed from constitutions or borderlines. They are shaped by the character of their citizenry. And the latter, in turn, are shaped by their most intimate institution: the family. The family is the receptacle in which the values of a nation are first kindled or corrupted. It is where character and social conscience are either nurtured or strangled in the cradle. The integrity of our public life, therefore, depends on the morality of our private lives.

    Family is key. From this sacred unit, a people’s sense of self, place, and purpose begins. If the family is compromised, then society itself becomes a ghost town of ethics: full of laws but lacking justice and compassion; rich in rhetoric, but bankrupt of vision. Societal growth, therefore, cannot be engineered solely by policies or economic indices. It must be cultivated through the slow, careful evolution of the human spirit. Through education, yes, but not the kind that alienates the learner from their origins.

    Francis Nyamnjoh, in his excavation of Africa’s epistemological crisis, recalls Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino with painful clarity. Ocol, the educated African elite, emerges as a walking corpse; a clearing agent for foreign ideologies and an enemy to his kin. His education does not liberate; it enslaves. It turns him against his wife, his people, and ultimately, himself.

    This is the face of the Nigerian elite: fluent in multiple languages and philosophies but unable to communicate with their grandparents; draped in academic garlands but disconnected from indigenous wisdom; eloquent before foreign audiences but dismissive of local realities. They are, as p’Bitek lamented, hens that eat their own eggs.

    The fetishisation of colonial values of beauty and notions of African reality has entrenched a psychological war on the African self. It is no surprise, then, that many Nigerians continue to bleach their skin, speak with borrowed accents, and look to the West for validation. Modernity, as defined by the West, becomes the Nigerian holy grail. Young Nigerians are taught to despise our histories, distrust our systems of knowledge, and to measure success by how far they can flee from our roots. In so doing, they become, like Ocol, a walking corpse, alive to foreign endorsement, but dead to native truth.

    This crisis manifests across every sphere: from university syllabuses that erase indigenous knowledge systems to national policies crafted in donor-pleasing jargon. Even religious institutions, once cultural sanctuaries, have turned into imported franchises of guilt and prosperity.

    Apollos Nwauwa rightly posits that Western education produced a contradictory elite in West Africa; one that served as both an agent of colonisation and nationalism. But nationalism, in our case, did not mature into sovereignty of thought. Instead, it hardened into mimicry. We changed flags, not philosophies. We rewrote our constitutions but kept the same epistemic shackles. What we call modernisation has often been little more than domesticated colonisation—metacolonialism, as Hussein Bulhan rightly names it.

    This metacolonialism is no longer imposed with rifles and chains, but through curriculum, cinema, policy consultancy, and international development models. It creates a class of elites who worship at the altar of foreign approval; those who speak of development only in the metrics handed down by British colonialists. They are the Ocols of our generation, trained to quote statistics, but unable to feel the pulse of their people.

    Thus, while the skyscrapers rise and the GDP is celebrated, the Nigerian mind continues to rot. We build flyovers over potholes of the mind. We chase digital revolutions while ignoring the intellectual genocide that is the continued erasure of indigenous knowledge.

    It’s about time we reclaimed Nigerianness. We must start prioritising what we think of ourselves over what the West thinks of us. This recovery requires a radical revaluation of knowledge, a turning away from borrowed epistemologies toward what Nyamnjoh calls a reality larger than logic. We must reprioritise native philosophies over Western syllogisms.

    We must dismantle the myth that science, stripped of ethics, context, and community, is the only path to progress; we must pay attention to knowledge systems that value Nigerian reality over Western logic. This means listening to market women who manage micro-economies more efficiently than government programs. It means engaging hunters, herbalists, griots, and artisans—custodians of ecological wisdom, history, and sustainable living. It means revisiting the shrines of thought that colonialism labelled “backwards” and asking: what did we lose when we stopped kneeling there?

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    We must re-educate our educators, decolonise our curricula, and refuse the seduction of validation by foreign wile. A child who learns to love their name will not be ashamed of their accent. A nation that learns to love its essence will not need to bleach its soul.

    We must stop treating ordinary Nigerians as disposable extras in the theatre of governance. The people who truly challenge the status quo: those who resist the prescriptive gaze of foreign-funded NGOs and speak truth in idioms absent in Western textbooks, must be centred in the national discourse. It is from these everyday realists that a true renaissance will manifest.

    The media must also unshackle itself from the imperial narrative machine. Too long has it amplified the metacoloniser’s myth of a Messianic Europe, while muting narratives of African resistance, resilience, and rebirth. The press must recover its role as griot and conscience, not just a content factory.

    There is a future worth dreaming of: one where our development models are rooted in communal values; where schools teach both code and calculus alongside cosmology and craft; where governance is not about appeasing international donors, but serving the child hawking bananas on a dusty road in Madagali, Agbado-Ijaiye and Sankwala. Such a future demand that we stop waiting to be invited to someone else’s table and start building our own.

    It’s about time we dislodged the clearing officers and coronated Ocols using Nigerian institutions as pit latrines of foreign ideologies. Shall we instead cultivate a new generation of thinkers? Those who can walk between worlds without losing their way, who can marry tradition with transformation, while acknowledging that progress is not a synonym for alienation.

    Civilisations are rarely built with concrete and currency alone, but with narratives, rituals, and native wisdom. Nigeria’s rebirth will come from memory, not mimicry.

  • The fire next door

    The fire next door

    There are truths that are better said untempered: that nobody savours the bitter taste of the herbs we season for others. That hate looks like other people’s torment until it pulses at our doorsteps. This much is affirmed by the reactions to the sad fates of Apesuur Ukechia and Ward Halil.

