By Ebuka Ukoh
A nation should never become accustomed to burying its people. Yet in Nigeria, grief now follows a rhythm that feels disturbingly familiar.
The Palm Sunday [March 29, 2026] killings in Jos are not just another tragedy; they also serve as a warning. When lives are reduced to numbers and mourning becomes routine, a country begins to lose something far more dangerous than security — it begins to lose its humanity.
It was quite difficult to get myself to write this. My heart is heavy. I mourn with the bereaved families, the communities, Plateau State, and Nigeria, my country.
But beyond grief, there is a deeper fear – that we are starting to get used to this.
Slow Death of Solidarity
The very essence of our humanity is solidarity. It is the instinct to feel another’s pain as if it were ours. It is what binds strangers into a society. It is what makes loss matter beyond the household where it occurs.
When that instinct weakens, something fundamental breaks.
When the death of another becomes just a statistic, we do not simply lose empathy. We lose the very fabric that makes us human. This is the danger Nigeria now faces.
Each new attack arrives with numbers: ten killed, twenty killed, dozens killed. The language becomes familiar. The shock fades faster. Mourning shortens. The next headline replaces the last.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, death becomes normalised.
A statistic is useful for analysis. It is necessary for policy. But it is not enough for humanity.
Behind every number is a name: a mother, a child, a father. A future that will never be lived.
When political rhetoric reduces loss to figures, it creates distance. And distance makes it easier to move on without meaningful action.
If these deaths were truly felt as human loss at the highest levels of power, would the response remain the same? Would the urgency not be different? Would the coordination not be sharper? Would the outcomes not begin to change?
Because what is treated as an emergency is acted on as an emergency. What is seen as a pattern risks becoming permanent.
A Warning We Chose to Ignore
Decades ago, Robert D. Kaplan warned of a trajectory many dismissed at the time. In his 1994 essay, The Coming Anarchy, he pointed to West Africa, specifically places like Jos, as potential flashpoints where environmental pressure, population growth, and fragile institutions could combine to produce sustained instability.
At that time, it sounded like a distant speculation. Today, it reads differently.
The cycles of violence in Jos and surrounding regions have turned warning into lived reality. Religious tension. Communal conflict. Repeated outbreaks of violence have led communities into cycles of fear and retaliation.
This is not a prophecy fulfilled, but more like a prophecy ignored. The role of the state is not to mourn after the fact but to act before the fact.
Security is not just about response; it’s about anticipation. Intelligence that works, systems that move quickly, presence that deters forewarned violence.
When attacks continue with such frequency, the question is no longer whether we are surprised, but whether we are prepared… and whether those responsible are being held to account.
Refusing Numbness
There is a line Nigeria must not cross – the line where citizens begin to accept violence as inevitable, where communities learn to live with fear as a permanent state, where death becomes mere background noise. That line is closer than we think.
Refusing it requires more than policy. It demands culture.
It needs citizens who refuse to look away, who insist on naming what is happening, who demand that every life lost be treated as a failure that must be accounted for.
It requires leadership that understands that numbers do not bleed, but people do. Nigeria is not numb. Not yet.
You can still see it in how communities rally, in how strangers give, in how people speak with pain, not indifference.
That instinct must be protected, because once a nation loses its ability to feel, it loses its ability to change.
The tragedy of the Jos mayhem is not only about those who died, but also about those who remain alive.
What about whether we will continue to count the dead or begin to confront what is killing them?
A country does not collapse only when violence spreads; it begins to erode when its people stop feeling the weight of that violence. And the day we read about death and feel nothing is the day we will have lost more than lives. We will have lost ourselves also.
Nations do not collapse in a single moment; they erode slowly, one ignored warning at a time, one statistic at a time, one life reduced to a number at a time. If we keep counting the killed without confronting the killer, we will not only fail the victims, but also fail ourselves. Because the day a country learns to live with death is the day it begins to die from within.
Mr Ukoh, based in New York, the United States, is a coauthor of Built By The Ancestors, an alumnus of the American University of Nigeria, Yola, and a PhD student at Columbia University
