I write as a citizen who has watched grief become routine and official statements become exercises in evasion. What is unfolding across part...
I write as a citizen who has watched grief become routine and official statements become exercises in evasion. What is unfolding across parts of Nigeria, including Kwara, can no longer be dismissed as an isolated crime or administrative failure. It reflects a deeper pattern: insecurity that appears tolerated, explanations that contradict evidence, and a state response that punishes communities while dangerous actors move with disturbing ease.
In Kwara State, residents of the North and South recount a grim daily reality of kidnappings, killings, rape, and displacement. Families bury loved ones quietly. Villages sleep lightly. Yet the official posture oscillates between denial and deflection. When credible video evidence surfaced showing armed suspects claiming access to a government vehicle and weapons sourced “from Abuja,” the response was not decisive transparency but a technical rebuttal: the arrests happened “elsewhere,” the van “belonged to vigilantes,” the facts are “under investigation.” This pattern is familiar to Nigerians: distance the crime, fragment the narrative, and let time dull outrage.
The contradictions are stark. If the suspects were arrested in Edo State, what explains the presence of a Kwara State government vehicle and a Kwara-linked vigilante group in that same operation? If the vehicle was unreturned, why was it in circulation alongside armed men? These are not trivial gaps; they go to the heart of state accountability. Security cannot be restored where the public is asked to suspend reason.
Citizens also observe an uneven geography of violence. Attacks concentrate in areas perceived as less protected, while other zones remain comparatively untouched. Whether by intent or omission, the outcome is the same: communities conclude that their safety is negotiable. When people begin to believe that protection depends on identity or proximity to power, the social fabric unravels.
This crisis is not confined to Kwara. Across the Southeast, anxiety has surged following credible reports of armed movements and a horrifying incident in which travellers returning from the North were intercepted on a highway, trapped, and burned alive. The driver and eighteen passengers perished, none escaping. At the time of reporting, the charred vehicle and human remains reportedly still marked the road. Such atrocities demand an immediate call for the division of the irredeemable country, Nigeria. Silence compounds trauma; denial deepens it.
Meanwhile, public discourse reveals a troubling moral confusion. Influential figures have referred to terrorists as “warriors,” even as foreign militaries are accused of killing them. Yet there is no corresponding urgency to arrest sponsors or dismantle networks. When words sanitize terror, and the state fails to act, impunity hardens.
The pattern repeats elsewhere: after attacks, security operatives descend on communities, mass arrests, intimidation, torture allegations, while perpetrators vanish into forests and highways. Peaceful civic movements are quickly blamed, sometimes before suspects are apprehended. This inversion of justice, where the innocent are targeted and the violent are courted, has eroded trust beyond repair.
At this point, citizens are not merely afraid; they are exhausted by a system that cannot or will not protect them. Calls for a federal security emergency in Kwara reflect desperation, not politics. Comparisons with past federal interventions elsewhere only sharpen the question: why is decisive action selective, and why does it arrive after irreparable loss?
To the international community, governments, multilateral bodies, and human rights institutions: this is a call for attention and action. Nigeria’s security crisis is no longer an internal matter when patterns of abuse, selective enforcement, and mass civilian harm persist without credible remedy. Independent investigations, targeted sanctions against sponsors of terror, and international monitoring are necessary first steps.
But many citizens now voice a conclusion born of lived experience: where a state persistently fails to protect, people seek self-preservation. The demand for self-determination, whether in Biafra or other willing regions, has grown not from ideology but for survival. Communities argue that only self-governance with accountable security and local consent offers a path to peace where the current arrangement has repeatedly failed.
This is not a celebration of division; it is a plea for life. Unity that cannot keep children safe, travelers alive, or villages intact is unity in name only. The world must listen not after the next atrocity, but now. Justice delayed here is measured in graves.
Written by
Nwaugwu E
Edited by
Chidi Ibe
For States Media Team
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