A TEACHER was beheaded somewhere in Nigeria. His head was cut off. He had a family, students who needed him, and a life that mattered. That gruesome act happened, and the country moved on. No serious outrage. No streets filled with angry citizens. No government official who could not sleep that night. Life simply continued, as it always does now, as if a man’s murder is just another weather report.
This is where Nigeria stands today.
Something deep and terrible has happened to this country. It is not just poverty. It is not just corruption. It is not just insecurity. It is all of these things combined, working together, until they have produced a population that has stopped expecting anything to be different. Nigerians have been beaten down so completely, for so long, that the fighting spirit is gone. The tears have dried up. The voice that used to shout has gone hoarse and then silent.
Nigerians did not become this way by accident. They were made this way, gradually, through years of broken promises, failed leadership, and a government that treats suffering as a normal condition of living in this country. When people are hungry enough, scared enough, and tired enough for long enough, they stop resisting. They start surviving. Surviving looks like silence. It looks like going about your business when a teacher is murdered. It looks like not asking questions because you already know there will be no answers.
Now the government is busy with elections.
In a country where a teacher can lose his head and the news cycle barely flinches, politicians are arranging themselves for the next power grab. Campaign posters are going up. Faces are smiling from billboards. Promises are being rehearsed in rooms where no ordinary Nigerian is allowed to sit. The machinery of electoral politics is running smoothly, as it always does, completely disconnected from the actual lives of the people who will be asked to vote.
This is the cruel irony that defines Nigerian governance. The state becomes most active, most visible, and most organized precisely when it is trying to hold on to or acquire power. Roads that were ignored for years suddenly get attention during campaigns. Communities that received nothing from their representatives are visited by those same representatives holding bags of rice and wearing party colors. The government wakes up when elections approach. It goes back to sleep the moment the results are announced.
What does it say about a government when its greatest energy is reserved for the business of staying in power rather than the business of governing? What does it say when citizens have grown so used to this pattern that they no longer find it remarkable? A country that cannot protect its teachers, that cannot guarantee a man will arrive home with his head still on his shoulders, has failed at the most basic promise a government makes to its people. The promise is simple. In exchange for your loyalty and your taxes and your obedience, we will protect you. Nigeria has broken that promise so many times that most citizens have stopped counting.
The silence after the teacher’s death is not peace. It is exhaustion dressed up as acceptance. Nigerians are not calm. They are depleted. There is a difference between a people who trust their government enough to let it handle a crisis and a people who have simply run out of the energy to fight. Nigeria is in the second category, and the government knows it. That knowledge makes accountability even harder to demand.
Citizens have a role to play in this too, and it must be said plainly. Democracy does not function when voters show up every four years out of obligation or for the small payments that get exchanged near polling booths. Democracy requires citizens who hold power accountable not just on election day but on every ordinary day in between. The politicians who smile on those billboards know that the average Nigerian’s memory is short. They know that by the time votes are cast, the anger over the murdered teacher will have been buried under newer tragedies.
This election season, Nigerians must demand more than the usual performance. Before anyone is given a vote, let them answer for what happened on their watch. Let them look at the communities where people have stopped going out after dark and explain what they plan to do differently.
A country is only as serious as the questions its citizens force it to answer. Nigeria has allowed its leaders to avoid the hard questions for far too long. The result is a nation where a beheading can happen and become old news within a week. The result is a government comfortable with the silence of its people because silence has never cost them an election.
The votes being counted in the next electoral cycle will either mean something or they will not. That decision belongs entirely to ordinary Nigerians and everyone who heard that news and felt something stir inside them before the feeling faded. That feeling should not be allowed to fade. It should be carried into every conversation, every polling booth, every town hall, every interaction with anyone seeking public office.
Nigeria has not been fully conquered yet. Conquered countries do not still have people writing about what is wrong. Conquered people do not still feel the weight of a murdered teacher even when they cannot explain why. There is something left. The question is whether it is enough, and whether Nigerians will choose to use it before the next election turns into another hollow exercise in maintaining the status quo.
The teacher deserved better. So does the country.
- West is a seasoned journalist and development practitioner with over a decade of experience in media, human rights advocacy, and NGO leadership. Her syndicated column, The Wednesday Lens, is published every Wednesday in News Point Nigeria newspaper. She can be reached at bomawest111@gmail.com.