Post by Miebaka Emmanuel Ikiriko (@miebaka86)
The Nigerian State Has One Job. And It Has Failed Us Spectacularly.
The Nigerian Constitution is unambiguous: the primary responsibility of the state is the protection of lives and property. This isn't a suggestion. It isn't a nice-to-have. It is the foundational contract between government and citizen the very reason we surrender a portion of our freedom and resources to a central authority.
Yet, what is our reality?
We wake up to headlines that have become numbingly familiar. Another schoolchildren abduction in the North. A family torn apart in the East. A farmer kidnapped from his own land in the Southwest. Communities not security agencies are now the ones negotiating with bandits, scraping together millions in ransom, and praying that their loved ones return alive.
And here is the cruel irony: the same government officials who have failed to secure our highways, who have abandoned rural communities to the mercy of armed groups, who have watched this crisis metastasize for years, have the audacity to mount podiums and lecture grieving families with "Do not pay ransom."
Do not pay ransom?
Where is the alternative?
Where are the rescue operations? Where is the intelligence-driven prevention? Where is the political will to treat this as the existential threat it is? When citizens are left with only two options pay or mourn the state has already failed. The instruction not to pay becomes not policy, but cruelty. It is the abdication of responsibility dressed up as moral authority.
But here is what breaks my heart even more:
We have normalized this.
We have become a people who see "15 kidnapped, 3 killed" on the morning news and scroll past. We have become communities where fundraising for ransom is now as routine as fundraising for weddings. We have become citizens who no longer expect rescue, only negotiation. We have adjusted our expectations so drastically that when someone is released after payment, we call it "good news" as if the state didn't fail at its most basic duty.
This isn't resilience. This is learned helplessness.
A nation that accepts the constant trade of human lives for cash is a nation that has lost its moral compass. We have stopped asking "Why is this happening?" and started asking only "How much?" We have stopped demanding security and started budgeting for insecurity.
And when we normalize the abnormal, the powerful no longer feel pressure to change.
The failure of the Nigerian state to protect its citizens is catastrophic. But our collective shrug in the face of that failure? That is the tragedy that will outlast this administration and the next.
We deserve a country where "do not pay ransom" is backed by "because we are coming to get them."
We deserve a country where the Constitution's promise is not just ink on paper, but boots on the ground, intelligence in action, and leaders who lose sleep when citizens are in chains.
We deserve to be angry. We deserve to refuse the anesthesia of normalization.
Because the moment we stop feeling rage at the abduction of our children, our farmers, our future that is the moment we have lost more than security. We have lost ourselves.
Share if you refuse to normalize this.
#NigeriaDeservesBetter #EndInsecurity #ProtectNigerians #NoMoreRansom
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