By Dickson Ebegbare
Nigeria is a vast land with over 200 million of us, scattered across different tongues, cultures and places of worship. If we’re being honest with ourselves, many of our worst national troubles didn’t just fall from the sky. They have grown from the cracks we allow: religious suspicion, ethnic mistrust, and the way we sometimes weaponise identity.
Lately, everyone has been talking about the statement made by the American president, his outrage over the killing of Christians in Nigeria.
Truth be told, this violence did not start yesterday. It has been simmering, ignored, and at times politicised. But now that the world is watching, it suddenly feels like new fire.
Let us pause here.
If we are fair, we will admit that insecurity in Nigeria does not ask what God a person serves before it strikes. Insurgence have bombed mosques during worship just as they have stormed churches on holy days. When bandits raid a village or herders attack a community, they do not flip a religious directory; they kill whoever they find. Pain has no prayer language.
What the world sees; and what the American president reacted to is the end result of a system that has failed to protect Nigerians. And because kidnapping has turned into a business model for criminals, the situation has only worsened. To them, Nigerians are nothing more than a quick ransom.
Still, we must guard against single-story narratives. If we keep telling the world that one religion seeks to wipe out the other, we are laying the groundwork for a national disaster we cannot afford.
The truth?
Every victim of this insecurity was first of all a human being. A son. A mother. A citizen. A Nigerian. Their denomination comes last.
So, instead of allowing foreign voices to tell our story in fragments, why don’t we insist that our government works with global partners to secure lives …ALL lives? If we must fight, then let it be a united fight: Muslims and Christians, North and South, all of us on the same side for once.
Because if bandits are allowed to keep thriving, it won’t stop to differentiate who is saved or who is slain. And if we allow rumour and propaganda to fuel anger between us, insecurity will celebrate, we would have done its job for it.
Nigeria cannot bleed into extinction while we argue about who owns the blood. We are in this together, and we must rise together.
Our survival depends on that unity.
