A VIDEO went viral recently showing a male student attacking a female student in what was described as a retaliatory assault. Nigerians were outraged. Social media erupted. Suddenly everybody became a saint. Everybody had an opinion on bullying. Parents who have never attended a single PTA meeting were posting long sermons about discipline and moral values. Politicians who bully entire populations for a living were issuing statements condemning violence in schools. The irony was so thick you could cut it with a machete.
Let me state clearly: what happened in that school was wrong. On March 5, two 14-year-old female students reportedly attacked a fellow student after a verbal confrontation. According to the Police spokesperson, the dispute started when the victim allegedly made offensive remarks about the girls’ late father. The situation escalated when a woman who came to pick up her son tried to intervene and was also assaulted. The school expelled the girls for violent conduct. The following day, the son of the woman who was attacked carried out a retaliatory assault — the video that set the internet on fire.
Violence in our schools is a serious problem and should be condemned without equivocation. No argument there. But here is what I find interesting about the whole episode. Nigerians condemned bullying in schools for about 72 hours, posted their hot takes, changed their display pictures to anti-bullying slogans, shared the video with captions like “This must stop!” and went right back to being the biggest bullies on the internet.
The selective outrage is what gets me. We condemn a 14-year-old for bullying but say nothing when grown adults with verified accounts and blue ticks make life unbearable for anyone who holds a different opinion online. The hypocrisy is staggering. We want discipline in the classroom but tolerate anarchy on the timeline.
And that brings me to the bigger conversation nobody wants to have. Bullying in Nigeria is not a school problem. It is a national culture. It has spread from the classroom to the timeline, from the playground to the political arena. The same energy Nigerians brought to condemning those students is the same energy that is conspicuously absent when the bullying happens on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Let me give you a practical example. Since the 2023 elections, the Nigerian political space has become one of the most toxic environments you will ever encounter online. The toxicity did not start with social media, but social media gave it steroids and a megaphone. Supporters of the Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, turned online bullying into an art form.
They call themselves Obidients, a play on the word obedient, but there is nothing obedient about the way they attack anyone who dares to question their candidate. Say anything remotely critical about Peter Obi and watch what happens. Thousands of accounts will descend on your page with insults, threats, and coordinated attacks that would make a military operation look disorganised. They don’t argue with facts. They don’t counter with data. They just swarm and attack until you either delete your post or deactivate your account.
And it is not just insults in the open. Someone I know a journalist, not a politician told me he received private messages on his social media from Obi supporters threatening his life because he wrote a critical piece about their candidate. Let that sink in. Threatening someone’s life because they expressed an opinion about a politician. In a democracy. In 2026. And these are the same people who will post “End Bullying” on their status when a school video goes viral.
To be fair, the Obi supporters are not alone in this madness. But they perfected it. They weaponised mob attacks on social media and made it fashionable to silence dissent through intimidation. The tragedy is that some of the people leading these online mobs are educated professionals lawyers, doctors, bankers people who should know better. When you strip away the political branding, what they are doing is plain old bullying. The same behaviour we condemned in that school video.
Then there is the entertainment industry, where another strain of this virus thrives. The fan bases of Wizkid and Davido have turned social media into a permanent war zone. These two are arguably the biggest music exports Nigeria has produced, and their fans have decided that the best way to show loyalty is to destroy anyone who doesn’t share their devotion. Say anything negative about Davido and the Davido fans the 30BG as they call themselves will come for your head.
Say anything about Wizkid and his fans will rain insults on you that would make a sailor blush. A music blogger told me he stopped reviewing Nigerian albums entirely because the abuse from fan bases was affecting his mental health. Think about that. A man stopped doing his job because fans of musicians bullied him into silence. These are not children. Many of them are adults who pay rent and file tax returns, but the moment their favourite artiste is mentioned in a way they don’t like, they transform into online thugs.
The question I keep asking is this: how do we condemn bullying in schools when we have normalised it everywhere else? How do you tell a 14-year-old that violence is wrong when the adults in the room are threatening people’s lives over political opinions and music preferences? Children learn from what they see, not from what we post on social media during outrage season.
The truth is, bullying thrives in Nigeria because there are no consequences for the bullies. A student gets expelled from school for violent behaviour good, as it should be. But what happens to the adult who sends death threats to a journalist for criticising a politician? Nothing. What happens to the verified account holder who leads a mob attack against someone who said Wizkid’s latest album is not that great? Nothing. What happens to the political operative who coordinates a harassment campaign against a newspaper columnist? Absolutely nothing. The online bully faces zero consequences, and so the behaviour continues, escalates, and becomes normalised. We have created a system where a child faces punishment for bullying but an adult walks free. Something is fundamentally wrong with that equation.
I have always believed that how a society treats dissent tells you everything about its maturity. In a functional democracy, you should be able to support any candidate, listen to any musician, hold any opinion without fear of being bullied, harassed, or threatened. Your fave may not be my fave. That is the whole point of a free society. But we have created an environment where holding a different opinion is treated as a personal attack deserving of mob justice.
Our lawmakers need to start taking cyberbullying seriously. The Cybercrimes Act of 2015 exists on paper, but enforcement is practically non-existent. According to a 2024 report by the National Information Technology Development Agency, over 40 percent of Nigerian internet users have experienced some form of online harassment. That number should alarm us. When nearly half the people using the internet in your country have been harassed online, you don’t have a bullying problem you have a bullying epidemic.
Social media platforms also need to do more. Twitter, now X, is notoriously slow in taking down threatening content from Nigerian accounts. Instagram’s reporting system is a joke. These platforms make billions from Nigerian engagement but invest almost nothing in moderating the toxicity that festers in Nigerian digital spaces.
But beyond laws and platforms, there is a cultural reset that needs to happen. And this is the hardest part because you cannot legislate decency. We need to stop celebrating the loudest voice in the room and start rewarding the most reasonable one. We need to stop treating political loyalty as a licence to harass people. We need to stop raising our children in a society where the adults are the worst bullies and then acting shocked when those children replicate the behaviour in school. A society that rewards aggression online will produce aggressive children offline. It is that simple.
If we must condemn bullying, let us condemn it everywhere in the classroom, on the timeline, in the political arena, in the fan pages, in the WhatsApp groups where people are abused daily for holding different views. Bullying does not become acceptable because the bully is an adult, or because the bully is “defending” a politician, or because the bully has a million followers. Bullying is bullying, full stop. The video from that school should be a mirror for all of us, not just a moment of outrage. Let us look at it closely and ask ourselves an honest question: are we any different from those students? Or are we just better at hiding our violence behind keyboards and anonymity?
- 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.