Why Are They Killing Us?

Femi Akintunde-Johnson

Dhere is a question that has haunted many Nigerians for years, but has now taken on a darker urgency: why are these people killing us? Not kidnapping for ransom, not rustling cattle, not seizing territory for ideological dominance – just killing. As if human life has become an irritant to be swatted away. As if spilling blood is a form of recreation. Not just with guns or bombs, but with a cold, gleeful finality that suggests something is twisting dangerously in the Nigerian soil, and instead of digging it out, we are pretending it is a decorative pot-plant.

  Last Saturday, 15 November, 2025, ISWAP terrorists ambushed a military convoy on Damboa-Biu road, Borno State,  and claimed they had captured Brigadier-General Musa Uba. Within 48 hours, they released images and videos through their propaganda channels, celebrating his execution as though it were a festival of depravity. The army attempted a hasty denial, but the militants’ evidence – which no civilised society should ever have to watch – spoke with sickening clarity. 

 It is eerily haunting that Brig-Gen. Uba was ambushed almost to the day, four years after Brig-Gen. Dzarma Zirkusu was killed on 13 November, 2021 at Askira-Uba, Borno in an ambush while reinforcing troops – both in the same battlefield, both claimed by ISWAP.

On the same day of Uba’s alleged execution (17 November), bandits invaded the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State about 4.00 am. They killed the vice principal, traumatised an entire community, and abducted 25 schoolgirls from their hostel. No manifesto. No political statement. No ransom demand – at least not yet. Just violence for violence’s sake.

Barely twenty-four hours after the Kebbi abduction, terror struck again – in a place meant for solace. In Eruku (Ekiti LGA, Kwara State), bandits stormed a Sunday evening service at Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), Oke Isegun (Mount of Victory). According to police and eyewitnesses, at least three worshippers were gunned down, and around ten others – among them the pastor – were abducted.  The attackers reportedly came from the bush, forced their way in, and dragged some of the congregation into nearby forests – an eyewitness, a pastor, put the number at 35!  

 So the question must be asked without blinking: what exactly do mindless killers gain from murdering innocent citizens who neither threatened them nor obstructed their ambitions? If kidnapping is the “business model,” if ransom is the “industry,” if banditry is the “enterprise,” then what do we call this new appetite for killing without purpose? When a man storms a church or school or farm settlement and massacres people who cannot possibly pose a threat to him, what theory of economics – or sociology or criminology – can explain that? Nigeria is watching a mutation take place: violence no longer requires incentive. It has become a culture. A pastime. A badge of belonging.

For years, we comforted ourselves with neat clichés: poverty fuels crime; unemployment drives banditry; bad governance breeds resentment. True, but incomplete. None of these factors explains why someone would execute a senior military officer simply to make a point on social media; or why unprovoked attackers slaughter worshippers in Owo (Ondo), Eruku (Kwara), Yelwata, Akpanta (both in Benue), Tarmuwa (Yobe), Mantau (Katsina), Enugu, etc; or why armed gangs in Zamfara light up villages like a bonfire party and then melt back into forests. You don’t kill a Brigadier-General for ransom. You don’t waste bullets on helpless worshippers to express poverty. You don’t abduct schoolgirls repeatedly – across states – because your grandfather’s cows were stolen.

No, Nigeria is dealing with something deeper: a moral, ideological and psychological rot, fertilised by years of impunity, indoctrination, ungoverned spaces, and the slow collapse of national accountability.

History offers us sobering parallels. Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, where cartels, guerrillas and militias turned killing into a political currency. Somalia after the fall of Siad Barre – warlords, jihadists and clan armies carving society into fiefdoms. Afghanistan after Soviet withdrawal. The Balkans during the ethnic wars. Mexico’s drug-fuelled violence, where sometimes killing is strategic, and sometimes it is simply theatre. Each of these societies confronted waves of irrational violence that seemed unstoppable – until the underlying ecosystems were dismantled.

Nigeria is now tolerating its own violent ecosystem.  Consider the northern corridor, from Zamfara to Katsina, Kaduna to Niger, Sokoto to Kebbi, and down through Plateau and Taraba: a vast expanse where the Nigerian state is often visible only through flyers, checkpoints, and press statements. In many communities, the gun is authority. The forest is refuge. The motorcycle is mobility. The AK-47 is identity. Boys grow up in an emotional vacuum where belonging is purchased by blood. Killing becomes the initiation ritual. The more gratuitous, the more respected. This is how terror franchises recruit foot soldiers without needing ideology classes.

Speaking of ideology, Nigeria has tiptoed for too long around the uncomfortable truth: many of these groups are no longer “mere bandits.” They have embraced fragments of extremist doctrine. Not full Boko Haram orthodoxy, but a cocktail of jihadist resentment, anti-state sentiment, anti-Christian hatred, and fascination with martyrdom. 

Overlay this with the most toxic ingredient of all: impunity. For more than a decade, Nigeria has treated terrorism as a nuisance to be managed instead of an existential threat to be eradicated. Killers raze whole villages and later stroll into markets to buy food. Kidnappers negotiate ransom using their own phone numbers. Bandits livestream their atrocities. Even when suspects are captured, some mysterious “higher authority” intervenes. A nation where murder carries no cost will inevitably produce men who murder without hesitation – and soon, without reason.

The question, therefore, is not merely “why are they killing us?” The real question is: why have we allowed them?

The usual approaches – “peace accords,” “dialogue committees,” “repentant terrorists,” and the ever-rebranded military operations – are political cosmetics. They cover the wound but do not stop the bleeding. What Nigeria needs is a three-track strategy that mirrors what has worked elsewhere.

First, a relentless security offensive, not token operations designed for press briefings. Colombia only reduced killings when it targeted cartel leadership, dismantled logistics, and retook territories. The Philippines reclaimed Marawi by denying extremists sanctuary. When Rwanda crushed the Interahamwe, it did so with decisive force. Nigeria must treat these groups not as disgruntled citizens but as existential enemies of the republic.

 Second, economic and logistical strangulation. Criminal economies survive on illegal mining, cross-border smuggling, gun-running, cattle theft syndicates, and political sponsorship. Mexico learned that starving cartel finances was as crucial as arresting gunmen. Nigeria must go after the financiers, not only the foot soldiers. Shut the money, and the guns grow silent.

Third, psychosocial reconstruction. This is the long game. Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Rwanda rebuilt fractured societies through deradicalisation programmes, civic education, community justice, and national re-orientation. Nigeria’s own youth demographic has been spiritually neglected for decades. A generation has emerged that fears no state, reveres no moral authority, and anticipates no future. That vacuum is where killers are manufactured.

We must confront the truth we keep avoiding: Nigeria is facing a metastasising cancer. And cancers do not disappear because the torso tells the leg, “It’s your problem.” If the northern theatre collapses completely, the south will not be spared. Criminal networks do not recognise geography, ethnicity, or religious borders. When they exhaust the north, they will migrate like locusts.

 Other nations have survived this kind of darkness. But none survived by wishing it away. They confronted it – with clarity, courage, intelligence, and national will. Nigeria must now decide whether it wants to remain a functional country or continue drifting toward a future in which murder becomes a language spoken fluently across all states.

The killers have declared themselves.

It is time the Nigerian state – and Nigerian society – declared itself too.