    On a Sunday morning, just after church, Apesuur Ukechia watched her world vanish. Not in a metaphorical sense. Her husband and three children, the centre of her 27-year marriage and dreamscape of her future, were gunned down by herdsmen on the native soil of Aondona, in Gwer West, Benue State. Months before, the same assailants killed her parents and all of her siblings. Now, widowed, childless, alone, and homeless, Ukechia breathes the air of the living but pines for the company of the dead.

    Ukechia’s loss is unacceptable, yet, no more pitiable than Ward Khalil’s. The harrowing video of the young Palestinian girl trying to escape the Fahmi Al-Jarjawi School shelter in Gaza City that had been incinerated by a deadly overnight Israeli airstrike, circulated widely on social media on Monday. Khalil ambled through the flames, her silhouette a ghost of a grisly genocide. Her five siblings, aged two to eighteen, along with their mother, died in the flames. Her father and one surviving brother remain in critical condition. “I was scared of the fire,”a teary Khalil told journalists. But what language does a five-year-old girl have for her family’s massacre?

    Some Nigerians, in reaction to Ukechia’s loss, accused the government for allowing the culprits roam free. They made a radical call to arms, urging every community hosting northerners to “evict them before they kill us all and take over our lands.”

    Reacting to Khalil’s loss, these same anarchists described her as “collateral damage.” The tenor of reactions ranged from “Her people started it on October 7, now they must live with the consequences” to “Serves them right! Next time, they won’t attack God’s chosen.”

    In another forum, some academics dismissed a video of  Zionist-Jews attacking Christian pilgrims in Israel, claiming it’s their divinely-ordained duty to kill every Christian because they are “idol worshipers.” They answered with silence and refused to condemn the attack and the genocidal campaign in Palestine. “It’s a hard decision that must be taken,” said an esteemed Professor.

    These random reactions mirror a world increasingly defined by pitilessness. And no country has made that descent into moral atrophy as casually and as completely as Nigeria. A massacre occurs in Plateau, Benue, Zamfara, Gaza, Southern Kaduna, or the West Bank, and the nation erupts into a paroxysm of digital grief. Hashtags bloom. Performative laments flood social media, teary op-eds rise like smoke from newspaper editorial pages. But five days later, or seven at the most, dawns the silence. Not solemnity. Disconcerting quiet. A shriveling of collective attention. Then, almost as if rehearsed, begins the rite of forgetting.

    This forgetting is an act of violence in itself; a quiet, cowardly complicity that has become the familiar touchstone of carnage in Nigeria. It erases the dead twice: once by the bullet or the bomb, and again by the indifference of the living. The citizens who once held vigils, marched for peace, or wept for neighbours, now scroll past the news of massacres with deadened eyes, muttering “God forbid” as if prayer were a prophylactic against complicity.

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    Lest we forget the heckling: It is painful to read acerbic posts by Nigerians, validating the genocide in  Palestine while laying curses on Fulani militia accused of genocidal attacks in Nigeria, in same breadth.

    Some truths are better said unfiltered: that the Nigerian public sphere pulses in prejudice to premeditated bigotries. Every bigot is complicit. Bigots in public and private places: bigots in medicine, bigots in engineering, bigots in law enforcement, bigots in education, and most disconcertingly, bigots in journalism. The latter rankles an ominous note. It casts those entrusted with the role of impartial watchdogs, as soulless, partisan perpetrators.

    Nowhere is this heartlessness more evident than in the schizophrenic morality regarding Palestine. Even as over 61,709 Palestinians, including 17,492 children, have been killed in Gaza (as of February 3, 2025), and 14,222 are still buried under the rubble, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, many Nigerians, armed with half-baked theology and deeply embedded bigotry, cheer Israel’s military campaign with messianic zeal. “God’s chosen people,” they cry, thumbing through the scriptures for confirmation bias. They quote Psalms and Revelation to justify napalm and cheer as Palestinian babies burn.

    They are impervious to correction, even as former defenders of Israel’s genocidal spree, like Piers Morgan, have since reversed course, calling the bombardments genocidal and unjust. Still, Nigerian evangelicals froth with righteous fury at the suggestion that Palestinians too, might be human.

    This grotesque moral disfigurement is worsened by the Nigerian media and intellectual class. Where is the fire that once lit pages in condemnation of Russia’s assault on Ukraine? Then, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was exalted as a David against the Goliath of Moscow. But when the same script unfolded in Gaza, they changed the language. It is not “genocide,” it is “retaliation.” Not “massacre,” but “military operation.” Not “ethnic cleansing,” but “self-defense.”

    When Israeli bombs flatten a Gaza orphanage, the pens fall silent and conveniently ignore how Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed and kept in an open air prison for over seven decades. The hypocrisy is stupefying. The duplicity, damning.

    What happened to Ukechia’s family in Benue is evil. But it is no more evil than what happened to Ward Khalil’s family in Gaza. Pain is not a respecter of geography. Neither is justice. And when a people weep for one massacre but dance around another with prophetic glee, what remains of their humanity?

    If a conflict of Palestinian-Israeli proportions erupts in Nigeria, the country will unravel. With a media so compromised, a citizenry so fanatical, and primed for blood, Nigeria would not survive.

    We have seen hints of this future in the Hurti massacre. We saw it in Bokkos LGA where families were wiped out and entire villages decimated. Some were burned alive. Others had their throats slit. We saw it in every other place where ethnicity or religion was weaponised against the poor. These victims were all from communities straddling the poverty line. That is why their deaths remain unpaid debts in the national memory.

