…Will Your Nigerian Government Move For You In Danger?
Some of the most heart-rending, soul-crushing tragedies on this earth happen in Nigeria, many go unreported and they happen with such regularity that I have been forced to ask a question that has always burdened my spirit: What, exactly, is the value of a Nigerian life?
We have seen what it looks like when a responsible government genuinely regards its citizens as precious. From Israel to the United States, we have witnessed leaders upend foreign policy, mobilise military assets, and exhaust every diplomatic channel to save a citizen whose life is in danger or rescue them if captured and proven to be alive. Even if eventually they are dead the government does not rest on its oars until the victims’ corpses are recovered and returned to their loved ones to be given dignified burials.
In such scenarios, you can tell the sincerity of a government in the urgency with which it moves when one of its own is in danger. Responsible governments do not count the cost. They move.
Now ask yourself: would your government move for you?
If you were kidnapped today, from your home, on a highway, or from a farm where you went simply to cultivate food to feed your family, who would come? Your councillor? Your local government chairman? Your House of Assembly member, your federal representative, your senator, your governor, your president?
Would any one of them lose a single hour of sleep over your fate? The answer, if you are honest with yourself, is no. You would likely remain in captivity for as long as your family and friends can crowdfund your ransom. If you were killed in a mass attack, you would not even be properly counted. You would become a number and not an accurate one. The Nigerian government has a long-established habit of downplaying casualty figures to protect the fiction of a hardworking, functioning administration. Your death would be an inconvenience to their image management, nothing more.
I have never seen any government treat its own citizens with such casual, systematic contempt. This is the same government that handles terrorists with kid gloves, where an army chief publicly describes terrorists as prodigal sons and a National Security Adviser calls murderous bandits our erring brothers and sisters deserving of compassion and forgiveness. Yet when young Nigerians took to the streets in October 2020 to demand an end to police brutality, a peaceful, lawful, constitutional act, this same government sent armed men to gun them down in cold blood, seized and desecrated their bodies, and denied their families the right to bury them with dignity. It then dared to ask for our loyalty and respect.
Our nation is greatly mismanaged, and our human resources mean nothing to the kleptomaniac ruling class. Look at where the money goes. The cost of running this grotesquely bloated government is staggering, you will see government spending billions on luxury vehicles and first-class travel for officials whose primary skill appears to be self-enrichment, while a pittance, reportedly less than five percent of the national budget is allocated to healthcare for over 200 million people.
Our hospitals are mortuaries with reception desks. Our roads are graveyards with potholes. And yet you believe these same government officials give a hoot about your life?
Have you ever sat with the thought of what it feels like to be a kidnap victim in this country not for hours or days, but for months? For years? Think of the Chibok girls: children, schoolgirls, taken in the night, and more than a decade on, many remain unaccounted for. While they rotted in captivity, the world moved on. Politics continued. Budgets were passed.
Governors were sworn in. At some point, every hostage must arrive at the most devastating realisation a human being can face: no one is coming. The government has quietly filed you under acceptable losses and moved on. After many years in captivity, only your family members would continue to hope and pray for your eventual release and safe return home.
And lest you think this indifference is accidental, consider that recently, a terrorist-minded Islamic preacher openly placed a bounty on the head of a fellow Nigerian citizen, calling for his beheading, and the Nigerian government responded with silence. Not a statement, no move to effect an arrest. Not even a press release. When a government cannot or will not protect its citizens from open incitement to murder, it has answered every question about whose side it is on. And the question remains what is the value of the life of a Nigerian, is it worth the two million Naira bounty offered by the Islamic preacher?
The life of an average Nigerian amounts to nothing in the book of this government. That is the only conclusion available to an honest mind. And so I say this not as despair, but as a warning: in whatever you do, protect yourself. Do not wait for rescue. Do not place your survival in the hands of those who have demonstrated, repeatedly and without shame, that you are disposable.
If you die on their watch, you will likely be buried in an unmarked grave, forgotten before the soil settles, mourned only by those who loved you.
Nigeria will not miss you.
Only your family and friends will.
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