On Sunday night, as Christians marked Palm Sunday, a day of peace, sacrifice, and hope, gunmen rode into a community in Jos and opened fire like men hunting animals. At least 20 people were killed. Not in a war zone. Not in a battlefield. In their homes. This is where Nigeria is now.
This is not “clashes.” It is slaughter. Let’s stop lying to ourselves.Residents described men on motorcycles, armed, coordinated, deliberate. They did not stumble into conflict. They came to kill. They shot into homes. Into families. Into lives that had no defense.This is not spontaneous violence. This is organized terror.And it is happening again. And again. And again.
The pattern is clear. The response is empty. After the killings, what did government do?A curfew.That is the playbook. People die. Government reacts. Nothing changes.No arrests. No decisive retaliation. No credible intelligence. No prevention.Just statements.This is not leadership. It is theatre of the absurd.
The truth many are afraid to say is that across Nigeria’s Middle Belt, Plateau, Benue, Kaduna, Christian communities are repeatedly attacked, displaced, and buried.
- Hundreds killed in Plateau and Benue in recent years
- Entire villages wiped out
- Churches attacked
- Worshippers kidnapped in their hundreds
In 2025 alone, Nigeria was described as the global epicentre of Christian killings. Let that sink in. The epicentre. Of killing Christians in the world. And yet, leadership speaks in careful, diluted language, “communal clashes,” “farmer-herder conflict,” “unknown gunmen.” Words designed not to offend. Words designed not to act.
There is a grim human cost they don’t show you. Behind every number is a story they will never tell properly. A mother who watched her son shot in the yard and die in her arms. A family wiped out in minutes. Children running into the dark, barefoot, hunted. These are not statistics. These are lives erased. And the survivors carry something worse than grief.
They carry the knowledge that nobody is coming to protect them.
What is now crystal clear is that leadership silence is complicity. Let’s be blunt. When citizens are killed repeatedly, predictably, and without consequence, it is no longer just a security failure. It is a leadership failure.
Jos has burned before. Thousands have died in cycles of violence stretching back decades. Panels were set up. Reports were written. Recommendations were ignored. Nothing was fixed. Now the killings continue.
A government that protects itself, not its people. Here is the uncomfortable truth: The Nigerian state has shown that it can act, when it wants to. It deploys force for elections. It mobilises for political interests. It protects elites with precision. But for ordinary citizens in Jos?
In Benue? In Southern Kaduna? Silence. Delay. Excuses. That is not incapacity.
*That is choice
Let’s Call it what it is. There is a growing argument, locally and internationally, that what is happening amounts to targeted, systematic killing of vulnerable communities. Government rejects the word “genocide.” But here is the harder question: At what point does repeated, unchecked mass killing become something more than “conflict”? At what point does failure to stop it become complicity?
The truth is Nigeria is normalising death. This is the real tragedy. Not just that people are dying.
But that the country is getting used to it. Massacres no longer shock. They trend for 24 hours.
Then they disappear. Until the next one.
A government exists for one primary reason: To protect life. When it fails at that, consistently, repeatedly, predictably, It has failed at everything. Jos is not just another tragedy. It is evidence. Evidence of a nation where citizens are exposed, killers are emboldened, and leadership is absent. And the cost is paid in blood. If this continues, the real question is no longer “Why are people being killed?” It becomes: “Why is nobody stopping it?” At least 20 people are confirmed dead as I write this piece. Their crime? Being Nigerian. May Nigeria not happen to us.
Anthony Ubani, a leadership and governance expert, wrote from Abuja
