Nigeria often feels like a circus, and our leaders rarely miss an opportunity to remind us.
I watched an interview where the president explained why he could not visit the victims of a massacre in Jos. According to him, there was no electricity at the airport, and he had somewhere else to be.
No electricity at the airport.
That was the reason.
It might have sounded absurd enough to be funny, if it wasn’t so deeply insulting. People bled. People died. Human beings were slaughtered, reduced to numbers in a news cycle that moves too quickly. And the response from the highest office in the country felt detached—unempathetic, distant, almost unaware of the weight of what had happened.
This is Nigeria. And we have seen this before.
During the End SARS protests of October 2020, citizens were killed in a moment that should have shaken the nation to its core. But what followed was just as disturbing: denial, silence, and carefully managed narratives. The institutions we expect to speak with clarity hesitated. Some contradicted themselves. Others said nothing at all.
It was not official channels that gave people a sense of what happened. It was individuals—those who were present, those who recorded, those who refused to stay silent. Without them, much of the truth might have been buried.
And that raises an uncomfortable reality.
The people we are meant to trust for credible information are no longer the ones we rely on. Instead, we turn to strangers—faceless accounts, unnamed voices, scattered witnesses. Sometimes they are honest. Sometimes they are not. They can inform, but they can also mislead. Yet we cling to them, because the institutions that should do better have chosen not to.
Violence is no longer rare. Terrorist attacks, kidnappings, rape, mass killings—these are recurring realities. And yet, more often than not, we hear about them first from ordinary citizens, not from the media houses tasked with informing the public.
Those same media houses seem preoccupied with trivialities—where the president travelled, who welcomed him, which dignitaries stood in line to shake his hand. We are told about ceremonies, appearances, and curated moments, while the issues that define everyday life receive far less urgency.
When truth is softened, delayed, or ignored, something breaks.
Voices begin to scatter. People are forced to fight to be heard—to post, to push, to protest, just to gain attention. And even then, it is often not enough. Over time, something even more dangerous sets in: numbness.
Sad news comes and goes. Death, pain, suffering—they no longer provoke the reaction they should. They have become part of the background.
I remember a woman in Lagos who documented her daily struggle with transportation because basic systems had failed her. She spoke consistently, publicly, refusing to be ignored. But instead of support, she faced harassment—not from authorities, but from fellow citizens. The very people she was speaking for turned on her.
No major media house amplified her voice. It was smaller, faceless platforms that carried her story and made it visible.
So the question remains: who do we trust?
The people we see but no longer believe,
or the people we do not see but feel are one of us?
Either way, we are in trouble.
Because when truth becomes uncertain, when voices are fragmented, and when leadership feels disconnected from suffering, a country does not simply struggle—it drifts. And a drifting country is far more dangerous than one that is visibly broken.