The Hypocrisy That Keeps Nigeria Bleeding
By Samuel Ateh Stephen
There is a kind of hypocrisy that kills faster than bullets, the hypocrisy of selective outrage. It does not pull the trigger, yet it creates the emotional climate in which murder becomes ordinary. It numbs the conscience, erodes shared humanity, and replaces moral judgment with identity based loyalty. Nigeria has become a nation where the value of a human life fluctuates depending on the victim’s ethnicity, religion, or region. Once empathy becomes tribal, morality becomes political, and a society where morality is political is already in decay.
When sixteen northerners were killed in Edo State, the reaction was swift and coordinated. Northern elders voiced outrage. Delegations traveled. Traditional institutions were stirred. The Governor of Edo State, Monday Okpebholo, traveled to Kano to meet with families and northern leaders. The killings were framed as an assault against identity. The value of the victims was elevated not simply because lives were lost, but because those responsible were perceived as coming from another side of Nigeria’s divide.
A similar pattern emerged when Fatima and her four children were murdered in Anambra by suspected IPOB elements. The state government moved quickly to calm tensions. Security efforts were strengthened. Leaders spoke firmly across ethnic and religious lines. And when a northern dominated market in Ibadan was attacked, the reaction from northern governors was immediate. The late Governor Rotimi Akeredolu responded with empathy, arrests, and reconciliation. These moments show that Nigeria is capable of moral clarity when it chooses to be. They demonstrate that the country can act decisively when violence threatens established boundaries.
Yet the same nation becomes quiet when the victims are from Southern Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, or Taraba. Entire villages are wiped out in cycles of violence. Families are buried in mass graves. Children are left without parents in numbers too large to count. These tragedies pass as routine news. There are no national delegations. No unified outrage. No sustained public grief. The silence reveals a dangerous truth. Some lives are implicitly considered less worthy of mourning.
Why does outrage depend on who the killer is, rather than the fact that a life was taken? A nation that mourns selectively has lost its sense of moral order. This is not justice. It is a collapse of conscience.
When perpetrators share our ethnic, religious, or cultural identity, many suddenly become restrained and diplomatic. The same people who demand justice in one circumstance immediately demand nuance or silence in another. Violence becomes tolerable if it comes from our own. But when the roles are reversed, the same individuals rediscover moral clarity and the language of condemnation. This shifting morality is the machinery that sustains cycles of revenge.
No society can endure when truth itself is filtered through ethnic or religious loyalty. If the killers are Muslims, they must be condemned. If the killers are Christians, they must be condemned. If they are Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Tiv, Fulani, Jukun, Bachama, or from any other group, they must be condemned. Silence, excuse, or justification is complicity. Evil has no tribe. Evil has no religion. It only has defenders.
The real threat to Nigeria is not the bandit in the forest or the terrorist with a rifle. The real threat is the citizen who excuses him, protects him, rationalizes him, or refuses to condemn him because of shared identity. Healing will begin the day Nigerians mourn every victim as though the victim came from their own family.
Until then, the country will continue to bleed from wounds we refuse to acknowledge, from injustices we refuse to confront, and from a conscience that speaks only when it is convenient.