    The horror is cyclical because the roots remain: unemployment, dead industries, crumbling infrastructure, and leaders who treat governance as theatre. Yet it is not too late. The fire is near, yes, tonguing our borders and threading through our cities. Yet this fire can be quenched.

    First, we must unlearn our inherited hatreds. Nigeria must teach tolerance and compassion in its schools as earnestly as it teaches arithmetic. Interfaith and inter-ethnic dialogues must be institutionalised at state and federal levels. Traditional rulers must enter the public square with the moral courage of old. Clerics must re-teach their congregations that God is not a tribal chieftain, nor a licensed executioner. The press must rediscover its calling as the conscience of the nation, not the mouthpiece of genocidal apologists.

    It’s about time we humanised each other again. This is the great task of our time: to learn to live together not as tribes or sects, but as people — fallible, flawed, but whose lives are sacred all the same.

    To do otherwise is to become like those who murdered Ukechia’s family. Or Khalil’s. And that, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of all.

  • Cynics build no country

    Cynics build no country

    They smelled blood and gathered like hyenas. Not in the savannahs of Sambisa or the dry grasslands of Konduga, but in the digital amphitheatre of Nigeria’s public opinion: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the press, and WhatsApp.

    At the centre of this frenzy was Professor Ishaq Oloyede, the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). A technical glitch during the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination led to irregularities in the scores of thousands of candidates. It was later discovered that over 20 suspects, including some school proprietors, had hacked into JAMB’s server to fraudulently boost the scores of “special” candidates, charging fees ranging from N700,000 to N2 million.

    The culprits reportedly infiltrated the national exam board, corrupted the computer-based testing system, and sullied the hopes of thousands of candidates. Yet, the national outrage did not pivot when this truth emerged. It simply fizzled.

    Oloyede cried, perhaps out of genuine remorse or frustration, but Nigerians were merciless. They called for his dismissal, demanding his head on a pike of shame, despite his peerless exploits as JAMB registrar. A teenager, reportedly distraught by his UTME results, took his own life, further aggravating the rage of a populace milking the tragedy for all its worth. May Almighty God comfort the family of the deceased. No doubt, the teenager’s death was avoidable and heartbreaking.

    But the glitch, however lamentable, was not unprecedented. In 2017, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in the United States had to cancel thousands of Graduate Record Examination (GRE) results due to server breaches. Similar mishaps have occurred in the UK’s A-Level exams. Technology fails. Systems collapse. But only in Nigeria do we drag a man to the digital square and skin him in public view, while conveniently ignoring the syndicates who orchestrated the sabotage. The Department of State Security  (DSS) must eventually make public the identities of the culprits, at least, to silence the drone of scepticism trailing the news of their arrest.

    This is Nigeria, where the appetite for bad news has morphed into a national delicacy. It is no longer mere pessimism; it is schadenfreude in full bloom. An emotional disfigurement where citizens derive pleasure from the collapse of their own public institutions.

    When news broke that Nigeria had quietly repaid its loan to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), one would expect relief. Instead, the public discourse quickly mutated into denial and deflection. Fact was contorted into fiction as influential voices, including supposed intellectuals, journalists, and opposition politicians, spread the falsehood that Nigeria still owed the IMF.  Official documents from the Ministry of Finance and the Debt Management Office confirmed the debt repayment, yet the people preferred the lie because it was juicier.

    Why? Because many Nigerians, particularly the vocal digital elite, suffer from a curious affliction: a longing to see Nigeria fail if it means the politicians they hate are discredited in the process. This dubious disillusionment and selective outrage are weaponised along party lines. We reserve our pitchforks for the ruling class only when our political enemies are in power. The revolutionaries of 2023, it turns out, are now the cheerleaders of chaos in 2025. Patriots by day, partisans by night.

    Consider, too, the more recent uproar about a supposed $21 billion loan by President Bola Tinubu. Social media buzzed with fury as influencers, commentators, and news media bemoaned a purported bid by the president to plunge Nigeria into a $21 billion debt. And yet, once again, the truth was sacrificed on the altar of sensation.

    The $21 billion figure is not an actual loan, but the aggregate borrowing ceiling outlined in Nigeria’s Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) for both federal and state governments over the next three years. In reality, only $1.23 billion can be borrowed in 2025, and that figure includes borrowing by all 36 states and the Federal Government, across every geopolitical zone. But Nigerians did not care to check. They shared the headlines, forwarded the falsehoods, and relished the chaos.

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    Nigerians do not read. Most would rather not read the MTEF, the Appropriation Act, or even official communiqués.  Instead, they rely on emotionally charged interpretations from partisan sources. We embrace anti-Nigerian narratives because they fit the tragic scripts we have already written in our minds. We do not wait to verify; we prefer to vilify. Shall we care to get informed, at least?

    The true crisis is not technological, fiscal, or political. It is emotional. Nigerians are caught in a destructive sentimental loop, forever swinging between hope and despair. But rather than seek healing, we find solace in cynicism. We make bonfires of bad news, and subconsciously pray for collapse, that we might be vindicated in our pessimism.

    This culture of cynicism is born of suffering and suspicion. Decades of misrule, corruption and failed promises have conditioned us to believe that nothing good can come from Nigeria. And when something good does come, like debt repayment or a public official taking responsibility, we dismiss it as propaganda or performance. We are allergic to good news because it disrupts our grievance narratives.

    Why did Nigerians go silent after the arrest of 20 hackers who compromised JAMB’s systems? Why are we not celebrating the efficiency of the DSS and Police in apprehending the criminals who tried to discredit a national institution? Why are we louder in condemnation than we are in commendation?

