There is a moment in every national catastrophe when accounting must be done. Not later, not after the next election, not when the dust settles over the next mass grave.
For Nigeria, that moment is now.
Since President Bola Tinubu stood at the Yakubu Gowon Airport in Jos on April 2, 2026, and promised grieving Nigerians that “this experience will not repeat itself,” more than six states have recorded fresh massacres:
Plateau. Nasarawa. Zamfara. Borno. Benue. Kaduna.
The dead, grieving and injured are not statistics. They are Nigerians who believed someone was governing their country.
Nobody is.
Let me be direct, as one who has been tracking the insecurity and demanding accountability for it for years. When Tinubu declared a nationwide security emergency in November 2025, I commended him for waking up, then I called his response what it was: weak and entirely devoid of the rigour that Nigeria’s multiple and distinct theatres of conflict demand.
I was right: Within 71 days of his declaration, over 316 civilians had been killed across 15 states, in more than 31 documented attacks.
In effect, the criminals were calling the Nigerian leader out, demonstrating the hollowness of his Jos Airport promise and leadership.
Because what followed the emergency declaration was not a strategy. It was a sequence of gestures.
Recruitment targets that fell far short of what the Inspector-General himself had recommended. On Christmas Day, the ultimate admission of failure: American airstrikes on Nigerian soil against ISIS targets, which the government scrambled to claim credit for, after failing to stop the same groups from killing Nigerians for years.
The pattern has been consistent across administrations.
Muhammadu Buhari, the fake anti-corruption fighter, came to power in 2015 promising permanent peace, but left eight years later having presided over at least 63,111 documented deaths.
He was the one who comically declared Boko Haram “technically defeated.” The insurgents answered with mass-casualty attacks.
Tinubu inherited the pattern, refined the rhetoric…and multiplied the body count.
In his first two years alone, Amnesty International documented over 10,000 killed.
The security budget rose from N969bn in 2015 to N6.57trn in 2025, a sevenfold increase, with nobody accounting for what it bought.
I repeat: this government does not have a security strategy but a security script: atrocity, visit, consolation, pledge, press release, silence, atrocity. What Nigeria has never enjoyed, across 11 years of APC governance, is a plan for what happens the day after the pledge.
Keep in mind that just days after Tinubu’s “this experience will not repeat itself,” the United States urged its citizens to avoid Nigeria and recalled embassy staff.
A country that committed training troops to Nigeria just weeks ago, loudly declaring no confidence in Tinubu’s government!
Nigeria is in this mess because it has a government which does not understand the meaning of strategy. For us, a real strategy, as I have outlined, must begin with a Presidential Truth and Accountability Commission: internationally co-chaired, with all hearings livestreamed, and prioritise an intelligence architecture fit for purpose.
The government must act now, but Tinubu is not serious about the promise he made in Jos. Otherwise, let him demonstrate it with a single act of accountability: publish the implementation report of the November 2025 security emergency. Name the commanders of Operation Savannah Shield. What was spent? What changed?
If he cannot do that, then the Nigerian people must understand that the promise in Jos was what every promise before it has been: a political sedative administered to a bleeding people.
Let me reiterate the importance of the Nigerian press. I know what Nigerian journalists are capable of when the moment demands it. I know the courage that lives in this profession: that Nigeria moves forward when the press refuses to be hoodwinked. I know, equally, what fear and dependence on government patronage can do to it.
What I am watching, in the coverage of Nigeria’s security catastrophe, is a press that too often reports the atrocity, transcribes the presidential promise, and moves on, without ever returning to ask what became of the promise. That is not journalism. That is complicity, and it begins with writing opinions without reporting the stories.
Consider what an accountable press corps would do with the material already in the public domain. For instance, why has Operation Savannah Shield, announced in February, produced no public performance report? Where are the forest guards that the DSS was ordered to deploy in November 2025?
Where were the 11,566 police officers recalled from VIP duty sent, and have crime rates changed in those areas? And the security budget of N6.57trn?
Nigerian media organisations that accept government advertising, broadcast presidential speeches without analysis, and treat press releases as news, are not neutral parties in Nigeria’s security crisis.
They are participants in it. Every unchallenged promise emboldens the next one. Every massacre reported and forgotten within the news cycle teaches the political class that the cost of failure is one bad headline, not one night of sustained accountability journalism.
The role of the press in a democracy is not to report government intentions but to measure what they actually do. It is to speak for the dead when the living have grown too comfortable or too afraid to do so.
The 28 killed in Angwan Rukuba on Palm Sunday and the 17-plus massacred in Mbalom on Easter Sunday deserved more than a press release from a presidential spokesman.
The 150 abducted in Zamfara deserved the kind of sustained, searching journalism that makes governments uncomfortable and forces answers from officials.
If the Nigerian press will not do that work, it must stop calling itself the Fourth Estate. The Fourth Estate exists to hold power accountable. A press that reports the massacre without answers and then fawns at the president’s next commissioning ceremony is not holding power accountable. It is providing power with cover.
Finally, the Nigerian voter.
The government behaves the way it does because it has learned that it can. Buhari promised security and delivered catastrophe, but was re-elected in 2019. Tinubu is on the same trajectory. Every time Nigerians allow a presidential consolation visit on roads paved with rice-bags of compromise to substitute for presidential accountability, they are voting, not at the polls, but in the deeper election of what they are willing to tolerate.
They betray the dead but also those who may die because the rice was accepted.
2027 is the only democratic instrument Nigerians have left. The question is whether voters will use it, or waste it again on the same exchange: stomach infrastructure for silence, cash or rice for compliance, ethnicity for judgment.
The long list of the dead cannot vote. But we can. And we can resist and refuse to be manipulated. Because now, we have nowhere to run, no guaranteed tomorrow, and no more lies to tell our children.
We must clarify who we are: we cannot say we object to the insecurity that prevents us from having a life, but accept those who are unwilling or incapable of protecting us.
