LET’s get something straight. Nigerians are going through one of the toughest security periods in the history of this country. What is happening in the north west and north central is not just a security challenge, it is a slow-motion humanitarian catastrophe.
Families are being torn apart. Farmers cannot go to their farms. Markets that once buzzed with commerce are quiet by mid-afternoon because nobody wants to be on the road after dark. Travelling on certain highways in the north is no longer simply a journey ,it is a gamble with your life, and reaching your destination safely is, as many Nigerians now say with complete seriousness, purely by the grace of God.
For many communities, the question is not whether the bandits will come. The question is when.
I say all this so nobody misunderstands where I am coming from. I am not writing from a position of comfort or detachment. Like every other Nigerian, I carry this insecurity like a stone in my chest. My people in the north are suffering. Full stop.
But there is a category of Nigerians making a bad situation catastrophically worse, and I refuse to stay quiet about them. These are the merchants of panic ,the fake news peddlers, the social media alarmists who manufacture terror for traffic and likes and whatever naira the algorithms pay them per thousand impressions. They sit in their comfortable apartments in Lagos and Abuja, tap out a few lines of fabricated horror, hit post, and then watch the engagement climb while ordinary Nigerians on the other end of their screens descend into genuine fear.
These people are a menace. And the law should start treating them like one.
Take what happened in Nyanya, Abuja not too long ago. News spread like wildfire on social media that bandits had kidnapped schoolchildren. Parents stampeded to schools across the area in sheer panic, pulling their children out, blocking traffic, clogging phone lines. Offices emptied. Men and women who had not run since secondary school were running. The fear was real. The trauma was real.
Children who witnessed the chaos will carry some version of that anxiety with them for a while. And then it turned out to be completely false. A phantom kidnapping, conjured up by someone sitting behind a phone screen, probably watching their engagement numbers shoot through the roof while Nyanya descended into chaos.
We saw similar false alarms spread in Lagos. The same story played out in Ekiti where schoolchildren were reportedly seen fleeing from bandits who were never there. These incidents are not isolated curiosities. They are becoming a pattern, and the pattern tells us something uncomfortable: in Nigeria today, public fear has become a monetisable commodity. Somewhere, a person decides that fabricating a security scare is good content for the day. They post it, it spreads across WhatsApp groups and Twitter before any verification is possible, and real Nigerians pay the psychological and sometimes physical price.
The content creator, meanwhile, has already moved on to the next post.
Mind you, panic kills people. It doesn’t need a bandit to pull a trigger. Stampedes have killed people in this country before and they will kill again if we keep creating conditions for them. People with heart conditions, with underlying health issues, the elderly, pregnant women they do not always survive stampedes. A false alarm is not a prank. It is potentially a death sentence for the most vulnerable people in the crowd. The person spreading it may never know the harm they caused, may never attend the funeral, may never connect their post to the outcome. But the connection exists.
And any court worth its wig should be willing to make it.
Some of these fake news merchants will tell you they were just sharing what they saw on another page. Some will claim they meant no harm. Some will issue apologies after the fact, as if an apology reverses a cardiac arrest, unbreaks a leg sustained in a stampede, or returns three hours of a child’s school day lost to manufactured terror. The courts should not be as forgiving as their followers. Anyone found guilty of deliberately spreading false security alarms for commercial gain or social media traffic should face the full weight of the law. And nobody should come out to protest the arrest. You forfeited sympathy the moment you decided your engagement figures were worth more than someone else’s peace of mind.
That being said, we must be honest about why these fake alarms land so easily and spread so far. They land because the real thing is happening constantly. When bandits have actually kidnapped hundreds of children from schools in Zamfara, Kankara, Kwara, Borno, Oyo and Kaduna when the fear has been validated again and again by real and documented events the ground is perfectly fertile for false alarms to take root and grow. People believe the worst because the worst has repeatedly happened. You cannot blame a parent in Abuja for panicking when they read that bandits have entered a school, because that same parent watched real footage of Chibok, watched real press conferences after Kankara, watched real parents weep on national television. The fake news merchants are exploiting trauma that the state created and has not healed.
Our security agencies must reckon with that fact even as they pursue the peddlers.
Like I have said previously on this page, the primary obligation here belongs to the federal and state governments. You cannot ask Nigerians to be calm about school security while almost 20 million children are already out of school, and a significant chunk of that number left precisely because parents pulled them out due to insecurity. Every fake alarm accelerates that number further. Every real abduction accelerates it too. The net effect is a generation of Nigerian children growing up without education, and we are then expected to wonder why poverty, unemployment, and militancy remain intractable decades from now. The connection is direct and it is devastating.
The Chibok abduction happened in 2014. Twelve years later, we are still having variations of the same conversation. That is a failure of governance, not just security. The political will to permanently end school abductions has never matched the political noise about them. Every state governor in an affected region must stop treating school security as exclusively a federal problem.
Local intelligence networks, community-based early warning systems, perimeter fencing and security personnel at schools in vulnerable areas these are not luxuries or aspirational targets. They are the bare minimum requirements of governance. A governor who cannot protect children in classrooms has no business seeking a second term.
Our security agencies also need to address something they have been reluctant to acknowledge publicly: the erosion of their own credibility is part of what makes fake news so potent. When official statements are routinely dismissed as propaganda, when government denials of attacks are met with public scepticism because the government has lied before, citizens default to unofficial information channels, including the worst of them. Rebuilding trust between the state and the public is not a soft, feel-good recommendation.
It is a hard security imperative. The Nigeria Police Force and the DSS have media and public affairs units. Those units should be proactive, not reactive. When a false alarm breaks on social media, there should be an official rebuttal within thirty minutes, not the following morning after the damage has already metastasised across ten thousand WhatsApp groups.
There is also a responsibility that falls on the owners and administrators of social media platforms and WhatsApp groups. Nigeria has one of the highest rates of social media usage in Africa, and a significant portion of news accurate and fabricated alike travels first through WhatsApp. Group administrators who allow unverified security alerts to circulate without pushback are not innocent bystanders. They are participants. The culture of sharing first and verifying never must change, and it will only change when people start facing consequences rather than follower counts.
So here is where we are. Real bandits are terrorising communities in the north west and north central. Fake bandits are terrorising timelines and WhatsApp groups from the comfort of air-conditioned rooms in Lagos and Abuja. Both are causing damage. Both must be confronted. The security agencies should deal with the former with weapons, intelligence and sustained, coordinated military operations that go beyond press releases. They should deal with the latter with arrests, prosecutions and convictions visible enough to deter the next person tempted to monetise public fear. One without the other is incomplete.
Nigeria is not short of problems. The last thing we need is a cottage industry built on manufacturing more of them.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.