    The answer is disquieting. We do not want redemption. We want revenge; revenge on a state that failed us and a leadership that dashed our dreams. But revenge, when misdirected, becomes self-immolation. We are burning the house because we were denied a room.

    And so, the same voices that mocked Oloyede’s tears now rustle silence as JAMB’s attackers are exposed. The same timelines that trended #JAMBFailedUs are now eerily quiet in the face of vindication. The hyenas have fed, and now they slink away into the shadows, waiting for the next wound to lick.

    To stem the tide of cynicism, Nigeria’s leadership must govern more humanely and communicate better. Perception is power. The government must establish a National Information Literacy Campaign comprising a coalition of ministries, media houses, and civil society tasked to teach citizens how to verify information, read official documents, and engage responsibly on social media.

    There is a need to create a Unified Government Fact-check Portal, a centralised platform where Nigerians can verify breaking news, track ongoing investigations, and access documents like the MTEF, Appropriation Acts, and debt records in simple, digestible formats.

    We must incentivise reading and data literacy via relatable channels like entertainment, gamification, and social media, to encourage understanding of public documents and policy summaries.

    When a public servant acts with honesty or when institutions self-correct, as JAMB did with its resit examination, the government and media must celebrate these actions with the same intensity we condemn failure. We must teach Nigeria to hear the quiet footsteps of integrity alongside the crash of corruption.

    The state must close the emotional distance between itself and the citizenry. Only then will Nigerians begin to see it as a trustee, not a tormentor. Every democracy is fragile, but its greatest strength lies in the people. If Nigerians lose faith in the country, no textbook reform will suffice.

    It’s about time we confronted our biases and cynicism, and ask: Do we want a better country, or do we just want our preferred side to win?

  • Ghosts of Hurti

    Ghosts of Hurti

    To walk the trails of Hurti today is to plod through ash and blood. It is to inhale the silence of a town stripped of laughter and homesteads where children’s voices once echoed, until they got choked forever by gunfire. Hurti, that rustic hamlet cradled within Bokkos Local Government Area of Plateau State, was not the first, nor, ominously, the last. But its horror, a massacre visited upon it on April 2, has already dissolved into the fog of Nigeria’s collective amnesia, barely a month since its soils got drenched with the blood of its young.

    Nigeria has moved on. But the graves remain chock-full of charred bodies, dreams aborted, and lives unlived. More pitiful is the fate of the innocent kids interred in the earth, their futures terminated. Yet to understand the anguish of survivors, young and old, is to confront the seething backdrop from which their tragedy emerged.

    For over two decades, Plateau State has stood on a fault line of simmering conflict, a geopolitical fissure where religion, ethnicity, politics, and land converge in an uneasy and often deadly embrace. Since 1999, more than 53,000 lives have been lost to communal strife across Nigeria. Plateau’s portion of this grim ledger is a macabre masterpiece: 700 killed in Yelwa in 2004; another 700 in 2008; over 1,000 in 2010; 300 wiped out in Mangu in 2023. The litany of death continues, each entry more grievous than the last.

    And now, Hurti joins that dark roll call. The sun did not blink the day Hurti bled. It hung, aloof and unrepentant, as if casting light on a tragedy it did not trigger. Under its fulgent beams, a thriving village disappeared in plain sight. Hurti, a hamlet tucked in the hem of Manguna District, in Bokkos Local Government Area (LGA) of Plateau State, startled from its mundane hum around 3.35 pm. In that fateful hour of April 2, 2025, death came hurtling at Hurti on motorcycles with a slayer in each seat. They slit the throat of the Mangut boys: Saltifat, four and Justice, seven, and tossed them into their burning home. Fatima Yusuf, barely nine, saw them hack her father to death; Josiah, eight, begged the assailants to spare his father. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” he cried. “Please, please!” But death is not sentimental. Neither was its squad of maniacal reapers.

     The bloodbath in Hurti, like that of Zike, Ukum, and Logo, follows a haunting pattern. They are attacks, largely unprovoked and wholly forgotten battles in which the casualties are always poor and faceless, the perpetrators seldom named, and the state perennially absent.

    To grieve for the victims, the children in particular, is to remember that they are not alone in their fate. In Buni Yadi, Yobe State, on February 25, 2014, 59 boys—students of the Federal Government College—were slaughtered in their sleep by insurgents. The massacre was apocalyptic. Then it was archived. Nigeria moved on. The same cycle of slaughter and forgetfulness enveloped Zabarmari as peasant farmers were hacked to death while harvesting rice. The victims all share a common profile: poor, invisible, expendable.

    This is not mere neglect. It is pitilessness. A systemic corrosion of compassion runs like venom from the corridors of governance to the convenient soapboxes of social critics. Nigerians talk a good game, hence our penchant for performative grief with calculated detachment: one-minute silences, press statements with bloodless condolences, photo ops and visits delayed until the spotlight fades. The rituals are rehearsed.

    The callousness that stalks Nigerian society is no passive force, it is ravenous, gleeful in its consumption of the weak. It is what allows policemen to collect bribes from disaster victims, soldiers to withdraw from besieged communities, and governors to headline music and sports fiestas while children are buried en masse. It is what makes officials toss “relief materials” at villagers – bags of rice in exchange for sons and daughters razed to ash.

    But the most damning indictment lies in the societal shrug. The Hurti massacre and Bokkos in general have not only been forgotten by Nigeria’s leadership and security agencies, but also by the very citizens whose empathy should rise above tribal trenches. Our moral pulse has weakened to a flutter. We have become a people desensitised by overexposure to horror, insulated by the belief that suffering, if not in our backyard, is not our burden.

