“The children of the poor you refuse to train will never allow your children have peace”
Last week, We woke up again to news that shakes the soul. An entire family wiped out in their home.
No warning. No mercy. No fear.
The rate at which homicides are occurring in the country is deeply alarming. What frightens me even more is the creeping possibility that, like bomb attacks and kidnappings before it, we may soon grow numb to it, accepting it as the new normal.
As much as I have tried to avoid news related to this incident, it keeps resurfacing, there is simply no escaping it. And since it happened, I have not been the same.
I have found myself looking over my shoulder, replaying conversations, questioning silence. Wondering whose toes I may have stepped on. Who secretly despises me. Who believes I should not be living the life I am living, speaking the way I do, existing boldly in my own space. I find myself looking at the two Almajiri boys in my home with a flickering sense of dread.
This fear is unsettling, but it is also revealing.
Because it is the same fear now living rent free in countless homes. People are no longer safest in their comfort zones.
Even our homes no longer feel like sanctuaries.
My only question is why? Not how because violence has become easy but WHY?
Why would anyone take a life they did not give? How does one wipe out an entire family without pause, without conscience? Did you not see the innocence in those children’s eyes? Children are pure, harmless, undeserving. Children who knew nothing, did nothing.
How does anyone find it in themselves to harm a baby? Why? for what? What could possibly justify it? How does a human being walk into a house and end multiple lives without hesitation? How do you silence crying, pleading, familiarity and still walk away?
There is no justification for murder. None. But violence does not exist in a vacuum. It grows. It is nurtured. It is enabled. if we truly want solutions, we must stop pretending these monsters fell from the sky.
We are raising and abandoning generations at the same time.
Let’s go to the roots.
Nigeria is sitting on a dangerous reality: a growing population of young people with limited access to education, rising unemployment, and no clear pathway to dignity. Many children drop out of school not because they are lazy, but because poverty forces their hands. Some never enter a classroom at all. Others grow up on the streets, where survival becomes the only curriculum.
These Neglected children grow into angry adults. Children denied education, structure, empathy, and opportunity do not magically wake up as responsible citizens. Many grow up knowing hunger before hope, survival before morality, the streets before school. When society repeatedly tells you that your life does not matter, some people grow up deciding that no one else’s life matters either.
Add to this a political system that has normalized the use of young men as tools.
Election after election, politicians recruit idle, angry youths as political thugs. They are armed with drugs, weapons, and false promises. Violence is rewarded. Loyalty is bought cheaply. For a brief moment, these young men feel seen, powerful, relevant.
Then the elections end.
They are dumped.
No rehabilitation.
No accountability.
No disarmament.
No jobs.
No future.
So what happens when violence has become their only skill?
When the drugs have rewired their minds?
When the anger has nowhere to go?
They turn on society.
And the victims are never the godfathers. Never the politicians. Never the powerful.
It is innocent families.
Parents, children, neighbors who are just trying to live. People asleep in their homes, believing they were safe.
The politicians move on to secured homes and convoys. The youths are abandoned but still armed, still addicted, still angry, and now more dangerous than before.
Research and security reports have repeatedly shown that areas with high youth unemployment, low education levels, and widespread drug abuse record higher rates of violent crime. This is not coincidence. When people grow up without hope, structure, or consequences, desperation becomes a breeding ground for brutality.
This isn’t about Kano alone. What happened here could happen anywhere. No, it’s already happening everywhere and that is the frightening truth we must confront. Insecurity has become so normalized that fear now lives with us quietly, persistently inside our own houses.
I am scared to my bones, And I know many people are too. Scared not because we are guilty of anything, but because we live in a society where life has become cheap, anger is unaddressed, and violence has been recycled and redistributed back to innocent people.
We are all afraid because nothing ever seems to happen to these wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are locked away, yes but with no real sense of justice. Court sitting after court sitting, adjourned endlessly, justice postponed into oblivion. One is left to wonder: what happened to “an eye for an eye”?
Justice must not be delayed or diluted. We do not want another baby Hanifa story, another Sanda about to quietly walk free on a state pardon, or another Hafsat Chuchu case that drags on while wounds remain open. We want action. immediate, transparent, and decisive.
Knowing that perpetrators are swiftly and fairly judged will not erase the pain, but it can offer the bereaved a small sense of closure. For a man who has lost his wife and six children, peace may never fully return, but justice served without delay can at least affirm that their lives mattered and that society still stands on the side of what is right.
This is why insecurity is not just a policing issue. It is a failure of governance, parenting, education, and moral responsibility. You cannot abandon children and expect peace. You cannot weaponize poverty and be shocked when it turns deadly.
Kano is not an exception. It is a warning.
Until we invest in education that goes beyond classrooms, until we protect children before they become statistics, until we stop using human beings as disposable political tools, we will keep counting bodies and asking shocked questions.
The truth is uncomfortable, but it must be said: A society that refuses to raise its children will eventually be terrorized by them.
And by then, apologies will be useless.
Until we start protecting homes before they become crime scenes, until we raise children instead of recruiting them for violence, until we stop normalising fear as the price of living, this story will repeat itself. Different city. Different family. Same ending. Insecurity is no longer a distant problem, it is sitting with us in our living rooms, locking our doors, stealing our sleep. The question is not whether this concerns us. The question is how long we will keep looking away before another home goes quiet forever.
Voice just cleared its throat.
- Kabara is a writer and public commentator. Her syndicated column, Voice, appears in News Point Nigeria newspaper on Monday. She can be reached at hafceekay01@gmail.com.