AROUND this time last year, as the spirit of Eid illuminated homes, streets, and hearts across Northern Nigeria, countless families waited with quiet hope for the return of their loved ones. Children marked the passing days with innocent anticipation, counting down to the moment they would finally embrace fathers who had spent long months away in search of a better life and a means of survival.
Wives prepared their homes with joy and expectation, ready to welcome husbands who had become the backbone of their households. Parents, too, waited with trembling excitement for sons who were not just children, but breadwinners holding entire families together.
But instead of reunions, what arrived were phone calls soaked in grief. Instead of warm embraces, there were corpses. Not victims of road crashes or unavoidable misfortune, but men hunted, brutalised, and murdered in one of the most horrifying and dehumanising ways imaginable at the hands of fellow Nigerians.
When the Uromi massacre occurred, I deliberately chose silence. I waited, hoping to see whether this country would finally demonstrate that justice is not selective, and that it does not depend on where the victims come from or who they are. Deep down, however, there was already a familiar fear: that the pattern would repeat itself—loud condemnations, promises of investigations, a few arrests made for public consumption, and then silence. That familiar, suffocating silence that often follows when the dead are poor Northerners.
A year later, many Nigerians still struggle to answer a painfully simple question: were the perpetrators truly prosecuted? Was justice pursued with the same urgency and visibility used to announce their arrest? Or did the matter quietly dissolve into the archives of forgotten tragedies, as so often happens in this country?
Because in Nigeria, the value of human life often appears most visible during election seasons, when politicians suddenly rediscover communities they have long ignored. They arrive with convoys and carefully packaged gestures, bags of rice exchanged for dignity, votes, and silence. In life, these citizens are neglected; in death, they briefly become politically useful.
This, perhaps, is the enduring tragedy of Northern Nigeria: a people repeatedly courted in politics but consistently abandoned in education, infrastructure, healthcare, and economic opportunity. A region celebrated in rhetoric but underserved in reality.
The Uromi massacre was not merely an outbreak of mob violence. It exposed something far more unsettling—the frightening ease with which human life is devalued when the victims are powerless, voiceless, and disconnected from systems of influence. In a country where citizens can be killed without due process, there is already cause for alarm. But when such killings fade without sustained accountability, the danger becomes even more profound.
Because silence is never empty; it communicates. And the message many Nigerians continue to receive is deeply disturbing: that some lives matter more than others.
Until Nigeria becomes a country where justice is pursued with consistency regardless of tribe, region, class, or political relevance these tragedies will keep repeating themselves. And somewhere, even tonight, another family will sit in uneasy anticipation, waiting for someone who will never walk through their door again.
As the noise fades and headlines move on, what remains are the memories of the victims: fathers who never returned home for Eid, sons whose parents waited in vain, and husbands whose wives prepared with joy only to receive grief instead of celebration.
May Allah forgive their shortcomings, envelop them in mercy, and grant them Aljannatul Firdaus.
And may this country one day learn, in full sincerity, that every Nigerian life carries equal worth and deserves dignity, justice, and humanity, no matter where it begins.
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.