Nigeria’s Quiet Collapse: When Murder Goes Viral and the State Looks Away | By Fẹ́mi Akínṣọlá

The moment a video of a murdered teacher surfaces online, the message is no longer private grief. It is a public broadcast of power, designed to humiliate the state, terrify communities, and extract compliance through fear. That such footage can be recorded, edited, and circulated without immediate consequence reveals something deeper than the cruelty of bandits. It reveals a state that has lost control of the narrative, the territory, and the moral authority that binds citizens to it. In Nigeria today, the audacity of criminals is matched only by the insensitivity of government.

You do not film a killing and post it for millions to see unless you believe nothing will happen to you. That confidence is not born in a day. It is earned through months of successful kidnappings, ransom exchanges that never lead to arrests, and security operations that fade after the headlines do. When armed groups can operate in the same forest corridors for years, reappear after each negotiation, and still find a school to attack, they conclude the state cannot reach them. Posting the video is the final declaration of that conclusion. It is a claim of ownership over fear in places where the state’s presence exists only on paper.

This is not random violence. It is psychological warfare with a business model behind it. The groups behind these attacks have evolved beyond opportunistic raids. They now operate with scouts, negotiators, financiers, arms suppliers, and media handlers. Someone is tasked with filming. Someone else manages the distribution. Phones, data, and internet access are part of the toolkit. What we are facing is a criminal economy with logistics, cash flow, and branding. Treating it as a law-and-order problem of isolated bandits misses the structure that keeps it alive.

The failure of Nigeria’s network providers and digital infrastructure compounds the problem. For years, the National Identification Number and SIM registration exercise promised to make every phone traceable, yet time and again, ransom calls go through, videos are uploaded, and investigators claim the numbers are “untraceable” or the data is “unavailable.” If telecom operators cannot proactively flag suspicious bulk registrations, monitor flagged numbers, and provide timely location data to law enforcement, then the registration regime is a charade. It is unacceptable that in 2026, after billions of naira spent on SIM linkage, the state still pleads helplessness when trying to track the very devices used to coordinate murder and extortion. Their reactive posture and slow response to security requests make them complicit by omission.

The state’s own response has been predictably reactive. Tactical units are deployed after the attack, press statements are issued, and promises of manhunts follow. But once the perpetrators melt back into the forest, the pursuit loses momentum. Proactive intelligence, surveillance of known routes, and disruption of communication networks are rare. The result is a cycle where the cost of acting for the criminals remains low, while the cost of inaction for citizens remains catastrophic. A government that only shows up after blood has been spilled signals that prevention is not a priority.

Equally troubling is how violence is becoming normalised in the public sphere. When footage of murder circulates widely and is met with outrage that lasts only a news cycle, the threshold for what society considers acceptable shifts. Young people absorb the message that violence pays and rarely costs you. This is compounded when political actors use thugs during elections and face no accountability. The distinction between political violence and criminal violence collapses, and the social contract frays further. If the state cannot punish those who kill, why should anyone believe it can protect those who do not?

The insensitivity lies not only in the slow response, but in the refusal to address the conditions that make such audacity possible. Justice is slow and selective. High-profile kidnappers are rarely prosecuted, and cases collapse under weak evidence or procedural delays. Local governance in many affected areas has lost legitimacy, leaving a vacuum that armed groups fill and govern in their own way. Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, making recruitment into gangs a rational choice for those with no lawful path forward. Poverty does not cause crime automatically, but it removes the barriers that keep most people within the law.

Information itself has become a weapon. The same phones that could connect students to learning are used to spread terror. Without rapid takedown of violent content and public education on the harm of sharing it, the bandits’ propaganda succeeds. Every share, every forward, extends their reach and amplifies their power. A government that does not treat digital spaces as part of the security terrain is fighting a 21st-century war with a 20th-century playbook.

The implication is uncomfortable but clear. Nigeria cannot secure schools and communities through force alone. Deterrence requires raising the cost of the crime to the point where it is no longer profitable. That means faster prosecution, dismantling financial networks behind ransom, holding telecom providers accountable for enabling anonymous communication, cutting off logistics, and making local governance functional enough to deny criminals safe space. It also means treating the public display of murder as a national security threat, not a social media incident.

Until then, the audacity will grow. Because in a country where the state is slow to punish and quick to forget, and where network providers hide behind bureaucracy while lives are lost, the message to every armed group is simple: act boldly, film it, and wait. The society that refuses to normalize that footage, and the government that refuses to be insensitive to it, is the only one that can begin to take its power back.

Copyright © 2026 Fẹ́mi Akínṣọlá. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author.