    What we fail to understand is that this pitilessness is a pandemic. It will not remain in Bokkos. It mutates and spreads from Hurti to Ikorodu, from Zamfara to Anambra, leaving in its trail corpses and hollowed communities, children raised in trauma, and a nation splintered by suspicion and hate.

    The cycle of reprisal killings and ethnic vendettas, whether visited on Berom, Fulani, Mwaghavul or Tiv, stems from the same toxin: mutual dehumanisation. The attackers of Hurti, reportedly Fulani militia, embody a villainous disposition long festering on both sides of the divide. But let us not be naïve. Fulani communities, too, have suffered brutal retaliations in Jos and its volatile outskirts. Entire villages have been wiped out in vengeance. This blood calculus and arithmetic of an eye for a tribe is unsustainable.

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    It is time, long past time, for a reckoning. Government, community leaders, traditional chiefs, and civil society must sit, not armed with accusations but with sincerity, to renegotiate coexistence. Not in panels or commissions that issue dust-gathering white papers, but through local peace councils empowered to enforce dialogue, mediation, compensation, and reintegration. Let us establish regional peace boards across flashpoints, integrating religious leaders, traditional rulers, security operatives, and victims’ representatives. The goal must be disarmament, reconciliation, and shared economic development.

    When schools turn into cemeteries and farms become killing fields, there is no national development—only national decay. We must also retool our policing and security architecture. Nigeria cannot keep papering over gaping wounds with the band-aids of ad hoc deployments and military showboating. What is needed is intelligence-led security, rooted in local trust and built through real-time surveillance, community policing, and consequences for failure. No more excuses, no more impunity.

    But even these efforts will flounder unless we confront the moral drought at the heart of our polity. We must unlearn the bestiality of our past and break from the brutal cycles of vengeance. For every Fatima left unavenged, another child picks up a knife. For every village unprotected, a new militia rises. What future awaits a nation where children are groomed in grief and taught to hate before they learn to read?

    The cost of our indifference is generational. The children of Hurti, those who survived, bear the scars not only of what was done to them but of what was denied them: the justice that never came, the love that was never shown, the homeland that failed them. They will remember. And what they remember will shape what they become.

    We owe them better. Nigerians must embrace a new social creed: one that prioritises humanity above heritage, dignity above dogma, compassion above conflict. We must teach our children that patriotism is not tribal allegiance but shared empathy. That to be Nigerian is not to be Hausa or Yoruba or Igbo or Tiv or Fulani. It is to be human and humane.

    The fate of Hurti’s children is not sealed in their deaths but in our response to them. History will not judge us for what happened in Hurti. It will judge us for what we did afterwards.

  • Dangerous lust

    Dangerous lust

    Life becomes breathtaking for once, and only once, everyday, for Aliyu Salisu. Just before dusk, while he is perched on the rail tracks of Galadima, in the bowels of Maiduguri, Borno State. Out there, in the sweltering heat, he tastes the unprecedented cool of ‘Ice.’  He sees for the umpteenth time, the city’s limitless possibilities and his place amid the urban sprawl.

    In that space and at that hour, he sees what his relatives are unable to envision about him: Aliyu, the successful timber merchant; Aliyu, the billionaire transporter, Aliyu, the responsible son.

    In a rare encounter with him, the 28-year-old widower recounted with zest, why 4pm is his best hour of the day. In that hour, he whisked out his discoloured glass pipe and fired up his daily dose of methamphetamine (meth) aka Ice, a ‘dangerous’ synthetic drug. Aliyu sucked on his pipe with conquering immersion, all the thwarted longings of his life urgent on his puckered brow and dependent breath. His face was hard and calloused with craving, and his eyes, reddish, like burnt earth.

    As the “Ice” thawed, he lighted an ample wrap of marijuana thus “stepping down” or chasing off the chills that succeeded his high at every deep drag. His mouth, incongruous at exhalation, became slightly distended like that of a whistling boy.

    The marijuana smoke was ingenuously haunting; it spread over him like a brassy blanket, and made the rest of him a soiled, grey background. Irredeemably high and past caring, miseries that lied within their grave of submissive sternness in his heart, spilled their troubled ghosts nonchalantly out of his mouth – all in a smoky spiral.

    His wife dumped him and “followed (married) a Boko Haram insurgent” and his paternal uncle believes he would “never amount to anything,” he drawled. Soon as his euphoria began to ebb, Salisu sprang abruptly from his seat muttering: “Why dem close this place sef?” his eyes scanning dejectedly what was left of Galadima’s redlight district.

    His smoking routine usually ended with a romp in a prostitute’s bed, in Galadima’s days of decadent glory. All that is history now as the Borno government demolished several brothels and pubs around Maiduguri, acting on intelligence that they posed security threats. More than 67 structures were destroyed for violating extant state laws that banned their operations since 2018.

    More curious kinks abound on the streets, in the pubs and numerous drug dens scattered across the country. For instance, while Salisu and his friend seek their highs in marijuana and synthetic meth, Suleiman Tanko finds his thrill in madaran sukudai, a potion chemically prepared with formalin (formaldehyde gin).

    Perhaps because it tastes like wild love, making him dance to a beat no one could hear. From dawn through dusk, Tanko boogies in ecstasy to the psychoactive potion. Although it is used to preserve corpses by mortuary attendants, it incites Tanko’s apathy to “big and small trouble;” like his joblessness and tragic loss of his drunkard son, Yusufu, in a gang fight.

