What Is a Life Worth Here?

Not a community. Not a generation. Not a headline number.

One life.

A farmer in Plateau who did not make it home from his field. A schoolchild in Oyo taken on a morning that started like every other morning. A young man in Zamfara who was in the wrong place when the wrong people arrived. A trader in Anambra whose death was reported in three lines and then not reported again. A woman in Borno who has been missing long enough that her name no longer trends.

One at a time, or in groups, in the north and the south, in the cities and the villages — Nigeria has been losing its people at a rate that should have, by now, produced a different kind of country. A country at its limit. A country that has collectively decided it cannot absorb any more. Instead, we have produced something else: a country that has learned, region by region, tragedy by tragedy, to grieve in silos and move on.

What is one Nigerian life worth?

Because the answer the state has given — not in words, but in response times, in prosecution rates, in the yawning distance between a life lost and any consequence for those responsible — is not an encouraging one. The machinery of government exists, in theory, to protect people. In practice, it has become very skilled at producing statements after they are already gone.

And the grief, when it comes, follows predictable boundaries. The killings in the Middle Belt are a crisis to some and background noise to others. The kidnappings in the northwest are a northern problem until they aren’t, and then they are a national tragedy briefly, and then they are archived. The bombings, the reprisal attacks, the cult violence in the south, the ritual killings, the armed herdsmen, the bandits, the separatist violence — each has its own regional audience, its own defenders, its own political framing, and so none of it ever quite becomes the shared, undivided Nigerian emergency that it actually is.

This is not accidental. A country whose grief is this fragmented is a country whose anger is manageable. You cannot hold power to account when the people who might hold it together are too busy arguing about whose dead count more.

Photo by bennett tobias on Unsplash

And underneath all of it is a question we have never answered cleanly: do we actually believe, in this country, that a single human life carries weight? Not symbolically — we are very good at symbolism, at candlelight and hashtags and senatorial condemnations. But structurally. Functionally. In the way a society is arranged when it has decided that losing one person is already too much.

A life in Norway, in Germany, in Japan — when one person goes missing, there is a machinery that activates. Not perfectly, not always justly, but with a seriousness that communicates: this person’s existence mattered to the whole. Nigeria has no equivalent of that seriousness. What we have instead is a population that has become, out of sheer exhaustion and repeated disappointment, its own shock absorber. We absorb the loss. We console each other. We commend the dead to God. And the people who were supposed to prevent it prepare for their next press conference.

The most honest and devastating thing about Nigeria is not that violent people exist here. They exist everywhere. It is that the systems built to protect life have so consistently failed at their basic task that we have stopped expecting them to succeed. We have revised our expectations downward so many times that we no longer remember what the original expectation was. And in that revised world, a life lost becomes less a demand for justice and more an occasion for grief — private, regional, temporary, and politically inert.

That is the thing worth being outraged about. Not only the violence. The normalisation of the violence. The way an attack in one region is someone else’s tragedy. The way numbers matter more than names. The way we have arrived, without formally deciding to, at a place where a single Nigerian life — one person, irreplaceable, specific, gone — does not reliably move this country to demand better.

It should. Every single time, it should.

We should not have to count the bodies before we decide the problem is serious.