Nigeria’s Moral Crisis Behind The Security Crisis

Beyond Bullets: A Crisis of Meaning

NIGERIA’S insecurity is often measured in casualties and territory lost. Less examined is the country’s changing moral response to violence. Death is now so frequent that it barely disrupts public life unless it aligns with a powerful narrative.

This has produced a troubling reality: Nigerians no longer grieve automatically. Grief has become conditional.

From Citizens to Categories

Victims are increasingly reduced to categories—religious, ethnic, occupational. These labels determine whether a tragedy becomes a national issue or a footnote. Humanity is filtered through identity before empathy is activated.

This process dehumanises the dead and distances the living. Violence becomes abstract, sortable, and ultimately tolerable.

How Violence Divides Instead of Unites

When tragedy is framed through identity, it stops uniting society. Each incident reinforces fear and suspicion. Sympathy becomes tribal. Outrage becomes a tool of competition rather than reform.

The result is a public discourse that is loud but ineffective, emotional but directionless.

The Political Economy of Attention

Violence that generates identity-based outrage attracts political responses; violence that does not is ignored. This uneven attention shapes policy priorities and teaches perpetrators where visibility lies.

Inadvertently, society incentivises the most divisive forms of violence.

The Long-Term Cost

Over time, selective mourning erodes national cohesion. Citizens stop seeing themselves as part of a shared story. The nation becomes a collection of parallel grievances.

Nigeria’s challenge is not only to restore security, but to restore the moral imagination that once insisted every death diminished the whole.

Without that shared belief, even the best solutions will struggle to take root.