    Yusufu, 13, took to the bottle very early; like his father, he fell in love with madaran sukudai, continually downing it to get high. In the end, he got stabbed to death, while high, in a turf war along the Galadima rail track, where local gangs converged to smoke and drink. But Tanko, has no regrets. “Wata ya seyray kankantchi’ii garra,” he said, meaning: “Does the moon trouble itself about the punishment of an ant? I won’t worry and die before my time,” he said, in the tenor of a man whose native “land” had gnawed his joy to feed grotesque lusts.

    At the backdrop of Salisu and Tanko’s wild indulgences, several youths across the country abuse hard drugs, despite the government’s outlawing of the sale and consumption of psychoactive substances.

    Strolling along Oju Irin – along Fagba-New Oko Oba axis – the modern-day Mecca for Lagos addicts, a suspicious mix of darting eyes and dank smell gives you the impression that the sea of shops and stalls offer something slightly more sinister than your standard cannabis, SK and heroin replicas.

    Between 2018 and 2019, nearly 15% of Nigeria’s adult population (around 14.3 million people) reported a “considerable level” of use of psychotropic drug substances, a rate much higher than the 2016 global average of 5.6% among adults according to a survey anchored by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Centre for Research and Information on Substance Abuse (CRISA) with technical support from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and funding from the European Union.

    Baring any urgent intervention, the typical life span of a teenage addict is just two or three years from time of the addiction, argued Sarat Ilyasu, an addiction psychiatrist. For instance, Theophilus Adeoye, 17, died of excessive consumption of vodka and tramadol one year into his addiction.

    The Medical Director (MD) of the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital (FNPH), Yaba, Dr. Oluwayemi Ogun equally sounded the alarm over the increasing prevalence of drug abused induced mental disorders among children, adolescent and adult Nigerians saying over 150 new cases are admitted at the hospital and its Child and Adolescent Centre, Oshodi Annexe every week.

    Reacting to Lagos teens’ addiction to Gutter Juice (Omi gota) and other psychotropic substances, she told me, in an exclusive interview, that: “Only disturbed people drink Gutter Juice. Each of the substances mixed in the juice is highly dangerous. Codeine, cocaine, Indian Hemp, Tramadol and Rohypnol are seriously dangerous to health the way they are abused.”

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    According to her, there is need for a lot of counselling and education of the youths, particularly at the home front. “They must understand that taking psychotropic substances would have adverse effects on them and possibly wreck their lives. Troubled teenagers especially must understand that the good times are made, not sniffed, drunk or smoked,” she said.

    Priscilla Benjamin-Olaoye, another mental health expert, argued that although the first assumption many parents make is that drug addiction is a spiritual problem, substance abuse is actually a chronic relapsing disorder, leading to mental and behavioural challenges.

    A spiritual problem, she stressed, is one in which the individual has no control over, but “in this case, substance abuse is one which the individual behaves themselves into. You cannot pray yourself out of what you behaved yourself into,” she argued, urging parents to implement a healthy balance of both.

    Benjamin-Olaoye could save her homily for desperate parents like Moyin. Moyin persistently dismissed expert advice that her 16-year-old son, Toye, needed psychiatric help, stressing that her son’s problem is spiritual – even as findings revealed that he was hooked on a strong brew of Gutter Juice containing strong doses of cocaine, boiled cannabis, codeine, tramadol, and rohypnol.

    Occasionally he smoked thinner and crack. After a chain-smoking and binge-drinking episode, Toye went off the deep end.

    Predictably, his mother sought spiritual help. But when exorcism failed with Toye, his mother shipped him off to a traditional asylum in Agbara, Ogun State. When I visited the home, I found the 16-year-old tied to a steel bar fastened to the concrete floor. He looked gaunt with flecks of eko tutu and agunmu (cornmeal and herb) spattered over his parched lips.

    His eyes bulged out of their sockets and his skin bore red welts from sustained beating. He looked spent and lost in an alternate universe but his caregiver paused from using the whip on him to assure that his case had remarkably improved.

  • Ghosts of Hurti

    Ghosts of Hurti

    Even vultures do not feast on their young. Yet in Hurti, Nigeria nourished on the blood of her children. The narrative is bloodcurdling: severed throats of innocent children, salty tears of sorrowing mothers, and decapitated fathers who bled out.

    The victims’ fates invoke the mindless grief of a nation too brutalised to feel empathy. Yet Hurti’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back. The horror that befell the hamlet on April 2nd is no accident of history. It is a grim parable; a ghastly rite of our clustered miscreation. That ill-fated Wednesday, Saltifat, four, and Justice, seven, had their throats slit by an ethnic militia. Subsequently, their bodies were flung into their burning home.

    That any human hand could press a blade against a child’s neck and pull—without scruples or remorse—is the ultimate indictment of a nation adrift. Yet this savagery is rarely singular. It mirrors a familiar rite of vengeance that has been around for a long time. At the same time, plagued warring communities pitted in a never-ending tussle dubbed the indigene-settler crisis, ethno-religious conflict, across Plateau, Benue and other States.

    From Riyom to Barkin Ladi, Bokkos to Mangu, the narrative is the same: a festering grievance, a retaliatory attack, and a government that responds with lofty speeches and body bags. This is not justice. This is the ritualisation of horror.

    Hurti did not burn in isolation. It burned as part of Nigeria’s slow, daily immolation. What remains after the carnage isn’t simply the ash of houses or the charred corpses of the slain occupants. What remains is eight-year-old Josiah’s scream: “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” as he watched his father get butchered to death. What remains is nine-year-old Fatima Yusuf’s barefoot sprint from death, and her fragile, prayerful chants above the crack of gunfire.

