Terrorism: Nigeria Revolves Around Grief
By Elempe Dele
Some believe our world should revolve around grief in Nigeria, while others argue we should not let it define us entirely—though we must never ignore it.
There is nothing as grotesquely cruel as the stories of school pupils surviving in the forests at the hands of terrorists who have murdered several of their classmates in their sleep. No one fully understands the bloody arithmetic fueling their brutality. One might call them narrow-minded, but how do they coordinate this terrorism with such deadly finesse?
The terrorists are never far away. There are harrowing tales of children being thrown into the fires of burning huts in front of their mothers. It is a devastating experience for any parent to watch their child die, not from illness or famine, but at the hands of another human being who should possess a soul and conscience. When Charles Darwin’s daughter Annie died, he described nature as “clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel.”
I do not believe evil can be eradicated by a single divine mandate. Evil is part of our existence, and we must learn to live with it as a harsh reality. There is little evidence of immediate divine justice amid widespread evil. When COVID-19 struck, like many others, I accepted our shared misery as part of life until a solution emerged.
Today in Nigeria, the dominant expression—visible in the flood of social media posts, on the faces of the young and old, in streets, markets, places of worship, and farms—is grief. It seems everyone has lost something or is anxiously awaiting their turn. Grief has become the honest baseline of our national existence. There is no diminishing it.
Even when we have not yet been directly attacked, we either genuinely sympathize with victims or feign empathy for political reasons. We must acknowledge this widespread grief, not merely for content creation, but because it is real and latent. We no longer grieve solely out of empathy or build memorials; grief has become embedded in our culture. We no longer hide it or suffer in silence—we grieve openly on social media and in public spaces.
Nigerian pain is profoundly valid. We seem to move from one tragedy to another like switching lanes on a highway. The central goal of these terrorists—the purveyors of violent crime—is to trap us in perpetual grief and leave us broken.
Human life matters; that is why we grieve. Every rational being values it. Yet we grieve less when death comes from war, climate disasters, pandemics, natural calamities, or famine. Those feel less humiliating, somehow.
Have we built schools only for our children to be unable to attend them? Roads not to be traveled? Churches and mosques not to be worshipped in? Farms not to be cultivated? Communities not to be inhabited? What is left that we are not grieving over?
Families can no longer recall shared moments of joy. Each member drifts in their own grief. We are forgetting how to exist because fear has become our essence: “Please don’t travel; waybill whatever you need—you know how it is.” “Make sure you’re home before dark; they’re said to be nearby.” “Don’t go to the farm alone.” “Can we really trust these workers? What if they’re kidnappers or informants?”
Every casual conversation reinforces an intangible fear. Nothing eases the grief. Gbenga and Aisha know they love each other, but grief clouds their memory of why. For now, their love is on hold—they hesitate to bring children into a world where they might be kidnapped. They find common ground in postponement. But who knows when this grief will end?
Grief has become an ill-fitting garment we wear without apology. When we look in the mirror, it stares back instead of our true selves. We decorate our homes with it and endure sleepless nights, resigned to carrying this burden into yet another day.
I often wonder if we can ever live peacefully again. I am a survivor of memories from the peaceful 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, when we lived side by side with relative harmony. Today, we hear only of mindless massacres, kidnappings, and banditry, with human blood flowing like offerings to cruel gods.
Since 2009, our collective grief has arrived not in a sudden deluge but gradually, building a deep melancholy across the nation. We do not fully comprehend it. Like COVID-19, we can only hope that, in time, this too shall pass.
