Nigeria is not short of tragedy. What it is increasingly short of is a shared response to it. Violence has become so frequent that it barely interrupts the news cycle unless it can be sorted into a familiar, polarising category. The country still mourns—but no longer as one. It mourns in compartments.
When people are killed or abducted today, the first question is rarely how or why. It is who. More precisely, which kind of people. The dead are swiftly reduced to labels—Christian worshippers, Muslim worshippers, farmers, herders, northerners, southerners. Human beings vanish behind descriptors, and with them disappears the idea that a life lost is, in itself, a national calamity.
This is a dangerous evolution. It suggests that Nigerians have begun to internalise a grim hierarchy of grief, in which empathy is activated not by the fact of suffering, but by its symbolic usefulness. Some tragedies provoke outrage, others indifference. Some victims trend; others vanish into silence.
Consider how differently the country reacts to similar crimes. An attack on a church or mosque ignites a storm—statements from religious leaders, condemnations from politicians, heated debates on television, and days of social-media fury. Yet abductions on farms, on highways, or in remote villages often pass with barely a murmur. The victims in those cases are not framed as affronts to identity; they are treated as unfortunate but expected casualties of a broken system.
This selective attention is not accidental. It reflects how Nigerians have come to process insecurity: not as a collective failure of governance, but as a series of episodic attacks on particular groups. Violence is filtered through identity before it is understood as crime. In doing so, the country has turned human suffering into a proxy war between narratives.
The consequences are corrosive. Once tragedy is framed primarily in religious or ethnic terms, it ceases to unite and begins to divide. Each incident becomes a confirmation of pre-existing fears: our people are under attack. Sympathy narrows. Outrage becomes tribal. The natural instinct to ask how to protect everyone is replaced by the urge to defend one’s own.
This helps explain a puzzling contradiction in Nigeria’s public discourse. Insecurity is widely acknowledged as a national emergency, yet responses remain fragmented and emotional rather than strategic. The debate oscillates between outrage and fatigue, without settling into sustained pressure for reform. One reason is that the victims are no longer perceived as interchangeable Nigerians, but as representatives of groups competing for attention and validation.
There was a time when mass tragedy produced a different reflex. The details mattered less than the fact that lives had been lost. Today, details are everything. The location, the identity of the victims, the religious setting—all determine whether an incident is elevated into a national talking point or quietly ignored. Violence has become a sorting mechanism.
Religion sits at the centre of this distortion. In theory, faith should expand moral concern, insisting on the dignity of every human life. In practice, it has become the most efficient trigger for selective empathy. Crimes framed as attacks on faith provoke louder reactions than those framed as attacks on people. The language of belief has displaced the language of humanity.
This is not merely a moral problem; it is a political one. A society that cannot agree on the equal value of its citizens’ lives will struggle to mobilise around solutions. Policymakers respond to noise. When outrage is uneven, so is pressure. Entire categories of victims—farmers, travellers, rural communities—slip into invisibility, not because their suffering is less severe, but because it lacks a powerful narrative hook.
The normalisation of violence outside symbolic spaces has bred a quiet fatalism. Abductions on farms are treated as occupational hazards. Highway kidnappings are discussed with weary resignation. These crimes do not shock because they have been stripped of drama. They do not challenge identity; they merely confirm dysfunction.
Yet this hierarchy of grief carries long-term costs. It teaches perpetrators an ugly lesson: attention follows symbolism. Attacks that inflame identity generate headlines; those that do not can continue with impunity. Inadvertently, society rewards the most divisive forms of violence with the greatest visibility.
More troubling still is what this pattern does to national cohesion. When mourning is conditional, solidarity frays. Citizens retreat into moral enclaves, caring deeply about some victims and barely noticing others. Over time, this erodes the idea of a shared fate. The nation becomes a collection of overlapping grievances rather than a community bound by mutual concern.
Nigeria’s insecurity crisis is often analysed in terms of weapons, borders, poverty and governance. All matter. But so does something less tangible: empathy. A country that has lost the habit of universal mourning will find it harder to demand universal protection. Until Nigerians can look at a victim and see a person before a label, outrage will remain fragmented and policy responses inadequate.
The question, then, is not only what is happening to Nigeria’s security, but what is happening to its moral imagination. When did the country stop believing that every death diminishes it? When did it become acceptable to rank victims by relevance?
Recovering a sense of shared humanity will not stop bullets or dismantle criminal networks. But without it, even the best-designed solutions will struggle to gain traction. A nation that counts its dead by creed has already surrendered something vital—and may yet lose more if it does not relearn how to grieve together.
Sadly musing.