    Hurti’s tragedy is not new, but its pain is freshly grotesque. Around 3:35 pm, the soft murmur of rural life ruptured to the hum of motorcycles, three slayers in each seat, their guns and machetes slung across their backs like casual accessories. Within moments, the air turned metallic with the stench of blood. Julia, 48, watched from the bush as her sons got slaughtered, paralysed by the knowledge that a step toward them was a step toward certain death. Her children died without her arms around them. Their last thoughts, zoned into the absence of a mother torn between love and survival. That is the real death. Yet Julia suffers another kind of death; the one that stalks a mother, long after she witnessed her sons’ murder and burial in a mass grave.

    The Mangut boys, like several of their peers, were soullessly erased from the nation’s moral register. Their killers are products of our moral void. The disfigurement of the soul that afflicts them drives hundreds of youths in several Plateau communities to bear machetes into neighbouring settlements, retaliating for past wrongs with future atrocities. The cycle is cruel and complete: blood for blood, sin for sin, horror for horror. And while the dead pile up, those still breathing shuffle forward, desensitised and forever maimed.

    No tribe or tongue owns this cruelty. What we are dealing with surpasses ethnic violence; it is moral atrophy cloaked as gall. Amid this cultural flop of empathy, Nigeria suffers a descent to pitilessness; a deadening of our national conscience. From the rostrums of leadership to the ramshackle dwellings of the poor, compassion is vanishing. In its place is a perverse exaltation of vengeance and rage.

    This malady is canonised in real time; it is what makes a government send relief materials instead of trauma therapists. It is what drives citizens to turn every tragedy into a statistic and every loss into a familiar tragedy. Pitilessness thus defines the Nigerian system. It flows through the corridors of power into the minds of everyday Nigerians who scroll past photographs of massacred children and civil deaths as if they were yesterday’s football scores. What kind of society is this, that a child’s charred remains invoke no rallying cry?

    The cost of unhealed wounds is profound. Josiah’s eyes, now vacant, tell a story we refuse to hear. Laughter has deserted his innocent heart, and he wakes up screaming from persistent nightmares. His father is dead, but Josiah dies a little every night. If we do nothing, he will grow up among us as a wounded shell. Like Josiah, hundreds of children across Bokkos LGA and beyond have witnessed similar horrors, and in their experiences, you begin to see a generational crisis of unfathomable scope.

    As trauma specialist Dr. Osaro warns, Josiah may grow up physically but remain stuck emotionally at the moment of his father’s slaying. And such children, unhealed, become adults unable to give or receive love. Some will harden into new agents of violence. Others will collapse inward, swallowed by fear or shame or addiction. Either way, society pays.

    The costs are steep: broken homes, mental illness, suicidal ideation, and violent crime. But worst of all is the silent inheritance: the rage, suspicion and grief that the living pass on to the unborn.

    It’s about time we halted the transmission of this transgenerational hatred. We must draw a line. There must be justice, not just for Hurti, but for every village whose earth has been darkened by blood. The perpetrators of the April 2 massacre must be hunted, tried, and punished. No more euphemisms. No more “unknown gunmen.”

    There must be healing, the type that surpasses food rations, sanitary pads, and temporary tents. I speak of structured trauma therapy and community-based interventions funded by the government. Art therapy, storytelling sessions, and safe houses for child survivors must become part of our emergency response. Healing cannot be outsourced to God. It must be planned, funded, and executed by men.

    There must be dialogue. It’s about time the government, traditional rulers, faith leaders, and local communities sat at a common table, not to relitigate old grievances, but to chart a pathway to sustainable peace. We must neuter the culture of reprisal and the myth of ethnic supremacy. We must cultivate mutual respect as a survival strategy far from the culture of utopia.

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    We must also address land use conflicts with transparent legal reforms. Set up conflict-resolution commissions that include all stakeholders: settlers, herders, indigenes, and imbue them with real authority. We must remove the bureaucratic bottlenecks that delay intervention and create safe zones where displaced people can live and rebuild without fear.

    And lastly, we must re-teach ourselves to feel. Our social and religious institutions must preach compassion louder than conquest. Our schools must teach empathy, not just arithmetic. Our homes must nurture kindness, not vengeance. Only then can we ensure that Saltifat and Justice did not die in vain.

    What Hurti demands of us is not pity but a covenant. We owe it to Saltifat, four, and Justice, seven. We owe it to Enoch Jabarang, nine, and Bright Ephraim, one. We owe it to nine-year-olds: Fatima and Josiah, who still wake up screaming from a horrid relive of their fathers’ murder. Shall we unlearn the barbarism of our past, and rework compassion, from a convenient slogan into a national policy and culture of co-existence?

    If we do not, then Hurti is prophecy; its flames will leap into other hamlets and other homes. And the fires may stay burning in our hearts.

  • The joyless parable of Mr. Whiner

    The joyless parable of Mr. Whiner

    Mr Whiner is Nigeria’s worst nightmare. A kindred spirit with the dubious patriot; while the latter devastates the country with bad politics, Whiner fulfills the role of a mortician. He is the proverbial pallbearer who spirits out a coffin at the first scent of roses.

    In Whiner, we encounter a parable of the Nigerian soul. No thanks to him, we know that Nigeria may not die merely by bullets and bombs, but by the gall of cynics in loafers and saboteurs in agbada, soft-shoed mercenaries who smile and kill.

