DENIAL, DERELICTION AND MASS DISTRESS

What irks the most about Nigeria’s insecurity, itching even those who are ordinarily and vehemently numb to Nigeria’s grim procession of ceaselessly bad news, is the levity with which the government appears to take and treat instances of attacks on citizens.

Through years of barely believable government incompetence and shocking vulnerability for long-suffering Nigerians, government actors and image makers have come to define and refine government response whenever there is a security breach.

It usually begins with silence, then denial and rebuttals, then gradual, grudging acceptance, at which point valuable time has been lost to criminals.

For the long-suffering people of Kaduna State, the past two decades have been an experiment in distress and dereliction, even complicity. In these preceding years, non-state actors primarily consisting of marauding Fulani herdsmen, bandits, and other terrorists have turned a state that hosts Nigeria’s premier defense institutions into their stomping ground. They cut through the state at will, cutting loose their deadliest attacks and chipping away at whatever sense of security is left in Nigeria’s supposed “center of learning.”

As 2025 ground to a halt, the intervention of US authorities in the crisis engulfing vast swaths of Nigeria’s  North stoked impassioned debates about genocide in Nigeria, particularly whether there was genocide against Christians in Nigeria.

The question sharply divided Nigerians, with many choosing the excuse of extraneous explanations to deflect  the question. Today, while the evidence points to the fact that the mass slaughter of Christians in different parts of Nigeria recalls chilling patterns of genocide, there remain many who do not believe that it is about Christians.

For these people who think Christians have become an alarmist lot, the recent attacks, which saw the kidnapping of about 172 churchgoers in Kurmin Wali, Kaduna State, should prompt a sobering reflection and introspection. These may however elude them especially those of them in government given how poisonous and pathetic their prejudices are.

Following the attacks, the questions have indeed returned to attack Nigerians and their pretence to security and progress with vengeance: what indeed is the fate of a country where the government is as impotent as the citizens in the face of ruthless but far from toothless state actors?

To live in Nigeria today requires a level of conditioning to fear that is simply absurd. It is the impossible situation of living under a cloud of fear and doing everything to give the impression that everything is strangely in place.

Even Nigerians living in the so-called cities and state capitals have to add a niggling worry for their safety to the backbreaking stress that is a fixture of Nigeria’s urban life. For rural communities, especially those in the North, insecurity has become a  terrifying reality, one that trails them to their farms and streams and shadows them in their homes.

In all these, the government prefers to flirt between denial and indifference, which begs the question: of what use is a government that is failing in its primary responsibility of securing its people?

Kene Obiezu,

keneobiezu@gmail.com