{"id":16620,"date":"2025-08-25T09:04:59","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T09:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/?p=16620"},"modified":"2025-08-25T09:08:45","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T09:08:45","slug":"remembering-nigerias-victims-of-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/2025\/08\/25\/remembering-nigerias-victims-of-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Nigeria\u2019s Victims Of Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By <\/span>Dakuku Peterside, PhD.<\/a><\/h1>\n
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\nEvery year on 21 August, the world pauses to honour victims of terrorism. In Ni\u00adgeria, that pause is never a simple act of remembrance. It is a reckoning\u2014one that asks us to say the names we know, acknowledge the stories we have not heard, and refuse the comfort of forgetting. The dead and the living\u2014wid\u00adows and widowers, children who suddenly became heads of house\u00adholds, farmers too afraid to enter their fields, young women return\u00ading from abduction to a chorus of suspicion\u2014are not statistics in a ledger. They are our neighbours. Any observance that does not place them at the centre becomes perfor\u00admance, not tribute. To remember in Nigeria is not merely to mourn the dead\u2014it is to reckon with the living whose survival continues to be a struggle for dignity.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The stories arrive in fragments that feel almost incompatible with ordinary life. They unfold across landscapes as different as the arid fields of Borno, the forests of Zamfara, and the farmlands of Benue. They reach into displace\u00adment camps and city markets, as well as into schools and places of worship. In Gwoza, a wedding be\u00adcame a site of coordinated suicide bombings; by nightfall, a hospital and a funeral were also attacked. At least eighteen people died\u2014some reports suggest more than thirty\u2014 and among the wounded were chil\u00addren and pregnant women. In Kat\u00adsina, a community security group returning from a condolence visit was ambushed; twenty-one of them were confirmed dead, even as ru\u00admours swelled the toll. In Benue\u2019s Yelewata, a displacement camp was overrun in June; accounts put the number of the dead in triple digits, with thousands forced to flee again. There are older wounds too: farm workers massacred near Maidu\u00adguri, whole wards like Mafa set ablaze, families burying loved ones before help could arrive. These are not isolated events. They are chap\u00adters in a long, cruel book that com\u00admunities have been compelled to read without consent.<\/p>\n

When we speak of \u201cvictims,\u201d we too easily default to those who died. But survivors carry an aftermath that resists tidy closure. Young boys pressed into insurgent ranks are left to wrestle with guilt, suspi\u00adcion, and trauma even when res\u00adcued. Widows struggle to provide for children in IDP camps where rations are meagre, education is sporadic, and safety is never guar\u00adanteed. Girls and women abducted by insurgents return with trauma, with children, with the stigma of rumours that shadow their at\u00adtempts to rebuild. Men who escaped with their lives live with untreated injuries, with night terrors, with the economic ruin of a burnt shop or a stolen herd. Children drift in and out of school because displace\u00adment has no respect for timetables. First responders and community guards, feted as heroes when they hold the line, are often left with lit\u00adtle more than a burial fund when the line breaks.<\/p>\n

Numbers can illuminate, but they can also mislead. Several trackers attempt to count the dead; their estimates differ, and some headline figures have been credibly disputed or withdrawn. What we can say with confidence is that displacement has run into the millions over the years and that lethality spikes in certain hotspots, especially where insurgency meets banditry and where farmer\u2013herder tensions are inflamed by drought, arms flows, and weak local justice. Treating these numbers as precise does more harm than good. Treat\u00ading them as a call to action may save lives.<\/p>\n

Action, however, must begin with clarity. Nigeria\u2019s Chief of De\u00adfence Staff has said publicly that identifying and prosecuting terror\u00adism financiers is ongoing, slowed by legal and cross-border complex\u00adities. That admission matters. It acknowledges what communities learned the hard way: violence requires supply. Motorcycles are bought, fuel is procured, SIM cards are replaced, cash is moved through informal couriers and seemingly legitimate businesses. The Nigeri\u00adan Financial Intelligence Unit has reportedly advanced several cases, working in conjunction with the Attorney-General and the National Security Adviser. That is the right direction. Yet victims cannot live on \u201cwork in progress.\u201d If remem\u00adbrance is to mean anything, the financial pipes that feed atrocity must be traced, frozen, and forfeit\u00aded\u2014openly enough that the public can see the difference between ru\u00admours and results.<\/p>\n

Justice is wider than court\u00adrooms. It is a child sleeping through the night because the road to her village now has an early-warning network and a rapid response unit that arrives. It is a farmer counting planting days instead of counting rumours of raids. It is a survivor who can speak without fear of re\u00adtaliation and receive counselling without having to trade dignity for pity. It is the knowledge that when politicians, contractors, or \u201cbig men\u201d dabble in the business of insecurity, a predictable chain ensues: investigation, prosecution, conviction, confiscation\u2014no mat\u00adter the surname.<\/p>\n

