Before Tribe and Religion, There Was Humanity

There was a time in this country, before the loud drums of tribe and the shrill gongs of religion drowned our collective conscience, when a human being was simply a human being. Before identity became a weapon. Before difference became a death sentence. Before Nigeria began to bleed without shame.

Today, that memory feels like fiction.

Nigeria is hurting. Not metaphorically. Not rhetorically. Physically. Viscerally. Blood is flowing across the land with a frequency that should alarm even the most indifferent observer. Yet, what should have provoked national outrage now barely earns more than a passing headline.

The recent massacre in Angwan Rukuba, Plateau State, is one too many.

Gunmen descended on the community with the precision of terror and the confidence of men who know that consequences are unlikely. By the time the dust settled, dozens lay dead, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, cut down in a manner too cruel to fully comprehend, too painful to adequately narrate.

And then, as always, came the silence.

Not the silence of mourning, we understand grief can be wordless, but the silence of leadership. The kind that echoes louder than gunshots. The kind that signals a dangerous normalization: that death, even in its most senseless form, no longer shocks the system.

Across the country, the pattern is depressingly familiar.

In the North-West, entire communities live under the shadow of banditry, where kidnapping has become an industry and human lives are traded with chilling efficiency. In the North-Central, recurring cycles of violence continue to turn villages into graveyards. In the South, highways have become corridors of fear, where travellers disappear and families wait endlessly for calls that demand ransom, or worse, bring devastating news.

Everywhere, there is fear. Everywhere, there is grief.

And everywhere, there is a troubling absence of decisive action.

Government responses have become predictable: swift condemnations, strong-worded statements, and promises of investigations. Yet, beyond the rhetoric, Nigerians are left asking a simple, painful question: what has changed?

Because the killings continue.

The kidnappings persist.

The blood does not stop flowing.

A government’s foremost responsibility is the protection of life and property. When citizens begin to feel unprotected, when communities start to rely on fate rather than state, when mourning becomes routine, then something fundamental has broken.

Nigeria stands at that dangerous threshold.

What is perhaps most tragic is not just the scale of the violence, but the erosion of empathy that accompanies it. Increasingly, victims are viewed through the narrow lenses of ethnicity and religion. Sympathy becomes selective. Outrage becomes conditional. Humanity becomes negotiable.

This must not be allowed to continue.

Before tribe, there was humanity. Before religion, there was humanity. Before politics, before power, before every dividing line we have drawn to separate ourselves from one another, there was the shared understanding that human life is sacred and must be protected at all costs.

The victims in Angwan Rukuba were not abstractions. They were Nigerians. Their lives mattered, not because of where they came from or what they believed, but because they were human.

If Nigeria is to heal, it must first remember this.

Leadership must rise beyond statements and demonstrate the will to act decisively. Security must be more than a talking point; it must be a lived reality for every citizen. Justice must not only be promised; it must be seen and felt.

Equally, citizens must resist the temptation to retreat into divisive identities that only deepen the fractures. The pain of one community must be the pain of all. The blood of one Nigerian must matter to every Nigerian.

Because when we begin to rank grief, when we start to justify death based on identity, we lose something far more valuable than unity, we lose our humanity.

Angwan Rukuba is not just a place. It is a warning.

A warning that a nation that grows accustomed to bloodshed is in danger of losing its soul.

Nigeria must choose: to continue on this path of silence and sorrow, or to reclaim the humanity that once defined us.

For now, the land mourns.

And somewhere in Plateau, among fresh graves and broken hearts, the question lingers, how many more must die before Nigeria remembers what it means to be human?