Nigeria is bleeding, and I am angry not merely because the Presidency is deleting tweets or gaslighting citizens, but because a people who should know better have lost their moral compass.
If President Bola Tinubu possessed an ounce of integrity, our nation would not be in this pit of despair. Yet this didn’t begin with him. It began with those who once believed that Muhammadu Buhari had a good head on his shoulders. His legacy is one of ineptitude, wickedness and backwardness, a legacy that even a billion-dollar propaganda campaign cannot rewrite.
The tragedy runs deeper. Those who now defend Tinubu do not do so out of respect for his virtue; they do so out of convenience, loyalty, or self-interest. To support a man so indifferent to the suffering of his people is to compromise one’s conscience.
Like the prophets who falsely told Ahab he would triumph, many modern-day clerics have spoken well of leaders whose hands drip with the blood of their citizens. Silence, once mistaken for strategy, has become complicity.
Where were the loud defenders of “sovereignty” when Christians were slaughtered across Kaduna, when Deborah was burnt alive, or when a bill was introduced to compensate “repentant” terrorists? The church kept quiet, paralysed by fear or comfort. Yet a Christian’s calling is not silence; it is to stand for truth, even when it burns.
Reports as far back as 2021 showed that over 3,500 of the 4,700 Christians killed globally were Nigerians — and that number likely understates the horror. Still, we normalise death, justify wickedness and excuse failure.
Now, those who once cheered the killings suddenly speak of patriotism and national pride, condemning America for threatening to intervene. In whose interest was it when farmers were beheaded? When villages were wiped out? Their sudden patriotism is hypocrisy in its most grotesque form.
No nation can survive when its citizens trade their voices for comfort and their faith for silence. Tinubu may have succeeded at rigging and rewarding sycophancy, but he has failed spectacularly at protecting the lives of Nigerians. The question is no longer whether he is a failure — it is whether we, as a people, have any soul left to feel the weight of that failure.
Wickedness is wickedness. Injustice is injustice. No government spin can make them right. Some of us refuse to grow numb to the blood that stains this nation’s conscience.
Peace, if you come in peace, Olu Ayo writes on X.