For years, we have relied on a familiar blend of troop deploy\u00adments and community vigilance. Both have saved lives; neither is sufficient on its own. Commu\u00adnity guards require training, insurance, and clear rules of en\u00adgagement to prevent them from becoming targets without pro\u00adtection or morphing into militias without accountability. Security agencies must be closely aligned with financial-intelligence teams, so that a spike in attacks triggers not only patrols but also audits of cash hotspots, scrutiny of bulk phone purchases, and visits to real estate fronts whose led\u00adgers never add up. Early-warning systems should be co-owned with communities, not parachuted in as gadgets with no maintenance plan. When we say, \u201ccivilian pro\u00adtection,\u201d we must mean protected routes to farms and markets, es\u00adcorted windows during planting and harvest, and safe transport corridors that align with curfews instead of colliding with them.<\/p>\n

We also need to repair how we see and speak. Benue\u2019s tragedy is often narrated through the lan\u00adguage of identity; so too are kill\u00adings in the Northwest and North\u00adeast. Precision matters. There are attackers and victims across ethnic and religious lines; there are crim\u00adinals and there are communities; there are grievances and there are atrocities. Collapsing these categories into easy labels invites reprisals, not solutions. On a day of remembrance, the most ethical storytelling is that which refuses to convert grief into a weapon.<\/p>\n

The government can do sever\u00adal things quickly if it chooses to be measured by outcomes, rath\u00ader than announcements. Victim support funds should be scaled up and ring-fenced for medical and psychosocial care, with mobile clinics reaching remote settle\u00adments and displacement camps. Compensation should not require documents that displaced people no longer have; case workers must go to survivors, not the other way round. Two or three \u201cprotected live\u00adlihood zones\u201d can be piloted, where farming windows and market days are secured through predictable, escorted access\u2014success mea\u00adsured not by ribbon-cutting but by the number of harvested hectares and market-day attendance. A pub\u00adlic tracker should report terror-fi\u00adnance cases from investigation to conviction, alongside the values seized and the portion diverted\u2014 by law\u2014to survivor services. These are not moonshots. They are the unglamorous work of a state that wishes to be believed.<\/p>\n

For Nigeria, the sobering truth is that terrorism has risen to chal\u00adlenge the state\u2019s once-unchallenged grip on the monopoly of violence. Its weapon is not only the gun or the bomb, but the calculated dis\u00adruption of order\u2014an assault de\u00adsigned to jolt citizens out of the fragile comfort of everyday life. Terrorism thrives on chaos, and its victims are not statistics but men, women, and children whose lives are scarred in ways no displace\u00adment camp can ever fully describe. It is time for a national awaken\u00ading\u2014a recognition that terrorism must be remembered alongside wars and natural disasters as one of the gravest sources of human suffering in our land. The police, the armed forces, and every arm of the state must stand with the rest of the world in marking this day, not as a ritual but as a solemn act of solidarity.<\/p>\n

A fitting memorial must rise, carved in stone and spirit, to hon\u00adour those who were cut down or forever altered by these senseless acts. Their memory demands more than mourning; it calls for resolve. What Nigeria needs now is not only compassion for the wounded but an unyielding commitment to ending terrorism, so that the nation\u2019s chil\u00addren can inherit a future no longer shadowed by fear.<\/p>\n

Remembrance is often mistaken for silence\u2014a minute observed, a candle lit, a prayer said. Those rituals are good. But in a country where grief is staggered across dates and dialects, remembrance must be noisy enough to jolt the powerful and tender enough to cradle the broken. It must insist that the measure of security is not the number of press briefings held after a crisis, but the number of cri\u00adses prevented. It must have space for complicated truths: that some casualty figures are uncertain, that some perpetrators will plead griev\u00adance to excuse cruelty, that some rescues will come too late, and that the work of healing will outlast ev\u00adery news cycle.<\/p>\n

\u201cRemembrance with remedy\u201d is more than a slogan. It is a compact. We honour the dead by protecting the living. We respect survivors by providing services that are predict\u00adable, not performative. We mark this day not to rehearse despair but to recommit to the ordinary labour that, multiplied across vil\u00adlages and ministries, makes terror less profitable and less possible. If we do this\u2014steadily, visibly, togeth\u00ader\u2014then perhaps next year\u2019s list of names will be shorter, the farming season longer, and the distance be\u00adtween promise and practice a lit\u00adtle smaller. That would be a tribute worthy of the people we remember today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dakuku Peterside, PhD. Every year on 21 August, the world pauses to honour victims of terrorism. In Ni\u00adgeria, that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16622,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-grassroots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16620"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16623,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16620\/revisions\/16623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}