    Consider, if you will, the curious case of Mr. Whiner. A journalist whose existence is fashioned in contradiction. He abhors his benefactor, a news publisher, with an almost theological fervour; perhaps because he was groomed to loathe those of different creeds. Whiner’s bile is tribal, his hatred inherited. Yet, he practically lives inside the newsroom of the newspaper owned by this same publisher. He is not a staff member. No pay slips bear his name. Still, he comes and goes like a ghost whose presence nobody questions, his access granted through the charity of a former editor.

    Whiner has a wife and children. Yet he deserts them nightly, to sleep in an office corner, beside the wires and routers, because the electricity and internet access are free. He brings soup and makes eba with water boiled in a kettle owned by the newsroom of the publisher he loves to hate. He bathes in the bathroom meant for employees, washes and irons his clothes with the hum of electricity provided by the generator of the publisher he prays would drop dead. Every week, he publishes advertorials disguised as stories: free pages untouched by tax or truth. These are gifts, really, from the house he curses with his breath.

    It is not his religion or politics that indict him. The democratic soul must have the right to critique power. But it is the gleeful subversion of basic decency, the cannibalising of the very hand that feeds him, that reveals the rot in his soul. Whiner loathes his benefactor, the publisher, who currently occupies a public office, yet has been feeding off his kindness for over one decade. He dreads the establishment’s ownership while reaping its benefits. He mocks his source of livelihood, venting his ill will with the vigour of a sponsored agitator.

    Some would blame the organisation for being too accommodating. I would say that Whiner has simply perfected the subtle art of subterfuge. Something the Yoruba would describe thus: “Je ka pe were won loko iyawo, kin won je ki nri temi se.”

    Whenever he is corrected or nudged toward decency, he puffs up like a peacock in heat, hiding his shamelessness behind the veil of religious conviction. What kind of saint sucks milk from his mother’s breast while wishing her dead?

    This same soullessness feeds the failed presidential candidate who, in a frenzy of rejection, flew to Harvard to demarket Nigeria, baring its sores before an audience eager to sneer. Like Whiner, he thrives on destruction. He’s the sort who, denied the throne, would rather watch the palace burn than help build a new one. He would bury Nigeria because he lost an election.

    It is this same venom that drives his cult of devotees, who gleefully applauded as he painted a dismal portrait of the country before foreign eyes. If they cannot wear the crown, the entire kingdom must burn. Many Nigerians, especially those who imagine themselves too educated to be deceived, drink deeply from this poisonous cup. They defend him on social media, share his slander like scripture, and justify his perfidy with elegant grammar.  “If I can’t have the apple, I’ll burn down the orchard.” This is Whiner’s gospel. And tragically, it has become Nigeria’s creed.

    In Whiner’s spirit, we see the foul ghost of many Nigerians: the cynic who lights a match to the village because his neighbour’s barn is larger; the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the corrupt policeman and public officer on his perch. This spirit belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey. Like Whiner, too many Nigerians exploit the country without conscience. The corrupt civil servant who inflates contracts and diverts funds meant for roads, schools, hospitals; he is Whiner in a tie. The judge who sells verdicts and perverts justice is Whiner, robed in law. The dubious activist who incites the masses with half-truths, never seeking progress but only more fuel for the fire, is Whiner with a megaphone. The journalist who twists headlines to please tribal and Western imperial patrons trades truth for bias and integrity for wordplay; he, too, is Whiner with a pen.

    It is Whiner’s syndrome that animates the Igbo zealot who screams that Lagos is no man’s land, a playground won by intellect and labour, even as he shivers at the thought of relocating to Enugu to replicate such glory. He boasts that Lagos cannot do without him, forgetting that a tree does not mock its roots while basking in the sunlight.

    Whiner’s spirit afflicts the Yoruba prodigal, who sells ancestral lands to bigoted interlopers, spends the proceeds on owambe parties and then returns to cry foul: “They are taking over our lands in large numbers! They will soon take our throne!”

    Then there is the Fulani herder, manipulated by a soulless political class and mythologies of dominance, who lays waste to crops cultivated with sweat and hope by middle-belt and southern farmers. He believes the earth was made for him and his herd alone. He, too, is a Whiner in entitlement and destructive tendencies.

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    These are hardly scattered fragments but different masks worn by the same face. It is the face of the exploiter, who only gives where profit is guaranteed and stays only where he can plunder. This, sadly, is the popular Nigerian disposition. And it is terminal.

    No nation can flourish when most of its citizens are transactional patriots. Nigerians wake up daily scheming how to game the country. They share fake news with glee, amplify bad tidings with the fervour of funeral criers, and downplay progress unless it favours their tribe or political messiah. They do not serve the country, they leech it.

    And when the country begins to rot from the gangrene of a thousand unchecked sins, they cry: “Nigeria has failed us!” As though they, too, didn’t swing the axe. The Igbos say: “A man who brings home ant-infested firewood should not complain when lizards invade his house.”

    There are consequences. If we allow the Whiners of our time to multiply, unchallenged, we shall one day stir to find that we no longer have a country. The economy groans because everyone is gaming the system. Our public institutions are perverted by compromise. The media, like its global counterparts, shamelessly teem with partisans who swap objectivity for tribal vengeance. The youth, seduced by social media posturing, have turned activism into theatre. Even the clerics, once shepherds of moral wisdom, are now spiritual gunrunners, trading prophecy for campaign contracts.

    Whiner is not just a man in the newsroom or a lout on the street. He is an archetype. He is a Nigerian who believes in taking but never giving back. Until we stop treating our country like a commodity to be drained, we will keep birthing Whiners. And Whiners do not build nations. They bury them.